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

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21–30 of 39 posts

Re: Ask HN: What Stops You from Switching Remote US Only to Remote Same Time Zone?

#21

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.

Government contracts makes a lot of sense. International travel being messier during a pandemic, especially flying into the US might be something people are unwilling to do, but pre pandemic it’s just slightly longer line with CBP, not really a material obstacle.

Re: Ask HN: What Stops You from Switching Remote US Only to Remote Same Time Zone?

#22
post #16
post #3

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

Skills

Would that mean that your company would hire if it found people with the skills residing in Canada and Latin America just like Automattic, Auth0, Gitlab, AI Fund, NodeSource, Ooyala, WolframAlpha, Auth0, etc. found them ?

Re: Ask HN: What Stops You from Switching Remote US Only to Remote Same Time Zone?

#24
post #17
post #15

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, importa…

Weird. Half Europe (IT industry) speaks broken English and everyone understands each other just fine mainly because the English used is simple, without fancy words and direct to the point.

I would say that it's actually one of Europe's disadvantages. While people in management positions usually do very well with English, technical people often have problem expressing their intention and speak awkwardly and/or simplify their message by necessity. The difference can be felt especially when the same team is allowed to speak in its native language (assuming everyone is a native in a given country).

Re: Ask HN: What Stops You from Switching Remote US Only to Remote Same Time Zone?

#26
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).

Re: Ask HN: What Stops You from Switching Remote US Only to Remote Same Time Zone?

#27
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.

Re: Ask HN: What Stops You from Switching Remote US Only to Remote Same Time Zone?

#28
post #19
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird. Half Europe (IT industry) speaks broken English and everyone understands each other just fine mainly because the English used is simple, without fancy words and direct to the point.

> everyone understands each other just fine mainly because the English used is simple, without fancy words and direct to the point Fine. So what? Just because it works doesn't mean it's perfect or frictionless. Lots of software and business concepts are not simple. They take a long time to explain, and they're hard to express with a language (English) that was not designed to express them. Like I said, it's a problem…

"Nitty-gritty"

Damn near caused an outage because the offshore team didn't know that idiom, and I didn't think about how they might not understand that. Told the not to get into the nitty-gritty of the upgrade until we knew more about how the customer was going to build -- but they didn't know what that meant and kept trying to finalize router configs.

Even with fluency little stuff like this can kill. There is a reason NATO makes everyone learn the same phonetic alphabet and radio transmission patters.

Re: Ask HN: What Stops You from Switching Remote US Only to Remote Same Time Zone?

#29
post #5
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's just more cost effective to hire anyone in any other country, thanks to living costs and lack of opportunity in some countries.

But why should I have to compete with developers of the same skill level who can afford to take a much, much lower salary than I can? Especially when I took out American debt to attend an American university so I can live in America and work an American software job.

Welcome to capitalism in 2020 mon ami. Enjoy the ride.

Re: Ask HN: What Stops You from Switching Remote US Only to Remote Same Time Zone?

#30
post #9
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why should I have to compete with developers of the same skill level who can afford to take a much, much lower salary than I can? Especially when I took out American debt to attend an American university so I can live in America and work an American software job.

Why should daily wage workers make Nike shoes in Bangladesh for peanuts when they can be manufactured in America for 10x more?

They should make $0 and they should be manufactured in America by robots for 10x less at scale. Not to mention polluting the environment less by not sending a boat halfway around the world for some shoes.
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