I live in Singapore, and I’ve spent 6 years I’ve been here working remotely for companies where most employees aren’t located in Asia. Grafana is globally distributed, but the distribution is extremely lumpy - ask any of our APAC engineering colleagues. I like Brendan Gregg’s piece 3 years of Extremely Remote Work very much, but it largely covers the challenge of being a remote worker when most of the people you work with are co-located and in an office. That’s not my experience, so I wanted to share a little about being a “more isolated” remote engineer in Asia and what it takes for a company to be effective with these employees.

You get what you pay for

Salaries may be generally lower in Asia than the US, but if you would pay top-of-the-market in the US or Europe, expect to pay top-of-the-market here, too. Talent follows a power law distribution, just like it does in most industries.

That said, there are millions of people with exceptional skills in Asia. Assume that 1% of the population could be a great software engineer and you’re looking at over 45 million highly-qualified people. If you’re a hyper-elitist we’re still talking about 5 million people, and those people often deal with terrible work cultures. Here in Singapore it’s well-known that a job at an MNC1 is going to get you better work-life balance and more meaningful work than you’d have at a small-medium enterprise2 or even a large local firm. Long hours with expected after-hours availability and no overtime are often the norm for these workers.

That gives you - the hirer - a very simple edge with remote Asian workers. These bad work cultures don’t lead to higher productivity, so your business doesn’t lose by providing reasonable work hours with good pay. You will make yourself extremely attractive to the most talented people.

You need to develop your company’s writing skills

Australians have a few hours of overlap with the West Coast, India has a few hours of overlap with Western Europe. Southeast Asia has precious few of either. Many workers have some amount of flexibility and can be accommodating. For example, I work late nights on Tuesday and Thursday to get more time with people 1:1 and in groups.

I think most companies are over-using chat applications. Chat apps like Slack seem like they would provide more opportunities for remote workers, but I think they put people in uncommon time zones at a disadvantage because they encourage short messages that lack context. They push you toward real-time conversations for things that could be asynchronous.

However, I think shifting this is very, very hard. Your most senior worker’s habits shape everyone else’s communication, and those tend to be set early in a company’s life. People who can’t fit into that communication culture leave it more often than they change it.

You need to increase employee autonomy

In line with the writing skills point: you need to be able to localize decision-making. Every checkpoint adds hours or days when you need the Western Hemisphere to weigh in. That means structure is your friend.

  • Policies need to be clear and possible to follow autonomously. Approvals for things like necessary tools should be automated and later reviewed or pruned rather than going into a multi-day review queue before someone can get started.
  • Policies and documentation need to be complete. If a developer says “we have to ask Séan in Ireland about that”, you’ve lost a day.
  • Hire people you can trust and then trust them. Far easier to write it than to do it.
  • Processes need to be short, and executed promptly. Code reviews & document reviews need to happen quickly. That puts more responsibility on the author to provide well thought out artifacts, and on the reviewer to read things generously and provide comments with enough context and suggestions for the author to move the ball forward without another round of back-and-forth.

You might want co-locate everyone in a certain domain

It’s easier to increase team autonomy than individual autonomy: more checkpoints can happen within a team, so the process discipline doesn’t have to be as strong in every individual developer. This can help compensate for the difficulty in shifting company culture, but inevitably people will need to work across groups, so your out-of-Asia employees need to understand the constraints of people who cannot have conversations full of short messages without clear next steps.

  1. Multi-national corporation ↩︎

  2. SME ↩︎