- Timezone

- Culture

Working with people in vastly different timezones is difficult. Just ask anybody working with people from the the US East coast and West coast. That's only a 3 hour time difference and it gets difficult.

Culture is another barrier. One of the things that's been hard for US-based companies to learn with working with people from India is in their culture it's impolite to say "no." They use other signals to indicate no. Americans miss those cues. They don't hear what the think is pushback and so they proceed as though everything were fine. Americans also find it difficult to work with Germans as their bluntness is seen as being rude. This is just scratching the surface for the culture barriers that abound.

This is why I say remote work != offshoring. They're two completely different animals.