https://www.realworkfromanywhere.com/6398528378
Because we're looking for teammates who overlap with our clients' teams working hours, this is a remote position available to anyone throughout the Americas (UTC-3 through UTC-10).
>In compliance with federal law, all persons hired will be required to verify identity and eligibility to work in the United States and to complete the required employment eligibility verification document form upon hire.
I am not expert in laws but what I understand here is that job position allows employees to work from anywhere but those employees need a work permission in US. In other words, this worldwide position is open only for US citizens.
I may be wrong.
Even regular employment is OK. Tested that myself. It actually is better from taxation view for the employee compared to working for EU native companies - might not apply to all EU states though - but it does in my country of residence, thanks to the bilateral double taxation avoidance deal.
how does that work? does your remote employer pay their part of the taxes for you as employee? do they honor your local employment laws with regards to holidays, and what not? can you sue them if they violate your countries labor laws?
what is the company reporting about you in their country?
i'd really be curious to learn more details about the arrangement. my guess is that it looked like employment but legally it was contracting.
No, your guess is wrong as I had no business license at the time and the local tax/insurance agency would come after me immediately (because nobody would've been paying my mandatory insurance).
I had 25 days of vacation (standard here, 5 days over minimum). The US company had to register with the local tax agency - there is a standard procedure for this situation. Applicable labor law is based on physical location specified in contract so my local law had to be followed.
You don't usually sue companies for violation of labor laws here - you go to the labor agency and complain, then they sort it out. I didn't have any problems though, so I don't know much about this.
in germany/austria i don't need a business license to be a sole proprietor. i just need to report my income and pay the relevant income taxes.
suing was meant to be a stand in for any way to sort out complaints. how does your labor agency force a remote company to comply with your laws? in particular how would they deal with wrongful termination?
maybe we are talking about the same thing, and there is just a difference of what you or me consider a contract vs employment.
may i ask what is your country? the US company registering with your tax agency is interesting. that may make all the difference. i'd like to know more about that.
I really don't know more about resolving complaints as I haven't had any problems. I guess at some point things would go to courts.
Employment is the thing that's defined as employment by the labor law, where the employer signs an employment contract with you and then pays you salary and sorts out your taxes/insurance... Contracting is having a business licence and sending invoices to a customer - with zero relation to labor law. In particular, no concept of vacation, and you pay your own taxes and insurance.
employment for me is what gives me the right to holidays, employer contributions to insurance, overtime pay and protection against unlawful termination.
this is why i consider any remote employment a contract:
you have to pay all taxes yourself, there are no employer contributions (you just have to negotiate a higher salary).
you have no legal means to force the remote company to follow local employment laws, other than an international contract dispute.
it is possible that some countries make it easier to treat a remote job as employment by simplifying taxes or easier access to unemployment benefits, compared to a truly self-employed person.
it may be that czechia offers that. given that it is part of the EU it would actually be interesting to know if other countries offer that as well, or if it is even based on some EU wide regulation.
there may also be specific treaties between countries that support this.
I immediately found this one that favours candidates with a proximity to Austin and seemingly requires a deep knowledge of US taxes: https://www.realworkfromanywhere.com/9143906857 . I suspect they’re not going to be interested in someone 10 time zones away.
I left the US when Covid struck. No way was I sitting around there during all of this.
I took a 50% pay cut to move back to my home country, while producing the same output (and value)... the company directly benefited from that.
Now, if my company forced me back into an office I'd say no. I'd be on the market only for a remote role, still at a steep discount on US engineers.
Why wouldn't a smart company take that offer?
WFH is not going away, but I suspect the FAANG will move away from it and the startups will capture the opportunity.
I see people all the time complaining about salaries being different based on location and how it’s wrong. I actually don’t mind it. I live in a LCOL area and work for a Bay Area company. I don’t get paid as much as my SF colleagues but I make so much more than anyone around here that it doesn’t matter.
At some level I wonder if people in SF are worried about people like me and the above poster because we’re stealing jobs by being cheap.
Anyways, I’ll always be remote. There is no other option. I’m damn sure not moving to California.
