[dominotw]

Really shocked by this. I had no idea there are employers who doesn't adjust your salary from US salary if you move to an entirely different country.

all the examples i know of like gitlab, mozilla ect adjust it to local country comp.

anyone know if such an employer actually exists in US?

[jsjohnst]

> anyone know if such an employer actually exists in US?

Yes. I’ve personally seen it happen multiple times at different employers, each with unique factors.

There are way to many factors at play here to make broad assumptions that no employer does it...

- first and foremost, Covid changed everything when it comes to remote salary norms

- Duration of move (some employers would be more lenient for 6-12mo vs permanent move)

- level of seniority (which correlates somewhat with how hard it is to replace said employee if employer says no)

- how long as the employee worked for employer (another factor in how much it impacts employer if employee moves anyway and goes to work for another company)

- how bad the employer wants to retain said employee (Multiple previous emplayers, big and small, have made exceptions for specific coworkers)

- it’s important enough to mention again, Covid changed everything.

[dominotw]

> There are way to many factors at play here to make broad assumptions that no employer does it...

Yes you can make broad assumptions that almost no hr, payroll, legal dept of any company is setup to deal with taxes, labor laws ect across hundreds of different countries.

Yes exceptions exist.

> - it’s important enough to mention again, Covid changed everything.

No it didn't. Do you have even a single example of an employer thats allowing ppl work longterm from whichever country they please due to covid?

[jsjohnst]

> Do you have even a single example of an employer thats allowing ppl work longterm from whichever country they please due to covid?

Yes, I do, but I’m not doing your research for you. You’ve been extremely combative and flat rude and incredulous this entire thread, so I’m stopping my participation. If you genuinely are in pursuit of knowledge and not to just pick random fights on the Internet, then I implore you to use a different approach.

[dominotw]

Sorry I wasn't trying to be rude, yes I agree that my comment were indeed rude. I apologize to you.

I'll try to be better.

I did do my research but I havent found any company that,

1. Lets you move to any country

2. Adjusts your payroll to that country's address.

3. Doesn't adjust your compensation from what you were getting paid in USA.

I do know of some exceptions where people were allowed to move to a country where they already have a home office. One of my coworkers moved to Dublin and my company had a home office in Ireland. Some of my coworkers are also stuck in countries like India due to covid and HR allows them to work from there for now. But it is not any sort of company policy to let ppl work from a random country forever while maintaining their US salaries.

But the claim here is that you can move to any random country like Barbados.

[pault]

In my case, a company called Pathable based out of Seattle, a company called Optify based out of Seattle, and a company called iCracked based out of San Francisco. I don't know what the heads of their HR departments would say if you asked them, but everyone I worked with was aware of my situation and no one ever questioned it.

[pault]

I have worked for several small startups in Seattle and the bay area that didn't say anything about me being in Brazil, Thailand, and Belize. In each case I was earning around $120k/yr on salary.

[dominotw]

Sure but did you change your payroll address? What was the address on your payroll?

[pault]

Sorry, I replied to one of your other comments but didn't mention it here: no, I used my mom's address. I had all of my mail sent there, mostly lived in monthly rentals, and renewed my tourist visa whenever it was up. When I did go back to the US I stayed with my mom, and I kept most of my stuff there, so you could make a good faith argument that it was my primary residence (in the US).

I'm pretty sure the only gray area in this arrangement is "working in the US" while staying in another country on a tourist visa, but it's pretty ambiguous. I'm working for a US company and getting direct deposits to a US bank as a US citizen. If I am on a trip to another country and I sign into my company's VPN for a work-related video conference, and maybe fix some bugs, am I working illegally? Maybe, but immigration laws aren't really written with that scenario in mind.

This is a topic that frequently came up in conversations with ex-pats, since once you start doing this you'll end up meeting lots of other remote workers doing the same thing. On the one hand, you are injecting a lot of money from your home country into the local economy, which increases GDP and supports local businesses. On the other, you are using public services without paying taxes to the host country. In practice, you can't use services like universal healthcare or free education without being a legal resident, so it's debatable whether your presence is a net negative for the local economy. It's probably not legal, but like I said, the immigration laws don't take this scenario into account. I was forthright with all of the immigration officials I spoke to and all of them just kind of shrugged their shoulders and renewed my tourist visa anyway. I figured that some countries would start writing new legislation and creating new types of visas to take advantage of this scenario, and we can see this happening now.

If your question is "is this legal", the answer is "it's complicated, but probably not". If you're asking if it's possible to do this long term, the answer is yes, it's not only possible but pretty easy. I was able to do this for almost a decade with no issues whatsoever. I'm glad that some countries are starting to think about this, because I'd much rather live with confidence that my work situation is accounted for than have to wonder if my residence there is dependent on the interpretation of each individual in the immigration department.

[dominotw]

Yea i know people who did this undere 'don't ask don't tell' policy. But the parallel comments here are claming that companies in US are setup to do foreign payroll, labor laws which I find really hard to believe.

[pault]

Oh, I see. I do know that some fully remote startups do this. There was a blog post that made the front page here for a well known company outlining which countries their employees could live in and what the salary bands were. I can't remember who it was though. Maybe gitlab?

[dominotw]

Yea that was gitlab ( there are a couple of others like mozilla ect). But they adjust your salary based on your location, like you mentioned.

claim here was that you continue to get 'cushy US salary' no matter which country and you get your payroll to the home address in that country. That sounds really hard to believe to me.