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Comment by Leszek | Hacker News Reader

One interesting aspect of this is that they still explicitly expect "synchronous" work, timezones be damned:

> We have initially designated 9am to 3pm Pacific Time as “coordination hours” where most employees will be expected to be available for meetings and impromptu communication, regardless of where they are located. This maps to 6am to 12pm in Hawaii, 12pm to 6pm Eastern Time, 5pm to 11pm in the UK, and 6pm to 12am across most of Europe

I know that I wouldn't work for them from Europe if those were the conditions.

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It seems an excessively long window. Six hours isn't a "coordination window"; it's a workday.

It's reasonable to have a set time when you can ensure that everybody will be together, so that you have at least some overlap for synchronous communication every day. But one or two hours seems appropriate, rather than six.

Even within the US, there are workers who want to work shift like 10-6, or even 12-8, without seeming entirely out of touch with the staff. It's good to mix such people into your team: it means you get some kind of coverage later in the day for people working late, emergencies, etc.

European here, and the 6PM-12AM window is the one I feel the most productive in. I guess it will be a big change for a majority of people but I would definitely be interested by this.

Moreover when I work, I work, so if the sun is already down I'm ok with it; when it's up I can do all the active parts of my day that are more enjoyable during the day.

Still, it's not perfect. I don't think it would be that big of a deal for social life, because most events happen during the weekend anyway, but you'd still be expected to not be available for anything. Hopefully this is just the first phase for Quora, and they'll realize at some point that the whole point of working remote is that everything is asynchronous and synchronous is the exception

Doesn’t work for families. 6pm - 9pm is primetime for kids. But who cares about them oldies, right? /s

When I managed teams with flex hours, several parents explicitly preferred to work 4PM to midnight because they could spend the morning with their kids while their spouse worked their day job.

If the working hours are presented up front and agreed upon by all, I don’t see why this is any more problematic than any other shift work. There are a lot of programmers out there who are naturally night owls and would prefer those hours anyway.

Having direct experience with this, I can say that it’s not only not a problem, it’s a bonus for many. Including people with children.

Let the people decide what’s best for themselves and choose jobs accordingly. Don’t shame companies who don’t fit your own personal ideals of working hours.

People complain about this. People would complain if they said they only hire in North American timezones. That said, a big window of synchronous communications between US West Coast and Europe is tough. East Coast to Europe is much more doable on a day-to-day basis.

I was actually having a conversation with someone I know in the UK about this a while back. His feeling was that it was a something of an advantage for a company that wants both a large US and a European presence to be East Coast-based for this reason.

> East Coast-based for this reason.

Or anywhere east of Chicago roughly (a large chunk of US/Canada is in Eastern time).

Even Chicago (Central Time) isn't too bad.

It starts getting iffy with Pacific and Mountain Time zones and CET.

> Don’t shame companies who don’t fit your own personal ideals of working hours.

It's not "my" ideal - I don't set school hours. In fact, unsociable hours are defined in law, for many, many reasons.

Quora's approach is shortsighted and, in my opinion, fundamentally ageist towards their European workers - and I say that as someone who definitely prefers to work afternoons.

Trust me, there is demand for programming jobs that work night-owl hours. A surprising number of programmers loathe morning work schedules. If Quora wants to create a job for them, there’s nothing wrong with that.

You don’t have to work there. You don’t have to work those hours. But please don’t shame a company for creating an opportunity for the people who voluntarily prefer those hours.

The alternative isn’t that Quora is forced to let European employees work their own schedules while everyone else has to follow the rules. The alternative is that Quora simply decides not to hire in Europe.

> The alternative is that Quora simply decides not to hire in Europe

Well then, so much for competition for best talent and all that jazz. I'm sure Quora's competitors will be happy to pick up the slack.

> Trust me, there is demand for programming jobs that work night-owl hours.

That is not the point. There is demand for night-time-guard jobs too. That doesn't mean it's a particularly appealing job, or that night-time guards are the best guards, or that regular guards won't be pissed off when you tell them from now on it's night-time shifts only, or that society as a whole is happy to have all these night-time guards around.

It seems like a fair compromise to say “you have to work our hours because we believe it’s important to have this overlap” rather than “sorry we’re only hiring in North and South America”

> When I managed teams with flex hours, several parents explicitly preferred to work 4PM to midnight because they could spend the morning with their kids while their spouse worked their day job.

This seems like it would be good for the younger children and then invert once they started attending school.

Also not easy to stay in touch with friends, which is even more important when all your colleagues are across the ocean.

Why choose to work there from Europe if you have such constraints?

Indeed, I guess Quora will become (even more of) a singles-fest in Europe.

My point is that as a general model, it fails hard here.

The current general model for US companies is to not hire people in Europe at all. That fails even harder.

Meh, plenty of companies open European subsidiaries every day. Google, Twitter and Facebook are massive in Ireland.

Becoming a multinational company with foreign subsidiaries is a whole different ballpark than hiring a one-off foreign employee, though.

And those employees aren’t technically employed by US companies. They’re employed by Irish companies that are owned by US companies.

The vast majority of US tech companies are not multinationals and aren’t going to consider incorporating overseas to hire anyone.

Many oldies don't have families.

Can’t tell if you’re mildly trolling or serious.

