[tom_mellior]

> Superstar engineer only works a couple hours per day?

Replace the superstar with someone working "normal" hours but in a time zone offset by >= 5 hours to your own. You seem to be saying that cooperation with such people cannot work. But that is simply not true, many companies do make it work.

Is it always easy? No. But it can work very well.

[PragmaticPulp]

We had distributed teams with people in different time zones.

The key is to require some defined overlap of working hours. If that's not possible, you divide the tasks as cleanly as possible across timezones so that people in the same timezone can work together.

Trying to force teammates to work together on something in opposite timezones doesn't work unless you have very relaxed deadlines. When someone has to wait until the next day to get a response to any blocking questions, work slows to a crawl.

[tom_mellior]

> The key is to require some defined overlap of working hours.

Sure, that's not what I'm disputing.

> When someone has to wait until the next day to get a response to any blocking questions, work slows to a crawl.

Blocking questions should be an absolute exception in any case, even if the person who can answer them is just down the hall. It's on engineering management to organize work and documentation practices so that people can find answers on their own.