[majormajor]

South America is an interesting one for a lot of US companies because the timezones line up much better with US-local folks than in any other continents.

There are still other substantial collaboration challenges, but if more places move to be truly remote-first, those places will necessarily have solutions for that anyway.

[foobiekr]

Agreed the time zones are killer.

If I start another company I’d really like to hire a competent offshore team in south or Central America but I have a lot of trouble getting there from here. If I wanted to hire a team in Israel, Pakistan or India, I could do it immediately, because I have trusted friends who can hook me up with people that they themselves trust plus or minus some skeeviness that I know how to manage. For south-of-us I have no connections and basically no way to start.

[esel2k]

Agreed. I am a product manager for a startup software acquired from Brazil. Nearly all engineering sit in Brazil (or some squads in India). I am the EU based PM that has to deal with the timezone issues and requirements- do I like it? Not really, but it is existing and the company might hire a an architect or tech lead on europe, the rest will remain outsourced. Generally speaking some of the developpers speak good English and so with Jira and Figma it works.