What Stops You from Switching Remote US Only to Remote Same Time Zone?

Question

If your company is Remote US Only, what would it take for your company to start employing people at the same skill level, with the same culture, language, same time zone, same experience, just not residents of the U.S.Is it distance to fly into your HQ?Guadalajara is closer to Bay Area than New York. Medellin is just as far as Bay Area from New York.Is it payroll and compliance? Deel, Pilot, etc., are like Zenefits/Trinet for Global Payroll.Is it experience? There are engineers residing outside of the U.S. in Canada and Latin America that work or have worked for Automattic, Auth0, Gitlab, AI Fund, NodeSource, Ooyala, WolframAlpha, Auth0, etc., They are all on linkedin.I want to understand the variables that if changed would make it so your remote U.S. only company has employees that reside outside of the U.S.

ajauntyshark · Accepted Answer

It usually means they have payroll and processes around taxes implemented in the US only. They might be unwilling to take "contractors" who are actually full time employees from other countries since in those scenarios they still have tax obligations. For some countries in the EU, such as Germany, you're unable to "contract" someone full time since the "employee" isn't actually self-employed and it would enable them to deduct a bunch of tax items that actual full time employees wouldn't be able to. In those countries, as a real contractor you can't have all your income coming from one company. If you apply this thought process to countries that are in the same TZ as the US, you can see that HR would have to look into a lot of legalities in those countries, keep up with the legalities, and calculate the risk of those laws changing. I'm extensively using quotations because contractor/employee is fuzzy in these scenarios.This is coming from a Canadian that dislikes the "Remote US Only" clauses when I see an awesome company hiring.

AnimalMuppet · Answer

For some, "US only" means they are working on government contracts, especially defense. Nothing's going to overcome that one.Others may be because, even if the flight time is shorter, international travel is still messier than domestic travel.

smt88 · Answer

I've hired and worked with many dozens of devs around the world. Some I worked with for 10 days, others for years.
The only downside that I haven't found a solution for is communication. Even with brilliant people who had been speaking English for decades, a lot gets lost because of language.
It's hard enough to talk to other Americans about technical issues. It's harder when the other person is losing small, important distinctions in each sentence.
It's obviously not a dealbreaker. The benefits of hiring internationally outweigh the drawbacks. In fact, no company I've ever helped build could have succeeded hiring only Americans.

gshdg · Answer

Payroll and legal complexities is the big one.I've also run into challenges around mismatches in cultural expectations of how employer/employee or manager/report relationships should operate.

blaser-waffle · Answer

We did at an old gig. Completely ditched the Indian offshore team for Mexico City. Generally, was a good experience, or was at least better than Tata/CTS/HCL.
The big changes were
- timezone overlap; they were Central Time and working for East and West costs weren't a struggle
- vaguely similar holidays / no surprises because no one in the US knows when Holy is
- level of English was usually better with the Mexicans, though they often had thicker accents; we could always find a Spanish speaker in the office if there were any communication struggles
- level of technical qualifications was usually better, in that Tata would be obligated to find someone who can do [X], and experience has shown that they'll find anyone, while the Mexican support teams usually had solid technical chops.
We had some limited success with a team in Argentina too, but there were a lot of tax and other logistical hoops. We had high hopes for the folks we reached out to in Brazil but they were never really organized, and I gather getting any sort of hardware into the BZ is expensive and complicated, plus they only have like 2 real Telcos and connectivity was problematic (this was like ~8 years ago, so things my have changed).

therm0 · Answer

Why is it so bad for American companies to hire American workers?

What Stops You from Switching Remote US Only to Remote Same Time Zone?

For some, "US only" means they are working on government contracts, especially defense. Nothing's going to overcome that one.
Others may be because, even if the flight time is shorter, international travel is still messier than domestic travel.

Payroll and legal complexities is the big one.
I've also run into challenges around mismatches in cultural expectations of how employer/employee or manager/report relationships should operate.

Why is it so bad for American companies to hire American workers?