[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.