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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?

#121

Post by reureu »

Jimmc414 wrote: post #116
paxys wrote: post #30

Make conversations public by default. If you use Slack, make team channels, project channels, announcement channels etc. all public. Discourage 1:1 and private communication unless really necessary, especially for engineering topics. This single change will have an immense impact on overall company culture.

This contributes to stress and notification fatigue, especially when bombarded with alerts from every channel. Some will turn off notifications entirely or disengage to maintain focus on their workload.

I'm struggling with this at my current job: nobody communicates about anything in asynchronous channels, doesn't want any form of daily synchronous meeting (e.g., standups), and won't agree to ad hoc meetings outside of our 1 hour once per week meeting. So lots of decisions and work get done in vacuums, which cause errors in various systems that would have been easily caught and addressed if someone just said "hey, I'm changing this column name from X to Y". So, just to say that the counterfactual here isn't "no stress because no notifications"-- it can be more stress from failed coordination.

There are in betweens here, with the major one being threads in slack. Everyone gets notified about a single message at the start of the thread, but does not get notified for any subsequent discussion. Any interested party can read more and participate as needed. For someone like me (a leader on paper but not really in practice), I'd read all the message and look for dependency or similar problems, but for others they may not need to.

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

#122

Post by vundercind »

bdangubic wrote: post #73
paxys wrote: post #30

Make conversations public by default. If you use Slack, make team channels, project channels, announcement channels etc. all public. Discourage 1:1 and private communication unless really necessary, especially for engineering topics. This single change will have an immense impact on overall company culture.

I’d want this as much as I used to enjoy open floor plan at the office… Discouraging 1:1 and private communication in my experience would actually have 100% opposite effect of what you are describing. This is equivalent to discouraging pair-programming which while may not be everyone’s cup of tea many find extremely productive

The point is search needs to work, including for people not involved the conversations. Private and 1:1 chats break that.

Use mute and let people @ you to pull you in when you're really needed. You don't have to leave notifications wide-open on every channel.

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

#123

Post by why-el »

I learned the following:

- Everything public in Slack. Create a fun-sounding moto that discourages DMs. Even if a DM happens, and the back and forth resulted in a consensus, share that consensus in a public channel (which makes it searchable).

- Record your team meetings, preferably with software that can AI-summarize. Folks on vacation / leave can get the rundown easily.

- Encourage the sharing of solutions to various problems (technical or otherwise) in Slack. If a developer is stuck, and someone helped them in a huddle or a pairing app, share the solution afterwards (again, makes it searchable). Discourage the over-sharing of screenshots (of your application and other things). Again, not searchable. If one must be shared, describe it. For instance, many devs share a picture of a stack-trace. Not super helpful for others. Grab the text and dump it to Slack.

- Have a good pairing software setup, unblocks for when Slack back and forth is too tedious. I like Tuple (tuple.app).

- Connect your issue tracker to Slack, if you use one, makes creating issues easy. Linear does this well.

- If feasible, have your team meet in person, cadence up to you, but at least once. Meeting the people in real life humanizes them more. I know it sounds silly to say, but it's very true in my experience. Your people will seem even lovelier.

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

#124

Post by marliechiller »

paxys wrote: post #30

Make conversations public by default. If you use Slack, make team channels, project channels, announcement channels etc. all public. Discourage 1:1 and private communication unless really necessary, especially for engineering topics. This single change will have an immense impact on overall company culture.

I found this can have negative consequences for more timid employees, junior hires or new joiners. People dont like sounding stupid in public, especially not in front of people they dont know. No matter how much of a safe culture you instil, human nature tends to prevail here and you get the loudest personalities being the the users of those public channels whilst others either dont ask those important questions or seek back channels anyway

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

#125

Post by vundercind »

paxys wrote: post #30

Make conversations public by default. If you use Slack, make team channels, project channels, announcement channels etc. all public. Discourage 1:1 and private communication unless really necessary, especially for engineering topics. This single change will have an immense impact on overall company culture.

Teams badly fucks this up by not providing normal-ass chats that aren't private ephemeral-ish groups. Their "teams" only have these weird announcement-oriented chats with terrible UX and visibility for ordinary chat activity, so you end up having to do everything in meeting-tied chats (created by the meeting, not the other way around) or ad-hoc group chats.

