I’m in a senior role working for an SF company, and my permanent address is in the Bay Area. Although I haven’t relocated per se, I work from the EU for months at a time because my partner lives there. It’s occasionally inconvenient for me because meetings occur when it’s evening / nighttime in Europe —- sometimes quite late —- but fortunately I don’t have too many such meetings, and I’m a night owl anyway. For coding tasks, sometimes it can actually work out better because I can do my day’s tasks before anyone in the US is awake, then submit my PRs, attend my standups, and sign off. Sometimes it works out worse because if I’m waiting on a code review or need help during the daytime in Europe, it won’t come till nighttime. And of course there are the random times when someone in the US legitimately needs to chat with me near bedtime etc. I do believe that being so remote so often means that I wouldn’t be a good fit for roles that require more leadership, because the time zone difference makes it hard to maintain a very high level of responsive communication and availability, particularly when it comes to meetings and chat. However, I’ve more or less accepted it for now as a reasonable trade-off of being a bit of a digital nomad.
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