I tentatively request suggestions (RFC) for a standard way of expressing remoteness:
- remote in one country - remote in region - remote by exact timezone - remote by timezone range (or official office hours) - mostly remote, with some country qualification - really, truly, totally remote In country, is because the company wants just one legal jurisdiction for employment, perhaps also for some filter on criminality/identity/banking.In region is not really defined in the world, except EU has some common employment law, corporate/banking harmonization, and small timezone spread.
Countries are not necessarily temporally compact in the sense of only 1 timezone. Obviously Russia, Canada, US... are extreme examples. Chile is well-behaved. But some places are split on daylight savings, so that is not strictly included in the criterion, there is just +-1hr in summer/winter.
Exact timezone might allow various N-S combinations, such as London-Lisbon.
Timezone range might allow London-Cape Town, or any US and Mexico. It's really overlapping office hours for core meeting schedule, independent of country.
Mostly remote might have some global freedom, but be limited to where the company has a legal entity for employment - or the opposite for contractors. Note that these may conflict: so you may not hire an 'offshore' contractor in a country where you have a legal presence (e.g. US company hires contractor through a Singapore company, but the contractor actually lives in Myanmar, which may be on the blacklist - see below, yes it is - or say India, where the original hiring company has a legal presence).
Totally remote does not exist. There are legal and financial sanctions that exist from West-G7-G20-OECD against various other countries that are beyond-the-pale. The core subset of rejects are the obvious axis-of-evilly kinda places, but there are many excluded by a corrupt banking system, or cyberattack risk (assuming you ship laptop or have connectivity through local country ISP - surely not, that's what VPNs are for, but try asking to live in China :) For example, N. Korea is obviously off-the-table, so is Vietnam, okay nice cheap place to live but I understand, however the Philippines as well (really?) yes, I assume mafia/banking or something.