Plus remote kinda opens you up to everywhere in the world, which in theory if they are skilled who cares where they are? So I seen some remote jobs that will limit where people can work remotely. Sounds like that also helps lessen the applications then, but some cities have millions of people like NYC.

Also hiring people in other jurisdictions opens up legal compliance and other issues. So if you have an office in San Francisco and wanted to hire someone in Cincinnati, you'd have to follow a bunch of labor laws as if you were local, and then the other state you now also owe a variety of different taxes in. Then some stuff is even city by city depending on the state. So a company in Los Angeles wanting to hire someone in San Francisco or vice-verses might run into extra stuff to take care of.

So I could see as a smaller startup how this could be a huge hassle of keeping up with all the different rules and keeping track of everything as they change, etc. There was a company in SF that wanted to hire me but wasn't sure if it'd work out long term since never worked with some of the stuff they were using and didn't know if it'd last if I moved across the country, but I guess for only a single person in a state it isn't worth it...

Wouldn't surprise me if that HR lady would need to consult with legal and lawyers then even some lawyers and officials don't even know answers to everything. So easier for them if I just packed my bags and flew to California. Sounds like my state's interest would be making regulations on remote businesses easier to keep residents.

Kinda same with affiliate marketing which I dabbled in, I was in a program but got kicked out because the company didn't like a rule here. Kinda sucks based on your state, you lose out on opportunities. I guess the state wants more money from businesses remote, but instead they alienate the business. I wasn't making any money from that program but if I did that could have been a big income hit so sounds like the state trying to gain money from a business could back fire if they decide to just pull out. Then they lose out both tax money from that business and the individual earnings on sales. So instead of getting half the pie, they want the full pie but end up getting no pie in the end if the business decides to just kick the residents out.

Then you use cloud hosting? Your video game is getting popular in India, click a few buttons and spin up instances to make it faster for them? Sounds easy for IT but then they might forget to consider that some jurisdictions consider a server so then yet another thing to make you meet local regulations. Like India for example, so now you are operating a business in India and all the stuff that comes with it. However probably the way those laws are written would consider ownership, some might apply to just dedicated servers you own colocated instead of rented servers like a VPS or dedi the company retains ownership of, like some places in the US wants property taxes on servers and other business equipments. Which is kinda disappointed because some stuff might be cheaper long term building your own server and shipping it to a datacenter somewhere then the cloud, but got to consider how the area the datacenter is in would treat that. Then I know there was a case where Los Angeles County wanted to charge property taxes on a satellite in outterspace.

Seems we're living in the future with amazing tech, but when it comes to all the legal stuff. They wrote everything considering that someone lives in a house and commutes to work every day with maybe a week of vacation a year. They haven't really considered the idea of remote work or even people living in Vans, RVs, Boats, living out of a suitcase flying or cruising around the globe since those communities struggle. Even the laws disadvantage homeless people from voting, getting required documents they'd need to get a job or bank account etc.

Very discouraging stuff though, seems like startups are already challenging and then you deal with a very outdated stuff then some local jurisdictions like cities or counties don't even have this stuff online either. So I guess that's another hurtle if you wanted to hire someone remotely in a small town in the midwest for example maybe. I guess if you get funding instead of bootstrapping/doing it yourself you can hire the right people to deal with all this stuff and later grow each category into their own departments like HR, Legal and accounting.

My idea if I had a startup that allowed working remotely, maybe setup like a "hub" office in areas that are interesting so they have a local office to report to, and make the office have like a co-working type space for remote workers who come into the office or someone might want to do half and half. Sounds like less questions of how to handle certain things and a headache. I hope in the future they simplify this sorta stuff though as more and more remote gains attraction.

Someone else in this thread was discussing that issue also. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22554014