It's IMPOSSIBLE To Collaborate With Devs Across Time Zones!

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hey folks I'm headed to the office we get that out of the way um yeah this is like day number four going to the office this week which is uh too much for me to be honest and we're going to go to Reddit I'm not going to go tomorrow it's just it's a lot um and this one's about uh it's from experience devs subred it's called collaborating across time zones so just a reminder if we go through this video and you're enjoying it you think it'd be helpful to share back onto this thread please do me a favor and share the video link back there if you thought it was helpful uh because I don't do self-promotion because I don't want to get banned but if you think it's helpful that would help me um so this person saying I have a conundrum and they

have basically teams across uh the US so east and west coast you're going have a three-hour time difference there remote first company and then they're talking about um B basically onboarding new folks that are says in Australia so um yeah completely different time zones basically how do you how do you get this team number one on boarded this is kind of what they're talking about right like but uh I I figured I'd talk about this more generally um this is what I've been doing for like five years now at Microsoft not not with ramping up new teams I mean but just like cross Geo collaboration so um I'm not going to talk about this from the perspective of like hey I'm an expert I figured this out this is still very much a work in progress for me let me get started driving at least

before I rant for uh way too long and haven't even moved um yeah it's a it's a really good conversation I think or topic of conversation because I think that especially with so much of the world going to like um remote work but this is just more and more common and um personally I don't know like I feel like maybe other people feel differently about this but I feel like we haven't necessarily caught up on how to do this kind of thing effectively I think there's probably been companies that have been around for like um you know like pre-2020 kind of time period that uh that I've been doing remote first uh and doing it well and that's all good and if every time I stop this car it's going to beep at me I'm probably going to have a a breakdown to be honest

it's not even it's actually like warm out there's no reason that this thing should be doing that and uh so yeah I think there's probably companies that have been doing this for ages and they do it well so my my focus here isn't to say oh like no one knows how to do this it can't be done with well but I think there's probably a lot of companies that we just haven't really figured out like a super effective way to do um cross geoc cross time zone kind of collaboration so um friendly reminder that as I get into this if you are thinking that you want to have your questions answered leave them in the comments Andor send a message to Dev leader on social media that's also my main YouTube channel if you send in a message I'll keep you Anonymous uh that way

you can write whatever you want and I'll do my very best to try and give you some advice so um to kind of back up a little bit for uh for at least my experience like prior to Microsoft you know I spent eight years at a startup that was very much just you know centered in one time zone we didn't have to think about anything uh complicated like that we were really just like one office collocated there was no uh remote work was really rare um we had a couple of exceptional cases where we had a couple of remote employees um but overall just like everyone Senter it to one spot and then we ended up having a like a satellite office but still in the same same time zone come on man stop beeping God God it's like this is going to give me

a mental breakdown before being burnt out from work um so I had like a large part of my career that I just like didn't really have to think about different time zones and stuff like that so um when I started at Microsoft this is my first sort of experience where it's like that's a really big part of what I have to sort through now I can't speak on behalf of like every single team at Microsoft or anything like that there's it's far too big with far too much variety for me to even claim this is like the majority but at least for what I've seen in the area that I work in it's called substrate or Office 365 substrate sort of the the infrastructure that all of the services run on for Office 365 um in substrate it's a pretty common pattern that we would

have like a a North American based team right and then there would be a counterpart to that team in China and it's really helpful I mean for many reasons but um one of the the most simple straightforward reasons is like if you consider that we have live services that are running 247 that need to have extreme availability like that means that when we and North America are going to sleep it's not um it's not like the services just turn off right like they have to be they have to be operational so uh we basically need people that that can be experts at any point in time and especially because you know we don't want to have to like wake up in the middle of the night uh from a support perspective if we don't have to just kind of makes sense and at this scale

and it makes a ton of sense um so that's like one of the most simple reasons for us to follow that kind of model now there's you know tons of other reasons to consider something like this uh you know from Talent uh you know just having a global talent pool to uh I don't know regardless you can come up with any reason you want um but this is like one of the the major benefits for us as a uh highly available set of live services but the whole focus of this conversation is like challenges right so like how do we navigate this kind of thing because of the reality is that while there's a lot of benefit to having teams that can be cross geography cross time zone um there's a lot of challenges that come with that and the first part is just like