Too many people discuss salary without discussing buying power.
When I did freelance work I loved picking up work from the coasts (NYC, LA, etc). They thought of me as cheap, I thought of them as a gravy train. Both sides benefitted from it.
100k in a rural, LCOL area probably has the buying power of 150-200k in NYC. I don't know the exact numbers, it's the idea that I'm trying to express here.
> Too many people discuss salary without discussing buying power.
In capitalism that is not important. If I have the negotiation capability to get a higher salary why should I accept a lower one just because I live cheaper?
Most people would accept a lower salary to WFH, or to have flexibility in their schedule to ensure they can attend to their child's lives.
The mistake "capitalists" make is thinking money is the only factor, or even the most important one.
But really, that wasn't even the point. The point is your salary isn't what grants you a good life, it's buying power. And having that buying power gives you a stronger negotiating stance anyway.
Australia and New Zealand are near the top on that list. Libel and defamation is a very commonly sought after legal means of silencing an organisation, entity or person.
Yes, both countries are places you can raise a family, start a business, walk down the street without getting shot (at least it's very, very unlikely) - you can watch anything (provided it hasn't been censored which has laxed over the years), but you really, really can't say what you want about anyone.
There's a very well-known security specialist who's sued multiple boutique, small-time consultancies and individuals for defamation of his character. He was called a charlatan. This is what it's like on a small-scale, you can't even talk about an individual at local conferences in case they're recorded, because you'll be taken to court (and have to spend 10's of thousands of dollars defending yourself).
The NZ sun is terrible. You feel the sun burning you as soon as you get outside.
Burn time can be about 10 minutes on a sunny day, and maybe 20 on a cloudy day in summer.
In NZ we get about 4000 in-situ melanoma diagnosis a year. I was one of them a couple of years ago (at 37).
Ditto. I assumed it was an opportunity to document any legally problematic reasons that drove you to quit so they could get ahead of them, or reinforce their case for firing you.
Remote is such an overloaded term.
Is it US/North America only?
Is it equal work for equal pay globally?
I was someone who took the opportunity to relocate back to my home country when Covid struck, but had to take a near 50% pay cut to do so, despite doing the same work. I'm surprised this hasn't become more of a hot button issue within the community.
Timezone and management capabilities of your organization could have been an issue in why the pay was so different.
Especially for startups, managing payroll in another country could be challenging. Also the latency on communications for daylight working hours could be bad - back and forth discussions leading to swift actions are hamper by a 9+hr timezone difference.
They don't need to manage payroll in another country. Everybody working overseas does so as a contractor which means it's just another expense for the employer.
I don't think it is an overloaded term... It just means that there is no office you are expected to go into. Those things you identified are just other dimensions that are also important.
It's so much easier to just hire someone in the same country. No visa/sponsorship, no timezone worries, no language/culture barriers. It's just so much easier.
I work (from Mexico) with people in the US, which has 4 time zones for mainland. My time zone lands in CT, Which is convenient both for ET and PT. I didn't require a sponsorship and I am able to communicate pretty well with my American peers.
And I'm between 50% and 70% cheaper than hiring someone in the US at the same level (PhD, 10+ years of industry experience, Executive level experience, startup experience, highly technical , etc etc).
And I know several people with a profile similar to mine.
Companies that discover this are getting an "unfair advantage "
Outsourcing has been attempted and is still occurring for the past 30 years. Yes, sometimes you get great employees like yourself, but it's a mixed bag and for some companies they just don't want to deal with the additional risks and headache.
Yes! I've been having to double tap links on iOS Chrome, as you've described.
I'm a frontend engineer so this had me puzzled. It's not like there's a zindex issue with something blocking it, as a double tap seems to often work.
DSE was an absolute rip off, but it was pretty much the only game in town.
As a kid it was an amazing place for me to spend an hour on the weekends pottering around all the electronic kitsets and latest computer parts/gadgets.
I would credit DSE with fostering a lot of my love of computers and technology.
I am quite sad it no longer exists.
