The promise of follow-the-sun work sounds almost magical: hand off a task when the workday ends, wake up to finished features, and keep customers happy around the clock. Many teams add partners, shift coverage, or experiment with global staffing, and nearshore software development often sits in the middle as a way to extend hours without asking people to work through the night.
However, reality is less glamorous. The classic follow-the-sun model grew out of support and telecom work, where tickets move between locations as local business hours end and begin again. For complex software delivery, the same pattern can help or hurt, depending on how work is sliced, how handoffs happen, and how closely people’s schedules line up.
When Follow-the-Sun Actually Helps
Follow-the-sun work is at its best when tasks are predictable, communication is disciplined, and customers genuinely need help at all hours.
Faster feedback on live incidents
One clear benefit appears when products have users in many regions and problems cannot wait. A crash in a payment flow, a broken login, or a data pipeline failure in the middle of someone’s workday still needs attention right away, not the next morning. Splitting ownership between teams that share tools and practices, but sit in different time zones, lets incidents land on someone working normal hours instead of on a tired engineer staring at a pager at night. Research on 24/7 customer service highlights how fast access to human help can be a competitive edge for support-heavy products.
Typical support situations where follow-the-sun works well for customers and teams include:
- High-volume, short requests. Tickets about password resets, billing questions, or basic configuration follow clear scripts, so a new team can continue the work with little confusion and close many items in a single shift.
- Clear ticket queues and rules. When there is a single-shared view of open issues, with priority levels and response targets spelled out, a team coming online can quickly see where to start instead of re-reading long chat threads.
- Stable products with known failure modes. If problems tend to repeat, logs are clear, and runbooks exist, work in progress moves cleanly between regions, and a later team can finish what the previous one started without guessing.
Shorter lead times for simple, repeatable tasks
Follow-the-sun can also shorten calendar time for tasks that are easy to break into small steps. This is where a nearshore software development company can add real value, because a team in a nearby time zone can pick up tasks late in the day and then talk through anything unclear during overlapping hours. N-iX and similar partners often advise clients to reserve this model for work that clearly fits that pattern, rather than pushing every project into a 24/7 shape.
When Follow-the-Sun Hurts Delivery
The same structure that looks great in a slide deck can quietly damage delivery when work is fuzzy, communication is weak, or time zones are badly misaligned.
Handoffs that break context
Every handoff loses some context, even with tidy boards and careful summaries. A developer who has been deep in a codebase all day holds a mental picture of edge cases, risks, and experiments that did not work. When that work passes to another team that has never seen the full story, they often repeat tests, re-read logs, or undo changes just to feel safe, which means the calendar moves but real progress does not. Research on time zone differences in remote work finds that collaboration drops as time gaps grow, especially when there is little overlapping time for live conversation and quick decisions.
- Frequent reopening of tickets. A bug marked as fixed in one region keeps coming back after another region deploys a slightly different patch or rolls back changes that were not fully understood during the handoff, which creates distrust in status updates.
- Long comment threads instead of quick calls. People trade messages for days to clarify a point that could have been covered in ten minutes if the teams had overlapping hours and a shared way of describing the work and its risks.
- Heavy reliance on one “bridge” person. A single architect, tech lead, or project manager attends most meetings and handoffs just to translate between locations, which becomes a bottleneck, a source of delay, and a real burnout risk.
Human cost behind the 24/7 promise
There is also a human side to the follow-the-sun myth. When leadership expects something to move at every hour, people stretch their days to close gaps, join calls outside their normal schedule, or watch chat on their phones late at night.
Still, there are ways to keep the human cost under control while still offering extended coverage where it truly matters:
- Clear rules about out-of-hours work. Teams agree on which incident levels really require night or weekend attention and track how often these rules are broken, so patterns are visible instead of buried in personal sacrifice.
- Shared “quiet hours” across regions. People in different time zones agree on specific windows when no meetings happen and chat notifications can be muted, which protects focus and reduces the sense that work never stops.
- Regular checks of schedule health. Managers look at actual login times, meeting patterns, and self-reported stress, then adjust staffing or coverage rules if one location keeps stretching its day to cover gaps elsewhere.
A Better Way to Use 24/7 Work
A more honest approach to follow-the-sun treats 24/7 coverage as one tool among many, not as the default model for every new product or vendor relationship. The most effective teams decide where fast global handoffs truly help, where nearshore development services with overlapping time zones is enough, and where a single core group working in one or two nearby regions will do the best work.
Careful use of extended coverage starts by mapping actual demand, not aspirations, and then choosing where work passes between locations and where it stays with a single owner. With that mindset, the follow-the-sun idea stops being a myth about instant speed and turns into a set of specific choices about support hours, risk tolerance, and how much context teams are willing to trade for a shorter calendar timeline.
