I worked at a video game company that outsourced to russia, and have worked with contractors my entire career--so i think i have some insight on the matter, too

I worked at a video game company that outsourced to russia, and have worked with contractors my entire career--so i think i have some insight on the matter, too :-) the video game company had a outsource good shop, with competent developers on the other side--the first big hurdle if I'm frank. they weren't cheap. sure, cheaper than local talent, but not gangbusters savings. If you don't want a mes in your codebase, paying for quality contractors is a must because you need to let them work independently. even then, they were only ever given work that would be very discrete, so that they could work on it independently without getting blocked. that is not collaborative, which is the point I'm trying to make. Is it constructive? sure. but is it collaborative? no. and it can't be--there was a 12h difference between the two zones. they were trying to go to bed while we were having coffee. at my last gig (non-gaming), we also had people in: shanghai, sf, nyc, sheffield, and tel aviv. want to try and do collaboration like that? even as a digital-first company that has good hygiene around remote work? it doesn't work: just look at a timezone calendar. So then you're stuck partitioning work so that everyone can be constructive in their office hours, and don't need to worry about what is going on, on the other side of the globe. but again, that's not collaboration. that's six teams all doing their work independently and having routine touchpoints to try and synchronize the independent threads. synchronization takes time, effort, focus. I'm not saying you can't get work done remotely, which is what I think you think I'm saying. I'm saying that if your work is partitioned to be collaborative, timezones more than anything are going to make a mess of your plans, and then add in cultural, langauge, etc barriers on top of that.