New top story on Hacker News: Ask HN: What prevents a company from hiring remote employees internationally?

Ask HN: What prevents a company from hiring remote employees internationally?
9 by half0wl | 4 comments on Hacker News.
I've been looking at remote opportunities and realized that a huge portion of companies hiring remotely requires you to be in certain regions (US, EMEA, APAC) — fully international remote is rare. Personally, I'm interested in "remote ok" startups (YC-backed & otherwise) but I'm outside of their specified regions and hesitant to reach out because of that. It's puzzling to me because I've been successful in previous fully international remote roles (& have lots of experience building remote workflows), so I'd like to understand the motivation behind why and identify potential solutions to enabling it, as a thought exercise driven by curiousity. From my perspective, there are a few barriers to this: - Timezone. This is a huge one when it comes to synchronous communications, especially if you're in the driver's seat (as a team lead etc.) Disparate timezones between team members can break a team's velocity if you're not built to be fully asynchronous from the ground-up, which IMO requires a cultural shift in communications (moving towards async comms where meetings are kept to bare minimum and/or only used for social face time). What can we do to make the switch to async comms easier? - No "human" touch. Socializing is critical because humans have an innate desire to connect; nothing can replace real-world connections. This is why off-sites exist for remote companies. They're way easier to arrange when your team isn't spread across continents, and arranging for international off-sites can be cost prohibitive as a startup. I believe there is nothing we can do to replace that human touch (not even the metaverse), so what can we do to make travel planning for companies easier and/or less costly? - Difficult to figure compensation scale. Remote roles typically peg compensations to CoL (Cost of Living). The typical setup I've seen is applying a CoL multiplier to the base comp. for the role and tacking on +/-20% for competitiveness (or as an "error correction"). How can we help them make these decisions easier? - Lack of legal presence. Having no legal entity in the country you're hiring in is a non sequitur, and setting up a legal entity per-country-per-hire is not scalable (beyond setting up the entity itself, you need to be aware of local labour laws, your tax obligations, insurance, etc.) I think Deel (https://www.deel.com/) has already solved this. - Compliance & regulations. The company may be handling sensitive data and/or has PCI/HIPAA compliance obligations. Or it may be a government organization where security/background checks must be performed. Systems/data access may also need to be scrutinized in situation of audits and documented ahead-of-time. Not much we can do here and I think it's a question of risk, so no international remote is probably for the best. I'm sure I'm missing something important. What do you think? (edit: formatting) (edit2: fix typo & re-phrase) (edit3: typo)