How does tax laws work in this case? When I was working from Mexico, I had to come back every six months to avoid local income tax.
Airbnb’s design to live and work anywhere
31–40 of 736 posts
Re: Airbnb’s design to live and work anywhere
#32If this becomes the norm then it's the end of SF as a tech hub. A big move for a company paying the sorts of salaries it does.
Add to this the fact that SF has deteriorated a great deal as a city since the start of the pandemic. The loss of downtown office worker revenue has decimated local shops and restaurants. It will take time for things to adjust to the new reality that workers just aren’t going back to how things were.
Re: Airbnb’s design to live and work anywhere
#33If this is the future, salaries will come down, and people will move to smaller cities.
In the short term, with tons of well-funded or high-revenue companies struggling to hire, remote is a way to make your existing comp more attractive by opening it up to a new set of people and out-bidding their local employers. In the long term salaries will likely equalize a bit, but maybe not that much. Even in today's tech hubs, the existing range of salaries is VERY wide. Not every dev in SF is making 300k+, and…
That's because even remote jobs are US/Canada only.
Re: Airbnb’s design to live and work anywhere
#34Have laws caught up for this new way to work yet? Last ai checked there are non-insignificant legal and tax issues for small businesses to have employees in other states.
The short answer is no, they haven't. Payroll for something like this is a huge pain in the ass if you're not at this kind of scale. You end up just hiring people as contractors, which has its own set of problems (namely the fact that you can't just do that because it's easier, they have to actually be contractors and not employees).
Re: Airbnb’s design to live and work anywhere
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the short term, with tons of well-funded or high-revenue companies struggling to hire, remote is a way to make your existing comp more attractive by opening it up to a new set of people and out-bidding their local employers. In the long term salaries will likely equalize a bit, but maybe not that much. Even in today's tech hubs, the existing range of salaries is VERY wide. Not every dev in SF is making 300k+, and…
That's because even remote jobs are US/Canada only.
It'll take a long time (likely never, for small companies) for more companies to be international-friendly, for communications reasons for non-English-native-languages nearby countries, for HR/tax/legal compliance overhead reasons even for Canada, and for those plus time zone headaches for others.
If you really want to do it with less paperwork as a US company, you can get around the tax headaches even today, hiring through some outsourcing staffing firms. Lots of those in Latin America now. Quite a bit cheaper. Still a bit of a communication hassle. But that hard barrier of not being employed directly keeps things at arms length in terms of affecting the overall salary market.
Re: Airbnb’s design to live and work anywhere
#36Have laws caught up for this new way to work yet? Last ai checked there are non-insignificant legal and tax issues for small businesses to have employees in other states.
Judging by my employer, small businesses are able to have their payroll companies take care of all that hassle without much cost, so it’s not really a problem.
It depends on scale. I moved during my last job, post-COVID, and the HR department has to make sure the state I was moving to was approved. If not, I was going to have to switch to contracting (fewer hours, fewer employer/employee type rules, more rigidly defined tasks, etc.) because the cost of setting up payroll and taxation in another state was too onerous for just one person, even at the higher levels of the development staff.
Re: Airbnb’s design to live and work anywhere
#37I've been working like this for the past year and a half. I'll never go back to a "normal" office environment. Winners in this new paradigm: Owners of real estate in lifestyle towns like Boise, Boulder, etc. I also think borders between the US and Latin America (same/similar time zones) will become a lot more fluid. Why not work in Mexico City or Buenos Aires during the winters, for a fraction of the cost of living i…
Friends, family, kids, not having all your stuff, cultural and language barriers, etc… It’s pretty obvious why this doesn’t work for a large portion of people. I am glad for the child free and those who have little need for stuff - but it’s just not… realistic for the rest of us (who are the overwhelming majority of the population). It’s good for that niche 22-28 crowd.
It's actually pretty economical to have a second home in Latin America, with copies of all your creature comforts there. Kids get multicultural friends, new language, and much wider perspective on the world.
Re: Airbnb’s design to live and work anywhere
#38> You can move anywhere in the country you work in and your compensation won’t change. Starting in June, we’ll have single pay tiers by country for both salary and equity. If your pay was set using a lower location-based pay tier, you’ll receive an increase in June. I wonder how this will change things for companies like Figma, which allow full remote, but pay remote workers less.
Eventually - and it might take a recession - the downside of “work from anywhere” will be that companies can “hire from anywhere”. That means the Bay Area salary you previously enjoyed may be knocked down through greater wage competition.
And then another company will pop up and pay more.
The thing is, we're used to the high pay now. Cut that and you're gonna cut efficiency. It's going to be hard to justify it.
Create bad will with your money makers good luck getting anywhere realistically.
Re: Airbnb’s design to live and work anywhere
#39Have laws caught up for this new way to work yet? Last ai checked there are non-insignificant legal and tax issues for small businesses to have employees in other states.
The short answer is no, they haven't. Payroll for something like this is a huge pain in the ass if you're not at this kind of scale. You end up just hiring people as contractors, which has its own set of problems (namely the fact that you can't just do that because it's easier, they have to actually be contractors and not employees).
Or you literally just use a PEO and let them handle it for you. It's not that hard.
Re: Airbnb’s design to live and work anywhere
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Judging by my employer, small businesses are able to have their payroll companies take care of all that hassle without much cost, so it’s not really a problem.
It depends on scale. I moved during my last job, post-COVID, and the HR department has to make sure the state I was moving to was approved. If not, I was going to have to switch to contracting (fewer hours, fewer employer/employee type rules, more rigidly defined tasks, etc.) because the cost of setting up payroll and taxation in another state was too onerous for just one person, even at the higher levels of the deve…
Your company could've solved this with using a solution from ADP, gusto, rippling, and the shit ton of other companies to do this.