The overlap tax killed "work from anywhere"

By 2022, hiring "borderless" tech talent had doubled over the prior three years, with India the single most common country US and European companies recruited from, according to Gartner's survey of 288 C-level executives and their direct reports. Companies competed under what Gartner called 'the same flag,' where technology mattered more than where a candidate happened to live. A company could hire an engineer in Bangalore, a designer in Lisbon, a support rep in Manila, and coordinate the difference in hours as a cost of doing business rather than a disqualifier.

That's changing. Software engineer placements in Latin America grew 250% year over year, per Near's 2026 State of LatAm Hiring Report, which tracked more than 2,000 placements across 411 roles. Colombia led that growth, jumping from third place to first and now accounts for 23% of all US placements in the region, according to Near's own analysis, even as India, once the top country for cross-border hiring, has been losing ground itself. Colombia runs on Eastern or Central US time year-round. A software engineer in Bogotá can join a 9am standup the same way an employee two states over would. The same meeting falls at almost 7:30pm for an engineer in India.

Global hiring strategy has shifted from ‘work from anywhere’ to ‘work from this time zone’. That shift is reshaping which countries get new roles, which teams get restructured, and which workers find their market quietly deprioritized.

The LATAM concentration

Hire with Near coded more than 2,000 discovery calls with companies considering Latin American hiring, sorted by the reason each one gave for exploring the move. That coding shows a 30% shift specifically away from offshore hiring in India or the Philippines, according to the firm's own published analysis. Hayden Cohen, the firm's CEO, says that reason is usually explicit. "They're telling us directly that the offshore setup isn't working, usually on timezone," he says.

One company had a senior QA engineer in Sri Lanka who was excellent, Cohen says, but the team kept releasing new code without her review because the overlap window was too short to include her. Another moved off a Philippines team for a different reason entirely: its US customers were Spanish-speaking, and the language fit wasn't there. "The most common version is simply, 'We'd rather they work the same hours as our US team instead of off-hours,'" he says.

Nearshore demand skewed almost entirely toward tech and startups in 2023, says Bryan DiGiorgio, founder of 1840 & Company, which places talent for client companies across more than 150 countries. "Today we're seeing interest from just about every sector: manufacturing, logistics, construction, healthcare support, financial services, and professional services." The biggest misconception, DiGiorgio says, is that LATAM is only about saving money. "The reality is that the strongest LATAM professionals have options and compete globally."

84% of Near's placements last year were mid or senior, according to the firm's 2026 State of LatAm Hiring Report. Within engineering, that figure climbs to 98%, and roughly a third of all Near's placements last year were senior enough to include VP-level and other executive roles. "AI is absorbing a lot of the junior work, so [senior hiring is] where the demand is heading," Cohen says. Growing companies increasingly can't afford senior engineers in the US, he says, so they're hiring them in Latin America instead, in the same time zone, as direct employees rather than through an outsourcing agency, at a cost they can actually sustain.

The overlap tax

Client conversations with Miki Furman used to follow the same script. "Two to three years ago, the opening question was 'how cheap can you go.' Today it's 'how many hours of real overlap do we get with our core team,'" says Furman, co-founder of Call Force Global, a nearshore BPO across the Caribbean and Latin America. Buyers will now pay more for a team that shares their working hours, he says, because they've learned what async handoffs actually cost. "A ticket that bounces across a 12-hour gap takes three days, not three hours." Cost still matters, he says, but it's moved from the opening filter to the tiebreaker.

Yahya Khan built Alliance Medical Revenue Group, a 20-person medical billing company, staffing part of his team in South Asia to serve US-based medical practices. "The South Asia presence made sense on paper. Skilled talent, lower cost, strong work ethic," Khan says. What it didn't account for was "the operational friction that came with an 8- to 10-hour time difference from our US-based clients and core team." "Work didn't stop," Khan says. "It just slowed down in ways that were hard to see on a spreadsheet but impossible to ignore in practice. A billing question that needed a quick answer sat for six hours. A denial that could have been caught and resubmitted the same day [became] a follow-up problem. The productivity loss wasn't dramatic. It was the accumulation of a thousand small delays that nobody could point to individually, but everyone could feel collectively."

Khan moved his team to Latin America. "Problems that used to age overnight started getting caught and closed within hours," he says. The bigger surprise was personal. "I stopped spending the first hour of my day reconstructing context for people who had worked while I slept," Khan says. "That hour compounded quietly over weeks into real capacity I didn't realize I'd been losing."

Ravi Parikh runs RoverPass, a booking platform for campgrounds and RV parks that also staffs customer service roles for the small operators who use it. Those workers are placed across Ecuador, Colombia, Mexico, Argentina, Chile, and Bolivia. "A SaaS support team of 50 has five people on shift at a time; the one in a bad time zone can be absorbed by the other four," Parikh says. "A 50-site RV park has one, maybe two people on shift. If your one customer service rep is in the wrong time zone, you don't have a customer service operation." "A camper calling to book Memorial Day weekend is on the phone in their car," he says. "If no one picks up in 30 seconds, they're calling the next park on the list."

