I would suspect no remote work hire is a cold hire. Most of the times it is someone which has previously worked on-site and shown to be trustworthy enough to manage themselves when working remotely.

So yes, getting companies who don't know you, and will hire you for remote work based on an interview only is rare.

As someone who's worked about 50% remote in the past year, this is not true. I've worked for companies in the US, Mexico, the UK, while based in the Netherlands. One common factor though is they were mostly people already in my network, so there is definitely a trust element - but not a "face to face" trust element necessarily.

It is rare, but it does happen. Over the last 4 years I've help to build up a 10 person development team (from 3) having never met any of the candidates before hiring them.

I didn't meet anyone else from the company until a year after I had already been working here.

The interview process is just needs to be fairly rigorous. Our preference is to hire within Canada because of:

* Timezones * Government incentives * Payment/Tax/Accounting hassles have already been sorted

But that doesn't mean we'll pass up great candidates in other locations.

We're hiring Modern Perl developers right now :

http://jobs.perl.org/job/18026

I have taken cold hire remote jobs before. I am admittedly surprised to hear that it is considered rare.

I work remotely 100% and love it. I would never assume that 'remote' means from anywhere in the world.

When I think of remote jobs for US-based companies, I generally think of those positions being for workers employable within the US already.

Usually the company is specific about where the remote worker can be for ex: in the same city but working from home, same timezone, within 1-3 timezones or just within the USA somewhere. Even meetups are generally written into the employment contract.

My whole team is remotely located across the US and it really works well.

Yeah, Keats. You are 100% right. Remote covered this briefly, I think in the "Beware the dragons" chapter.

I don't understand the legal side of the situation completely, but if you have enough people working out of a given international city, it could create a Nexus and require you to set up an office, etc.

Remote's advice here is to hire international workers as contractors, but to treat them like full-time employees. Not ideal.

Hopefully, this will get easier as time goes on.

"hire ... as contractors, but to treat them like full-time employees"

In UK employment law at least this isn't legal, or rather the law simply treats them as employees.

I think they were referring to the liabilities from the perspective or running a company. Not, how it affects the individual employee/contractor.

Same thing in the US. There are major tax implications.

If you hire contractors, treat them like contractors.

Perhaps it's because, as the the book notes, that overlap in working schedules (which timezone overlap facilitates) is important to collaboration.