6 ms·
I've spent a lot of time working with people in London and Asia. I'm based in New York. I can't speak to other professions, but for programming it's extremely
by CoolGuySteve 6y ago
I've spent a lot of time working with people in London and Asia. I'm based in New York.
I can't speak to other professions, but for programming it's extremely difficult to work with people on the other side of the Earth. The 10-12 hour time difference makes any small issue or missing files/data that should take 20 minutes instead take a day to get resolved.
Working with people in Europe isn't as bad, you can sync up all morning. But the same applies to any issue that happens in the New York afternoon.
It pretty much guarantees your software will become architected around time zones due to Conway's Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- skyde 6y agoconsider people in Montreal, same time zone good university with computer science but much lower salary and cost of living
- CoolGuySteve 6y agoWe hire Waterloo coops and let them work from wherever they live in Canada for the exact same reason. It's trivial to pay them the highest end salary and the take home for them will be far better than Microsoft/Google/etc.
- blaser-waffle 6y agoLots of data centers there due to cheap electricity via Hydro Quebec. I'm in 'Burta and consider relocating there all the time. Heard mixed things about not speaking French, though.
- rubber_duck 6y agoAlso usually people outsource as cost savings primarily and you get what you pay for even in Asia. IMO you can save 30-50% if you're lucky for equivalent skill levels, below that and you are introducing chaos monkey bots in to your system.
- moneywoes 6y agoTypically, where does one look for quality remote talent?
- biztos 6y agoI normally work in the middle of four time zones my team is spread amongst. Yes, it can be a pain. Sometimes you have a 6am meeting and sometimes an 11pm meeting and sometimes both in the same day. You have to have your shit together enough to deal with day-long lag for non-urgent stuff, and you have to care enough to jump on urgent stuff at all hours. Even if you might rather have a chummy relationship with your colleagues, you have to be a bit more distanced and professional in order to accommodate the time difference. But if you have a good team, you also should ask yourself: is the convenience of collocation worth losing the team? At the risk of veering OT: there’s a pretty good business in arbitrage around these cultural blockers. For instance there are thousands of people working for Indian companies in Central-Eastern Europe because (mostly) German companies are a lot more comfortable if they can meet the dev manager on any given day and fly home for supper.
- kelnos 6y ago> Sometimes you have a 6am meeting and sometimes an 11pm meeting and sometimes both in the same day. I think we need to find a better way to deal with timezone-distributed teams. I personally would never find a 6am or 11pm meeting to be acceptable. If you require me anywhere from 9am to 5pm in my local time I'll be there; anything outside that must be strictly optional. And I mean actually optional, not "optional but we'll see you as not a team player if you don't show up".
- jobigoud 6y agoI'm in Europe and some of my coworkers are in NZ. There is a 12H difference. The entire 9 to 5 section of one is outside the 9 to 5 section of the other.
- hkt 6y agoAmen. I've done a little cross timezone working and can confirm there are a lot of "optional" meetings.
- Scea91 6y agoMany regular jobs are outside of the 9-5 interval so having a different schedule is not exploitative per se. In this case many people would probably appreciate the flexibility to actually have leisure and see their families in daylight hours. Of course, in the end it is all about personal preferences.
- metrokoi 6y agoThere are many other small drawbacks besides time zone differences, such as different cultures (different holidays to work around, different expectations and values) and different languages. There will always be companies which value those conveniences more, and companies which value cheaper labor or a wider hiring pool.
- langitbiru 6y agoWhat about night-owls? Maybe they are more suitable. Say a night-owl who lives in Jakarta, Indonesia, which has 12 hours difference to New York. The night owl can work synchronously with the team in NY, right?
- mech422 6y agoI actually do this, except I'm the night owl... When I actually need to work with my team (as opposed to just status updates), I work from midnight till whenever and sleep the next day.
