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Remote collaboration still sucks, especially with big time zone mismatches. There's a world of difference between me walking over to my coworker's desk for a quick chat and we can pull up a whiteboard or look at a screen together and me trying to find time with a coworker with an 8 hour time difference (convenient overlapping hours are usually booked solid with meetings already) and try to make myself understood over zoom.
And if they're gone home for the day (which happens before I have lunch) I can't talk to them at all that day.
That's the best time of my day, when I can work without constant meetings and constant braindead queries from my jeet coworkers in Mumbai.
If your coworkers are morons, that's kind of a skill issue.
Well I can't fix their skills unfortunately. And I'm very well paid to be a tard wrangler for jeets, that's the only reason I stick around.
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I've seen both sides, as I have some collaborators who go back and forth with enough significance that we keep up when they're abroad. There are nice things about being able to stroll down to their office. There are also nice things about, "Here's what I've been thinking about today; it's still kind of a hazy idea, but I think I'm on to something," and then I head home, go to bed, they work on it all through my night, and first thing in the morning, I have an email about their progress in taking my idea and running with it. Similarly for working a document toward a deadline. I can do what I can do, leave some notes, and magically, much progress has occurred while I was sleeping. It's a wonderful feeling when it happens.
Sure. I've worked with coworkers on a 24x7 rotation and there the time difference is a must for maintaining sanity. But when I'm working on a project (rather than keeping a system running) I find it way better to be nearby.
This works in the case that they have nothing going on, or are going to drop everything to pursue your project. More likely IME, they'll think about it for perhaps an hour and send you some feedback. That's the kind of thing that would have been way better as a meeting and that's most of my cross timezone experiences.
I'm sure it's quite field and role dependent, but mine is definitely a good one on that front. They're already pursuing "my project" as a large component of their role. So if I have the makings of a promising idea, it's not uncommon for them to spend hours trying to make the details work. I'm pretty impressed pretty often, but I also have managed to get myself a set of impressive collaborators.
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