There are dozens of other major competing payroll services providers.
Why do people on HN expect others to learn PC or Internet security but themselves throw in the towel trying to learn relatively simple tasks?
But it's a mental leap to move from "just need to find enough clients to pay my bills" to "need to make sure the paperwork is right so I can pay someone to help me out".
I don't personally find it intimidating, but I've also done it before.
So yes, you have to fill out 5 forms, and write 4 checks, every year for withheld taxes.
But none of this qualifies for “it’s sad, it’s getting hard to be a small business”. They’re just things everyone in the US has been legally obligated to do for part time employees for an exceedingly long time.
So I don’t get the tone of this thread.
It’s a literal chilling action on small business.
And yet, somehow hundreds of thousands of small businesses, most of them in non technical fields whose owners I would surmise don't have nearly the average educational and/or technical skills that HN readership does, somehow managed to navigate it.
This isn't terrifyingly complex. You can work it out yourself, or pay a reasonable fee to someone to set you up. It's a business expense that any actually viable small business should be able to easily justify.
We're talking about a Google search and a few forms...
If you don't have the money to pay $50 bucks then do it yourself and just worry less. The chance you mess up is so low it isn't even a thing.
If you're unable to grow your business because you are scared about a step required to grow your business you aren't going to grow your business. Nobody owes you this. Risk aversion isn't anyone else's fault.
She's managed just fine as well. I've managed a department previously and had to deal with worker's comp matters and same thing. It's not very difficult to learn. It's a bit of overhead, sure. It's just part of the job of overseeing others.
Well, I’m super libertarian and generally opposed to any and all government regulation, but… if labor laws are stifling small businesses, why have labor laws in the first place? The reason for this law is explicitly, specifically, stop businesses (small and large alike) from doing business this way; it’s not an unintended consequence, it’s entirely the point.
Now, maybe you'll argue that these are all steps that the government should be doing instead of the employer. And I agree, but they're done this way because there's a whole political aisle in this country dedicated to the proposition that the government shouldn't ever do anything. So someone has to do it, and in our scheme it's the employer.
This attitute is exactly why those laws are needed. As a business owner if you want to hire some other human being to work for your company then it should be your natural instinct that wants you to learn everything that makes the life of that other human being easy to work for you, but because you have no intrinsic interest in actually educating yourself what someone might need if they work for you, that is why you have to be forced into learning that by law.
It's sad that all you care about is someone getting your work done, because it's still a human being and that legislation is there for a reason.
Everything? That'd be thousands of pages of regulations to sift through and understand. So, no, there's no "natural instinct" to do that.
Kind of going overboard on the rest of it. They just want to hire some part time help, not staff a coal mine.
I only finally bothered to learn how to do it all last year when I needed some extra help with projects for my consulting company. Prior to that I just paid a contract CFO to deal with it because it's what you don't know you don't know that gets you sued. So either it's expensive to hire a CFO just for that, or expensive in your time to learn it all when your main goal is to actually get work done that produces revenue.