> the time zones are killer, and this can't be ignored

100% agree, especially when there is minimal overlap during normal office hours. I was managing a dev team in India from the US and it was a real challenge. The company ended up moving team to the US, relocating most of my team. Despite all the people being the same, management became much easier.

Since then I've done US and EU, and EU and IN, and those have all worked fine because we had sufficient overlap during business hours.