Is hiring outside the US remotely so fraught with difficulty it’s worth paying extra 100,000s?
Are you talking about hiring a remote team and managing them? The answer may very well be yes for organizations that don't know how to properly communicate and utilize tools and methods to manage them. There is an entire middle management class in Silicon Valley that exists to manage engineers in person. Their day consists of many meetings, meetings with their team, cross-functional teams, visiting you and your co-wo…
I wonder whether it's mostly risk aversion rather than an intentional "feature". The execs of FAANG _know_ that if they spend more money and put more people to work on adding features, acquiring users and expanding to under developed markets, they'll more-or-less reliably rake in billions for themselves and the company.
Most companies are experiencing double digit growth, so the upsides of decentralizing the offices is limited (even if say you reduce 50% of staffing costs, it's still not that great of a deal compared with potential lost growth and lost profits), and since nobody else has done it on a large scale before, the risks are (perceived to be) high and nobody wants to risk killing the goose that lays golden eggs.