Managers recently began alternating weekly meetings between 8am Wednesdays and 9pm Thursdays, so neither Americans nor Indians get the late shift every time.
"People are more receptive when they realize that this relatively challenging burden of working between time zones is a shared burden," Hazlehurst said.
It's unclear whether Silicon Valley's new work schedule will become the national norm as jobs migrate abroad -- or whether foreigners will continue to staff the most brutal shifts. Roughly 830,000 US service-sector jobs -- ranging from telemarketers and accountants to software engineers and chief technology officers -- will move abroad by the end of this year, and 3.4 million more jobs will leave over the next decade, forecasts Forrester Research Inc.
Bombay-based consulting powerhouse Tata Consultancy Services employs 42,000 employees worldwide, including 14,000 people in India who handle US projects. Their shifts are 7am to 3pm, or 2pm to 10pm local time, not including frequent early or late meetings with overseas clients, said Arup Gupta, president of Tata Consultancy Services America.
"We can be the ones who put in the overlap time," Gupta said. "These types of schedules are baked into India's DNA. We have to earn our money somehow."
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