You can fake it with lots of manual "pinning" but that relies on everyone agreeing which chats are primary and should be pinned so they don't start splitting messages over other chat rooms, then you still end up with things like chat for one basic topic being split across multiple meeting-chats that all have the same membership or (worse) just slightly different membership.

It's as if they designed the tool to make effective remote work hard—but this also (like most things that make remote work worse) makes using it in an in-office context worse. It's just flat-out bad.

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

#126

Post by jerf »

em-bee wrote: post #87
singleshot_ wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's better if this chat has history which expires in 24 hours. Probably wise to run that by counsel.

it is insane that we can have face to face and even video meetings that are not logged, but we can't have text based chats like that? what if we meet on IRC? should that be illegal without a bot to log the conversation?

Sadly, I'm sure that the only reason that face to face meetings are not logged is technical capability more than anything else. The law just hasn't metaphorically noticed yet that those can all be recorded to. It's still on the pricy side at the moment. (Don't forget not every business is a tech business that still reasonably expects 20%+ profit margins.)

I often bang on the fact that laws made in the 20th century are often written against an implicit background of what is physically possible that people underestimate, like, the number of laws that people nominally break every day but are impossible to enforce because we don't all have an assigned police presence assigned to us. We should not casually assume that once we acquire the capability to enforce these things that we should. Another example of this is that while I understand the drive to document what a company is doing, we need a certain amount of ability to speak to each other off the record, even in a corporate environment. Yes, it is used to do bad things, but we are humans, we need that slack, and it is used to do good things too.

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

#127

Post by bsuvc »

vundercind wrote: post #125
paxys wrote: post #30

Make conversations public by default. If you use Slack, make team channels, project channels, announcement channels etc. all public. Discourage 1:1 and private communication unless really necessary, especially for engineering topics. This single change will have an immense impact on overall company culture.

Teams badly fucks this up by not providing normal-ass chats that aren't private ephemeral-ish groups. Their "teams" only have these weird announcement-oriented chats with terrible UX and visibility for ordinary chat activity, so you end up having to do everything in meeting-tied chats (created by the meeting, not the other way around) or ad-hoc group chats. You can fake it with lots of manual "pinning" but that relie…

100% agree.

The people making the decision to switch to Teams don't "get" slack.

They think the features are the same, so what's the problem?

Ironically, Microsoft Teams is terrible for teams.

It's a Frankenstein cross between instant messanger and SharePoint.

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

#128

Post by dgfitz »

lvspiff wrote: post #117
paxys wrote: post #30

Make conversations public by default. If you use Slack, make team channels, project channels, announcement channels etc. all public. Discourage 1:1 and private communication unless really necessary, especially for engineering topics. This single change will have an immense impact on overall company culture.

I'm at a company now where we are trying to do this but the CIO/CEO keep weighing in on EVERY conversation where they disagree with the approaach. The whole reason we are having the open conversation is for ideation and good communication but when a high level person comes along and says "well thats not the way I would do it" everyone decides to go back to 1:1s, direct messaging, and calls so as not to document anyth…

Sounds like they need to spend their time differently. Yuk.

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

#129

Post by vel0city »

marliechiller wrote: post #124
paxys wrote: post #30

Make conversations public by default. If you use Slack, make team channels, project channels, announcement channels etc. all public. Discourage 1:1 and private communication unless really necessary, especially for engineering topics. This single change will have an immense impact on overall company culture.

I found this can have negative consequences for more timid employees, junior hires or new joiners. People dont like sounding stupid in public, especially not in front of people they dont know. No matter how much of a safe culture you instil, human nature tends to prevail here and you get the loudest personalities being the the users of those public channels whilst others either dont ask those important questions or s…

Yeah, I'd agree you want a healthy balance of 1 on 1 and group conversation. A quick aside is one thing, and if it is a question that should lead to documentation then documentation should be written for it instead of just assuming someone is going to search through a year+ of slack messages in some public channels.

Even in person, not every conversation is good to be had in front of the large group for a variety of reasons.

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