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While working for an Australian company recently acquired by an American company, one of the first post-merger meetings was about cross-cultural awareness. The invitation was from New York and scheduled for a Saturday at 01:00am Sydney time.

I worked in NZ for SV companies for the past 20 years (until I retired) - I essentially worked US time but NZ days - so I got up early (5am winter, 7am summer and worked US core hours 10am-6pm) but didn't work US Fridays and got a lot done on my Monday. After 5 years I switched jobs and they agreed that I'd never have to start work at 5am (so 11am-7pm CA time) - that worked really well

I worked for an Australian company from Germany and did similarly (I worked German work days but would start early ~5:30-6am to have some overlap with the Australians - they never expected me to work "core hours", just to have some overlap).

It wasn't too bad! Much easier than working with west coast US (where their 9am is my 6pm - I don't want to work late but I don't mind working early).

9am in Pacific time is probably more like your 3-4am (depends on where in Aus you live) - certainly you could create 'core hours' 1-5pm Pacific time which would at worse be your morning (early morning in your winter)

Reminds me of the Carmageddon postmortem. They had administration and HR in London, and all the devs in Sydney.

In the postmortem they noted that this worked very well because they would all be working at the same time...

The Northern/Southern Hemisphere DST issue affects all kinds of places. I had the same issue between the US & Brazil, for example, where east coast US time difference between Sao Paulo is either 2hr (yay) or 4hr (boo), or three hours during the "swing shifts" between the dates each country observes the DST change.

Similarly, the "three continent" meeting scheduling problem exists with many combos, too, especially if you have teams in both Western Europe / Middle East / Africa and anywhere in ASEAN.

I work from New Zealand, for a quite geographically distributed team. For our team, the solution is partly:

    1. "Write everything down" culture.
    2. Rotate the regular meetings. For example, a meeting around 1000 UTC for Europe / Asia folks on Monday. Repeat the same meeting at 2000 UTC for US / Asia folks.
    3. Write good notes for each meeting, so people who could not attend can review asynchronously.

2x meetings may not work for a truly distributed team where you have people all over the world. In which you will need to have 3x rotating meetings which becomes a bit harder to manage.

DST changes do happen every six months, or so. We mostly roll with it, and adjust the meeting times as necessary.

I currently work for a YC company based in New York, with myself in Australia after moving back to be closer to family and have switched my work schedule to be from Tuesday to Saturday to align with EST as you mentioned. Not exactly the most pleasant working hours but my coworkers have been pretty accommodating to make the essential meetings as early as possible.

One slight benefit that makes the Friday to Saturday shift more tolerable is that I won’t start the following work week until Monday night/Tuesday morning, so my weekend nights are Saturday and Sunday, so losing out on Friday night isn’t too bad. Definitely not a schedule for the faint of heart though.

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Yeah, timezones (and different days) are an issue for regular meetings. At my last job, US east coast to Europe worked pretty well. We'd be reasonable morning time on the east coast and Europe would be reasonable mid to late afternoon time. But the (for me occasional) call to Singapore was always a pain for someone.

I worked for a EU company that had been acquired by an US company a few years I started.

We had dev teams in US, EU and Asia. It worked well because most of the top leadership remained in EU to manage the business unit. The US company somehow managed to put their career ambitions aside and recognize that non-Americans are capable of making decisions

We could have meetings with teams on both sides of the globe, and reduce on-call duty because we would have devs available in office a large portion of the day.

If we needed to sync all teams, we often had two meetings with EU as the host. There were some occasional shared meetings where the US office had to start early, and the Asians stayed late, but they were the exception

We still managed to integrate with the US parent company and share the tech stack where appropriate.

I found being in the US east coast in teams spread across Europe and the US to have the advantage of being able to touch base with anyone fairly easily but the disadvantage of never getting that natural quiet period.

I don’t see how us east cost <-> apac is really feasible on any kind of regular basis.

It depends if you're a morning person or not. I used to manage teams in India & China from the east coast and it was usually a-ok having 2-3 hours of overlap each morning. It's FAR harder from the west coast and there's really no way around having evening (US) meetings since the alternative is asking the remote team to be in the office quite late.

That said, this is also why many Asian teams get accustomed to working US hours -- essentially "2nd shift" -- to accommodate west coast overlap.

I think daily/weekly you'd shift work hours (that what I do when I have a meeting like that). Global meetings are always a pain, though I'd say the worst meetings are when US-based folks plan a meeting based on their local timezone, as opposed to UTC, because it always ends up at 3am in Australia (so I bow out of those).

We have US/UK/Shanghai teams that for years we tried to combine into one big distributed team, which never worked well. Usually big meetings happened twice, once for US/UK and once for UK/Shanghai, and on the rare occasions they wanted one big meeting it was centered on UK time, so US people had to get up really early and Shanghai people were on really late.

Then there was one time when both of us in the US happened to have taken the next day off, and we're both naturally night owls, so I suggested just for that one time moving the meeting 6-7 hours earlier on a different day - we'd both still be awake, it would be just before the start of the UK workday, and just before 5pm for Shanghai, so for once they didn't have to get online late.

We didn't do it because the UK group didn't want to get up an hour earlier.

We had occasional interlock meetings, briefings, and webinars but it pretty much meant that from the east coast you were doing them at 10 or 11pm. I'm sure senior execs did more frequently. We didn't really have people on the west coast, especially latterly when I was there.

Up to 5 or 6 hours is a reasonable range for routine interactions.

I did US East Coast / Shanghai for one project. We got really good at asynchronous messaging, and that went a long way.

Still didn't fix the 1-workday latency for discussions, though.

A lot of companies have definitely gotten better at asynchronous communications over the past few years. Not perfect for everything but if you can keep the weird hour calls to a dull roar it's probably more manageable than even 10 years ago.