[grecy]

I'm an Australian that left 8 years ago, and have been living and working in the US and Canada ever since.

I agree with you 100%.

Australia being expensive: Anyone that says that needs to wake up to how lucky they are to live in "the lucky country". After living a few years in America (and to a lesser extent Canada) I'm more than happy to pay extra for "stuff", given life is so, so much better. Heath Care, Education, decent infrastructure, paid vacation, sick and maternity leave, just to name a few. Also consider someone working minimum wage in the US ($7.25/hr) has to work ~206 hours to get that $1500USD MacBookPro. In Australia, someone on minimum wage ($16.37/hr) has to work ~113 hours for the same $1849AUD MacBookPro. Obviously minimum wage earners are not buying MacBookPros, but given that wages scale similarly, you see living/working Australia is actually better than living/working in the US.

Timezones: Wait, it's a complaint that the world has timezones now? Give me a break!

Foreign Investors want a global vision: The OP of the article is upset that foreign investors want to get a boat-load of money back on their money by reaching as many customers as possible? Does this person not understand how investors think?

In short, cry me a river. I challenge any Australian who disagrees with me to go and live in the US for a few years, then see what you have to complain about.

[vacri]

The timezone issue is significant if you need to offer realtime support as part of your product, and the majority of your clients aren't near where you are.

[grecy]

Yes, but that's like complaining you have to spend time brushing your teeth in the morning, or take time out to feed yourself the calories you need to live.

There is nothing you can do to change it, so if you really, really don't like it, move someplace it's not an issue.

It's part of life, stop complaining about it, and get on with it.

[semerda]

West and East coast in the US are 3 hours apart (timezone - ta-da!). Same issue with timezones applies even in the USA. Realtime support is hard to do anywhere in the world. What happens when the operator is overloaded with too many requests. There are many ways to make this scale and work even across timezones and languages.

[vacri]

Come on guys, give me some credit. We're having problems with internal processes right now because our offices are split between Melbourne and San Francisco, and there's only 2 hours in the regular working day of overlap. Being a couple of hours out is nothing compared to being almost the entire working day out.

The more your support has to do shift work, the harder it is to get and vet support, train them properly, and the more expensive they are to pay. The more they're awake during normal sleeping hours, the lower the quality of support - and I say this having spent two years doing support for in-timezone sleep medicine equipment. The article also states other problems with response lag and low efficiency, which is what happens if you can't adjust your work day (and if you do, then you're out of sync with local services).

The kind of condescending 'get over it' comment from grecy is utterly beside the point - regardless of whether you deal with it well or not, out-of-timezone sync support is more difficult to do, and that is something worth mentioning in a list of hurdles an Australian startup might face.

[grecy]

> The kind of condescending 'get over it' comment from grecy is utterly beside the point - regardless of whether you deal with it well or not, out-of-timezone sync support is more difficult to do, and that is something worth mentioning in a list of hurdles an Australian startup might face.

You know, Australians are very well known internationally being being complaining so-and-sos.

I can't believe a thinking person would actually complain that Australia is in vastly different time zone. Next you'll be complaining it's too hot, then that it's to sparsely populated (oh, you already are). It never ends with you, does it?

[vacri]

?

You're doing some pretty massive projection there. I said that the timezone increases support costs if you're not where your market is, and it's worth putting on a list of hurdles for startups. I didn't complain about the timezone, just mentioned that it's not the trivial issue you painted it as. It's also winter here in Melbourne, where it gets cold enough that I've heard both Scots and Canadians bitch about how stupidly cold it is here (because we don't insulate our buildings properly), and when summer rolls around, I love the heat and 40+ degree days. And when it comes to 'sparsely populated', I've argued several times here on HN that Australia is one of the most urbanised large countries in the world - despite the outback image we promote, far more of us live in the cities and we have a very centralised population.

So not only are your complaints wrong about me, they're the diametric opposite of who I am and what I say. It's fine if you don't like the country and want to live somewhere else, but don't just make shit up about your former fellow citizens in order to justify your movement to yourself.