Perhaps a controversial perspective, but if you aren't working in the same timezone, and can't synchronously communicate with your colleagues, can you provide as much value with respect to your California-based peers?
Sure, you can watch Zoom recordings, but when folks have to connect, it'll be a 24-hour turn around to get questions answered, and those lags could materially impact business outcomes.
The flip side is if problems exceed their original time zone, then employees outside the time zone can continue to work the problem and a business might get a solution sooner than they would have
In my current situation I have the added benefit of being in a close time zone to our team which was in Belarus (who now are in Ukraine and Netherlands). I manage an 8-person devops team and act as liason to our backend and frontend dev teams, as wrll as manage the customer relationship.
Before this job I was an individual contributor getting 3-5 hours of overlap at a company distributed all over the USA.
This afforded me more than enough overlap, extra on-call coverage hours and a solid 4 hours of uninterrupted project time. It is actually a huhe benefit that I get that much uninterrupted project time.
Again, if a company sees value in my skillset and multiple decades of experience then they will have to pay me the salary I want. If not, another one will.
It has been at least a decade sincr I have spent more than 2 weeks per year in-office or worked in a team that wasn’t distributed over 4-10 time zones.
Why wouldn't they be able to work at the same time? People adjust their schedules for work when necessary. I work the standard 9-5 nowadays, but several years ago I worked at a warehouse from 6pm - 4am. I slept from 5am to 1pm as a result. Sure, there are outside pressures, like family obligations, but the job usually trumps all schedule conflicts in my experience
Sure, you can watch Zoom recordings, but when folks have to connect, it'll be a 24-hour turn around to get questions answered, and those lags could materially impact business outcomes.