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Ask HN: How do you communicate in a remote startup?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you communicate in a remote startup?

#11

Post by toast0 »

travisb wrote: post #4

Video calls. If you aren't having at least one video call a day something is probably wrong. Configure it such that starting a video call takes no more than 4 clicks. Have a company-wide General/Coffee chat where people talk about arbitrary things. It's better if this chat has history which expires in 24 hours. Write lots of short documents -- especially for designs. Review them much like you would review code. This…

> If you aren't having at least one video call a day something is probably wrong.

Depends on how you work? A video call every day would be too much for me, but two a week seems alright. I'm also not a fan of daily meetings in person either, though.

Re: Ask HN: How do you communicate in a remote startup?

#13

Post by [deleted] »

alexchantavy wrote: post #7
travisb wrote: post #4

Video calls. If you aren't having at least one video call a day something is probably wrong. Configure it such that starting a video call takes no more than 4 clicks. Have a company-wide General/Coffee chat where people talk about arbitrary things. It's better if this chat has history which expires in 24 hours. Write lots of short documents -- especially for designs. Review them much like you would review code. This…

> It's better if this chat has history which expires in 24 hours. This sounds fun to have a b.s./watercooler chat channel. It'd be cool if Slack had that feature but I wonder if that's a non-starter for corporate reasons.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: How do you communicate in a remote startup?

#14

Post by swatcoder »

What becomes apparent very quickly outside the imposed rigidity of a physical office is that different individuals and different roles all have different optimal communication patterns. And people can get really fussy if they aren't getting the structure/tools/freedoms/whatever that they feel they need.

And so the answer to your question is ultimately much more idiosyncratic than you're hoping it to be. Whatever answers you find here, take them as inspiration for things to try out rather than specific things to do.

With that said, effective communication patterns tend to naturally snowball, so if you can start getting people feeling connected and collaborative, you'll find that they'll naturally keep that up and build on it.

But you are going to need to throw some spaghetti at the wall to see what your team needs in order to get that process started.

Re: Ask HN: How do you communicate in a remote startup?

#15

Post by bigfatkitten »

travisb wrote: post #4

Video calls. If you aren't having at least one video call a day something is probably wrong. Configure it such that starting a video call takes no more than 4 clicks. Have a company-wide General/Coffee chat where people talk about arbitrary things. It's better if this chat has history which expires in 24 hours. Write lots of short documents -- especially for designs. Review them much like you would review code. This…

> It's better if this chat has history which expires in 24 hours.

Your legal and HR departments will be much less enthusiastic about this idea if your org is big enough to have either.

Re: Ask HN: How do you communicate in a remote startup?

#16

Post by betamike »

screye wrote: post #12

If you're in similar time zones, try https://www.gather.town/ ? I've used it for remote conferences, and I like its 2D UI. Real sense of space there.

This is what my last, 6 person, startup used, and it was really helpful. It lowered the barrier to having a quick discussion, since you could see if someone was at their "desk" or busy in a meeting.

Also you can see if other teammates are having a discussion or co-working in a common area, which made for some ad-hoc co-working sessions.

Re: Ask HN: How do you communicate in a remote startup?

#17

Post by Atotalnoob »

screye wrote: post #12

If you're in similar time zones, try https://www.gather.town/ ? I've used it for remote conferences, and I like its 2D UI. Real sense of space there.

This would be insanely disruptive to me and I think most of my team.

There are much better ways to handle this like using gitlabs handbook.

To me this is the equivalent of having to be on camera all day. Am I idle if my avatar hasn’t moved or interacted with something in game?

Re: Ask HN: How do you communicate in a remote startup?

#18

Post by great_wubwub »

One thing people miss about remote work is that it's inherently transactional. Show up to a meeting, get or give what's needed, then go back in your hole. This is nice but for many people the lack of genuine social interaction is a killer.

A few jobs ago we set up Donut (donut.com) to set up a couple 15- or 30-minute 1:1s per week and tried to stick to the rule that we weren't supposed to talk about work, just chat about whatever. A replacement for break room chatter, not Yet Another Meeting. It didn't always work very well but when it did, it was great.

Some of the best conversations I had were with an autistic SRE who spent his first month telling everyone how autistic he was in case we needed to know. He did better virtually than he would have in person - lack of eye contact due to camera angles, maybe? So yeah, this has value even for you neuro-atypical, "I don't need chatter, just code" types.

Re: Ask HN: How do you communicate in a remote startup?

#19

Post by zb1plus »

great_wubwub wrote: post #18

One thing people miss about remote work is that it's inherently transactional. Show up to a meeting, get or give what's needed, then go back in your hole. This is nice but for many people the lack of genuine social interaction is a killer. A few jobs ago we set up Donut (donut.com) to set up a couple 15- or 30-minute 1:1s per week and tried to stick to the rule that we weren't supposed to talk about work, just chat a…

All work (in-office or remote) is inherently transactional. If I am in an office, I have to pretend to have genuine social interactions with people. Social bonds made between colleagues have will happen organically. No in-office mandatory fun.
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