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First of all, sorry you're experiencing this. This is not a unique situation unfortunately.
Early in my career I embraced this and just dealt with it, and as I grew more tenured I decided that was not going to be how it was.
Changes I made were advocating for moving the work I was involved with to a more TZ friendly place (eg South America); and/or stating ceremonies were going to be at hours that worked for me. I had to change product teams to get the first one (and have vowed to never go back to working with India based teams again - purely for this TZ nonsense), and with the SA team we worked out a good schedule that everyone is happy with.
To be honest, India is still cheaper by a small margin, but we're so much more effective as a product team working throught a normal workday and collaborating instead of burning both ends of the day.
My advice is to work towards getting out of this situation and/or creating a business case to bring the team closer to you. I would bet a large sum that everyone will benefit and the business will get higher ROI from the change.
As another point, if you're starting your day at 6:30, you are well and entitled to end it early. Don't feel like you need to hit that magical 5pm for an arbitrary reason.
Thank you for sharing your experience. I’m 10 years into my career and this is the first time I’ve managed such drastic time zone difference on a daily basis. We’ve all had the occasional super late release or early call here and there, right?
By my 60 day mark in this new company, I’m going to have to devise a solution or look elsewhere. My quality of life isn’t worth it at this point in my career when I know I’m good at what I do.
Mentor
I think everybody should just make it a point to ask two questions during interviews
1. Where do my customers sit ? .
2. Where is the Engg team located?
Also, think of ways you can reduce your involvement in stand ups. Here's what I did in my past roles. This will probably be controversial so I want to qualify this by saying that this is what worked for me. Some may find it useful, others may balk at it.
Run prep sessions ( also called grooming sessions ) prior to the sprint - explain the initiative, write up tickets , no ambiguity, have the team size and estimate each ticket. Have a groomed and prioritized backlog ready - all the time. These prep sessions can be run at hours convenient to you.
If your backlog is always ready, sized and prioritized, your team will essentially run on auto pilot and will require least involvement from you.
Don't need to attend daily stand ups. Have the Engg Lead or the Project Manager report status updates to you. That way, you are always focused on work that is at least 2-3 Sprints out and gives you breathing room to even think strategically. Get out of the daily operations mode. Also, the more involved you are in the day to day operations of the Engg team - it means either the requirements were not clearly stated upfront or you are probably doing a project managers job, both red flags. Have the QA be your proxy and have them do the acceptance testing as well. Of course, never lose sight of what is being delivered, how is it supposed to work, look and feel but delegate as much as you can.
Yes to this feedback. Thank you. I did ask those questions. I’m on an internal tool so my customers sit at HQ (EST 2 hours ahead) which isn’t part of why I’m on meetings at 6:30 am. The devs are split between US and India with the India part being news to me after I came onboard.
I’m going to take these suggestions and work with my scrum master. We have a lead engineer starting next week too who can start to manage the daily touch points.
If you're starting your day at 6:30am then you should be ending it by 3pm. No questions asked.
Exactly. It’s impacting my cognitive abilities throughout the day. That’s my biggest issue. People are working beyond 2:30/3:00 but I just refuse at this point to sacrifice on both ends of my day.
Are all those meetings necessary in the morning or can you modify the structure / format / direction of those meetings to make them more to the point and result oriented - also can you reduce the number of touch points? You aren’t getting out of the time zone thing but meetings you can manage
I’m going to have to push for either my absence in the meetings or fewer ceremonies overall. It’s an agile org so you can see how these add up quickly. I’m 10 years into PM work and this is pushing me to leave entirely or move to being an IC without team ceremonies.