That reminds me... on top of the shifts in society because of COVID, it's a shame that there's no place like Dick Smith, Frys, Radio Shack, computer stores, etc., where young geeks can go and meet each other. I was a geek among geeks as a kid, but even then I still liked that I could go to electronics stores, comic shops, hobby stores, and just be around people who were kind of weird like me and also had a love for the sorts of things I was interested in. With most of today's meetups still being "remote", at least where I live, I have to wonder where the hell a young me would be able to go today. I'd just have to network through Discord and hope that my server doesn't suddenly get banned because Dischord Inc. thinks it's a group of "hackers".
Basically, I think there was something to having physical places to go to. It's a culture that seems nearly dead.
Jaycar still does a lot of this! The one in Central Park Sydney still does a lot of workshops, they have a maker hub, sell a lot of the class electronic components and things like that. Nothing like it used to be with Dick Smith and Radio Shack everywhere, but there's still a few places around.
The maker hub is pretty cool! They have a 3D printer service, where for ~$0.40 per gram you can bring your STL file, and they will print it while you watch a movie at the Cinemas next door. I wish there were more places like this in Sydney.
I have floated the idea of starting a hackerspace in Sydney City with a bunch of friends, but it has never really got beyond the talking phase. The cost of renting a small (~90 sqm) workshop/office space in the CBD makes it cost prohibitive without a large amount of members joining. I wonder how many people would be interested in setting up a co-op for this?
I wonder whether you could approach the startup hub or one of the coworking spaces there and see if they’re keen on putting some space aside for it? Occupancy is waaay down and will probably stay that way for quite a while.
Actually, I could probably have a conversation with the space I’m in - if you wanted to reach out to me?
I didn't encounter DSE until the mid 2000s when I moved to NZ, but the Jaycar of today stocks way more components than did the DSE of 20 years ago. Jaycar even keeps a stock of 74LS TTL chips behind the counter!
Jaycar has taken over the "over-priced retail" segment of the electronics store market that DSE used to hold (and Tandy before that). But most of the old stores are gone as everything has moved online.
I don't know that is entirely true. My local Jaycar (regional Australia) is still a good source for smaller bits and bobs, and I buy a lot of stuff there like circuit board varnish that nobody else would bother to stock. even then I don't mind paying a small premium for a USB cable or whatever because having a jaycar locally is fantastic for what I do.
They still have a decent selection of things like soldering irons and other tools and a little selection of Raspberry Pi and Arduino kits, along with hobby cases, switches, plugs, wire, solder, batteries etc.
Indeed, the places that sell 5 cent resistors etc were where I would hang out. But nobody does that anymore. People just buy the cheap crap from Aliexpress :'( And nonbody makes enough money selling individual components.
It's such a stark difference. I remember there being a Radio Shack in mainstream retail centres like Broadway Shopping Centre.
Now if you find a similar shop it'll be in some run-down industrial estate :'(
I'd recommend people interested in electronics to go directly to somewhere like Digi-Key online for ordering parts. It's a bit of a learning curve to work out what to filter out, but you get exactly what you want for even cheaper what the retail stores could do, and for most projects it doesn't take much (a few interesting ICs) to put you over the threshold for free shipping for people in the US. The threshold for international free shipping is higher (I think it was $200?) but I have hit it sometimes!
Element-14, RS Online, and Mouser are the other ones to look at, especially here in Australia or other places not in the US, because their shipping is often better internationally. But I find myself having to bear the shipping cost for Digi-Key a fair bit!
True but ordering is often not a great option. Many times when I was young I'd be working on a project and find I was missing some part. I could just jump on my bike and go buy it right away.
As a Norwegian expat in Melbourne since early 2000s I'd somewhat equal the DSE experience to Frithjof Arngren in Norway in the late 70s/80s (for any Norwegians lurking around here).
I never got to Arngen's stores, if any, but those printed catalogues were truly amazing experiences of full on geek.
There were a lot of design similarities to Dick Smith ie the prominently featured hand drawn heads.
Today I see he has a website in his name, which is ... unique. I have no better way to describe it.
