I was a lead/senior developer of a team of ~10 (in a startup of 30). I was involved heavily in the direction of the company, as well as the day to day running of my team. I now work remotely with a 15 hr time difference. Nowadays I feel extremely left out of the direction of the company, the direction technically, and what my team is up to day to day. I try to close these gaps during calls with my team every day, but it's just not enough. This leads to intense feelings of anxiety and impostor syndrome.
As an example, I'm currently working on a proof of concept using Rust to replace some existing C++ that coordinates some Gstreamer pipelines. This sounds like the perfect task for remote: self contained task, redoing existing code, fairly small scope. But remote (or more specifically the time difference) makes it pretty difficult. I don't know Gstreamer that well, and I don't know the existing code that well. I'll often run into a problem that I KNOW someone on my team could answer in 2minutes, and unblock me. Instead I need to push through wasting valuable time trying to figure it out myself, or wait till they are online. Perhaps this is the time difference not the remote aspect at fault. If they were on the same timezone, it'd be a quick Slack message away
Now, I am reduced to writing code that slots in around my team. As for actual empirical metrics, I don't have many. We tend to track achievements as a team (OKR's etc), and my team has been hitting there goals mostly. I do feel we could achieve more though if I was onsite. A probably non valuable one might be Github commit count, which dropped from ~ 3500 for the 2018 year to ~ 300 for the last 6 mo. So at least on code alone, I am churning substantially less of it out.
I'm not poo-pooing remote btw. I think my story would be totally different in a 100% remote company, or a company with substantial remote presence. I think for me though, in this situation, I prefer on site.
Oh boy, my guess is that the 15hr time difference part is the biggest issue: it's rough to not have _any_ overlap in natural work hours.
Not to say that your issue might not be remote in general, but for me I definitely think that having much more than the 3 hour difference I currently have with my team would be tricky: just too much time where someone is waiting for someone else.
I can easily imagine other side of the world being tough. +/- 5 hours or so, you can reasonably time shift a bit so there's significant overlap in the course of the day. But you get into 12 hours and you're into one or the other ends of the call being well outside normal work hours. So it doesn't happen a lot on a regular and casual basis.
The work package that you are assigned to yourself is not necessary a problem with remote per se. It sounds like that the work package is not matching the skills/knowledge for assigned team. But you are correct, the ramping up of knowledge is much easier when the teams are close together where sharing of know-how is much lower.
