Canada Is Arguing Over Which Three Days You Have to Badge In. Iran Is Arguing Over Whether It Can Reach GitHub.

🇮🇷 Iran · 🇨🇦 Canada

*By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

In Canada, "remote work attitudes" means a running argument over badge-tracking, VP reports on who showed up, and whether three office days a week is generous or insulting. In Iran, it can mean something closer to the studs of the building itself: GitHub restricted, AWS and Stripe unreachable, Slack accounts suspended and wiped without warning, and internet blackouts that have run past 70 days at a stretch. Both countries have workers asking, reasonably, "can I do my job from here today?" — they are just answering an entirely different question.

Do's & Don'ts

🇮🇷 Iran

🇨🇦 Canada

Iran

The honest starting point for remote work in Iran isn't company policy, it's infrastructure. US sanctions and OFAC rules restrict Iranian developers' access to GitHub's paid and private features, block npm publishing, and cut off account creation on AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and Oracle Cloud — along with the payment processors, Stripe and PayPal among them, that would otherwise let a freelancer actually get paid internationally. App Store and Google Play developer accounts face the same restriction, closing off paid-app revenue as a path too. What remains generally open is consumption: reading documentation, cloning public repositories, downloading public packages — participation is what's blocked, not access to information itself.

Developer Shahin Sorkh, speaking on record about the reality of the work, described hitting a wall mid-project: sites simply display a message reading "you cannot offer a page because you are sanctioned by the United States," and Slack has suspended Iranian accounts outright, wiping their data with no recourse. The workarounds are now a parallel professional infrastructure in their own right — cryptocurrency and peer-to-peer exchanges for payment, hosting through Hetzner, OVH, or Alibaba Cloud instead of the US majors, and accounts registered through diaspora relatives abroad. None of this is marginal or occasional; by most accounts it's simply how the profession now operates for anyone who intends to earn from outside Iran's own small domestic market, which makes the workaround stack itself something closer to standard professional infrastructure than a clever hack. Layered on top of all of it are periodic nationwide internet restrictions; one recent stretch ran past 70 days and, per local reporting, disrupted "work, healthcare, daily lives and mental well-being" for people simply trying to stay online. For a remote worker specifically, that single fact outranks anything an employer could offer: no flexible-work policy survives a dead connection, and no manager, however understanding, can route around a nationwide shutdown.

Canada

Canada's remote-work argument looks almost quaint by comparison, which doesn't make it any less real to the people having it. Statistics Canada's November 2024 data found 12.5 percent of employed Canadians working entirely from home and another 11.5 percent on a hybrid schedule, but the direction of travel is unmistakably back toward the office: the share of hybrid workers spending at least half their hours on-site rose to 55.8 percent, up 4.2 points in a year. Public administration moved hardest, with on-site hybrid time jumping nearly 20 points to 61.5 percent, and Correctional Service Canada scrapped work-from-home entirely in favor of a five-day office week. The federal government's own return-to-office mandate for public servants took full effect in September.

The private sector tells the same story with more granularity. A long-running Blind thread on TD Bank's remote policy shows the drift in real time: fully remote teams before the pandemic, then one office day every week or two by 2022, then badge-tracking reports going up to VPs and AVPs on who's actually showing up, then a 2024 comment flatly calling remote work "ending." BMO staff outside Toronto reported being asked in two to three days a week over the same period, with no fully remote option on the table. None of it is sanctions or infrastructure — it's simply management deciding, one badge swipe at a time, that flexible didn't mean what everyone assumed it meant in 2021.

The Reckoning

Set side by side, the two countries are solving completely different equations with the same vocabulary. Canada's flexibility fight is a negotiation between employer and employee over a resource both sides fundamentally have access to — office space, internet, payment systems — with the only real variable being how many days a week someone has to use the first one. Iran's is a fight for access to the resource itself, where the real "return-to-office mandate" is a government filtering decision or a foreign sanctions list, and no amount of manager goodwill changes whether Stripe will process a payment.

That asymmetry means the countries aren't actually competing on the same axis, however similar the headline subject sounds. On Hofstede's framework, Iran scores moderately high on power distance and uncertainty avoidance, consistent with a workforce that has had to build durable, informal, trust-based workarounds — crypto payments, diaspora-held accounts — precisely because formal institutions can't be relied on to function; Canada's lower power distance and higher individualism produce the opposite failure mode, a workforce comfortable enough to openly argue, by name, on a public forum, about whether their bank's badge-tracking policy is fair. Neither trait is a complaint about character; both are entirely rational responses to the institutions each workforce actually has to work inside.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Blind (teamblind.com) — A TD Bank employee answering a colleague's question about remote work described the drift bluntly: a fully remote team before the pandemic became one office day every two weeks, then the bank started tracking badge-ins and sending the numbers up to VPs, with executives told to be in three days a week — a policy that changed shape every year someone checked back in. Scrum masters and specialist roles sometimes stayed functionally remote underneath an official city-based job posting, which meant the real policy, as always, lived in the team's actual habits rather than the HR page.

Blind (teamblind.com) — A BMO employee outside Toronto, answering the same thread, said colleagues in the city were being asked in two to three days a week with no fully remote option offered at all, adding they'd be surprised if a rival bank were any more generous — a small, candid cross-check on how uniform the big banks' policies actually are.

Gigazine interview, developer Shahin Sorkh — Asked to describe the actual texture of working remotely from Iran, he didn't lead with hours or hierarchy; he led with the message international sites show Iranian visitors outright: "you cannot offer a page because you are sanctioned by the United States" — the sentence that, more than any manager, decides what Sorkh can and can't build on a given day.

Iran International reporting — Residents living through one of the country's extended internet restriction periods, which ran past 70 days, described the disruption in terms that went well beyond the office: it affected "their work, healthcare, daily lives and mental well-being" alike, a reminder that "remote work policy" in Iran is downstream of a much larger and less negotiable set of decisions.

Conclusion

If you're moving from Canada to Iran, retire the instinct to ask HR about remote-work policy and start asking about payment rails, hosting providers, and VPN reliability instead — those answers will tell you far more about your actual working life than anything in an offer letter. If you're moving from Iran to Canada, the frustration flips: the infrastructure will simply work, and your new fight will be the oddly petty one of counting badge-ins and guessing whether this year's three-day mandate becomes next year's five.

Both countries will tell you, in their own way, that remote work is "complicated right now." In Canada that means a meeting about it. In Iran it means a sanctions list. Know which meeting you're actually walking into. Pack accordingly: a good manager helps in one of these countries, and a good VPN helps in the other, and mixing up which one you'll need is the single most common rookie mistake either direction.