Even in a distributed organization, you have to deal with taxes separately per-country, so each country has to be approved by HR, in a sense. And you can’t have employees living in places like Iran.

Distributed startups often use a 3rd party to do the actual employment/compliance of people across N countries. Those providers are called Professional Employer Organization (PEO) and serve as Employers of Record (EOR) - handling employee/contractor agreements, payroll, compliance, tax, etc. The startup itself does not even register a legal entity in the country, and everything is managed by the likes of Papaya Global, Globalization Partners, etc.

Right but the default case is that every country is okay, minus the exceptions.

This whole debacle is Gitlab choosing to add China and Russia to their list of exceptions.

For physical offices, it's a whitelist: if we didn't decide your country gets an office, too bad

That ship has sailed IMO, in that even in single location orgs you will have foreign employees with potential legal obligation toward different governments, and domestic employees with strong ties to other countries.

From that point of view Gitlab’s diacussion on hiring or not employees from specific countries seems a bit old (except if it’s for paperwork reasons)

You will have employees from foreign countries, but not employees living in foreign countries.

This not only changes the degree to which the foreign country can influence them, but it changes the degree to which other countries can retaliate if they act as spies.

For a recent example, see the twitter employees who were spying for Saudi Arabia.

I think, from other comments, it's a matter of residence, not origin.

Another interesting aspect to a globally distributed team like this is how it's inherently uncertain how the business will be impacted by dynamic geopolitical changes/rules across the world.

Here it's about China and Russia. But the next day it could be government pressure on hiring bans in Pakistan or Indonesia or South Africa or Peru based on whatever countries are in a spat at the moment.

What happens to the current employees then? "Sorry, you're fired"?

When ukraine was starting it's revolution in 2013/4, and it was unclear what was going to happen in the country, if it would break into war, or just become some place we could no longer keep our 250 employees, my HR team came to talk to me.

I had 12+ employees there and they asked me to write down the names of 3. Those 3 would be the ones we would try to extricate from a country descending into war should that happen. Them, their wives, and their children.

How the fuck do you make that decision?

As best you can.

In December 2018, news broke that Charlotta Turner, Professor in Analytical Chemistry at Lund University in Sweden, arranged for mercenaries to rescue a doctoral student and his family from the Islamic State.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/12/13/swedish-universi...

Organisations do this. Resources are limited.

More likely, "Sorry, we either need you to relocate or move to a new role within the company".

Companies forcing employees to relocate isn't exactly new...

My employer was bought by a larger company which laid off some long term eastern european contractors in basically this situation.