- neurostimulant 6y agoI do this, exactly 12 hours differences with my team on the US (except when dst applies which totally confuses me). Most of the time I’m the night owl, but now that we all have babies, our working hours become even more random and sometimes the us guys would work on the wee hours instead. Also I’m supposed to sleep right now but.. yeah
- mikekchar 6y agoI work from Japan and my colleagues are in the UK. I agree that it's very difficult. Having a few hours of overlap almost every day is crucial. Usually I work until 8 or 9 pm (sometimes later). Probably for someone who has a shifted time schedule (gets up at noon) it would be absolutely ideal, but I'm a morning person :-) Still, I've adjusted to it. There are a couple of things you need. First, meetings have to be at times where everyone is available. That can be an inconvenience for some people, but it is what it is. Sometimes it means that some people in the UK have to get up early, sometimes it means that I have to stay up late. But if you are sensible, nobody has to take the full burden. To combat time-zone-Conway's-law I often do a hand-over work with my colleagues. I work on something in my afternoon. We pair for a couple of hours and then they work on it for the rest of the day. They leave me notes and I carry on. It takes practice and trust to do it, but when it works it is actually incredible. I would say it's my favourite way of working. However, when it doesn't work it's terrible :-). The biggest thing is developing trust, relaxing and just going with the flow. Your colleague is going to go in directions you didn't expect. You need to be magnanimous and keep going in that direction, even if it sometimes makes you uncomfortable. On the plus side, I've found that it's stretched me as a programmer and I've learned a lot. I would take timezone co-lacated (or rather coworker, preferred working times co-located) if I could, but you can make it work otherwise.
- artsyca 6y agoHey you're living the life!
- mikekchar 6y agoSo I tell myself ;-) However, the reality is that it's pretty hard. I live in a rural area of Japan. There are few world-wide remote jobs at the moment and so hanging on to my contracts is pretty important to me. There are times when the client gets it into their head that since I have few other options, it's a good opportunity to get more for less. So balancing the risk of going for a long while without work against a client that is intent on low-balling you is quite challenging. On the whole I'm happy because I love where I live (it's become my home), my wife's family is here and we can help out and it's a good lifestyle. Probably I'd have less stress somewhere else, though. That is to say, I don't really recommend it if you have other options ;-)
- paganel 6y agoEast Coast to most of Europe is not that bad, for example I live in Eastern Europe and I work with people from the East Coast and the 7-hour difference is quite manageable. Among other things it has changed me into being more productive in the afternoon but I wasn't a morning person anyway so things work out. On the other hand the 10-hour difference between my time and the West Coast would be a lot harder to manage, those 3 extra hours do matter.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- LockAndLol 6y ago> The 10-12 hour time difference makes any small issue or missing files/data that should take 20 minutes instead take a day to get resolved. Those problems can be solved pretty easily with better communication and processes. Gitlab is remote-first and they are working quite well. Maybe your team-lead and project manager should have a look at how other companies are doing it. It's their job after all
- katbyte 6y agoHashicorp engineering is also fully remote.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoNo matter how good your communication and processes are, they can't solve the fundamental conflict where person X discovers they need some new information and the person Y who has it is asleep. You can accept the conflict, and establish an expectation (as all remote-focused teams do) that you will not be able to synchronously work on most tasks to completion. But this interacts poorly with many other expectations and processes. For example, my team's standups have become completely useless over the past few months, because we're all making 20% incremental progress on 5 things instead of completing 1 thing. When customers are breathing down my PM's neck for a new feature, he doesn't want to hear that it's 4 person-hours to implement and merge but those 4 person-hours will be spread over the next week.
- mkhpalm 6y agoThats my experience as well all the places I've worked with teams on all ends of the globe. I'd go so far as to say its even kind of harder than it needs to be between eastern/western timezones. But nothing really compares to the money pit hellstews that seem to result from teams working opposite hours while trying to make deadlines.
- rhlsthrm 6y agoConversely, my 5 person team is distributed across California, Europe, UAE, and India. It's hard for us to all sync together like you mentioned, but we use our overlap times to work together as much as possible and are very diligent about "hand-off" procedures. The upside of this is that we have 24 hour work cycles. I can go to bed and wake up to a bunch of progress being made. I'm actually a huge fan of this "overlapping time zone" style, as opposed to the opposite time zone style that you mention.