Time Zones, Honestly: What Hours You Will Really Work
Before you accept a role, know what the schedule does to your life. Here is the maths for the four common cases and how to negotiate the version you can sustain.
People accept roles without calculating the hours, then discover three weeks in that the job requires being awake until 1am. Do the maths first. It takes two minutes and it prevents a resignation.
The four common cases, from West Africa
United Kingdom. You are one hour ahead in their summer, same time in their winter. Their 9am to 5pm is roughly your 9am to 5pm. This is the easiest possible arrangement and it is why UK and Irish companies are worth targeting first.
Western Europe. You are the same or one hour behind. Effectively a normal working day.
US Eastern. They are five hours behind you. Their 9am is your 2pm; their 5pm is your 10pm. Most such roles ask for roughly 2pm to 10pm, or a shorter overlap window like 3pm to 8pm. Workable, but it eats your evenings.
US Pacific. They are eight hours behind. Their 9am is your 5pm; their working day ends at 1am yours. Be honest with yourself about this one. Many people can do it for six months and very few can do it for three years.
The question to ask in the interview
Not "what are the hours" but: "How much live overlap does the team actually need, and which hours specifically?"
The answers vary enormously. Some roles need four hours of overlap for standups and calls, and the rest is yours to schedule. Some need full coverage of their business day. Those are two completely different jobs at the same salary.
What is usually negotiable
- The overlap window. Four hours instead of eight is a very common compromise and is often accepted if you ask before signing.
- Meeting placement. Asking for recurring meetings to sit early in their day, which is mid-afternoon for you, is reasonable and usually granted.
- Fridays. Many distributed teams already run a lighter Friday.
What is rarely negotiable: attendance at the weekly all-hands, and being reachable during a live incident if you are in a support or engineering role.
Protect the boundary from day one
The failure mode of an evening-overlap job is that it quietly becomes an all-day job — you work your own morning because you are awake, then their day, and end up doing eleven hours. Decide your start time and hold it. Set your working hours in the calendar so colleagues see them. Close the laptop at your finish time.
Nobody will do this for you. Distributed teams generally respect stated boundaries and almost never guess unstated ones.
A useful filter for your search
If you have children, study, or anything fixed in the evening, weight your search towards UK and European companies. It narrows the list, and it makes the roles you do get sustainable.
Building a working day that survives a distributed team is Stage 1, the Remote Mindset Blueprint. See Stage 1.