Definitely written communication is important. However, I think too much of the discussion is around the negatives of major time zone differences. There's also

Definitely 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 :)