[jefftk]

Many people move across the country or even between countries for these jobs, especially to the SF Bay Area. You want more assurance than that before you uproot your life.

Additionally, the time to spin up at a mature company with it's on tooling and enormous amounts of existing code can be really long. I don't think you can generally tell in two days whether a person is going to do well.

[mixmastamyk]

If you can do common things well, you can learn a codebase.

Remote contracts are a thing as well.

I'm not sure international hires are relevant to the discussion, they are at best a sliver of the whole.