Ask HN: Why that many more US-based companies are hiring "US-only" remote?

As others have touched on, the legality of workers rights is very complex.

Companies don't want to learn and create the proper legal structures and compliance practices just to hire 1-2 people in that country.

Foreign countries have different holidays, worker protections, parental leave, taxes, etc. that companies just don't want to deal with. Some countries make it a huge mess paying someone in equity/options (see China).

Among other reasons, 2022 Section 174 tax changes require 15 years of depreciation for non-US software engineering ("R&D") expenses, vs 5 years for US workers, https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Section%20174. There's currently a proposal in Congress to restore US R&D tech worker salary depreciation to one year, for the 2026-2030 period.

You can't legally hire someone else not currently in the US or at least has a US-work permit and thus can be legally hired in the US and made a resident in some state. It used to be that the law turned a blind eye about this but now that's not the case.

You can Deel these employees but you can only transfer money abroad long enough till you realize that the only way to do it fully legally is to create a foreign entity in the foreign country and hire the employee through it. Might work for a particular and unique talent but it doesn't scale.

The US system is now hostile for "globally" distributed teams.

W-8BEN and don't worry about it, there are larger problems tbh. Or if you can use it for tax minimization hire internally.

Why hire internationally when you can hire someone remotely from the MiddleOfNowhere South Dakota that will happily work for peanuts and not have to deal with tax issues, time zones, etc?

Besides every opening for any remote job gets hundreds of applications within 24 hours. Most companies only need good enough CRUD developers. The market is flooded with unemployed “full stack developers”