Challenges faced while working in different time zones [closed]

Question

I am sure there are many developers out here who have team spread across different time zones. What are some of the challenges people face and whats the best way to tackle them?

Answer 1

I currently work in a different time zone than the rest of my team. The biggest challenge is early in the morning and late in the afternoon when some of us haven't started work for the day or some have already left for the day.

It's just part of the work effort and we all respect each others valuable time. If it's something critical (and that's a relative term) then we just call the team member or page/text the whole team. If that happens then we all respond as needed. No big deal. Because of the respect factor, we know to only use this if necessary.

During the normal working day we just use the standard stuff like email, phone, and IM.

Answer 2

In all honesty, any company that has split development of a project across time zones is out of touch with the realities of engineering. The MBAs, in an attempt to save themselves a buck or two, foist upon their engineers the unenviable position of altering the schedules of their lives - leading to high stress, longer work hours, lower morale, and higher turnover. Quality suffers, ship dates suffer, feature lists suffer. The only increase you'll see in your project is the bug count.

You can have engineering projects split up like this if you don't have any need for low-latency communication between project units. In other words - if they are working on almost entirely independent segments of the system.