Ask HN: People who work different timezones than your company. How sched?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44502833

by tetris11 • 1 year ago

18 27 1 year ago

news.ycombinator.com

What's your schedule like?

How do you motivate yourself to work?

Is caffeine/sleep/food an issue?

PaulHoule• 1 year ago

'pends on the timezone. It is easy in finance to live in NY and work London or vice versa. Working London from SF though looks to be a lot harder. To work Singapore or Hong Kong from NY would be a stressful lifestyle.

markx2• 1 year ago

I started working at wordpress.com (Automattic) in 2006. Everyone was remote.

I was in the UK, a colleague was in Eire and everyone else the US. The colleague was (still is) a coder, I did user support. Communication was IRC. The effect for me was that I'd do my full day then stay online as the US folks started theirs. 15+hr days became the norm (I moved into tackling spam as well as user help) and on more than one occasion I'd just work through the night. ENTIRELY up to me, zero pressure, not even implied. I just like to stay on top of things.

Motivation? I was hired to do a job, so I did it.

At the time I imbibed a lot of caffeine but that was as much as addiction as anything else. Kicked that habit before I left.

It took some years but teams were eventually set by timezone +/- a few hours which was good.

joezydeco• 1 year ago

Never work with teams to the west because they will always schedule meetings for what they think is mid-morning and it's lunchtime where you are.

zamadatix2• 1 year ago

If you're that set on a fixed lunch schedule put a calendar block for it and don't feel bad for telling people you have a conflict at that time. If they ignore/don't care about that then the real problem is shitty coworkers/company (possibly against the law depending on location), not clueless accidents.

Something I've learned with eating + time zones is "find out when people actually eat, not what time you'd be eating if your clock was changed too". Apart from cultural differences you easily conclude lunch is "sometime between 11:00 and 2:00" just by surveying ones neighbors. Add in a few hour time difference and suddenly it's impossible to schedule a meeting unless you guess, learn, or see it on their calendar when scheduling.

muzani2• 1 year ago

For people whose schedules are full, it's almost mandatory to have a calendar block for lunch. I prefer 3 PM or 11 AM lunches honestly so I'm flexi; it's when the restaurants have more capacity, unless they just ended shifts.

vhcr• 1 year ago

I prefer working with teams to the west, I'm a night owl, so I can start my day at 11 am.

JohnFen• 1 year ago

The last time I worked on a team with members in different time zones (very different -- half the team was in the US, half in India), the only thing it realistically affected was meetings. Since we were essentially 12 hours apart, there was no way to schedule meetings so that they were convenient for everybody. What we did was to alternate who had to have the meeting at the weirdo time. Spread the pain and all that.

8organicbits• 1 year ago

I've done this as a short term contract (freelance). One was 12 timezones different. We found about an hour a day to overlap and tried to be efficient with that time. Most of our communication was async (and naturally would have been for the type of work, even if I was local) so we didn't always need the full time.

It disrupted my sleep cycle, which was tougher than I expected. I'm always up late, but working late is different. The project was exciting, so motivation wasn't an issue.

I'd do it again, for the right project. But I personally wouldn't want to do anything more synchronous than an hour a day.

Someone• 1 year ago

I have worked with testers 9 hours off my schedule.

That worked out very nicely. We developed during the day, sent out a mail with test instructions, went home, and had a mail message with test results in the morning. So, it felt like you never had to wait for test results.

9 hours also isn’t too large a difference for the occasional phone meeting (one side would take the call from home, either before coming to work, or after getting home, and would take compensation time typically on the same day).

It does require people in both teams who can write clearly, though.

TheAlchemist• 1 year ago

3 years working with people in a very different timezone. It can be a curse or a blessing and it all depends on the project / people.

Schedule wise, I do some regular evening hours (2 / week) to catchup - that can be a real problem sleep wise. If you finish your calls late in the evening, especially the ones where you are the one doing the talking and presenting things, it's very hard to go to sleep straight after that. You need to add at least 1h of winding down time.

As for motivation, from my experience, when I'm working on something I really like, I'm 10x more efficient that I would be in the office. When you start in the morning, you know that for a long period there will be nobody to interrupt you and you get a LOT more done.

The opposite is similar though - when I'm not motivated by a project, it's insanely hard to motivate myself. But maybe it's a sign that the project shouldn't be done in the first place.

mindwork2• 1 year ago

For many years I worked for US based company from European timezone. 9-10 hours difference. It's been okay. I started work around 2-3pm and left around 10pm. It was pretty tough because I couldn't sleep for 3-4 hours after my work day ends that meant 1-2am.

