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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?

#171

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

Since I haven't seen this yet in the comments, a startup I worked at in a previous company set up Discord channels for small teams, and it by far replicated the closest to "folks are sitting next to each other in the same room" experience that I've seen before.

I see lots of advice here about documenting everything, discouraging 1-1 conversations, etc., and while I agree with that up to a point, this advice can also drastically slow you down if you require a level of formality for everything. The thing that was nice about having Discord channels is that if I needed to get a quick explanation about something, I could ask quickly without needing to schedule a meeting, etc., and everyone else in the channel can listen in (if desired). Discord also has good "deafen" features, so if you're heads down and don't want to be bothered it lets people know.

Again, I think this only works well with about ~8-10 people max per channel, but that's about the optimal max size for project teams anyway in my opinion. I highly suggest you try it if you haven't - when I first tried it I thought "How is this any different from Slack Hurdles?", but the small usability improvements in Discord made it feel to me like it approximated the in-person work experience much better than Slack (note we didn't use Discord as a complete replacement for Slack, just for small "working group" teams).

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

#172

Post by neilv »

aen1 wrote: post #158
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

Are you sure that's introversion, rather than shyness or insecurity? The answer might help with the solution.

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

#173

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

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…

I think this is something that can really be mitigated by more senior people modeling good behavior.

For example, as a principal engineer on a new project or working on something I wasn't familiar with, I'd go out of my way to ask things along the lines of "Hey, this might be a dumb question, but I'm new to X so could you explain how I do ..." I think this goes a long way to building up a culture of psychological safety on a team.

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

#174

Post by negus »

aen1 wrote: post #160
marliechiller wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I would like to work with you. Asking searchable things may be considered disrespectful to one's time

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

#175

Post by rglullis »

MisterKent wrote: post #142
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…

Agree with the above, except: Sharing solutions in slack works until stuff becomes impossible to find. Using confluence or some type of team documentation feature can help with that stuff. Better yet, keep it very low effort to add docs there, so people can copy paste important (long lived) messages there.

Yes, I think I mentioned this before: we had similar issues on our team and I was tasked with improving intra- and inter-team communication.

The solution we adopted was to create a Confluence space for each team, and any question on Slack would have to be in the form of "Where on Confluence can I find the information about ?"

This very quickly made all team leads responsible for documentation and for keeping things up-to-date. If no page about existed, then the lead would have to create the minimal page even if just to answer the question on Slack and respond with the Confluence link. Once you have the link, people would use the comment page to ask for clarifications/details, and we would "resolve" the comments as soon as the page was updated.

Maybe it's because I am big fan of wikis, but to me this worked quite well.

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

#176

Post by KameltoeLLM »

neilv wrote: post #172
aen1 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Are you sure that's introversion, rather than shyness or insecurity? The answer might help with the solution.

[flagged]

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

#177

Post by OfficeChad »

dmitrygr wrote: post #25
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 is transactional. I solve your problems, you pay me money. I have family and friends for "social interaction" and "meaning". I do not seek that from a job, nor do I want a job that claims to provide it. Any recruiter that tells me "our company is like a family" gets a reply that says "so i can cry on your shoulder in case of a bad breakup, and you'll help me move furniture?" and then gets blocked.

[dead]

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

#178

Post by patrickhogan1 »

diggan wrote: post #151
patrickhogan1 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thank you! I'll check out the Slack admin panel! I removed that item from my main message because I was concerned some people might misinterpret "tracking" as something invasive (e.g., reading messages). What you're describing is exactly what I'm looking for—just the stats—to support public disclosure and knowledge sharing.

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

#180

Post by KameltoeLLM »

KronisLV wrote: post #89
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.

> Discourage 1:1 and private communication unless really necessary, especially for engineering topics. Working at an established org right now, where the team is still remote first. I tried suggesting this, but got pushback and the team actually settled on the opposite. For example, they want any optional changes (e.g. suggestions) in pull requests not to be left as comments but discussed in private which 90% of the…

[flagged]
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