[HN Gopher] Show HN: I made a site for 100% location independent...
___________________________________________________________________
Show HN: I made a site for 100% location independent jobs
Author : saasxyz
Score : 107 points
Date : 2022-09-03 14:16 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.realworkfromanywhere.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.realworkfromanywhere.com)
| bambax wrote:
| > _The Axios Smart Brevity Studio team is looking for talented
| freelancers to create content on behalf of Axios clients at the
| local level. Individuals will write copy and capture lifestyle
| imagery and videos (primarily on smartphones) for use on Axios
| Local's social media, websites and newsletters._
|
| > _Ideal candidates will embody an entrepreneurial spirit, a
| passion for Axios Local's mission and have the following skills:
| (...) Must be able to secure transportation to shoots. Take note:
| Assignments may fall during the workweek as well as on weekends._
|
| This doesn't sound very "remote". It also does not sound like a
| real job.
| cholantesh wrote:
| It sounds like a lot of the 'jobs' that 'digital nomads' claim
| to be working at when I meet them. I agree that it doesn't
| sound real.
| etothepii wrote:
| I don't think there is any chance gitlab will let you work from
| DPRK
| shagie wrote:
| Gitlab's list of where they have professional employment
| operations is https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-
| group/employment-so... - along with the "who they work with."
|
| It is a much shorter list than "anywhere" and many of those
| employers of record will have their own constraints on if you
| can work in another country while using them as a service. For
| example, if you're working out of Brazil, then the hiring
| partner is Remote.com but then if one heads over to Chile, then
| its Global Upside. If its Spain, then its Remote.com again, but
| its questionable if you could head over to Portugal to work.
|
| The "work anywhere" becomes complicated once a company is on
| the hook for taxes and work visas.
| Minor49er wrote:
| The Apply button doesn't work for me on any of the job listings
| I've tried. I'm on Firefox for Android
| saasxyz wrote:
| Just tried on firefox for android and it is working for me. Can
| you try again or from any other browser?
| flog wrote:
| The first job I looked at stated they were hiring "anywhere
| across the US", so this doesn't look like a very well curated
| list.
| saasxyz wrote:
| Please post a link too so that I can take a look and others can
| trust your claim as well.
|
| Some mistakes happen. I am trying my best to eradicate such
| postings.
| robin_reala wrote:
| 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.
| homarp wrote:
| https://www.realworkfromanywhere.com/2179261410 100% remote
| work environment - work from anywhere in the US
|
| https://www.realworkfromanywhere.com/1165562271 Remote based,
| US only.
|
| 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).
| saasxyz wrote:
| Removed. Thank you so much.
| yreg wrote:
| >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.
|
| https://www.realworkfromanywhere.com/9281024581
| saasxyz wrote:
| 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.
| ItsTooMuch wrote:
| There's no need to have US work permission if you're not
| on the US soil.
| em-bee wrote:
| the company may not want to hire a contractor but only
| have regular employees that just happen to be living
| outside of the country.
| ItsTooMuch wrote:
| 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.
| em-bee wrote:
| 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.
| ItsTooMuch wrote:
| 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.
| em-bee wrote:
| 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.
| yreg wrote:
| Fair enough, then I (slightly) misunderstood what your
| site is about.
| polishdude20 wrote:
| We use a company called "Deel" as an intermediary third party
| that has locations in many countries. These types of companies
| act as your "employer" in the sense that they pay you and you're
| legally their employee.
|
| I wonder if there's an opportunity for these third party
| companies like Deel to put up a job board for remote work
| positions? This would mesh well with their product as they can
| say "hey we can help find you qualified candidates and we will
| deal with the legalities of it"
| anyfactor wrote:
| I would love to hear your honest opinion OP. How do you plan to
| source the jobs? How do you plan to attract job seekers to your
| site?
|
| Remote job boards represents the majority of the spam emails I
| got since I started posting on Whoishiring. The irony is that,
| that is a job thread itself and people think that the people
| posting there are "leads" to their job sites. At first I even
| posted on a couple, but I got sick of being treated like a beta
| user with job zero proposals. Job boards is hard to grow just
| like social media sites.
|
| I would love to hear your plan. In the world of tech projects the
| rule of success is being lucky, be first, be lucky or offer
| something different. When an aggregration-type pops up for an
| industry, it is darn freaking hard to grow a new business there.
| And there are dozens of job aggregrator sites that sit on top
| other sites. And all has filter by location.
|
| I am not dismissing you at all, I am geniunely curious. I hope
| you take no offense.
| tpmx wrote:
| Click on apply on any of those job listings, get redirected to
| some other site.
|
| This is just a basic SEO/referral play. Flag the shit out of
| this, IMO.
| abinaya_rl wrote:
| Perfect, I'm wondering how are you sourcing the jobs. Do you
| source the jobs manually or automatically?
