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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

One of the things that I think rarely gets mentioned WRT remote work, especially when the "you can hire workers anywhere in the world" platitudes get bandied about.

While distance may not matter as much, time zone absolutely does. I think many companies have finally realized that for software teams outsourcing to Indian and East Asia, with a colocated team in the US, is horribly inefficient. As a sometimes dev manager I refuse to manage people where one of us has to be online from 10-midnight or some nonsense like that to get a teeny window of overlap.

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You can usually find a way to make it work with any pair of timezones (e.g. North America and Europe, North America and Asia), but when you throw in a third distant timezone it becomes a huge pain.

At Mozilla, we had people working on the same project in North America, Western Europe, and Australasia. The meetings alternated between inconveniencing Europe / Australasia, but the additional latency of having all 3 timezones involved in decisions really slowed things down.

I worked on a ~3 month remote project with people in timezones +6 and +12 hours ahead, which is arguably the worst configuration of timezones. Yet, we indeed found a way to make it work (and in fact I have some fond memories, though I doubt it was sustainable). The worst part was the project manager insisting on daily 7am standup calls (spoiler alert: I was not actually standing for these absurd calls).

Yes, I agree, you can "make it work", but not without a real negative cost to efficiency and employee morale. I don't know anyone that doesn't hate that "super early or super late" time span, and it just sucks for everyone. Over time I think many of your best employees will just refuse to work those kinds of hours indefinitely if they have other options.

I specifically contrast that to when I worked with some excellent devs in Brazil who were only a couple hours off and the whole project and relationship was fantastic.

There are also advantages. Given that you hire independent people who don’t need to be micromanaged. Spreading your dev ops team across time zones makes sure someone is almost always doing their normal daily work when something needs attention. It also creates a two-shifts structure that is pretty good as long as you set up some short-form knowledge transfer at the end of day. We just post a short end of day standup post in slack

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