[philfreo]

There's a big difference between remote work (which can function 100% perfectly fine in the "Manager's schedule") from "remote work across varying timezones". In my experience (3+ years working fully remotely, 10+ years working partially remotely), timezones (overlap of working hours) matter much more than physical geography.

Even among remote work in different timezones, there's still a huge difference between say a 4 hour timezone (say, covering all of North America) working with people from potentially ANY timezone where you have potentially 0 hours per day of overlap.

Even in an organization that does asynchronous work really well, very few organizations can do everything effectively in async, meaning that you'll always want to have some overlap for synchronous discussions.

My advice for any company concerned about expanding remote work would be to simply limit/restrict which time zones you're comfortable people working in.

Our all-remote person team at Close.com has scaled up to 15+ engineers, 40+ people overall. We do have people all over the world, but we tend to focus our hiring around American & European Timezones, which provides a nice balance of covering a huge percentage of the world's population while still providing enough overlap to have synchronous meetings.

[pc86]

Or just require that people keep a schedule for your timezone. So you can be in whatever timezone you want provided you're working 8-5 UTC-8, for example. Requiring someone be in a specific timezone is just a slightly less of a burden than requiring they be local enough to commute it. You're still excluding a huge swath of potential employees.

[philfreo]

Yes, I'm using "timezone" as shorthand for "the timezone of your working hours", which occasionally can/does include people who want to work odd hours to accommodate.

That said, we are always a little skeptical of people who are willing to work very odd hours (e.g. throughout their night), because for many people it's not sustainable for them long-term.