On the bright side I could sleep as much as I wanted in the morning and do chores in first half of the day.

What helped me with motivation is Daily Standup with my team where you have to report about your L24 progress and what you're going to be N24. This added enough stress to increase my motivation to do stuff. I couldn't show up with nothing or lie my way out of it. Also US comp was pretty big motivator. Geo arbitrage etc.

ktallett2• 1 year ago

I can understand the comp being a motivator, but stress. L24 and N24 has always seemed ludicrous. That's insane micromanaging. Is it really unacceptable for something to take more than a work day? Not every task can be broken down that way, you also sometimes change something which breaks something else so you are actually further back. Plus when do you plan work?

mindwork2• 1 year ago

I guess we have different understanding of L24/N24. There is no need for a task to take 1 day, it can span days easily. I had tasks which spanned a week or two just because they were deep technical work. But I was able to explain what I did and what progress did I make to the room of engineers. Nobody has been asking me about deadlines or when would it be done, it's not that type of meeting. But it's a nice check-in point to see if I(or the team) move in the right direction and if I don't report meaningful progress for multiple days maybe I need help or extra eyes on my work. I would post draft PR with the code so other people can evaluate and correct my approach. This saves you from working days in the wrong direction.

clvx• 1 year ago

I worked with teams located in Israel, Ukraine, Poland, UK and Easter, Central and West US while based on Mountain Time.

Long story short, really weird times. Even though most of the communications were async, I still started really early and then called it at midday because I didn´t have more battery on me. I followed up on things by mobile chat in the afternoon but I was already checked out mentally by 2pm. Sometimes when I felt rested enough I gave it a little more in the nights and coordinated with early birds from Europe before I hit the bed.

This went on for over 2 years easily. I gotta say I completely burned out and it took me a long time to recover.

For the ones asking why?. The business outsourced some services overseas which became part of the critical path.

486sx33• 1 year ago

Currently living in central time and working for a company on eastern time. It’s pretty sweet. I’m up at 630 cst which is 730 est but no one really wants a meeting before 9am est (8am cst). I get a few texts between 7 and 8 cst but no big deal. Back there they are winding down around 3pm est which means I often have from 2pm cst on all to myself and it’s still sunny and beautiful out for a long time. My biggest challenge is staying up past 8pm cst which is a solid 6 hours after work has finished but the sun is still out. I’m losing the evening fishing time.

gardenhedge• 1 year ago

Why did you do this? Did you not have contracted hours in your timezone?

zamadatix2• 1 year ago

One's schedule inevitably turns into whatever they let it. If you're one that's naturally going to want to join every call or be around for the most active chat periods then no amount of caffeine or motivation is going to make the schedule you decide to keep sane. I'd heavily recommend staying away from caffeine to try to solve tiredness, at best it temporarily masks any symptoms while the problem remains at the end of the day.

Motivation itself isn't that much different than other remote jobs. Make sure it's something you're interested in working on, try to make a few close work buddies, and go enjoy life when the time you said you were going to clock out comes.

ktallett2• 1 year ago

I think the key thing here is, it's highly unlikely you need meetings every single day with staff overseas and if you do there is usually a crossover hour. You don't need to both be in constant contact to do good work. You can easily work in different time zones without having a significantly different schedule.

therealfiona• 1 year ago

Live in Hawaii, work operates on Central Time.

Wake up 4:45am, start work 5am (9am or 10am central). Make a bagel or something easy. Get drinks as needed. Get a snack before standup at 1pm central if needed. Get off at 1pm (5pm or 6pm central). Make lunch at that time. Eat dinner about 5-6pm. Head to bed at 7:30pm to 8pm.

I don't take a lunch. And if I do, I'll just work later or start earlier the next day.

I have to get on meetings at 4am sometimes when we do a deployment or have meetings with people who are more important than me. I've had to be on a 3am equivalent meeting once in the past 4 years. Small price to pay for the privilege of living in Hawaii.

ok_dad• 1 year ago

I work about 5-6 hours outside of my company's primary time zone, but they tend to try and keep any meetings I need to attend to after 6am or so in my time zone. I don't have much trouble being motivated to work, I am only part time for now anyways, but I do get out and do a daily walk before I do anything heavy for the day, so I'll do some meetings, planning, and admin in the mornings then walk then I have energy to sling code for 4-6 hours.

Some days I just don't work, and I learned to give myself the day (rarely two) but get back to work with a strong day the following day to regain my momentum. I find momentum is key in working remotely, you have to maintain a steady pace and not go too hard or too easy or else you're going to burn out or develop bad habits.

