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Re:Atlassian tells employees they can work from home forever by ghaff on Friday August 07, 2020 @07:08PM (#24087343)
Timezones are challenging between US West Coast and Europe. But, at my company, we do a lot of collaboration between US East Coast and Central Europe--which seems manageable synchronously but is probably approaching the limit where it's fairly straightforward (on a frequent basis).
Re:Atlassian tells employees they can work from home forever by caymanjim on Friday August 07, 2020 @07:47PM (#24087643)
I'm US east coast working for a US west coast client, and that's complicated enough. I've got a few hours before and after work to myself, which is nice, but the workday is smack in the middle. On the upside, I can sleep in and stay up late if I want. On the downside, I often miss family dinners (less of a concern with covid) and there's no long block of time for more than errands during the week. Overall, I like it. A bigger shift would be hard. I may move to Hawaii when the plague passes, and then my day would start at 6am. That'd be rough.
Re:Atlassian tells employees they can work from home forever by vosper on Saturday August 08, 2020 @01:04AM (#24089166)
> I may move to Hawaii when the plague passes, and then my day would start at 6am. That'd be rough

I do this, but from New Zealand: 5am (in winter) is 10am in SF, so I wake up at 4:50am. I'm usually online by about 5:15am. I manage a software team, who are distributed across North and South America.

It works fine. There's more than enough overlap between all our timezones (some of my South America team have adjusted towards SF time, too, though I haven't asked them to). Many of my colleagues don't even know what time it is for me, which is kind of the idea - it makes it easier if I just stick to west coast office hours, then no-one else has to think about it.

The early starts do drag as winter goes on, but I have the first daylight savings coming up in about 6 weeks - that'll mean 6am starts - then another DST shift will make it 7am (but I'll probably do 6:30am).

I am a morning person, and though I wouldn't usually wake up at 5am by choice, I wake up and become fully alert quickly enough that it's fine.

Having a big contiguous block of time in the afternoon / evening is amazing. Even in the middle of winter I finish work at 1pm and I have ~4 hours of daylight left to do whatever. In summer I'll finish around 2pm and have 7 hours of daylight. It's like having a full day to do stuff, every day - provided I have the energy.

Re:Atlassian tells employees they can work from home forever by thedufer on Friday August 07, 2020 @10:20PM (#24088416)
> I may move to Hawaii when the plague passes, and then my day would start at 6am. That'd be rough.

I know someone who did this. If you're a morning person already, the 5am wake-up isn't terrible, and finishing work at 2pm means you get prime surfing time every day. Not a bad way to go.

Re:Atlassian tells employees they can work from home forever by arbitrary_name on Saturday August 08, 2020 @10:29AM (#24091847)
Literally did this all the way through the bay areas SIP order. Was going to head back but things are worse in Hawaii now, they just shut down the beaches...
Re:Atlassian tells employees they can work from home forever by ghaff on Friday August 07, 2020 @07:59PM (#24087725)
I actually know someone who is a one-woman PR agency in Hawaii with mostly (all?) West Coast clients. Yes, she gets up at like 5AM.

I have a lot of calls that are mostly people in eastern time and central European time. It mostly works pretty well. We schedule calls typically between about 8:30 and 11 ET. Sometimes those of us in ET have a bit earlier calls than we prefer and the Europeans have calls a bit later than they'd prefer but it works pretty well. And we just don't expect Europeans to get back to us on the same day if we send them an email in the afternoon and they don't expect us to respond to emails in their morning.

Of course, if you're contracting the client may well want a more synchronized schedule.

Re:Atlassian tells employees they can work from home forever by cheerlessbog on Friday August 07, 2020 @09:22PM (#24088148)
What makes it truly hard (speaking from US location) is having a team in both directions. If you’re an Eastward team, or Westward team, but not attempting both, there is enough overlap that with some flexibility you can have meetings when everyone is awake.