Clojurians Log v2

I feel ya. I'm 57.

Twenty years ago, when I joined Macromedia, I was one of the oldest in my department and I definitely felt some age-ism from some folks. When Adobe bought us, I ended up being one of the youngest in my group so... 🙂 But I'm the oldest person at my current company.

I help the diversity of my team at Apple through my age 🙂

I've given semi-serious thought to dealing with my predicament from a diversity perspective ("I'd be a great fit for teams where Knackered Old Men are currently under-represented. Skills include yelling at The Cloud...").

Some places could really use some yelling at their crud apps with tens of users, deployed on autoscaling kubernetes clusters..

What are some reasons why some teams prefer to hire remote but only within a particular country? (other than timezone, which i feel is not a good reason since anyone anywhere can choose to work within any timezone)

I seem to recall reading an explanation of this in the last few months. The tl;dr version is it takes effort to ensure legal compliance, and most companies would rather not bother. However, I think timezone is fair enough - if I'm in Timbuktu when the rest of the team is in Toronto, unless I keep unsocial hours it's going to be more difficult for me to collaborate

In this hiring round I got asked in applications if we are OK to hire people from Russia, Iran… So presumably geopolitics also come into it.

can I ask how that went? Did it feel like hiring Clojurians is particularly hard or easy?

Legalities and logistics mainly; ie, whether the two countries have any trade associations. This tends to go in hand with timezones, as neighbour-countries often have established trade laws. Politics comes into play for certain domains, but I don't think it is that common.

Still not over — we got many applications, but we are also hiring for remote, and COVID suddenly made a lot of people looking.

Yeah, my previous (US) company had to jump through a few hoops just to hire in the EU, let alone the rest of the world

Why not hiring someone from EU as contractor? Then you don't have to deal with bureaucracy.

what a contractor means differs between countries, and is taxed differently than an employee. This can get very costly fast. At the same time this results in different responsibilities/obligations between the contractors and the employees, and the same between what the company can offer to its employees and its contractor-partners. Again, laws dictate different treatment. Laws, again depending on the country, dictate that a contractor-relationship may be considered a hidden employee agreement, if the contractor is only in relation with that single company for a long time. This in turn means penalties, and different taxing that weights on the company side.

This is why PEO companies exist. They act as the middleman that employs people that work for other companies with whom the PEO has made agreements. Of course, the middleman always gets a cut. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_employer_organization This again cannot work well for all companies, and this usually has to do with legislation terms and money. Usually, if there are enough people in a country that need to be employed this can work better. If there are many, then it's better for the company to setup an actual branch and be taxed itself on that country. etc, etc, laws, legislation, taxes and terms

Regarding contractors: in Europe, it's "easy" to hire across country boundaries (within the EU, at least) so a lot of Europeans tend to assume that US companies could do this just as easily -- but it's much more complicated here in the US. Again, refer to that link to the long Hacker News post...

Thanks @seancorfield

(as it notes in that HN post, it can sometimes be difficult for a company in one US state to hire people in other US states! For small companies, getting group health insurance for staff can sometimes mean only being able to offer coverage in one state, or unequally in different states -- and then there are tax issues which differ across states, and even interstate banking issues that can arise as well!)

Here in Cameroon there is little or no regulations over that, so its like one of those legal grey areas. Looks like our governments just never thought of remote work, or maybe the number of people working remotely is still so insignificant that they just don't think it's important to regulate that yet. I have been working remotely with a UK based company for over 3 years now. Payments are simply handled through money transfer services similar to services like western union or worldremit. I also get to pay for my own health insurance, life insurance and retirement benefits (social insurance) by myself when i get my salary. So we get paid like freelancers, though we work on a 40hrs/week full time employment contract.

Interesting development in that area is the OECDs Digital Tax initiative. From what I understand OECD works on reform of the global tax system. One of the areas that they plan to fix is taxation of digital work across borders.

I don't have one specific link to send but if you google oecd digital tax you'll find some information