|
| I'm working on the Remote Jobs API service[1] for the job board
| developers. Each and every job is manually vetted and carefully
| curated from 40+ sources. If you think it will be useful, let me
| know. Happy to set up an account for you.
|
| [1] - https://remoteleaf.com/remote-jobs-api (Founder here)
| quest88 wrote:
| What's the difference between this and the pre-pandemic
| remoteok.io?
| paxys wrote:
| Do you verify if these jobs are _truly_ location independent? In
| my experience all such companies really mean "anywhere" as long
| as it is in a handful of approved countries and time zones, and
| the rest will get a "sorry we can't hire in this jurisdiction
| because of compliance/HR/tax issues".
| saasxyz wrote:
| These postings come from various sources where they provide
| their location as worldwide. Some jobs explicitly say they are
| bound to a list of specific locations while others say
| worldwide. I only curate worldwide jobs.
| lagrange77 wrote:
| How would you approximate the ratio of jobs posts you scrape
| to those entered by your 'post a job' feature?
|
| EDIT: Thought about it and i guess it's 100% scraped for
| now..
| saasxyz wrote:
| > EDIT: Thought about it and i guess it's 100% scraped for
| now..
|
| That's right. I introduced 'post a job' feature only today.
| sokoloff wrote:
| No one is (legally) hiring truly location independent.
| em-bee wrote:
| legal limits only apply to hiring in countries where the
| company has a legal presence. in those places there is a
| possible limitation on legally hiring fulltime contractors as
| they may be classified as employees.
|
| everywhere else there is no legal limit to hiring
| contractors, simply because it doesn't make sense for any
| country to prevent its citizens from selling their services
| to a foreign company, nor has the country any legal ability
| to force that company into establishing a local presence.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Any US entity has restrictions from contracting with
| entities in some embargoed countries.
|
| https://ofaclawyer.net/prohibited-transactions/ is for the
| US, but I think most countries have something similar.
| em-bee wrote:
| yes, but these are a few exceptions and they apply to
| most countries worldwide. using that as an argument that
| a truly location independent job is not possible feels a
| bit pedantic, when the parent comment is about companies
| that artificially limit their remote hiring to a few
| specific countries for no discernible reason.
| jdthedisciple wrote:
| Nice site! If I could request a feature, it would be the ability
| to filter by country, job and perhaps time model.
| dewey wrote:
| Is there any difference to
| https://remoteok.com/?location=Worldwide?
| saasxyz wrote:
| That's also one source and accounts for 5% of postings
| available on my site. So, in a way it makes a difference.
| sintezcs wrote:
| I've been looking for a new remote job recently, and I've heard
| the following from a couple of companies: "We are a truly remote
| company - you can work from anywhere in the world! (Except Russia
| and Belarus)". Just curious, does the companies from your list
| allow remote work from these countries?
| orangepurple wrote:
| Courtesy of OFAC, these places are generally off limits:
|
| Belarus, Burma, as well as Cote D'Ivoire (Ivory Coast), Cuba,
| the Democratic Republic of Congo, Iran, Iraq, Liberia, North
| Korea, Sudan, Syria, and Zimbabwe
|
| You can't touch these people or companies either no matter
| what:
|
| https://www.treasury.gov/ofac/downloads/consolidated/consoli...
|
| The amount of stuff you are prohibited from doing business with
| is huge: https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/office-of-
| foreign-as...
| robin_reala wrote:
| That's only for US companies though.
| orangepurple wrote:
| Nope. If you violate OFAC as a foreigner you are shit-
| listed by the US government. You become radioactive and
| anybody with even the most remote ties to the United States
| can't do business with you safely. The US government can
| find a random rule from their massive trove to use to throw
| the book at you at that point. You're in their crosshairs
| both literally and figuratively since there is a decades
| long precedent of US extrajudicial killings of even its own
| citizens. They will go to immense lengths to shut you down
| if they hate you enough. The extradition of Kim Dotcom has
| been going on for a decade and they tried to put him in
| prison for life because he once had a server in the United
| States. That's the entire legal basis for the extradition.
| If they fail he is bankrupted, if they succeed he will be
| in an American prison until he dies.
|
| OFAC violations can have numerous painful impacts on a
| foreign company's business beyond mere payment of fines,
| including triggering red flags during due diligence by
| prospective partners, investors, acquirors, and financiers,
| putting companies in breach of contractual obligations to
| their banks, creating a disadvantage or disqualification in
| bidding for contracts, and attracting additional scrutiny
| from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United
| States (CFIUS) when attempting to acquire or invest in U.S.
| businesses.
|
| From: https://www.wiggin.com/publication/the-aggressive-
| extraterri...
|
| US government overreach is hard to overstate. If things get
| bad enough the FBI/CIA will attempt to abduct you (Viktor
| Bout, Assange, Snowden) or suicide you in a foreign prison
| (John McAfee). Most likely nobody will learn about your
| story after your unfortunate "suicide."
