Precisely. Especially in India - which is almost as large a time zone offset as you can have. Furthermore, India pays competitively enough that you’re not saving that much money for top talent as compared to e.g Eastern Europe. When I ran engineering teams, the language/dialect barrier between our US mothership and India was much much wider than South American and European devs, even though India is technically the largest English-speaking country in the world.
It makes perfect sense: the "natural" lines would give India two time zones; combining them into one half-hour time zone gives the whole country the same time.
It did cause problems with the early Bell Labs Unix releases, which didn't contemplate that a time zone might not be a whole number of hours away from Greenwich.
Surely India as a large federal nation would be OK with two time zones! It makes about as much sense as China having one time zone for its sixty degrees of longitude.
You don't have to adjust the clocks though, you can adjust business hours instead. Just look at Spain, which shares the same timezone as Poland: they simply wake up/go to bed later on the clock, but not with regard to the sun.
Spain is a good example of a politically-motivated time zone. Prior to Franco putting the country in CET to be in line with Axis powers, it was in GMT, which makes a lot more natural sense.
> they simply wake up/go to bed later on the clock, but not with regard to the sun.
This defeats the purpose of having time zones at all. People generally prefer the sun near overhead at noon; otherwise we would all just set our clocks to UTC no matter where we are. It would certainly make programmers' lives easier ;-)
The offset between local noon and time-zone noon is never that large, nowhere near what it's like in China, and it actually puts the center of the country closer to solar time. So it seems a reasonable thing to do, better than having the TZ line right in the middle where the railroads will keep crossing it.
> Furthermore, India pays competitively enough that you’re not saving that much money for top talent as compared to e.g Eastern Europe
According to levels they're probably making 15-20% the equivalent salary of github employees with similar YoE in the U.S. But you're right, eastern europeans probably have similar wages.
Until ~2010, Belarus was until someone went all-in with Moscow.
Ukraine is (and still will be) an excellent outsourcing opportunity. Personally, I find it very easy to understand Slavic-speaking English as a secondary language speakers.
In general, there can be word use, humor, and cultural media reference difficulties, so it's important to always use very plain and direct language to avoid misunderstandings. To further comprehension and understanding, it's beneficial to say the same thing again in different words and ask for their understanding of details in yet other words.
PS: Early/mid 2022, I bought items on Etsy postmarked from Kyiv. Somehow, sellers forwarded parcels to Germany and Turkey and then to the US between shellings, missile attacks, and columns of Russian armor advancing.
The hardest time I’ve had communicating at work has been with native English speakers from India. They have such a strong accent and such different idioms. Same to some extent with Singlish.
The problem is they really are speaking perfectly legal English, with grammar better than mine, but it’s a different dialect. Not true of ESL Indians.
Native English speakers make up 0.02% of India's population. I've worked in tech for a decade and have met exactly zero native English speakers in India. I honestly have no idea what you're talking about.
I’ve spent long enough in the industry that I am relatively comfortable with many of the accents, I would love a class to exist that teaches non-Indians the dialect.
I think after about a year in tech consulting I developed a pretty robust ability to understand accents that most Americans have trouble with. Chinese, Russian, Indian, Nigerian, you name it. I guess if someone wants to practice they could listen to Kitboga or something.
Absolutely, that's what I'm trying to say - that they have accents, and we have accents, and they're different. I sure as shit don't speak the Queen's English, which is etymologically closer to what they speak
The impact of the timezone difference was greatly underestimated by people. During my prior experience working closely with a team in India, I realized that I would never take up a job that demands it again. Although the engineers were competent, the +10 hour time difference caused inconvenience to everyone for sure. Either someone had to work very early or very late... everyday
