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Comment by maxxxxx | Hacker News Reader

From the US the time difference is a major problem. You can never discuss anything during normal work hours and any issue will have a one day turnaround. Or you stay up late all the time and then it takes over your personal life. We have some devs now in Costa Rica which is much easier to manage because you can discuss things on the phone during the day.

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I would like to second this. If you are in the US or Europe there is no way to meet via conference call/video with Indian developers and make the meeting be in office hours for both India and you. This makes the communication much less agile and/or generates a really poor work-life balance for the people that is forced to work at night, and this impacts directly on the quality of the development. For US and Europe it would be much better to hire from Latinamerica instead.

I agree with most of the comments. Clients & development teams can manage the time difference diligently -

a.) Picking good Project management tools (We use BaseCamp + Wunderlist, Asana + Skype, Slack + Trello, Jira + Skype)

b.) Most of the time we required Standup calls with project owner to discuss status & work ahead

c.) Proper documentation & project planning reduces time spent on phone calls & constant bugging

d.) Slack is considered to be distraction to your productive hours

This is fine and good but you are creating a lot of process to work around a fundamental problem. Direct face to face communication during working hours is hard to beat.

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