I tend to work whatever days are necessary, weekend or whatever. My life is very flexible, so sometimes I'll have a mid-week weekend and work the weekend instead.

tl;dr: momentum is key, try and work at least a few hours a day and ensure you maintain a steady pace over time without doing death-marches or being lazy.

specproc• 1 year ago

My last employer was truly global, I was interacting with people from Japan to the west coast of Canada, with the bulk of people in EU timezones.

Worked great for me, I'm a little bit to the east of CET. My mornings, my most productive hours, were typically unmolested. Then chill out into meetings in the afternoon.

My boss was in Toronto, had to work a bit late to do calls with him, but usually had a long lunch or big dog walk on those days.

His day was typically meetings in the morning, work in the afternoon. The opposite of mine.

I pitied the Australians. They seemed to be attending calls at brutally antisocial hours.

dansult2• 1 year ago

2am all hands.. but for the most part it's great working with European and American colleagues

dansult2• 1 year ago

I work in a global company with people in Asia, Australia, North America and across Europe. My team are all in NA and I'm in Australia. I just get up early to maximise cross over, two morning meetings for me a week. Works pretty well but I do get up/stay up occasionally for 2am meetings. Apart from all hands there's no pressure to do so. Hardest part is arranging a meeting between a European, American and myself - someone is going to be out of normal hours. Fully remote rather than "remote but this timezone" is great.

mstaoru• 1 year ago

You need to work with people who value async communications and uninterrupted work time (or cultivate this culture). I recently moved to EU and it's very very difficult for me to adapt to people insisting on having a call or a meeting for everything. It's such a waste of time and the knowledge is completely lost unless you make notes... in text. Before that I worked in SEA, with teams from across the time zones but in a very "Asian" context. Perhaps since not everybody spoke perfect English, the teams actually preferred typing.

For a while I worked on a 1pm-9pm schedule which gave me a decent overlap with the "let's have a quick call" folks. Having the whole morning to myself was nice.

muzani2• 1 year ago

Most people don't like working 9-5. My sweet spot is 4 AM. Half the people I work with prefer nights - it's cooler, better time to smoke, etc. Maybe it's just SE Asia where people get lazy during the day. Or maybe we just have a culture of hanging out at night. 9-5 takes priority but teams tend to follow the devs.

The main issue is always the regular meetings, the standups. Most people prefer to wake up at 10. Some at 11 lol. So you can move standups around "lunch" safely enough. Some people hate standups at the end of the day (i.e. me) because it tends to overlap with the inconsistent end of day school schedules and traffic jams.

But do consider if you actually need standups. Everything should be on Jira. Whenever you commit a file, it can be on Jira too. Scrum was invented before all these tools, back when people had individual offices. Continuous Flow is a valid option and agile.

Other key meetings are what to do (grooming), what have we done (demo), and what can we do better (retro). You don't actually need to follow any sprint format. A clean format is meetings on Monday and Friday, but with new teams and startups, you might want one every 2 days.

If you can do async, do so. Lots of people prefer text too. Text is slower, mainly an issue for managers who need to talk to lots of people. But it lets people think more clearly and supply links as necessary.

saluki• 1 year ago

Everyone has their typical 'work day' so you just get used to everyone's schedule and planned zooms around that and use slack for general communication. Occasionally I would msg or zoom outside of my core hours but we also had flex time so it worked out well. We generally always scheduled meetings through google calendar so timezones were handled there for coordination. If we mentioned a time in slack or on a zoom it was always given as NYC. It was a non-issue, motivation, sleep, food aren't related to this. Some team members worked later in the day in their local time zone by choose to overlap more with NYC.

TXTOS• 1 year ago

I’ve struggled with this too—our team spans Europe, Asia, and the US. We settled on two practices that really helped:

    Append-only logs
    Instead of chat threads that scroll away, we keep a single plain-text “journal” per project. Every update gets appended with a timestamp and author tag. No editing, no missed messages—people just read from the top and see everything in context.

    Per-task semantic headers
    We prefix each log entry with a short header like TASK-123: or MEETING-UX: so you can grep for specific topics later. It’s saved us hours hunting through free-form notes.

(For anyone curious, I recently wrapped this into a tiny “TXT OS” proof-of-concept that lives in a single .txt file—happy to share if it’s of interest.)

Hope that helps! I’m onestardao—feel free to ping me with any follow-ups.

Ask HN: People who work different timezones than your company. How sched?

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