Like I said, I work in the industry. I've worked on several projects with teams on more than one continent.
The much-repeated "it'll slow down collaboration" is only a factor of how terrible your company's communication strategy was at the outset. If your company worked entirely verbally and contained little to no digital communication or memory, then you'll have a terrible time.
100% remote work makes intercontinental collaboration almost seamless. My current employer has teams on every continent, except Africa (so far), and we've been at it for over half a decade.
I worked at a video game company that outsourced to russia, and have worked with contractors my entire career--so i think i have some insight on the matter, too :-)
the video game company had a outsource good shop, with competent developers on the other side--the first big hurdle if I'm frank. they weren't cheap. sure, cheaper than local talent, but not gangbusters savings. If you don't want a mes in your codebase, paying for quality contractors is a must because you need to let them work independently.
even then, they were only ever given work that would be very discrete, so that they could work on it independently without getting blocked.
that is not collaborative, which is the point I'm trying to make. Is it constructive? sure. but is it collaborative? no. and it can't be--there was a 12h difference between the two zones. they were trying to go to bed while we were having coffee.
at my last gig (non-gaming), we also had people in: shanghai, sf, nyc, sheffield, and tel aviv. want to try and do collaboration like that? even as a digital-first company that has good hygiene around remote work? it doesn't work: just look at a timezone calendar. So then you're stuck partitioning work so that everyone can be constructive in their office hours, and don't need to worry about what is going on, on the other side of the globe. but again, that's not collaboration. that's six teams all doing their work independently and having routine touchpoints to try and synchronize the independent threads. synchronization takes time, effort, focus.
I'm not saying you can't get work done remotely, which is what I think you think I'm saying. I'm saying that if your work is partitioned to be collaborative, timezones more than anything are going to make a mess of your plans, and then add in cultural, langauge, etc barriers on top of that.
I cannot be more direct about this, it is not seamless, or even close to seamless, in general, to work across continents such as you describe.
Maybe you've cracked a nut here, and we'd all benefit from your wisdom, experience, and stories, but that is not the experience most folks have working across continents or cultures.
We did crack the nut: we stopped being ameri-centric, and we rejected the notion that productivity must be directly observed during the process to be measured. We rejected "core hours" and we rejected ephemeral vocal communication. If it's not on record it has no value to us.
We have people working at all hours of the day. We have teams split across continents. We have team meetings, but we schedule them a week or more in advance, and even then they're optional. We make prodigious use of Miro, Basecamp, and other collaboration tools. We don't consider any collaboration "finished" so much as "in progress" and often a "meeting" could take course over days, as team members from around the world chime in. There has never been, and will never be, an office.
I think this person is mostly just being self congratulatory. It's not seemless, they're a subcontractor, without being too directly disrespectful, their view is heavily skewed towards singing the praises of cheap outsourced labor.
The much-repeated "it'll slow down collaboration" is only a factor of how terrible your company's communication strategy was at the outset. If your company worked entirely verbally and contained little to no digital communication or memory, then you'll have a terrible time.
100% remote work makes intercontinental collaboration almost seamless. My current employer has teams on every continent, except Africa (so far), and we've been at it for over half a decade.