Distributed time zones

Working with a distributed team, such as Wikimedia’s tech team, has its advantages and disadvantages. One irksome, yet useful aspect of that is the different time zones that people live in.

In the early days, our time zone distribution looked roughly like this:

Classic Wikipedia admin timezones

With Tim in Australia, Mark and others in Europe, and me in California, our timezones were nearly evenly spaced. If we all worked the same hours (local 9-to-5s for June are marked above), we’d almost never be online at the same time. Of course we all worked irregular hours, so there tended to be some overlap.

For most of 2007 though we’ve had something more like this:

Compressed timezones

Tim moved to England, I moved to Florida, and suddenly our time zones are much more compressed, with a much larger overlap.

On the one hand this is nice — we have more “face time” for real-time interaction in the chat channels.

On the other hand this leaves a big portion in the day when none of the core tech team is “on duty”, which reduces our ability to respond quickly to crises. Luckily we’ve had a lot fewer problems this year since we’ve gotten a lot of old problems fixed up and our hardware capacity has generally stayed at or ahead of the growth curve.

For 2008 it looks like we’ll be going back to a more spread out team:

New timezones

Tim’s moving back to Australia, and I’ll be heading back to California when the Wikimedia Foundation sets up its new offices in the San Francisco bay area. We’ll also have Rob still active with the servers in Tampa, filling in some holes in coverage in the middle.

There’s some concern that this’ll reduce our ability to work directly with each other by IRC, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Relying too much on chat introduces problems of its own:

  • Those who aren’t available online constantly get marginalized…

    When important decisions are made in chat, you don’t get to participate if you dare to sleep, have a day job, go to class, have a life… :)

  • Records are poorer compared with a mailing list or wiki — not only did you miss the boat, you don’t get to see what the boat looked like. You may not even know there was a boat…

    We try to combat this by keeping a detailed server admin log and announcing details of big outages or updates on the lists.

Putting more emphasis on mailing list and wiki communication could make it easier to embrace new developers who can’t all be online at the same time… and paying more attention to our own wikis might help with dogfooding. ;)

Updated: Corrected Melbourne to Sydney in 2008 time zone map.

4 thoughts on “Distributed time zones”

  1. So you’re going back to California? How has Florida treated you thus far?

    Well at least I can still make all the global warming jokes if you’re in San Francisco ;)

    And didn’t even know that Tim was in England, though the hours he was around did start to look unusual.

  2. Trivial nit-pick: I could be wrong, but the 3rd graph instead of Melbourne should maybe say Sydney (or more exactly, “Central Coast”, which is >= 2 hours drive north of Sydney, but most folks won’t know where the Central Coast is, so Sydney is probably close enough).

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