The world has already blurred the lines between countries. Technology made that inevitable. What hasn’t kept up is the way the tech industry still talks about talent. For decades, we’ve relied on labels like onshore, offshore, and nearshore.

The product is still forming, the roadmap keeps shifting, and decisions need to be made before all the answers are visible. This is usually when founders are told to “bring in a vendor.”

In global teams, trust isn’t built in meetings. It’s built in the in-betweens.But here’s the challenge we’re seeing across distributed workforces: when your team spans continents, someone is always waking up while someone else is signing off. The world runs on different clocks and so do your teams.

Work doesn’t look like it used to and that’s not a bad thing. Across teams, industries, and projects, we’re noticing something interesting: the real shifts in how we work aren’t loud. They’re subtle. They show up in how people set boundaries, ask for help, question workloads, and rethink what “productivity” should actually feel like. And leading many of these shifts is a generation that refuses to play by outdated rules: Gen Z. Here’s what we’ve observed across teams and client environments and why these changes matter.