I appreciate they have a whole section on disadvantages, but this stands out to me: "All-remote companies should consider meetings as a last resort, instead relying on asynchronous collaboration tools[...]" To me, this implies a further disadvantage: extremely high latency when compared with in-person collaboration. That can be fine for some things. But there's all sorts of work where I really value live discussion.…
> I know that some remote-first companies tend to group related work by timezone, so that teams can be both distributed and low latency. I take it Gitlab isn't one of those? Probably depends on the team, individuals being able to self-organize and their experience. While some companies may see timezone distributed teams as disadvantage, I believe it is an opportunity to have a continuity of work and getting things do…
If somebody is going to pick up coding right where I left off, I need to transfer a lot of state from my head to theirs. At best, this takes a lot of time. But what's more likely is that things get In software our true enemy isn't time, it's error. It takes seconds to create a bug, but often takes hours or days to remove it. It takes minutes to misunderstand the purpose of a feature, but days or weeks to rework the code to match actual need.
I think if we want to get more people at the coalface, the right solution isn't working in shifts. (If it were, we would already be working in shifts without regard to timezone, just like factories do.) Instead, it's to increase collaboration, which requires much more synchronous communication. E.g., techniques like collective code ownership, pair programming, frequent pair rotation, cross-functional teams, small units of work, continuous delivery, and very frequent releases (daily or more often).
Since very few people work like that, I think it's reasonable to assume that faster results are not in fact a priority for most businesses. So the "distributed timezones are an advantage" to me sounds like an after-the-fact justification, not an actual solution to a problem.