The obvious point is that enough people in EU have children/families to make these hours a huge burden if not outright unworkable.

Presumably they think "workers in EU timezones will have to work unsociable hours" is a more generous policy than "we don't hire workers in EU timezones"

Of course, policies like "no cross-continent teams" or "no meetings whatsoever" would be even better - but that's an even bigger corporate re-organisation.

Definitely generous towards the taxman! All that extra taxable on unsociable hours...

> them oldies

Actually the real “oldies” are paying for their kid’s college tuition now.

Same, i do most of my work in those hours (amsterdam), being synced with the US is a nice bonus.

That’s a pretty insane expectation given that their physical office presumably don’t require working at midnight. (Good luck getting that one past European regulators)

I used to work from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil for a company in Sydney, Australia for few years. Interesting dynamics working for the company on the other side of the globe, I think it was 13h difference. Some aspects were good, you were basically left to do your job without interruptions for the day. You/they wake up to the updates on the other side.

Sounds like you had a pretty sweet gig.

In my European country you're required to pay 125-200% for night and sunday shifts, I wonder if they will do that.

Baseline pay is arbitrary, so if you're always working the same night hours it doesn't matter what part is called base salary and what part is additional payment for night work.

> Baseline pay is arbitrary

Nope. Most of Europe has minimum wage regulations, and especially tech workers have the freedom to walk whenever they choose and go to competition.

Of course I'm aware of minimum wages, presumably Quora is not paying it's tech workers minimum wage.

They'll just do the usual thing when regulations pose a problem: work around them or not hire in that region. That's the tradeoff with regulations, you lose some potentials business.

Why would regulators be involved in setting employees working hours?

> Why would regulators be involved in setting employees working hours?

That's what regulators do: they regulate stuff. That "stuff" includes – in particular in many European countries – employee working hours.

Let me introduce to something called labour laws. You'll find this surprising, but they exist in the US as well (even though they are much more lax there).

Another surprise for you: work is not supposed to be indentured servitude anymore.

Seems senior management wants the same amount of synchronous meetings rather than investing in more asynchronous communication. If they're just mimicking in-person approaches then that bodes ill for the whole initiative in my view. I say senior management because they're usually the only ones who have 6+ hours of meetings per day.

> 5pm to 11pm in the UK, and 6pm to 12am across most of Europe

This is completely ridiculous and means abandoning any kind of family or social life. It also means they probably only hire young, single people with no kids. Based on this, they sound like a seriously insensitive and diversity-hostile company.

I think it sounds much more reasonable if you read it as them saying "We suggest you stay within the PST time zone. If you want to live in a different time zone that's fine, but we won't change our core hours for you".

> It also means they probably only hire young, single people with no kids.

I worked at a company that did this. It actually attracted a lot of parents who wanted to spend mornings with their kids while their spouse was at work, rather than send them off to childcare.

Just because it doesn’t work for you doesn’t mean it won’t be ideal for someone else. Always good to have options.

The parents I know who could do flex-time liked to spend the morning/afternoon with their kids and then work in the evenings. For younger kids that allows you to split-shift with your partner while for older kids you get to be there when they get ready/get home from school.

In France kids from 6 years old onward, get home from school between 5 and 6 pm and usually have extracurricular activities after that. Then they are supposed to go to bed at around 10 pm.

So if you're working 5-11 pm you're only going to see your kids at breakfast at best (if they don't skip it because they're late). You're also not going to have dinner together as a family, which, to me, would be unacceptable.

Timezones matter. London is a financial hub because it's able to work with both the US east coast (NY) and also most of Asia-Pacific. NY and Asia-Pacific though is doable but tougher (12-13h difference).

The toughest is when you need to include folks from SF, London and HK [1]. There's just no good overlap. Either you rotate the suffering or you get disgruntled employees.

One solution is to decide which timezone is most important to you, and then restricting hiring +/- 6 hours from that timezone. Or split up synchronous meetings to two different sessions for two different sides of the world (this might lead to content bifurcation but may work in some instances).

It's a serious quality of life issue that employers ignore or downplay at their peril -- by not respecting timezones, employers are signaling they don't care. Employees on the short end of the stick with respect to timezone feel unimportant and excluded (first hand knowledge of this), especially if it's imposed from above without consultation.

Even small timezone differences are annoying -- I'm in Central Time and people in Eastern Time keep scheduling meetings around my lunchtime. The only way to get around this is to add fake calendar items around lunch time to block off that time.

[1] https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/meeting.html

>I know that I wouldn't work for them from Europe if those were the conditions.

There is no system that would satisfy everyone. You wouldn't work for them but pretty sure many other people wouldn't find it a burden.

In this modern day the concept of working only during the daylight is slowly disappear. In most big city, night time can still pretty lively.

My assumption is that Quora is very CONUS-focussed, no?

So a 9-3 PT window is pretty reasonable for that region, especially if they're transitioning from offices where you were expected to be at a desk.

It's absolutely true that the work window is unpalatable much east of Nova Scotia, but they also don't have any people IN those zones now.

OTOH, being able to move to Ireland (e.g.) and keep your job -- albeit with super weird hours -- is pretty neat.

If remote-first with American timezone becomes a trend, I could see Indians and Chinese moving to South America.

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