if you consider teams that are working together and by the way um I as I talk through this I'm not assuming any sort of like prior experience working in software companies like so some things I might be saying here you're like well no Nick um but for some people you might not have started in the software industry yet so this is kind of meant to be applicable to anyone um if you're co-located working on stuff uh and let's say even in office like it's very easy to just turn and talk to people right um and if you're now talking about remote employees but you're at least in the same time zone you can like get on chat or you can ping them and say hey let me call you and like it's you have this convenient ability to communicate right um but once you start

having even different say in North America from east to west coast there's a three-hour difference right so what do you like already if you think about like tra uh traditional like 9 to5 like sort of working time frame now you have to consider like okay well someone on the East Coast if they start at 9:00 that's 6:00 a.m. for people in Pacific so like what do you do right um sorry one sec had to had to respond to my skip level manager and I'm sitting here at a light so seem like a safe thing to do it says something about a phone call and usually that would mean something uh quite important so if you already have like a three-hour time difference and you're thinking about like working hour overlap like that that's already going to put some inconveniences on people right so the the

whole point here is that the more Vari the time zones the more and more challenges that you can start to face like things that seem otherwise very simple now can get more complicated for collaboration right so the one one simple example that comes to mind to me is like scheduling meetings and then you're like why is this person scheduling meeting during my lunch hour and it's because it's not their lunch hour right someone scheduling a 3:00 meeting in Eastern Time Zone and they're like hey this is a great time slot and you're like yeah except I'm in Pacific and I'm trying to eat my lunch after you know a jam-packed morning full of meetings or other activities and you're like I don't want to do a meeting over lunch so um something as simple as that becomes kind of weird or at least something you

have to give more consideration to um the the thing once we start getting into like cross geography like especially different countries and stuff getting involved different literally employees that might have um management chains that report up differently right so like quick example like our engineers in China like they don't they don't report to me from like a like a management perspective right like from a people leadership perspective they have their own manager and I think that's a really good model so that they have like career support and stuff but from like a project and sort of work uh work stream perspective like I collaborate with the manager in China and we get alignment um some stuff we might argue is like driven more like air quotes here like out of headquarters but a lot of like it's very collaborative in my mind um so that's

all goodness in terms of like that reporting structure but once you start to have this cross geography thing going on I think we like it really levels up the challenges with collaboration so something I think that's worked really well for us uh and again this is like things I've seen over the past past 5 years because even my previous team and current team very similar in terms of setup um even though they're completely different teams the idea being that we pick some days of the week that we are saying these are days and it's not every day but these are days that we are willing to sort of have open scheduling uh in cross cross time zone um like hours right so brief example is like at the end of the day on on a Tuesday we might say like hey the people in North America in Pacific time are willing to have meetings like between 5 and 6 and um p.m.

right and then that means that people in China would uh to get the overlap they would have to be willing to have like an 8:00 a.m. meeting depending on daylight savings time and stuff like that it gets a little bit crappier at certain times of the year um but like that's one example right and then it means yes the people on the east coast and for us uh in terms of uh how we're spread out not many on the East Coast so it's not um not such a challenge on our team but it might mean the odd person is like okay on a Tuesday uh I might have uh like a late meeting like an 800m meeting which don't get me wrong that sucks but we kind of try to find this balance and that might mean for the person with the 88 a.

meeting sorry 8:00 pm meeting in Eastern time that they're like hey on a on a Tuesday like I'm just going to start work later or I'm going to take a longer lunch or I'm going to compensate on some other day for it like and I would encourage that like they should because they shouldn't say okay well I'm going to start you know my 9:00 a.m. eastern and then take a meeting at 8:00 p.m. and just work the whole time um and for anyone that is doing that like I would strong encourage against that because it's not going to be sustainable but the point is that we as a team come up with like some days of the week that we're like okay these ones were willing to try and have like uh some cross team collaboration and so we'll vote on it that kind of

thing try to get some some alignment and that way we hold ourselves accountable when someone's like man like we we should schedule something to have a conversation it's like hey look like you know we you're you're kind of doing an exceptional thing if you're going outside of that time that time boundary so it's not that you're not allowed to or anything like that um but you shouldn't you should have the expectation that like you should be scheduling in those dedicated slots and if you need to go outside of that you're having dedicated conversations to say hey look like are you able to meet otherwise like let's find other ways to collaborate like asynchronously right and then we can follow blow up and a better time um so anyway the one point was around like dedicated slots the team agrees on um and like I'll give

