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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?

#231

Post by weitendorf »

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…

I think that you can have genuine social interactions remotely, but that it takes a certain kind of person. Most people, even most younger ones IMO, just aren’t accustomed to interacting with people online via chat. But people who are eg prolific Reddit/twitter/etc users, or heavy users of discord/IRC/chat-heavy MMOs do really well IME (and yeah, a lot of these people are neurodivergent). You also probably either need to be really passionate about your work or have some kind of common interest to chat about to build a genuine connection, and not to be so shy that you self-censor yourself (/have a culture that doesn’t force people to self-censor).

Video calls are nice but I personally think they’re functionally the same as meeting in person. The biggest difference between remote vs in-person work is how you interact with people outside of formally scheduled meetings (eg showing people how to do something or casually conversing with them). Regular “hang out” meetings can’t fill this role, you really need something like chat IMO.

At prior jobs I’d say usually only 5-10% of people I came across directly at work were “good at chat”. If you could figure out how to filter for these people when hiring you could run a remote company very well, and have a strong culture and sense of community.

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

#232

Post by lanstein »

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…

s/Slack/Zulip

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

#233

Post by sarchertech »

sanderjd wrote: post #230
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…

I think " everything in public" is actually bad advice. Not everyone is comfortable saying everything valuable that they have to say, to a large audience. It is very intimidating to ask questions in a channel with a lot of members. "Too bad, get over it" is not the optimal answer. What I do believe is good is to encourage things to be public by default , and to encourage people to be stingy about what they make priva…

Yeah there are plenty of things that shouldn’t be said in a public. Problems that haven’t been verified yet, ideas that haven’t been through etc…

If your company is big enough there’s bound to be someone above you who will hold you to the first version of an idea you threw out or who will freak out about something that may not really be a problem.

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

#234

Post by emmelaich »

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…

Don't rely exclusively on async communications. It can be a huge time waster.

Have your team in vidcon regularly, scheduled.

Whether for strictly work or social doesn't matter. If social, leave a big window of time that people can come and go anytime they like without explanation.

You can even leave a camera running in each location for a while just for the occasional hello / wave. (Just make sure the camera is marked as and understood to be live)

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

#235

Post by Gigachad »

weitendorf wrote: post #231
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…

I think that you can have genuine social interactions remotely, but that it takes a certain kind of person. Most people, even most younger ones IMO, just aren’t accustomed to interacting with people online via chat. But people who are eg prolific Reddit/twitter/etc users, or heavy users of discord/IRC/chat-heavy MMOs do really well IME (and yeah, a lot of these people are neurodivergent). You also probably either nee…

Remote work feels a lot like Reddit. I don't actually know any of these people I work with, I just have very shallow interactions with them. I started coming in to the office after years of remote work and its unreal how much more social and friendly it is. People who I would hardly have more than the most transactional of chats with on Teams are now sharing their personal lives freely.

I'm Gen Z so remote work has been most of my work history. I'm just genuinely shocked at how much more effective and fun it is to work with people in person.

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

#236

Post by jandrewrogers »

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…

The biggest problem with Slack, by far, is that it is effectively ephemeral. An enormous amount of valuable content in Slack quickly becomes undiscoverable for all practical purposes. This creates significant challenges if history matters and this only gets worse as the number of people on it grows. In every organization I've participated in where Slack is the central "everything box", they had to invent parallel processes and systems so that things don't get lost in Slack.

Slack should be treated like the super-IRC that it is, it is poorly designed to be the nominal system of record that people try to use it as.

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

#237

Post by ketzo »

If you're asking a question (whether 1:1 or in a group setting), frontload as much context as possible. Always give:

- some minimal description for the problem you're trying to solve

- what you've tried already, and why it hasn't worked

----

Bad:

> "Hey! Does anyone know how to use X"?

...time passes...

> "Sure, I can help with that. What are you trying to do?"

...time passes...

> "I'm trying to do Y."

...time passes...

> "Okay, sure. You can set it up like this."

...time passes...

> "Oh, I already tried something like that actually, and it didn't work."

...etc., etc., etc.

----

Good:

> "Hey! I'm trying to use X to do Y as a part of feature Z. I already tried A and B, and they didn't work for . Could someone help me out?"

> "Oh, yeah, that's a known problem with A and B. We can get around that by setting up X this way. Since you're working on feature Z, you might also want to consider..."

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

#238

Post by crystal_revenge »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #236
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…

The biggest problem with Slack, by far, is that it is effectively ephemeral. An enormous amount of valuable content in Slack quickly becomes undiscoverable for all practical purposes. This creates significant challenges if history matters and this only gets worse as the number of people on it grows. In every organization I've participated in where Slack is the central "everything box", they had to invent parallel pro…

I hear people say this all the time, but at multiple jobs in the past Slack has acted as my own internal Stack Overflow.

Whenever I got a weird build issue, or some error that was related to internal code, I would just search Slack and the majority of the time I would get the answer I was looking for, provided that answer was a problem in the past.

Likewise I've found Slack search invaluable when it comes to remembering conversations I had with someone months ago.

Beyond just search, I've seen teams have lots of luck with task specific channels for major projects. It keeps the chatter low and the information high.

Ultimately I think my favorite thing about Slack is that it is a pretty good de facto internal knowledge base (better than poorly maintained confluence pages for sure).

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

#239

Post by dyauspitr »

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…

I think having long discussions in slack is a huge waste of time and adds a tremendous amount of overhead. Usually something that a 10 min call can achieve takes hours over slack.

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

#240

Post by sanderjd »

oDot wrote: post #226
sanderjd wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this incompatible with (or even, different from) using slack? It is asynchronous and preserves history...

History preservation is not just about continued existence, but also about discoverability. Other forms of communication (issues, project planners, and email lists) are much better for the latter.

Arguably...

I honestly don't even see the argument for why this is true of email lists. I went from an email-list-heavy environment to a slack-heavy environment, and both have been pretty equally good/bad for this.

I do think issues, project planners, design documents, etc. are better for discoverability, but they are also, in my experience, far less complete a history of what's been going on, than whatever the primary communications platform is.

There has been a lot of useful work that gets done in the cracks between the planning and work tracking artifacts, every place I have worked. I think you can either make that persistent and discoverable, despite it being super noisy, or just lose all the context on it altogether.

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