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Comment by woeirua | Hacker News Reader

The biggest problem with the whole global workforce thing is timezones. Having worked with some remote, global teams, it is a real PITA to schedule meetings with someone 14 hours out of sync with you. Either they're working late into the evening to do meetings or you're waking up super early to talk with them. Then add the unreliability of telecoms across the globe and it's just a total fiasco. For some teams it works, but if you want a tight knit group it won't work.

Also, people like the social aspect of work. That's why I think everyone is pretty much going back to the office as soon as this is over.

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I am in the Japanese timezone. I am working with people in central Europe, East Canada and Silicon Valley. Have worked in such a way for years.

The secret is just: no meetings. Meetings should be exceptional. If you have discussions in a timezone, record it for those who can't attend. Prefer async, prefer written communication.

Have lots of one-on-one communication.

90% of the meetings I have ever attended were counter-productive anyway and were just there because a middle manager wanted to feel useful by wasting devs time. If you are having a meeting where one person is doing most of the talking it can be done async. Feedback can be given async. Demos can be done async.

Some conversations need realtime, but most of these can happen one-on-one, recorded for people who are in a different TZ.

Yes, that's a different way of working, but it is not too hard, we have the tools and it makes sense. The only obstacle is a culture of the useless meeting. Kill it, embrace the async world. Keep realtime communication for meaningful 1-on-1.

This is very accurate. I'm in the US eastern time zone but working with teams in the Pacific time zone, IST, and CEST constantly. My employer cancelled all of our leases when everyone went home so we're now all remote 100%, but that doesn't really change anything about having to work remote.

Embracing async communications is the key. If I send you a message at 3am just reply when you are ready. If I need a real time meeting I can schedule it, but that's rare for developer communication.

Having worked with all kinds of timezone differences, I'd say the toughest one is when it is just a couple hours, like pacific to eastern.

With a small difference it feels as if it is basically the same timezone so people schedule meetings with that assumption, but clearly it isn't. By the time I'm awake in California it's basically noon in EST.

When most of my team was in India with a 12.5hr time difference it was actually easier because it was obvious to everyone that we're on opposite cycles so meetings were an exception and nobody expected real-time communication and acted accordingly.

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