6 ms·

Yeah, timezones (and different days) are an issue for regular meetings. At my last job, US east coast to Europe worked pretty well. We'd be reasonable morning t

by ghaff 2y ago

Yeah, timezones (and different days) are an issue for regular meetings. At my last job, US east coast to Europe worked pretty well. We'd be reasonable morning time on the east coast and Europe would be reasonable mid to late afternoon time. But the (for me occasional) call to Singapore was always a pain for someone.

bradleyjg 2y ago
I found being in the US east coast in teams spread across Europe and the US to have the advantage of being able to touch base with anyone fairly easily but the disadvantage of never getting that natural quiet period. I don’t see how us east cost <-> apac is really feasible on any kind of regular basis.
- ghaff 2y ago
  We had occasional interlock meetings, briefings, and webinars but it pretty much meant that from the east coast you were doing them at 10 or 11pm. I'm sure senior execs did more frequently. We didn't really have people on the west coast, especially latterly when I was there. Up to 5 or 6 hours is a reasonable range for routine interactions.
- aragilar 2y ago
  I think daily/weekly you'd shift work hours (that what I do when I have a meeting like that). Global meetings are always a pain, though I'd say the worst meetings are when US-based folks plan a meeting based on their local timezone, as opposed to UTC, because it always ends up at 3am in Australia (so I bow out of those).
  - Izkata 2y ago
    We have US/UK/Shanghai teams that for years we tried to combine into one big distributed team, which never worked well. Usually big meetings happened twice, once for US/UK and once for UK/Shanghai, and on the rare occasions they wanted one big meeting it was centered on UK time, so US people had to get up really early and Shanghai people were on really late. Then there was one time when both of us in the US happened to have taken the next day off, and we're both naturally night owls, so I suggested just for that one time moving the meeting 6-7 hours earlier on a different day - we'd both still be awake, it would be just before the start of the UK workday, and just before 5pm for Shanghai, so for once they didn't have to get online late. We didn't do it because the UK group didn't want to get up an hour earlier.
- CoastalCoder 2y ago
  I did US East Coast / Shanghai for one project. We got really good at asynchronous messaging, and that went a long way. Still didn't fix the 1-workday latency for discussions, though.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    A lot of companies have definitely gotten better at asynchronous communications over the past few years. Not perfect for everything but if you can keep the weird hour calls to a dull roar it's probably more manageable than even 10 years ago.
- eitally 2y ago
  It depends if you're a morning person or not. I used to manage teams in India & China from the east coast and it was usually a-ok having 2-3 hours of overlap each morning. It's FAR harder from the west coast and there's really no way around having evening (US) meetings since the alternative is asking the remote team to be in the office quite late. That said, this is also why many Asian teams get accustomed to working US hours -- essentially "2nd shift" -- to accommodate west coast overlap.
throwaway95325 2y ago
I worked for a EU company that had been acquired by an US company a few years I started. We had dev teams in US, EU and Asia. It worked well because most of the top leadership remained in EU to manage the business unit. The US company somehow managed to put their career ambitions aside and recognize that non-Americans are capable of making decisions We could have meetings with teams on both sides of the globe, and reduce on-call duty because we would have devs available in office a large portion of the day. If we needed to sync all teams, we often had two meetings with EU as the host. There were some occasional shared meetings where the US office had to start early, and the Asians stayed late, but they were the exception We still managed to integrate with the US parent company and share the tech stack where appropriate.

by ghaff 2y ago

bradleyjg 2y ago

I found being in the US east coast in teams spread across Europe and the US to have the advantage of being able to touch base with anyone fairly easily but the disadvantage of never getting that natural quiet period. I don’t see how us east cost <-> apac is really feasible on any kind of regular basis.

ghaff 2y ago
We had occasional interlock meetings, briefings, and webinars but it pretty much meant that from the east coast you were doing them at 10 or 11pm. I'm sure senior execs did more frequently. We didn't really have people on the west coast, especially latterly when I was there. Up to 5 or 6 hours is a reasonable range for routine interactions.
aragilar 2y ago
I think daily/weekly you'd shift work hours (that what I do when I have a meeting like that). Global meetings are always a pain, though I'd say the worst meetings are when US-based folks plan a meeting based on their local timezone, as opposed to UTC, because it always ends up at 3am in Australia (so I bow out of those).
- Izkata 2y ago
  We have US/UK/Shanghai teams that for years we tried to combine into one big distributed team, which never worked well. Usually big meetings happened twice, once for US/UK and once for UK/Shanghai, and on the rare occasions they wanted one big meeting it was centered on UK time, so US people had to get up really early and Shanghai people were on really late. Then there was one time when both of us in the US happened to have taken the next day off, and we're both naturally night owls, so I suggested just for that one time moving the meeting 6-7 hours earlier on a different day - we'd both still be awake, it would be just before the start of the UK workday, and just before 5pm for Shanghai, so for once they didn't have to get online late. We didn't do it because the UK group didn't want to get up an hour earlier.
CoastalCoder 2y ago
I did US East Coast / Shanghai for one project. We got really good at asynchronous messaging, and that went a long way. Still didn't fix the 1-workday latency for discussions, though.
- ghaff 2y ago
  A lot of companies have definitely gotten better at asynchronous communications over the past few years. Not perfect for everything but if you can keep the weird hour calls to a dull roar it's probably more manageable than even 10 years ago.
eitally 2y ago
It depends if you're a morning person or not. I used to manage teams in India & China from the east coast and it was usually a-ok having 2-3 hours of overlap each morning. It's FAR harder from the west coast and there's really no way around having evening (US) meetings since the alternative is asking the remote team to be in the office quite late. That said, this is also why many Asian teams get accustomed to working US hours -- essentially "2nd shift" -- to accommodate west coast overlap.

throwaway95325 2y ago

I worked for a EU company that had been acquired by an US company a few years I started. We had dev teams in US, EU and Asia. It worked well because most of the top leadership remained in EU to manage the business unit. The US company somehow managed to put their career ambitions aside and recognize that non-Americans are capable of making decisions We could have meetings with teams on both sides of the globe, and reduce on-call duty because we would have devs available in office a large portion of the day. If we needed to sync all teams, we often had two meetings with EU as the host. There were some occasional shared meetings where the US office had to start early, and the Asians stayed late, but they were the exception We still managed to integrate with the US parent company and share the tech stack where appropriate.