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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?

#151

Post by diggan »

patrickhogan1 wrote: post #149
why-el wrote: post #123

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 vario…

Great list. Add a few.. 1. Meet in person every quarter. Fly people into the HQ if there is one. If not just rent meeting place. 2. Have a well written handbook like Gitlab that explains how your company works. 3. Onboarding program - remote onboarding sucks. Do onboarding in person (if you can) or assign an onboarding buddy if you can’t. 4. Slack Is Great But (SIGB) - teach people that they don’t need to read everyt…

> 1. Gitlab somehow statistically tracks public / DMs. Haven’t implemented at my startup but if anyone knows a simple way to do - please let me know.

If you use Slack, I think the admin panel already contains the number of messages in channels VS DMs. Long time I last saw it myself, but I think it was missing a breakdown on how many members of the Slack received the channel/"public" messages (as not everyone is part of every channel, 2 member channels vs 200 member channels for example), maybe it looks different now.

> 5. Slack Is Great But (SIGB) - teach people that they don’t need to read everything. Many people get overwhelmed

I think this happens when Slack is the "source of truth", because the ephemeral feeling it gives since it's a chat ultimately. If you instead use a wiki/whatever to actually collect things that are important, there is less stress about possibly missing out on important things. Make summaries by week/month and it'll be even easier for people to catch up easily, which means even less stress :)

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

#152

Post by Cthulhu_ »

lutorm wrote: post #140
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.

My experience (being fully remote for over a decade) is that it's extremely distracting to have all discussions public. It creates a lot of noise and it's very hard for people to not get drawn into conversations that doesn't directly affect them. It's definitely good to have finished conclusions available for everyone, but the "sausage making" is more distracting than useful. Of course it depends on the size of the t…

It depends on your self-discipline as well, as in, leave Slack or whatever alone for X hours a day, leave channels that aren't important, and if the volume is higher than you can manage in a reasonable time, Slack has AI powered summarization tools nowadays which are pretty decent. Ultimately though, your attention span and information management is your own responsibility, nobody else will filter it for you.

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

#153

Post by bongodongobob »

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…

I was going to say the same thing. Had this setup at my last job and the CEO would chime in with irrelevant, outdated, not feasible, or already considered ideas. We'd then have to spend time communicating and explaining the shit we had already been talking about for the last month or whatever. It was incredibly frustrating because it gave a public impression that our team was either incompetent or combative. It was gross.

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

#154

Post by Cthulhu_ »

andrei_says_ wrote: post #100
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.

Basecamp is incredible for this. Encourages grouping people by projects, with all communication on a project being public. All activity on a project listed in one place. Catching up with work takes minimal effort, including when someone goes on vacation or leaves the team. All it takes is skimming through the project. Slack is built around chat with high has its limitations when applied to the context of a longer ter…

While Slack - if you pay for it - permanently stores all communications and makes it archivable, it's also ephemeral and anything said more than a day ago is effectively gone. They do have an AI summary tool to catch up though, if you pay for it, which is alright.

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

#155

Post by Cthulhu_ »

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.

And that's fine. You're not expected to stay online and respond at all times, that's the antithesis of asynchronous communication. Just reserve a block of time per day to catch up - like you would with emails - and go through things then. Only leave notifications on if they're addressed to you specifically.

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

#156

Post by vundercind »

mvdtnz wrote: post #147
vundercind wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot relate to the notion that interactions over the Internet must be sterile and non-social. It's like reading someone assert that 2+2=5. My brain breaks trying to process it and starts contorting to figure out how it might somehow be true from some off-kilter perspective when it straightforwardly isn't.

I'm not sure where you read that but it certainly wasn't in the comment you responded to.

> 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.

"Inherently"

It's simply the premise on which the entire post is based.

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

#157

Post by raverbashing »

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…

Private team channels sound like a good compromise

Also someone with good standing in the company to politely point to the CTO that it's not his job to give his 2c at every conversation in slack (typical behaviour of people coming from the technical side)

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

#158

Post by aen1 »

why-el wrote: post #123

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 vario…

Totally disagree. For introverts, "everything public in slack" means that I would rather not say something than have 50 people see my thoughts/rants/silly questions in public

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

#159

Post by aen1 »

patrickhogan1 wrote: post #149
why-el wrote: post #123

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 vario…

Great list. Add a few.. 1. Meet in person every quarter. Fly people into the HQ if there is one. If not just rent meeting place. 2. Have a well written handbook like Gitlab that explains how your company works. 3. Onboarding program - remote onboarding sucks. Do onboarding in person (if you can) or assign an onboarding buddy if you can’t. 4. Slack Is Great But (SIGB) - teach people that they don’t need to read everyt…

Meeting in person >1 hour away is difficult for people in many life circumstances. And if there are constant meetings, it either strains families or makes the person who can't make it feel left out

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

#160

Post by aen1 »

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…

1000% agree. I'd rather spin my wheels for an hour on Google than ask a silly question in public
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