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by alephnerd·3y ago·view on hn ↗
24 hour operations matter in large budget (>$20k/year) deals. There are SLAs to hit, massive penalties if they are not hit, and customers are VERY trigger happy with filing Severity 1 escalations and texting your company's C-Suite, Board, and Sales Leadership to get a bug resolved ASAP.

In additon, some level of regional redundancy is critical to prepare for black swan events (eg. a regional power outage like in the NE in 1996, flooding in Sacramento or East Bay suburbs leading to Product Owners or feature owners dealing with evacuations - this happened to us with the current flooding).

And finally, 24 hour operations allows you to expand to markets outside the US. While engineers in San Jose are sleeping, it's the middle of the workday for customers in London, Paris, Istanbul for example and they will inevitabely have bugs and issues arise.

Also, like I mentioned in the comment below:

2. Training and mentoring is a reflection of your company's Engineering Management. My employer has had an easy time offshoring development to Slovakia and Bangalore because we had Tech Leads and Engineering Management make the initiative to mentor, train, and onboard offshore team employees as we would domestic employees. I've seen similar examples occur across the industry (eg. Google Pay's dev team in Hyderabad, DE Shaw's dev team in Gurgaon, Motive/KeepTruckin dev teams in Lahore & Islamabad). If Management views Engineering as a cost center (which, it pains for me to say as an ex-cybersecurity engineer, at times it can be), that's where you tend to see the relationship between offshore and onshore teams collapse, because the relationship is based on the implicit arbitrage of labor.

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Fair points. Continuous operations create significant drag in day-to-day feature development work, but I can see the value for truly urgent things like Sev-1s, or having engineers that can jump on customer calls in different timezones.

Definitely agree on the training point. That was one of the things we did right. I and several of the other senior engineers rotated through the foreign office for the better part of a year to get the new teams spun up on our codebase. Both offices maintained a good relationship afterwards.

Thanks for the clarification.

For sure. As an early stage startups (pre-Series D) that target lower market or mid-market (B2C startups like Chime or B2B SaaS startups like many of the ones you see in YC), continuous operations aren't significantly important at their stage, but as their revenue grows, it becomes more and more critical.