you another example too because a new thing on my current team setup is that I actually have some engineers in Europe and I have not had engineers in Europe before that I'm collaborating with on a regular basis so that's why for me um like when I talk about being burnt out over the past like couple of months now like one of the things contributing to that and I'm not blaming the engineers in in Europe but like I have a daily meeting with them and it was like at 9:00 but that's also the time on some days I'm trying to drive to the office that's also like now been moved to 8:30 which means that I have to be prepared before 8:30 so every day of the week now starts for me before 8:00 uh sorry before 8:30 so generally sometime around 8:00 but I also

have meetings after hours from you know North America to meet with China and collaborate that way that sometimes go till 6:00 uh I have some days of the week where I have an 800 pm. meeting so like for me I have a whole bunch of stuff that's layered on top and it's like it's absolutely not sustainable right um so I'm just giving you an example of like we found some time slots where we can at least overlap and that's really good but also like it's not a sustainable thing for me to do like a an 8:30 a.m. daily sync with engineers in Europe it just isn't not not unless I'm giving up something else uh but this is this is time boxed so it's like I I understand it's going to have a negative impact on me in the short term but um I like

I kind of accept my fate and like I said I know it's time boxed something that's really important to consider is that so you have dedicated time slots uh asynchronous communication and leaning into this as much as possible some things are really helpful to talk about on a call but to give you an example if you were going to review um you know someone's design together right so you have a design review for a design document that was put together what I would say is like a really inefficient use of time is to pull people together for an hour and basically just read through the design together there's a in some meetings I've seen before it's like we use the first you know 10 to 20 minutes to do like shared reading time I think absolute worst use of time I could imagine and it's

not because I you know the count argument as well we want to make sure everyone had time to read and it's like yeah but you don't need to you don't need to get X number of people across time zones at the same time to read a document together like it's to me it's completely senseless to do that so that's a really bad example and then you layer on like say that someone who's presenting the design is basically just reading through the document it's like like what value is that right because now you're trying to synchronously provide people information that they could have consumed ahead of time so in a situation like this I would I would say like how much work could everyone do on their own asynchronously Ahad ahead of time and try to enable that kind of thing right get the design sent

out well in advance more than 24 hours get it sent out make sure that people are Ser like taking it seriously to go review and add comments get a discussion going try to have conversations about thing from things from the design ahead of time either through comments asking questions whatever so that when you come together to discuss things like you already have some burning topics that really need to be addressed so that you can use that time together to have valuable conversations not not okay let's read through this okay let me read it back to you okay does anyone have questions now for the first time and oh yeah sorry I don't have the answer for that we'll have to follow up now You' spent an hour together and have accomplished basically nothing right so leaning into asynchronous work as much as you possibly can

because otherwise things get delayed tremendously um if I can reflect on one of the biggest bottlenecks or slowdowns that I've seen coming from startup that was like rapidly growing to Microsoft which is like ridiculously big as like a as a company is the sort of the overhead of communication because of the scale because of cross geography because of all these things layered together there is so much overhead and time between communication so I cannot stress enough I'm not saying that everything is perfect uh for asynchronous conversations but trying to do it as much as you can to keep things unblocked I think is like number one to to sort of emphasize that point if there was one time slot in the week that you agreed upon as a team that is like the cross geography time to meet and it's the day after that and

you're like hm we really need to meet to talk about something are you going to wait one whole week before you can start having a conversation like absolutely not it would be so insane to do that so you should start as as early as possible asynchronous communication um I would say another thing to layer on it's kind of related to asynchronous communication but it's like if you know that you have these different working hours right um as much as possible trying to do like a a handoff I think is valuable so you know the the example I was giving with the daily meeting that I have currently with my uh my engineering counterparts in Europe um based on the work they're doing what we will do in in our time like our daytime is you know we'll see how far they got on their work

and we'll go great like let us know what you want us to follow up with in our daytime we'll go make progress on that so by the time you come back online like we can unblock you so I think this is a really powerful strategy it's not um again it doesn't it's not like it's a silver bullet solves every problem but um I see a lot of value in it uh I've seen it working really well for what we've been doing recently right so you'll have a team they get stuck on something and it's like no problem like we'll talk we'll try to find the experts in our time zone chat with them get you the information you need and continue on um so it's really about like finding what you can do in your time zone and when you need to you're getting other

