[samus]

The need to schedule meetings at unreasonable times is one of the drawbacks of outsourcing and globally distributed teams, no disagreement here.

It's within the (usually hard-fought for) rights of employees in many countries to refuse such meetings. Unless they explicitly signed up for such a schedule of course. However, I would be very surprised if freelancers and people in leadership positions can refuse to participate in such meetings. In turn, they usually have higher salaries.

Of course, it sucks for people in other countries not being able to refuse to work at weird times. But if they could refuse, their country would immediately be much less attractive as an outsourcing destination.

Edit: tl; dr: regular remote meetings should between people in leadership positions. Day-to-day work should be managed by local managers, else it will either suck for everybody or suck enormously for workers in the country with weaker worker rights.

[spaetzleesser]

And the offshore team should be large to perform autonomous work. We often get only one or two guys from India or China who need to work closely with the US team . So it ends up with the offshore guys sacrificing their nights or the US people have to sacrifice.

It looks cheaper on paper but this way you get all the overhead of offshoring but bad productivity. It’s terrible.