I would love to hear your thoughts.
Ask HN: Do YC startups hire remote employees from other countries?
1–10 of 12 posts
Re: Ask HN: Do YC startups hire remote employees from other countries?
#2Re: Ask HN: Do YC startups hire remote employees from other countries?
#3Most of them, no
Re: Ask HN: Do YC startups hire remote employees from other countries?
#4Remote: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs/role/all/remote
India: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs/location/india
Re: Ask HN: Do YC startups hire remote employees from other countries?
#5Most of them, no
Is this because working IRL in the same room or building is more productive?
That this stereotype is self evidently absurd doesn't really detract from the psychological pressure to imitate. It's like the companies who carefully copy all the hiring practices they've heard about from Google but don't bother with the compensation or aggressively targetting specific university graduates to recruit from.
It's really easy to get a single room with a beer fridge and make everyone stressed, and some successful companies had that property, so let's copy the properties we know how to.
An alternative game plan would be to try to copy the aspects of companies that made them successful, as opposed to the aspects that are easy to copy, but that's very much harder to do.
Re: Ask HN: Do YC startups hire remote employees from other countries?
#6Most of them, no
Is this because working IRL in the same room or building is more productive?
Re: Ask HN: Do YC startups hire remote employees from other countries?
#7Re: Ask HN: Do YC startups hire remote employees from other countries?
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is this because working IRL in the same room or building is more productive?
Neither. legal and compliance. If you hire someone in a new country you now have to comply with that country's labor and tax codes, a lot of times that means setting up a new legal entity in that jurisdiction. This can be really difficult/impractical for smaller companies.
There's also the "false contractors" route, i.e. hiring remote contractors but treating them like employees. Which is also a quite common setup among early stage startups with a fully distributed DNA.
Re: Ask HN: Do YC startups hire remote employees from other countries?
#9Re: Ask HN: Do YC startups hire remote employees from other countries?
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is this because working IRL in the same room or building is more productive?
Neither. legal and compliance. If you hire someone in a new country you now have to comply with that country's labor and tax codes, a lot of times that means setting up a new legal entity in that jurisdiction. This can be really difficult/impractical for smaller companies.
We work as contractors - not employees - so no regional employment laws apply and we're just issuing invoices for services rendered.