By the time most of Dhaka’s offices are emptying out for the evening, my day is just getting its second wind. I log on properly around 6pm, when the first Slack messages start arriving from colleagues in Boston who are only now starting their morning coffee. My actual crunch hours run from about 8pm to well past midnight, the exact window when our product and engineering leads – spread across US time zones 10 to 11 hours behind Dhaka – are awake, in meetings, and expecting answers.
I have, at various points, joined a client call at 1am. My family still isn’t entirely sure what I do for a living, only that it apparently can’t be done during the day.
This is not an unusual arrangement anymore. Bangladesh’s IT and outsourcing sector – companies like Brain Station 23, Vivasoft, Enosis Solutions and a growing list of others – now exports close to $900 million worth of services in a single half-year, much of it built by engineers whose actual working hours are dictated by clients in North America, Europe or the Gulf rather than Bangladesh Standard Time.
I don’t sit in a traditional office for any of it. Most days I work from home, lying haphazardly across my bed. No branch manager walks across my workspace at 9am checking who’s in and who’s not (at least, not in the traditional sense) because by 9am, most of us haven’t started yet.
While I’m sure none of this has replaced Bangladesh’s traditional office culture, there is no doubt that a parallel work culture, like mine, has been slowly building up alongside it. Bank branches, government offices and most domestic corporations still run on the same physical-presence, punch-in expectations they always have, and for the majority of the country’s workforce, that hasn’t changed.
What has changed is the birth of an entirely separate professional class: Freelancers, remote engineers, and outsourced teams who never clock into a Dhaka building’s 9-to-5 at all, and while it is true some of them earn three to five times the typical salary at the same level, their deliverables and standards are set somewhere else entirely.
So, is the 9 to 5 dead? Not quite, but it is increasingly becoming a thing of the past, as foreign schedules devour local time zones and constant availability through the internet means that, for some of us, the working hours never really end. They merely carry on forward to the next day.