| affgrff2 wrote:
| Btw: Is there a way to legally employ or be imploded in a 100%
| location independent way? I mean, technically I can dream up some
| crypto stuff to do so. But do you think it is possible to make it
| possible with regard to taxes, health insurance etc.?
| bitL wrote:
| For US-based jobs one could work on W-8BEN form as a contractor
| from abroad responsible for their own taxes, health insurance
| etc. Of course that requires a freelancer/business entity at
| the place of residence/tax domicile.
| edgefield wrote:
| I'm not an expert but my understanding is that the answer is
| "No." For a company to employ someone legally in a country on a
| salary basis, the company and employee need to follow local tax
| and employment law. As you can imagine, these vary
| significantly from country to country. The only way around this
| to my knowledge is if the company sets up a legal operation in
| the country or hires via a third party "professional employment
| organization" (PEO). The company contracts with the PEO and the
| PEO hires the individual. The primary function of the PEO is to
| follows all of the local tax and employment laws. From my
| experience, PEOs increase employment cost by ~50% or more.
| dewey wrote:
| Usually in cases like that where the company doesn't have a
| local entity you will be employed through a EoR (Employer of
| Record) like Remote, Deel and many others.
|
| Then you are not directly employed at the company but employed
| through another company which then grants you the benefits for
| the local country that were negotiated. The other alternative
| is a regular freelancer / contractor relationship.
| orangepurple wrote:
| Every country on earth demands some form of payroll tax, social
| security tax, unemployment insurance in the form of self-
| employment tax, or a combination of the above. It is dependent
| on your "tax residence" which is a very complex topic you
| should research because governments WILL go after you for that
| cash.
| taigeair wrote:
| neat site, how do you plan to get traffic to it?
| etothepii wrote:
| By making the front page of HN.
| peter422 wrote:
| So the plan here was to scrape the job listings off another site
| (freshremote.work), pretend those people posted on your site,
| make a show HN and then hope someone is tricked into thinking
| this site actually gets traffic and pays you $49?
|
| I understand what you are doing but how is this providing any
| value? Wouldn't people just be better off going to the site you
| are scraping from?
| saasxyz wrote:
| I am not trying to trick people into believing all those
| postings were posted directly on my site. Anyone clicking
| around the site will simply find out that it is curated from
| various sources. And also on the top there is a clause that
| says "updated daily". Isn't it enough for people to understand
| this is curated from external services?
| dewey wrote:
| > Isn't it enough for people to understand this is curated
| from external services
|
| Usually "curated" means hand selected and filtered, not just
| scraped and automatically posted. It's an aggregator of
| aggregators at this point.
| djohnston wrote:
| Aggregator of aggregator is a viable business these days,
| till u get aggregated XD
| wooque wrote:
| you just learned how most job boards, but also classified
| advertising works
| paxys wrote:
| I'd wager "freshremote.work" is doing exactly the same thing.
| This is why 90% of job boards on the internet are useless. Just
| stick to reputed ones (Indeed, LinkedIn) or go directly to the
| company's careers site.
| djohnston wrote:
| Just aggregate this dude and you've upped the game!
| cercatrova wrote:
| That is in fact how every job board gains traction. I've seen
| it happen multiple times.
| piinecone wrote:
| Hopefully the fact that we're not doing this for our
| developer job matching site is not its death knell. We're
| building up developer preferences first, and then we can ask
| employers to create job descriptions and potentially match
| with developers.
|
| Scraping, in our case, wouldn't work anyway because most job
| advertisements don't have the information we require.
|
| (For the curious, my friend and I are making
| https://polyfill.work. Developers say what they want -- pay,
| schedule, etc. -- and polyfill introduces employers and
| developers when they want the same things)
| dvtrn wrote:
| Welcome to Job boards. It's not really a secret that this is
| how many, many, many of them work.
| Jonovono wrote:
| I was thinking of making a site like this for the opposite ;p.
| "we work in person". Tired of this scam of remote working. (I
| understand it works well for some people and companies)
| piinecone wrote:
| I think you should probably do that -- niche job boards seem to
| do well, (or, at least, I've convinced myself that that is the
| case). I should also mention you can do this with the developer
| job matching tool my friend and I are making:
|
| https://polyfill.work
|
| If you hit "onsite" as a developer or employer you'll only be
| matched with in-person employers/developers. It's very much a
| work in progress at the moment.
| BazookaMusic wrote:
| The quality of the posted jobs is a bit questionable. Still
| laughing from this: www.realworkfromanywhere.com/7369835152
| bobwaycott wrote:
| That's hilarious.
| SeriousM wrote:
| "100% remote work environment - work from anywhere in the US" is
| not worldwide...
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-09-03 23:01 UTC)