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Ask HN: How do you work remotely from an opposite timzeone?
I've recently moved to California from my home in Europe. As a technical manager I have to directly manage employees and work with many of my colleagues in Europe.
The main issue I am experiencing is having to match work hours to schedule meetings. No matter how I look it someone has to make a compromise (wake up very early).
With many employees moving to remote work, how do you handle major time differences?
- PaulHoule 6y agoTwo approaches are: "as much written and asynchronous communication as possible" (the Indian model) and "give the team their head in most respects, accept the risk that you may need to regroup" (the Chinese model) Part of the competitive advantage of NYC and London as financial centers is that it is easy to teleconference between those cities. It is already surreal to me to watch the stock market open in bed at a hotel in San Diego and isn't hard when I am still on east coast time, but it's a lot harder to work from the west coast to london, never mind points east.
- flurly 6y agoDefinitely written communication is important. However, I think too much of the discussion is around the negatives of major time zone differences. There's also plenty of benefits 1) Oncall can be split, meaning you no longer have to fear being woken up in the middle of the night 2) Code is being pushed all the time, meaning less chances of merge conflicts and more version control happiness 3) Naturally, your employee base gets more diverse, and thus you'll have more diversity of opinion and better products :)
- i_like_to_post 6y agoDon't schedule so many meetings.
- Gustomaximus 6y agoCompromise and work morning/evening for calls. It works fine if you have an employer who recognises this and doesn't expect you in the office from 8-6 too. I used to have 2 bosses/teams, one in Dallas other in London while I was Sydney based. I'd have meetings outside typical hours morning/evening. The company was fine if I was regularly out of office and taking part of the day off as my job was getting done so it worked. If I had managers that were "why is he coming in at 11am today" it would have been a nightmare. Also it can run quite well for task lists, work getting done while you sleep. Often I leave tasks at the end of a day and they are done when you wake up. This offset if you miss resource access during your day depending on setup. Personally I find it fine, but I've always been ok with doing a bit of work out of usual hours.
- softwaredoug 6y agoYou're a manager, that means lots of meetings. Planning meetings and 1-1 with direct reports. Personally, if I were the manager, and I committed to supporting this team, I would take the bulk of the hit and wake up as early as possible to overlap at least 3-4 hours with my team. (Of course, I also would think long and hard about whether I wanted to make that commitment) Generally, I also think it's important teams figure out their core timezone(s). A good rule of thumb for large companies is to at least span one ocean (to not be too insular). But spanning a 12 hr difference can be pretty tough.
- principal 6y agoFor my personal scenario, I completely agree that the responsibility falls on me. That is in fact how I've been handling the situation so far. (and thanks for your answer reassuring that it's right) What I'm also wondering is how other companies approach this scenario, especially with companies that are transforming to be remote (e.g. Twitter) and companies remote first from the beginning (Gitlab in mind)