The view from Asia-Pacific

As US companies pull back from hiring in Asia-Pacific, the cuts aren't spread evenly, says Himanshu Agarwal, co-founder of Zenius, a remote staffing company based in India that places engineers and support staff with US clients. "The impact is concentrated in roles that require high-frequency collaboration," he says, "software engineering, design, customer success, and other teams that need 4 to 8 hours of daily overlap with their US-based colleagues." India has felt that pullback hardest in engineering, since the country has long supplied a large share of the remote engineering talent US startups hire. The Philippines is seeing a similar pattern in customer-facing roles. "They've started treating time-zone alignment as a productivity requirement rather than a preference," Agarwal says.

"Many [Asia-Pacific] professionals are now also targeting employers outside the US market," Agarwal says. "Europe, the Middle East, Singapore and Australia are some of the popular locations they prefer." Others are moving into fields scarce enough to be exempt from the pullback entirely: "engineers are specializing in AI infrastructure, platform engineering and other areas where expertise is harder to source globally," he says, the same reasoning that already protects cybersecurity and data infrastructure roles, where "the cost of time-zone friction is lower than that of finding the right candidate in a specific location." Customer-facing workers, meanwhile, are adjusting their own hours "to purposely create an overlap with US teams."

The same cost-and-overlap calculation pulling US companies toward Latin America is playing out on the other side of the Pacific too. "Australian companies are definitely looking to Vietnam more and more for timezone overlap," says Keith Vaughan, who runs Cipher Projects, an AI engineering firm with teams split between Australia and Vietnam. Vietnam's own universities are producing a fast-growing pool of STEM graduates. "It's also about value degradation in places like India, where costs are going up yet quality remains the same," he says. Clients rarely frame it as a single decision. "They weigh timezone in the equations and say if we move, we get this timezone benefit, plus different benefits like openness, flexibility and cost in a multi-factor equation," he says.

Companies that once scattered individual developers across several countries are asking Vaughan to bring them together into one Vietnam-based team instead, "better aligned with only 3-4 hours divergence." Managing a handful of disconnected hires spread across time zones has simply become unworkable, Vaughan says, regardless of how well any individual performs; the arrangement itself is what stopped working.

Design, not damage control

Hollie Wegman spent four years as COO of Attio, an AI CRM company with hubs in London and San Francisco, an eight-hour time difference from the start. "Our framework was relatively straightforward," Wegman says. "First, where are our customers? Second, where can we find exceptional talent? Third, can those teams work together effectively? Customer proximity and talent density were the primary drivers. Time zone overlap was a constraint rather than the objective itself."

Not every company approaches the decision that deliberately, and Wegman argues that's usually where the misdiagnosis starts. "Imagine a team in London makes a decision during an in-person conversation and the San Francisco team later feels excluded or surprised by the outcome," she says. "It's easy to conclude that the issue was the eight-hour time difference." In reality, she says, "nobody documented the decision, shared the context, or communicated what happened." Wegman’s test: If everyone magically moved into the same time zone tomorrow, would the problem disappear? The answer is often no. "Many companies don't actually have a time-zone problem," she says. "They have a habit-formation problem. They haven't built the rituals that turn local conversations into company-wide knowledge."

Companies get geography wrong in two different ways. Wegman sees hiring pools that are too narrow, restricted to a handful of convenient time zones, missing talent elsewhere entirely. "The best designer for a problem might be in Lisbon. The best engineer might be in Berlin. The best marketer might be in New York," she says. "If you restrict hiring to a narrow geographic area solely for time-zone convenience, you're reducing the pool from which you can build that team." Furman sees the opposite mistake: treating a whole region as one market when it isn't. "Picking the wrong region for your customer base is the most common and costly mistake," he says. "Latin America, Colombia, Mexico, is deep in bilingual English and Spanish talent built for US-hours customer and sales roles. The Caribbean, Jamaica, Trinidad, is deep in native-English voice, which matters for complex or regulated phone work."

Even the right geography doesn't guarantee anything on its own. "The biggest mistake I see is hiring isolated individuals before building a hub," Wegman says. A single hire dropped into a time zone with no local teammates is "effectively a ship at sea." Success with a nearshore hire has much more to do with how someone is onboarded than where they're located, says Gabriela Paez, a business consultant at Solvo Global. When onboarding gets rushed or skipped, she says, "employees are often left trying to figure things out on their own," which leads to miscommunication and a slower ramp regardless of time zone.

Parikh has built that same principle into an actual process. Roughly one in four to one in five first-time placements at RoverPass fail within 90 days, he says, and almost never because of the hire's skills. An operator hires a good candidate, skips written processes, expects the new hire to figure out how things work, and by weeks six to eight the mistakes have piled up enough that the operator lets them go, concluding remote doesn't work. "The hire isn't failing," Parikh says. "The management is failing." Operators who succeed do the opposite from day one: written SOPs before the hire starts, daily check-ins for the first month, one named US team member as an escalation point, and actual numbers reviewed weekly instead of a vague check-in.

For Wegman, remote work is no longer the question. The one that matters is whether companies can find the right balance between overlap and coverage. "Too little overlap hurts collaboration," she says. "Too much overlap means giving up many of the advantages distributed teams create in the first place."