[SR2Z]

> This is sortof absurd on the face of it. For context, I'm a European who's been working for US based companies for well over a decade now, and rarely do I have communications issues (and they're generally with non-native English speakers, mostly Europeans living in the US).

You might have excellent fluency, but my experience is that it varies a lot depending on the person.

> Granted, you can't fire them for not laughing at your jokes but the same sort of process gets followed in California where most US tech companies are headquatered.

I think this is underselling the degree of employment protection in Europe, but I will freely admit I'm not an expert.

> In fact, it's normally easier to get a better person outside the US, as they have less options at big-tech level wages. The US dominates the tech sector because of availablity of capital, not availability of talent.

But "better person" here doesn't mean smarter - it means a more effective employee. Working in a very different timezone, language barriers, and culture differences make that an uphill battle, which is why offshoring hasn't exploded.

[disgruntledphd2]

I'm a native English speaker, for what it's worth. There are about 80mn or so of us in Europe.

I think the issue around employment protection is that the US laws are crazy bad, so any level of employment protection seems weird. Ireland and the UK (weirdly the places where you have lots of native English speakers) have pretty employer friendly laws for Europe.

Western Europe generally has a bunch more protections for permanent employees so maybe that's what you mean? Note that employment laws are almost entirely national, but the EU sets a floor.

Timezones definitely make a big difference, but again the cultural differences between Ireland and the UK and the typical coastal US tech companies are wildly oversold.