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I (in the CEST time zone) am currently collaborating with a colleague who lives in Australia, because academics often don't get to choose where they end up. It

I (in the CEST time zone) am currently collaborating with a colleague who lives in Australia, because academics often don't get to choose where they end up. Its a fucking mess, most of the time its ok, we can meet in the early morning here which is late at night there and do most work offline, but when deadlines are looming or issues crop and we have to talk back and forth over stuff urgently it basically cuts the useful time in the day down to like 3 hours at most, and even that results in at least one of us working very unsociable hours. Remote work I like, I'm very happy working from home and can do so fairly productively, but timezones are a big issue. My example is with two people working in two timezones, if you've got a bunch of people working in different timezones (the person above mentioned 5!) it can quickly become very messy.

lstodd 5y ago
When I played EVE Online long ago, we had 1/3rd of people from east coast, 1/6th from west coast, 1/3rd from Europe and the rest from Australia, we came up with pretty efficient framework. It only takes accepting that the work has to be mostly asynchronous, then build processes around that. If deadlines loom and you have to talk urgently, that means the processes were inadequate - that is all. All those "hybrid/flexible" schemes are doomed to fail. Remote work isn't office work at all, it's quite different. This is also what drives management nuts in my opinion - they feel that stuff has to be changed significantly and they don't know how, or if they are now in fact redundant.
- eigenket 5y ago
  I think this comment is coming from a very different place to my experience. Academic work is much less predictable than the sort of work you seem to be talking about. Like we're doing maths that no one in the world has done before, and which is objectively kinda hard. When we notice a mistake a few days before a big conference deadline (which is actually what happened around the end of last year) its hard to imagine any process could be adequate to stop that happening. Mistakes get found even in peer reviewed papers all the time, admittedly usually innocuous ones. You seem to be suggesting processes for vetting our internal stuff which are more stringent than actual peer review.
disgruntledphd2 5y ago
Australia is hard if you're not in Asia. 8hr time differences are doable, but super annoying. I used to do Asia in the morning and California in the evening, and that's really tough. A lot more work than you think can be done remotely though, especially if you can get people together 2-3 times per year. You need good people, but then you always did. The market is less competitive in a lot of places, which means that you can get much better people than you could otherwise afford. That being said, it is much much much less effective for mentoring and training junior people, which is a massive concern for full remote.
ghaff 5y ago
In my experience (and it's probably partly because it's what I'm used to), working between US East Coast and Europe--so about 6 hours difference--works pretty well. And many of the teams I work with are distributed that way. It starts to get harder if you bring in the US West Coast and/or APAC.

lstodd 5y ago

When I played EVE Online long ago, we had 1/3rd of people from east coast, 1/6th from west coast, 1/3rd from Europe and the rest from Australia, we came up with pretty efficient framework. It only takes accepting that the work has to be mostly asynchronous, then build processes around that. If deadlines loom and you have to talk urgently, that means the processes were inadequate - that is all. All those "hybrid/flexible" schemes are doomed to fail. Remote work isn't office work at all, it's quite different. This is also what drives management nuts in my opinion - they feel that stuff has to be changed significantly and they don't know how, or if they are now in fact redundant.

eigenket 5y ago
I think this comment is coming from a very different place to my experience. Academic work is much less predictable than the sort of work you seem to be talking about. Like we're doing maths that no one in the world has done before, and which is objectively kinda hard. When we notice a mistake a few days before a big conference deadline (which is actually what happened around the end of last year) its hard to imagine any process could be adequate to stop that happening. Mistakes get found even in peer reviewed papers all the time, admittedly usually innocuous ones. You seem to be suggesting processes for vetting our internal stuff which are more stringent than actual peer review.

disgruntledphd2 5y ago

Australia is hard if you're not in Asia. 8hr time differences are doable, but super annoying. I used to do Asia in the morning and California in the evening, and that's really tough. A lot more work than you think can be done remotely though, especially if you can get people together 2-3 times per year. You need good people, but then you always did. The market is less competitive in a lot of places, which means that you can get much better people than you could otherwise afford. That being said, it is much much much less effective for mentoring and training junior people, which is a massive concern for full remote.

ghaff 5y ago

In my experience (and it's probably partly because it's what I'm used to), working between US East Coast and Europe--so about 6 hours difference--works pretty well. And many of the teams I work with are distributed that way. It starts to get harder if you bring in the US West Coast and/or APAC.