I'm a developer and I have a small American business. I see all of these posts about building remote teams distributed across the world and I think "yes, perfect!", but somehow I've been completely unable to find anyone covering the legality of doing this in detail. For example, I want to be on this list under "Worldwide":
https://github.com/jessicard/remote-jobs
Ideally I want someone that essentially works for us full-time and understands all of our core infra, can maintain it, etc. like an employee would. There seem to be tons of remote-only job postings in this vein.
But I don't understand how it's legal - aren't these people being treated as employees, which come with an impossible amount of risk / international law / messiness attached?
Is there perhaps a whitelisted set of countries that have extremely simple employee / contractor rules?
My worst nightmare is ending up in court for accidentally crossing some line that I didn't understand. I just want to hire someone and start building an awesome remote team!