Ask HN: How do you pay your remote workers located in various countries?
I'm about to hire 1 remote worker / freelancer working out of Barcelona, Spain (US Citizen) and another working out of India (Indian Citizen).
I previously hired a remote worker out of Ukraine and after he completed a small job, found out that I couldn't pay him through paypal. Ukraine has some laws that make it difficult. So the only way was to open an UpWork account and grant him a private gig and then pay him through them. UpWork charges the client (me) 10% or 20% which is ugly.
So I would like to know how you pay your remote workers as freelance contractors, if you are in a situation similar to mine, without ending up having to eat expensive fees, or violating any US or remote workers' country's tax laws.
Costs, Fees, reliability #s would be great!
[P.S. I'm based in San Francisco, California]
44 comments
[ 10.8 ms ] story [ 1255 ms ] threadI have/had 50€ worth of bitcoin and I tried to turn them into real money. Now I have ~50€ in some wallet on some service and I haven't been able to figure out how to get them out.
In most of the world cryptocurrencies are not practical in any way.
This is the user experience for an EU citizen. It's probably similar for people in the states.
Remitely makes it easy, but the fees/exchange rate is high.
I also am debating about sending a prepaid debit card w/ PIN, because local ATM fees are only 50-100 peso for international transaction. Maximum 52php, but the full interchange rate is applied 49-52 PHP/1USD vs Remitely 47-48PHP.
At $500-700, that's $10 to send via the service + $10 in exchange fees.
Take a look at coins.ph - the service has apparently built some connections with a lot of local money options. You can even put money back into it via 7/11 in the Philippines if you have no other banking options.
Speaking to a potential employer, I would say that if 30 USD is expensive versus the salary you are paying, then you are paying too little.
As an example, my employer hires developers in the Philippines and pays on average 5000 USD each per month. The cost of the wire transfer is 0.6% of that. I think we pay more per month on phone service just to talk to them.
As a developer, you have all the power to become a black hole of resources, sucking in all the money paid to you, the time of everyone who deals with you and all positive energy. That's why the start-up gurus will tell you that one bad hire can sink a company. On the other end, you have developers who can will into existence the sun, the moon and the stars. Location and nationality don't matter.
I think what people get caught up on is they think it's about developer skills. But paradoxically, when you are hiring a developer, it's those development skills which are the last things on the list of importance aside from the fact that they should be present.
https://80000hours.org/articles/skills-most-employable/
There was an HN thread on this article the other day. Agree with it or not, but I think all those things above programming is what separates a disaster looking to pick up a check from an A-team operator who doesn't have to worry about getting work.
But for most programming jobs, developers are interchangeable and a big part of hiring a developer(remote or not) in developing countries is that you can pay a fraction of the salary you would be pay if you were hiring a dev in US/Europe. Hence this in essence is one of the major selling points.
What are the specific things would you say one can do to sell themselves at that rate keeping in mind the above mentioned point?
If you want to know how to sell software (or services), I couldn't even touch the advice which tptacek and patio11 regularly give on HN. Do a search for their threads and run with their advice. As per patio11's profile, you could even email him and there is a 70% chance of him getting back to you.
[0] Busy with work and kids leaves me with less time for the Internet generally, as you can probably gather by e.g. my HN participation being "a time or two weekly" rather than "multiple times every day for years."
That depends. I should've clarified that the remote workers are Contractors, not Employees, and the hiring period and costs vary. For example, I'd hired a contractor in India to write a small Python script -- took him 20 minutes - (1 time gig) for 50 USD. If I were to do a bank transfer for a 30$ fee, that's over 50% of the cost of the actual work / services rendered.
But I get your point. For remote employees on a USD salary, it's usually 2000 USD or more per month, and in that case, Bank Transfer may be feasible as it's convenient for both parties.
Being paid via bank transfer is standard here (for employment it's actually enforced by law), if my employer in US would try to pay me via some strange intermediate or god-forbid BTC, I'd immediately think of a scam or attempt at tax evasion (with all the liability that comes with that).
Another questions is how would you define salaries of your employees across various countries. As exchange rates could go up and down a lot. So you'd probably define salaries in the currency of country where company is incorporated in.
So for a US company you would pay your employees by bank transfer in defined amount of USD, pay the transfer fee on top of that. And employees would get money in their local currency based on the exchange rate.
Of course, ideally you would have all your remote employees open a bank account in your currency which would simplify everything.
For most banks / situation you actually get USD - the banks aren's allowed just do conversion by themselves (at least here in EU).
So you get a separate USD account balance which you then need to manually request to exchange - which is good because you can decided when to exchange it :)
Yes, good point. I'm incorporated in US and the remote workers are Contractors, not Employees (sorry, should've made that clear in my OP). I will be paying these contractors an agreed upon monthly or 1 time fees payable in USD.
This works as you will anyway need invoice for tracking expenses