[Kamq]

Offshore generally means you're trying to slash costs. Say, hiring $10/day devs from India. Now, there are great devs in India, but they don't work for $10/day.

It's the same term that was used for transitioning textile and other factory work to third world sweatshops.

Hiring internationally is just that. You might get someone for a bit cheaper (somewhere in the neighborhood of 20ish percent), but that's usually in exchange for the extra hassle of managing a remote team and dealing with timezone issues. You don't usually crank through these people every quarter, they're hired for the longterm (or, as longterm as anyone in a software job is hired for).

[withinboredom]

I worked on a team with two other engineers. I was in the EU, one was in Australia, and one on the west coast of the US.

We had very, very little overlap to have meetings (unless one of us wanted to wake up early or have a late night meeting, which happened a few times). We did everything async, even meetings and decisions.

The best part would be learning how to open a WIP PR, with enough detail that someone else could understand what you were going to do. You'd wake up in the morning to find a team member had contributed to your PR, either by fixing nits (we didn't have time to go back-and-forth on shenanigans or it would take weeks just to merge a single PR), or by actually implementing some idea they had. So, if you didn't like it, you'd just remove that commit from your PR.

It was fun, but it takes a lot of trust!

[jiggawatts]

I had the "timezone thing" with a colleague in the same city because he had some weird sleep disorder. Basically, he was a vampire. Asleep during the day, working all night.

It was awesome. I'd turn up to the customer site to collect their issues and requests, do some investigation, formulate the precise requirements, and send it off to him.

The next morning, magically, things would be done.