Ask HN: Why is it so hard to find remote jobs in Europe?

I read a lot about remote work - either sourcing from Hacker News and other media. However, what I see in practice, at least in Benelux Area, is that companies are far more interest in on-site positions than remote positions.

Why is it so? If the advantages of remote working are so clear - why companies still hire only on-site positions?

Or he works in a technologically conservative area that is slow to adopt new trends, even useful ones.

Take a look at the HN Who is Hiring threads over the past 2 years, and count up the total remote jobs. It's increasing at an impressive rate. Companies are discovering that they can still hire talented developers for average salaries (particularly those devs living in economically depressed areas).

There are thousands of devs who don't have the option to up and move to N. California or NYC. Some of them are very talented. It's not hard to figure out, and I'm sure the same dynamics are at work in Europe.

The theory that remote working is advantageous has the unstated premise that the thing being optimized for is wealth. In that theory, it makes sense to use methods that let people get their jobs done with minimum cost and distraction.

In reality, money is a weaker motive than power. When workers are on site, particularly in an open plan office, the boss's brain receives reminders every hour of every day that he is wielding power over underlings. That's not what everyone cares about most - but it's the people who do care about that, who become bosses in the first place.

(In the West, it's customary to maintain the fiction that it's about money. Apparently in places like Japan and South Korea, they don't bother with that fiction; you can spend your time in the office browsing Hacker News if you like, but if your boss is in the office seventy hours a week, you've got to be there eighty hours a week.)

As for what to do about it, as I see it the main strategies, in increasing order of difficulty and potential value, are:

1. Remember that remote work is not sensitive to location, and search the whole world for remote working jobs.

2. Become a contractor and look for clients who want goods and services rather than bosses who want underlings.

3. Start your own company and try to fix the problem for other people as well as yourself.

Isn't the point of having a remote job to not care where the company is registered? Assuming you are in Benelux Area, what's the point of looking for remote company from Benelux Area?

Exactly what I was thinking. It would be a problem is companies outside Europe wouldn't let you do remote work from Europe but that doesn't seem to be the case.