Problems encountered while working in different time zones

Question

I am sure that there are many developers whose team is scattered across different time zones. What are some of the problems people face and what is the best way to solve them?

Answer 1

I currently work in a different time zone than the rest of my team. The biggest problem is in the early morning and late afternoon, when some of us have not started work during the day, and some have already left for this day.

This is just part of the job, and we all respect each other with valuable time. If this is something critical (and that is a relative term), then we just call the team member or page / text as a whole team. If this happens, we will all respond as necessary. Nothing wrong. Due to the respect factor, we know that this should be used only when necessary.

On a normal business day, we simply use standard materials such as email, phone and chat.

Answer 2

Honestly, any company that split the development of a project by time zones is not related to the realities of engineering. Trying to save themselves or two, MBAs are imposing their engineers an unenviable position on changing their life schedules, which leads to high workloads, longer working days, lower morale and higher turnover. Quality suffers, ship dates suffer, feature lists suffer. The only increase you will see in your project is the number of errors.

You may have such project projects as if you had no need for a small delay between projects. In other words, if they work on almost completely independent segments of the system.

Answer 3

We have a team that is distributed or should work across 3 or 4 different time zones. In the course of this, we encountered several problems related primarily to communication.

Meetings are difficult to organize at a time convenient for all team members, so sometimes it may be necessary to subset a team meeting or refuse to approach a team meeting for an individual update approach, when one main team member is responsible for a specific foreign team.

Another issue is job transfer and communication. For example, we have a resource in India, and if they have a problem that causes them to stop working, it may take 2 or 3 days because of their schedule, if we do not respond quickly enough, all because of the time difference. Therefore, it is imperative that we not only plan diverse work to fill these delays, but also respond to their requests in a timely manner. We often assign testing tasks to resources in this particular time zone, as this is often an endless task.

In addition, you need to have a good change management system and code repository. The more asynchronously you can create communication channels, the better, and this also applies to the exchange of information (for example, tracking sources and problems).

There is no reason why you cannot make distributed teams work, especially at the current age, where we can work from almost anywhere, as long as we have a link to the Internet. However, it is important to know where your bottlenecks are in the project and to ensure that work is appropriately distributed.

Answer 4

If you don’t have a great process set up exclusively for this type of scenario, then another time zone will kill your project term. At least one side must be very flexible in order to adjust its time for meetings. But of course, this will ultimately lead to disappointment among team members.

Check out this SO thread that talks about outsourcing and its practical problems, I think you will get a few https://stackoverflow.com/questions/111948/outsourcing from there too.

Or an outsourcing tag - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/outsourcing

Answer 5

We have such problems with support - we use 3 commercial SDKs, and support teams are in remote time zones (the difference is 8-10 hours). Moreover, not all working days overlap.

This fact had a big impact on my reverse engineering abilities :)

Answer 6

Plan, plan and plan some more. A few other notes:

1) Remember local holidays if the team is in other places, for example. different countries may have different holidays. For example, some sects celebrate some Christmas holidays two weeks later than most Christians, for example. some orthodox sects that I think of.

2) Schedule appointments at specific times, which may be outside normal business hours. This was especially true when there was a time difference of 13 hours between the rest of the team and me.

3) Remember the "clock of the kernel" with a change in time, for example. if I’m in Pacific time and want to update something in New Jersey Eastern time, and I do it at 5 pm Pacific time, that is, at 8 pm Eastern time, and maybe someone will not notice change or don’t check it until the next morning, which may mean that some support person gets up at 4:30 AM Pacific time, as in the East, some began to be active and go: “Yeah, why it doesn’t work the way yesterday?"

There are other obvious things related to the awareness of the presence of various alphabets, for example. Latin, Cyrillic, Arabic, etc., And this can affect how the computer interprets the entered text.