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Yash harkawat
Yash harkawat

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I checked 900 "remote" job postings. Of the 71 that fit me, 16 were open to India.

#remote #career #webdev #opensource

"Remote" on a job board usually means "remote, inside the US".

I wanted a number, so I wrote a script that reads 8 remote job boards (Himalayas, RemoteOK, We Work Remotely, Remotive, Jobicy, Arbeitnow, Working Nomads and the Hacker News "Who is hiring?" thread) and labels every posting for one question: can someone living in India apply to this?

What one run looked like (19 Sep 2026)

  • about 900 postings read
  • 71 matched "react / node / full stack" and were less than 14 days old
  • 41 of those 71 were restricted to somewhere else: "USA Only", "Europe, LATAM", "must be authorized to work in the United States", "CET +/- 3 hours", German (m/w/d) local hires
  • 16 were really open to me: 1 named India, 3 named APAC, 12 said worldwide
  • 3 did not say either way
  • the rest were the same job posted on two boards

So roughly 1 in 4 of the relevant "remote" jobs was one I could actually apply to.

How the check works

No AI, just reading the posting in a fixed order:

  1. The board's own location field ("Anywhere in the World", "USA Only", "Europe, LATAM, APAC").
  2. Phrases in the description ("EU residents only", "authorized to work in ...").
  3. Timezone rules ("within 3 hours of EST") compared with the candidate's UTC offset.
  4. Local-hire markers such as (m/w/d).

A job that only says "Remote" is marked unclear, never "worldwide". Every verdict carries the quoted text it came from, so a wrong one is obvious.

Two mistakes I made first, in case you build something similar: the word "global" in a description ("a global company") is not a hiring statement, and two-letter country codes ("in", "it", "de") match ordinary English words.

Try it

It runs on Apify as the Worldwide Remote Jobs Scraper: set your country and keywords, get a JSON/CSV list with a verdict per job. It works for 110+ countries, and as an MCP tool for AI agents.

https://apify.com/yash_harkawat/remote-jobs-eligibility-aggregator

The code is open, including the full rule list in src/eligibility.js:

https://github.com/yashharkawat/remote-jobs-eligibility-aggregator

If a verdict looks wrong for your country, open an issue with the job URL and I will fix the rule.

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