Is it distance to fly into your HQ?
Guadalajara is closer to Bay Area than New York. Medellin is just as far as Bay Area from New York.
Is it payroll and compliance? Deel, Pilot, etc., are like Zenefits/Trinet for Global Payroll.
Is it experience? There are engineers residing outside of the U.S. in Canada and Latin America that work or have worked for Automattic, Auth0, Gitlab, AI Fund, NodeSource, Ooyala, WolframAlpha, Auth0, etc., They are all on linkedin.
I want to understand the variables that if changed would make it so your remote U.S. only company has employees that reside outside of the U.S.
Yes so realize that most people don’t get pensions. But if there is a public pension shortfall, taxpayers are on the hook.
The only downside that I haven't found a solution for is communication. Even with brilliant people who had been speaking English for decades, a lot gets lost because of language.
It's hard enough to talk to other Americans about technical issues. It's harder when the other person is losing small, important distinctions in each sentence.
It's obviously not a dealbreaker. The benefits of hiring internationally outweigh the drawbacks. In fact, no company I've ever helped build could have succeeded hiring only Americans.
Fine. So what? Just because it works doesn't mean it's perfect or frictionless.
Lots of software and business concepts are not simple. They take a long time to explain, and they're hard to express with a language (English) that was not designed to express them.
Like I said, it's a problem between two native English speakers, too. It's just more of a problem when one of those people is missing chunks of vocabulary or doesn't understand some of the small, impactful differences in wording in English.
My business partner is Israeli and speaks excellent English, and we still run into these problems sometimes.
My anecdotal experience with this is minimal because immigrants often work with larger companies than mine, but I have had a few.
One coworker was from Ukraine, and communication was very hard. He'd been in the US for more than 10 years, but he sounded like his only experience speaking English was from formal classrooms. As someone who is awful at learning and pronouncing foreign languages, I can definitely sympathize with him. I'm sure it was not an issue of effort at all.
The others were Indian, and there was no noticeable communication barrier. They knew (and used) American idioms, and they never seemed to have trouble keeping up with the mumbly way that tech people often talk. These were CTO-level, went to top colleges, and probably had a lot of English immersion in India before they moved.
This is coming from a Canadian that dislikes the "Remote US Only" clauses when I see an awesome company hiring.
Others may be because, even if the flight time is shorter, international travel is still messier than domestic travel.
I've also run into challenges around mismatches in cultural expectations of how employer/employee or manager/report relationships should operate.
The big changes were
- timezone overlap; they were Central Time and working for East and West costs weren't a struggle
- vaguely similar holidays / no surprises because no one in the US knows when Holy is
- level of English was usually better with the Mexicans, though they often had thicker accents; we could always find a Spanish speaker in the office if there were any communication struggles
- level of technical qualifications was usually better, in that Tata would be obligated to find someone who can do [X], and experience has shown that they'll find anyone, while the Mexican support teams usually had solid technical chops.
We had some limited success with a team in Argentina too, but there were a lot of tax and other logistical hoops. We had high hopes for the folks we reached out to in Brazil but they were never really organized, and I gather getting any sort of hardware into the BZ is expensive and complicated, plus they only have like 2 real Telcos and connectivity was problematic (this was like ~8 years ago, so things my have changed).
