Out of curiosity, what’s the problem with hiring internationally? You require some timezone overlapping?
dimitarvp
tfwright
I was under the impression that is was a tax thing, and I didn’t press. I might follow up though so we can increase the applicant pool.
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NobbZ
Timezones, taxes, employment laws and work permissions/trade embargos are the 4 major problems.
8
crova
I’ve been looking for Jr position as well and it’s been rare to see open positions on the wide.
Majority has been for senior, and even though I had a couple of interviews I know that a senior role for me is out of my league atm.
I’ve been able to find a freelance just recently and hopefully it will help finding something else later on.
Good luck on your search!
1
Toddy
If the jobs were open to outside the US, I don’t think the timezone would be a problem for employees on Latin America for example. A difference of 4 hours at most.
About the taxes. Maybe if you discount some of them in the final salary it could still be competitive outside the US. Given that some currencies are less valuable than dollar.
But I don’t know about employment laws or work permissions in this case. Could you talk about it more @NobbZ ?
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NobbZ
Taxes do not have anything to do with competivity inside or outside a region. It is about where they have to be paid and how they have to be calculated. Getting taxes right for the "“home country” is usually hard enough, though doing it correctly for a foreign country is especially if you perhaps need to pay just another tax consultant for that one employee who lives in a neigboring country.
Also, laws about how you have to employ and what you have to guarantee them differ between countries. So there might countries exist where you can fire someone without reason from between today and tomorrow, while in other countries there are laws that require you to hold an employee for at least 4 additional weeks to give them the opportunity to find something new. Also if they have to go to the court because of some disagreements, usually the employees legislature and location are assumed, which can cause additional costs for the employer.
Some of these problems are tried to get circumvented by hiring “contractors”, rather than employing someone, though beeing a self-employed contractor comes with additional problems of beeing self-employed.
4
bottlenecked
You hit that one right on the nail. My current employer had to consider all of these issues while hiring. They’re Europe-based and in the end decided on hiring from just within the EU. People outside their countries of operations are hired on as contractors (on paper, not how they’re actually treated) to ease most of the administrational pains. I’d say it works for them and it works for me.
1
KiKi
Yes, from what I know by talking to people who work for US companies, being employed is quite complicated, especially it there is no tax treaty between US and workers country so almost all of them work as contractors and that works fine. Contractor has to deal with taxes but that’s not so complicated once you get the hang of it. One person I know even started a company in Estonia to avoid many of those issues and works with an US employer through that company.
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dimitarvp
Good analysis. From what I’ve seen, most programmers are just fine being hired as contractors so most of the reasons you enumerated are null and void in this case and it kind of turns into a “just in case” thing without a solidly explained reason. At one point it becomes cultural and not mandated by legislation.
1
NobbZ
For me it was a long way to go before accepting that beeing open to contract work and at least partial self-employment would be the proper way to go.
Also not every company might be open to contracting people, as with or without NDA, the trust level is completely different between contractors and employees.
And as I have mentioned already, national law might regulate cross border contracts. Especially for the US, a reason I hear very often, is that the company has to make sure that the employee/contractor has to have a US work permission.
Last but not least, consider this: A company in A-land hires a contractor from B-land, and one of these countries puts “IT-services” under an embargo after the project is half way done. This is another reason why remote jobs often are limited to a certain region, where such embargos are highly unlikely, like US only or EU only.
I wish it was not like it is, but it is the world we are living in, and I hope that my grand childs will live in a world with less terretorial thinking, but I know it can’t be changed from one day to the other.
2