Every brilliant Googler not collaborating with other brilliant Googlers is also not collaborating with other brilliant talents at Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, etc...

You can get the same no-rush-hour benefit by going the opposite direction; I show up to the office at 7am, and I'm out the door by 330 at the latest. There's somebody else in my office that I've only ever overlapped with for a couple hours at a time because he basically never shows up before noon. He used to give me a hard time about how early I left every day until I explained that I was showing up to the office an hour or two after he went to sleep each night.

I'm in California and I try to get meetings scheduled for the late morning or early afternoon. 11am meetings are totally reasonable for anybody on the west coast, and it's not too hard to convince people in (for example) New York to not schedule meetings for before 10am their time. On the rare occasion that I need to make a 6am phone call with somebody who's a real go-getter on the east cast, I'll just bite the bullet and show up at 6, and then take off around 2.

On the other hand, I used to work in a bakery, so waking up at 7am is still sort of like sleeping in for me. But there's nothing like finishing your day at 330; I love it.

I like 11-4 as core hours. Not to early for the folks who like to sleep in, not to late for people who want to get home to their family, and there is still 5 hours of overlap for meeting.

My team mostly works similar hours to me (1-9, as I said elsewhere) but my previous team was more nine-to-fivey. We just had meetings after lunch, it wasn't a big deal. A couple folks on the team had kids and left every day at 5:00, and I did their code reviews in the evenings (so they were ready waiting when they came in the next day), and they did mine in the mornings, and it worked fine.

From working with clients in different timezones (and in a previous life running global projects) this is par for the course.

The fact that you only get 4 hours joint meeting time is just as good as if you were collaborating on east vs. west coast.

As an engineer at Google a key difference from some other companies is how few meetings I have. I have less then 10 hours of meetings per week, and they are all scheduled between 11am and 4pm. There's also plenty of less-formal meetings when I strike up a conversation with my coworkers, usually closer to 6:00 as we start to focus less and wonder more.

I made the mistake of moving 18 miles (San Jose) from where I work (Mountain View). Two years ago traffic wasn't bad but I swear it's getting worse. If I leave the house at 9:00 it takes 45-60 minutes to get to work. If there's a major accident or problem it can take up to 90 (happened once). Now I just don't leave the house before 10:00. My commute is less than 30 minutes and I regain 30-60 minutes every day.

I feel very fortunate to work at a company and with a team that supports my preferred schedule.

Nice that you live somewhere that an hour makes a difference.

I work 6am to 3pm, and I still get stuck in traffic pretty regularly.