Totally this. I'm on the US east coast. At my last job, most of my colleagues were in Bangalore. Time zones made meetings a bit of a pain for everyone. Certainl

Totally this. I'm on the US east coast. At my last job, most of my colleagues were in Bangalore. Time zones made meetings a bit of a pain for everyone. Certainly nothing ad hoc, and even meetings planned well in advance were usually less than ideal. Even worse, the evening-to-morning "ping times" often slowed progress. That's bad when it's a code review that ends up taking weeks. It's terrible when it's debugging a customer issue. I have to say that certain cultural issues made all that worse. I did run into the "say yes but then do nothing" issue that other people had warned me about. Also, the team I worked with was super sensitive to hierarchy, who got to make decisions, who got credit for what, even who could talk to whom. This often led to people being offended, or to realizing that the "wrong" people had been involved in a discussion, requiring another round-the-world ping time or two to resolve. I saw multiple people forced out of the group because of these issues and have had lengthy discussions with a couple about how that happened (it turns out that just being too friendly with me is one thing that broke a local taboo), so I don't think it was a purely local phenomenon. I don't know how any of the cultural issues affect a single developer joining a team elsewhere, though. Perhaps people who've had a bad experience with an Indian team don't think about how an individual would be different. Perhaps they're just discriminating. But I'll bet time zones are a big part of it.