people um sorry I lost my train of thought CU I have to switch lades here you're doing as much as you can in your time zone and then figuring out what you need to rely on the other time zone for and being clear about the asks go over one more Lane um now specifically around onboarding I think this can be challenging um because this is a period of time where you probably need to do some of the most like handholding collaboration making people feel uh connected um I realize like you know if if there's budget like one of the best things you can do I realize this example from Reddit was like people in Australia uh it's probably going to be pretty cost prohibitive but uh if there's any opportunity uh for travel budget getting people together once I think is super helpful come on

you got to move God okay um yeah i' I've noticed that in improving collaboration if there is travel budget you get people together at least once can make like a ridiculous difference um this gets more into some nuances around like how people communicate in terms of like written communication or even calls and stuff um I've talked about this in other videos but like sometimes you can have friction build up and like it's just because personalities aren't really uh aligning you could have uh language barriers cultural differences and then you bring people together and I've seen and I'm say again it's silver bullet solves everything but I've seen like multiple times where you can like it's completely evaporated um some difficulties like this so um something that I would recommend if there's travel budget uh but I I also recognize like could be very cost prohibitive

um but yeah when you're when you're getting people on boarded this is a period where you're going to have um probably a lot more need for reli in on collaboration and communication cross time zone um might not be a great answer but something that comes to mind is like do you come up with an onboarding strategy where it means in the shorter term um you know the sort of what do I don't know how you would call it but like the headquarters or whatever like yeah like maybe you're work hours might be you might have to compensate a little bit right I'm I'm kind of thinking about the situation I'm in right now where I'm like hey it's time boxed so for a period of time it's kind of crappy but like we acknowledge that it's we acknowledge the value it's adding and we acknowledge

that it's not indefinitely so for example could you have a couple of people and maybe you rotate through but you have a couple of volunteers that might uh wake up early or stay up late depending on on the overlap and you're like you know you're going to have this responsibility where you're helping out um to get folks on boarded more effectively and then for those individuals doing that it's like giving them some some time back at other points right so like hey by the way like you know just I'm just making up an example for for to illustrate but like on a Monday and Wednesday you're going to be up and you're going to be online for 7:30 a.m.

so that you can help with this other team but um on basically like take a take a half day on Friday right or take every other Friday off or something like that just so it's like it's not hey you just have to work more but it's like we're recognizing that you're facilitating something that's really valuable and like we want to acknowledge that and just coming up with some plan that's uh I don't know it's going to be overall helpful for the team but without I don't know totally burning people out because I mean the reality is that kind of thing I think when it's sustained will absolutely take a toll on people so finding a balance there just trying to think of a you know something that might be a little bit creative to to try and help but I do think as I'm getting

close to the office um having a on when you can uh do cross Geo stuff something else that came to mind and I this slit my mind sorry uh I talked about my current setup right now we have people in North America people in China people in Europe This is three separate time zones and there is no overlap between the three there is no overlap between those three um that that's reasonable so how we've been doing this um is we'll find ways to like you know our our China team can sink with our team in Europe our team in Europe can sink with North America and the North America can sink with the people in China and um you have to overc communicate when you do this kind of thing that's maybe something else to stress because there's more there's more opportunity like forget a

detail right oh yeah like we communicated this and it's like yeah but you communicated it only with that other team right there it's like more opportunity for like broken telephone kind of uh side effect so like making sure you're over communicating uh goes a long way I'm just realizing like how fragmented my thought process was while recording this but probably a side effect of uh just long week so um apologies for that but I hope there's some some tidbits in there that are that are useful at least to get your your thought process going I want to acknowledge that like cross Geo stuff different time zones can be can be really challenging um I'm I'm literally literally feeling the effect of that right now um so it's it's a lot um but one of the things that's super valuable is like I was saying we

have this opportunity where we can collaborate with Engineers that are awesome in different parts of the world and um I think when you can nail down like effective ways to collaborate and communicate then you can really take advantage of that now let's see if there's any parking in here probably not there's someone in front of me already going to be getting spots they're not taking that one okay so parked on the line this is so stupid I hope that person doesn't go on their vehicle because it's going to hit my car but anyway I'm done I'm at work bye