International remote work is a whole different ball game and #1 I admire anyone who can power though it, #2 Ultimately believe it is only beneficial when given very specific conditions. I had one team that was based in Eastern Europe / Russia and they could write code like demons, but explaining business requirements nearly put everyone over the edge. Communication was a serious barrier, not to mention the time schedules. I love the tech talent there but wow, could totally understand not wanting to jump into that kettle.

I like your analogy about the cake and definitely respect your thought process there. The way I have gotten around this is that I (or another team member) always played the role of gate keeper / "integrator" to make sure the merging of branches went as smoothly as possible. Now we also had the benefit of full test suites to run, user stories to compare against, etc. but it seemed to work. The drawback is that as the "integrator" my actual development time would be cut in order to keep timelines met. However the plus was that I could question the dev's intentions maybe make some extra adjustment / cleaner code and ultimately produce a more maintainable code base. I also was never caught off guard about garbage coming in - ha.

Does anyone else use this sort of "integrator" role and seen these challenges / benefits?