As a European, it is very disheartening to see how many companies espouse "we are now embracing remote work company-wide", which on closer inspection means "California hours +-2h time difference".
It's not nearly as easy to have people in a timezone 16 hours offset than you might think. So I am not surprised that they would be two very different decisions.
Right, so that's the point where your job offer should say "Remote - US" or "Remote - UTC-8 +-3h".
And I have seen a few companies do that! I would say that this is around 20% of the companies.
The other 80% simply list those jobs as "Remote", so they show up on their job pages under all continents, or at least, under their "outside the US" filters.
Then sometimes it's not mentioned at the top of the job offer, but in the footnotes with the "we hire regardless of disability etc." statements.
All of these things are fine. They're just a far cry from that blog post that the CEO made 10 months into quarantine, talking about how the company will open itself to global remote work.
EU working with developer team in India. There are advantages and disadvantage -
* EU team (e.g. presales) are not available half the day to answer queries and this creates delays, but also forces people to write good tickets if they want anything done
* Conversely, even senior developer staff get half the day clear of meetings to do deep work or focus on internal meetings / mentoring
* Thankfully this team are mature adults, but I've seen an us and them thing develop between engineering and the rest of the company elsewhere. It's natural when everyone outside engineering is short term incentivised to downplay technical debt and such. If it can happen when everyone is in the same building, I can definitely see how easily it could happen if only engineering are sat together and all the evil product owners are just angry faces on a screen.
I'm in California, and am currently interacting with developers and application engineers working in India, US East Coast, France, and Israel, and formerly China (haven't had to deal with that team lately). This means that evening or early morning meetings are sometimes needed. We try to keep it to a minimum, and this hits some people more than others.
I'll add that global/fully async remote work is even more merciless, especially on Agile figuring-it-out-as-we-go-along orgs. Communication has to be written and clear enough to avoid back-and-forth, changes are possible on the order of a day, not an hour so planning ahead and evaluating critical paths is more important, and everyone has to be able to pick up and put down work that's become blocked by someone on the other side of the planet. It's a tall order, but I'd like to think that the benefits are worth it for both individual and company.
I recognize past experiences in what you describe - but here's the punchline:
Working for a completely on-site company located in two buildings within 10 minutes' walking distance, it was still sometimes impossible to get hold of some people, or understand their attempts to communicate without going back-and-forth 3-4 times.
I think the company I'm thinking of is simply also a "winner of remote work" because it already managed to survive despite massive mismanagement and miscommunication before remote work.
California to Europe is tough for many things. I work US East Coast timezone and collaborate a lot with Europe--but that feels like it's getting near the limit for any regular synchronous activity unless one side or the other starts to work atypical hours.
I do totally get it. I only take an issue with the (maybe unintentional) duplicity of pretending that "remote work in the continental US" can only mean "remote work".
I have seen many European companies as well who do this unintentional duplicity of "remote" meaning "anywhere in the EU/EEA".
In addition to the obvious time zone constraints, I think payroll taxes and such are a major regulatory boundary that you need to cross in addition to having "all your shit together" as one of the top comments puts it.
> In addition to the obvious time zone constraints, I think payroll taxes and such are a major regulatory boundary that you need to cross in addition to having "all your shit together" as one of the top comments puts it.
This can be annoying even across state boundaries, let alone internationally, for smaller companies that aren't already operating in several states. Consider also things like group health insurance, which are often geographically bound (sometimes even to a single city).
It boggles the mind that the biggest companies on Earth are the likes of Instagram instead of a huge company called "Adapt" which takes care of all that between employee and employer as a third party.
I have no personal experience but I have been told that even if you farm a lot of things out there is a certain amount of paperwork (and cost) that you have to handle in-house.
Right now, if N companies want to hire in M countries, the total expenditure in HR departments is in the order of O(N*M), when it could (theoretically, ideally) be O(N + M).
Is that really the case? There is some evidence that globalisation had plateaued over the last decade or so. I can't find any recent evidence one way or the other.
The winners of remote work are all fleeing to New Zealand, leaving the rest to wallow in decaying infrastructure and a healthcare system bursting at the seams.
The pandemic accelerated the end of globalization. Globalization is over. The US will become less and less involved in the other countries -- even less than it is now -- and corporations will not be hiring teams that are mix of time zones, languages, and cultures. They will continue to hire people with credentials like those in charge, who look like, speak like, and have the same goals / culture as those in charge.
