My experience working in New York on a small team with the rest of the organization in Mountain View is that I got 10x the communication work done when I travelled to Mountain View. Some things are just better sitting around in your cubes or gathering for lunch, versus setting up a video conference, booking rooms, writing an agenda, etc. People can veer off topic. People you didn't invite can show up. People are at their primary workstations with their work open. Collaboration actually happens, rather than a mere "here is a question that will unblock my next day of work".
I was an IC with a very small team (who were in New York), so I didn't really need to meet with other teams on a daily basis. But every couple months, I did need to fill the pipeline with future work, and it was much easier to do that in person.
I am not sure what this means for a world beyond COVID-19, but right now I feel like everyone is in a holding pattern and are just tweaking their day-to-day applications, rather than planning the next big thing. That is sustainable for a few months, but it will be interesting to see if it's sustainable for longer than that.
(Do people ever co-found a startup with someone they've never met in person? Has anyone ever had a summer internship in college remotely? I am very interested in seeing how these things work.)
I've worked with non-native English speakers my entire career. Time zones just aren't as big of a problem as you think. You have to learn asynchronous communication. That means writing which, by the way, is by far the best way to perform complex communication.
I don't really understand the response. I'm not talking from a position of ignorance here; time zones are exactly as big of a problem as I think, because what I think has been informed by my experience working across time zones. There are certainly mitigation strategies, which improve the situation far beyond the naive solution of "let's pretend they're locals who just never come to the office". But no mitigation will make communication with someone you've never met in Shanghai as easy as it is with your buddy in the desk across the hallway.
I've worked across time zones too. Your problem is that you try to fight their existence and want it to be like "your buddy across the hallway". But it's not. If you accept that then you can find effective ways to communicate with them.
I agree on the time zone thing...
But I really prefer voice comms when possible. The rest of my team is 10+ hours away, so we do a skype 'standup' at the start of my day, end of theirs.
Bigger issues tend to be around language and culture...