3 ms·

Working from the West coast regularly with people in India, Europe,and US east coast, I disagree. You certainly have some benefits of having teams spread out a

by vmarsy 10y ago

Working from the West coast regularly with people in India, Europe,and US east coast, I disagree. You certainly have some benefits of having teams spread out around the world, as you could virtually have someone working at any hour of the day. But communication is very hard with the foreign countries, because of 2 things: time difference, and some language barriers. Even with only the 3h time difference, communication with the east coast is sometimes problematic. It really depends on how your team works, but let's say you insist on code reviews before submitting code, then you can easily loose days between a dev in India and a dev in the US.

amyjess 10y ago
> It really depends on how your team works, but let's say you insist on code reviews before submitting code, then you can easily loose days between a dev in India and a dev in the US. Or for that matter, if your QA is in India and your devs in the US need more information to investigate, that can take days... I worked at a company like that. I'd come into the office in the morning to see a ticket from a QA person in India, they didn't provide the information I needed to reproduce/investigate the bug, so I left a comment asking for it. Of course, they didn't get back to me until the middle of the night (my time), so I couldn't act on it until the next morning. And then, of course, I'd fix it, and they couldn't verify until the next night...
- nitrogen 10y ago
  The response lag can be ameliorated to an extent by having lots of work going on in parallel so nobody is blocked on one critical reply from someone in another timezone. I've done remote development as an employee, remote development as a consultant as sole developer on a project, and local development as an employee working with other remote developers. IMO a lot of the issues people have come from inexperience with asynchronous communication. I would argue that growing up writing open source with international teams, using IRC and email lists, not only has made me appreciate remote work better, but also gave me a mindset to understand asynchronous distributed systems better, too. But it's not an insurmountable advantage; I believe any team, if it cares enough, can work effectively with remote developers, and get the morale and cost benefits of doing so.

by vmarsy 10y ago

amyjess 10y ago

> It really depends on how your team works, but let's say you insist on code reviews before submitting code, then you can easily loose days between a dev in India and a dev in the US. Or for that matter, if your QA is in India and your devs in the US need more information to investigate, that can take days... I worked at a company like that. I'd come into the office in the morning to see a ticket from a QA person in India, they didn't provide the information I needed to reproduce/investigate the bug, so I left a comment asking for it. Of course, they didn't get back to me until the middle of the night (my time), so I couldn't act on it until the next morning. And then, of course, I'd fix it, and they couldn't verify until the next night...

nitrogen 10y ago
The response lag can be ameliorated to an extent by having lots of work going on in parallel so nobody is blocked on one critical reply from someone in another timezone. I've done remote development as an employee, remote development as a consultant as sole developer on a project, and local development as an employee working with other remote developers. IMO a lot of the issues people have come from inexperience with asynchronous communication. I would argue that growing up writing open source with international teams, using IRC and email lists, not only has made me appreciate remote work better, but also gave me a mindset to understand asynchronous distributed systems better, too. But it's not an insurmountable advantage; I believe any team, if it cares enough, can work effectively with remote developers, and get the morale and cost benefits of doing so.