Absolutely agree. Also, if you expect people to be switched on at 9pm, be flexible about them not responding first thing the next morning.

I interviewed with a company who is on the west coast. I'm in Ireland. We overlap for a few hours during their morning. Every interview was scheduled during their afternoon. I always asked to move it to an earlier spot. Seems like this conscious awareness of other people isn't automatic.

My view: if you're a global company, you need to instill in your employees a respect for time zones. You need your employees to be aware of where their colleagues are and what their "normal" working hours are. You to be intentional about this and actually say it. At a previous company the CEO actually took a minute during an all-hands to say "Look everyone, we're a global company now and we're hiring like crazy in Europe. Be respectful of timezones. If you need to talk to a colleague in Europe, do it during your morning". That was enough to ensure that most of my meetings happened before 5pm local time, and when they didn't, you'd have at least one person during the meeting say things like "let's cover X first so @raffraffraff can get off the call early" or "guys, we're going off-topic and we've got colleagues from Europe on the call". It normalised consideration.

> spread the pain fairly so nobody has to always take meetings at awkward hours.

That was my biggest issue; obviously a late meeting or two occasionally is fine. It's a distributed team, that's a necessary evil. It just bothered me that, after COVID, they made zero attempt at even trying accommodate the satellite offices.

> In principle, I agree, but I should point out that "No meetings outside regular daylight hours" and "My employer shouldn't care where in the world I do my job" are not compatible with each other.

Not if you're all in North America. I've worked for two large, distributed companies in the last several years, where I reside in Eastern time zone. There's enough overlap between me and teammates in the Pacific time zone that evening meetings are never necessary.

Yeah, I don't get that one. You need to be in some really extreme timezones to not have any overlap. I worked with both UK and US from Australia (not Apple) and it was possible. Occasionally I'd do a meeting at night and start later the next day, but it was always my choice.

I used to work with people from PST (-8), CET (+1) and KST (+9). The meeting planner [0] shows no "acceptable" overlap, but we made it work by doing meetings very rarely, planning them far in advance and essentially taking turns which timezone gets the late (22-23) or early (6-7) slots. This was despite the fact that there was a clear hierarchy - sometimes the boss got up at 4 or stayed up until 23 so we wouldn't have to.

[0] https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/meetingtime.html?iso=...

As I said, our team is literally spread evenly around the globe (though not nearly in equal numbers). Every hour of the day is bound to be awkward for someone.

In those cases we split the meeting and someone sent in the notes async. At the level where all those people absolutely must be present... I would hope they're paid enough and have enough agency in their roles to figure out the solution.

India is 10.5 hours from both coasts of the US (for most of the year).

If two employees work at the same local times, they have to work an 11 hour day to have 30 minutes of overlap.

Try UTC+12/13 and having to regularly coordinate with Europe :)

Working with the US and Asia is fine though, always have a couple of hours of overlap.