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Comment by bauerd | Hacker News Reader

Hire in complimentary timezones so no one has to be on call at night

Unless you're hiring 3-4x the engineers, then this doesn't scale. I would much rather occasionally be paged at night than have to be on call all or even most of the time.

Even if that "on call" was only 9-5, getting distracted and losing half a day to tracking down the latest flaky test or owner for a failing dependency really adds up and makes it significantly more difficult to do my day job. When I'm oncall, I'm oncall 24/7 for a week (30 minute SLO) and the expectation is that the amount of non-oncall tasks I'm able to get done that week is significantly impacted. I'm fortunate to work on a team that acknowledges that reality; I know many people, even at large software companies who should know better, whose management is far less reasonable.

It's true but most people do not have the luxury of being able to focus on a single task each day until done. If that is a requirement for you I'm not gonna knock it but I feel it is rare to get.

We’ve been trying to staff a 3x8 follow the sun model for over 6 months and have been unable to fill the roles in EU and especially APAC

Plenty of good devs open to competitive offers down here in APAC.

I joined a US company as part of a follow the sun model. Although ironically I seem to support people who are up at midnight in Europe more than in my area of the world.

Happy to have a chat, see if I can offer any useful feedback :)

Hmm, living in APAC, it seems like companies in the US are either never hiring for remote positions overseas, or offer laughably low salaries.

Yeah, I wish I had more power here.

We’ve been trying to staff a 3x8 follow the sun model for over 6 months and have been unable to fill the roles in EU and especially APAC.

Pay more. It literally solves all recruitment problems.

Gee, I wish I could control that.

Salaries in the EU are not what they were and have improved dramatically. I've found most companies to be wildly off the mark when making offers. Perhaps you need to recalibrate.

It’s true, and it’s sad to see. A long time high performer on our team based in Germany makes a pittance compared to more Junior US based folks. Alas, I cannot do anything about it.

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