Many of them hire you as a contractor, of course. However, I noticed that more and more companies use an "HR as a service" (e.g. deel.com) to act as an intermediary who has an official branch in most countries and takes care of all the formalities for you.

In that case you’re working for deel and deel is contracting you out to the hiring company.

Companies can fire you/lay you off without even any of the mediocre protections you get under US law.

I’m not sure how deel handles this situation with employees in countries with stricter worker protections. Do they require the company to pay severance, do they include that in their fees?

I suspect that they are operating in a gray area because no one is really looking.

> I’m not sure how deel handles this situation with employees in countries with stricter worker protections. Do they require the company to pay severance, do they include that in their fees?

We hired engineers in Mexico through Deel and were required to provide the mandatory severance up front (I forgot the exact amount but I think it was like 3 months salary?).

That money sat in an escrow account until we let go of the employees at which point we still had to follow all of the local labor laws which I believe also meant that every severance needed to be individually negotiated.

Deel handled all the mechanics but we still had to follow the process (meaning that the time between deciding to lay people off and actually being able to do it was a month if I recall correctly).

For what it's worth the experience convinced me to stick to traditional contracting companies for my remote engineers. Deel is probably a better fit for a company looking to transition to having a full time headquarters and business set up in that country rather than one that wants to just leverage the global pool of engineers.

That sounds like lawsuits waiting to happen for Deel and/or their customers. Either people are employees of Deel or they are your employees, Deel can't have their cake and eat it, too.

Definitely seems to be based on a strictly literal reading of the law that might not hold up under scrutiny.

If someone is acting as a de facto employee of a company, I don’t see the “employer of record” fiction holding up.

It's pretty close to working with a local software house receiving works (customers) from the U.S. and operate team as "project base". Except you can't rotate into projects across companies and get paid about +30-40% of local market rates.

I move between countries. Anyone happen to know how this works for this situation? (i.e. I'm currently in Mexico, but next week I'll be in Guatemala. Does Deel cope with this, and if so how?)

Even if you move between countries you still must have a tax residency somewhere. So you're employed from the place where you have your tax residency.

Not really. I left Germany last year. As I wasn't a citizen and I'm not now a resident, I'm not a tax resident of Germany. Edit: clarification: I specifically de-registered with the German tax system, as required by German law. And to establish a new residency, I would have to live more than 180 days in that country, which I haven't yet.

I have multiple citizenships, so I'm not automatically a tax resident of a country I'm a citizen of.

I'm an edge case for tax laws.

Unless the us is one of those citizenships which mandates filing. And I suspect that if you dodge tax residency by avoiding 180 days anywhere I figure you’re at risk to any border agent with a sore ass having a bad day.

I'm not "dodging tax residency" - I'm legitimately travelling.

There's a lot of discussion on this in the digital nomad community. You literally can't register as a tax resident without spending at least 180 days in a country, for most countries. And yes, some tax authorities get a bit strange about people not having a tax residency for an extended period, but we're just following the rules.

The US is different because of the Federal/State tax split, and Federal taxes don't depend on residency. Not many other countries have this split.

Australia (one of my citizenships) is moving towards having to file tax returns even if not resident, but afaik it's not there yet.

I’m moving locations a lot myself too. I’ve found deel / remote is not great because it tethers you to the country you started in.

For my situation setting up my own us llc and contracting/consulting through it means I can move around. Also the us llc onboards cleanly for any companies using gusto and for others I send a W9 that they know how to handle.

> because it tethers you to the country you started in.

How would is the alternative you describing different? Didn't you just tether yourself to US?

When setting up Deel you could have just stated that you were in US and move around like you're doing now.