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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?

#241

Post by crystal_revenge »

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…

Worked remote most of my life. Quarterly meetups are exhausting for people that didn't sign up for travel for their job. Many people doing remote work do so because they have a lot of responsibilities at home and benefit from being able to work around family, pets, etc.

However, my experience is the difference between 0 in person meetups and even 1 per year is astounding. I was at one company that didn't have in person meetups for years and when they finally did the company culture changed (for the better) over night. The difference between 1 per year and 4 per year is negligible barring the fact that the latter makes me start to dread meetups rather than enjoy them.

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

#242

Post by stavros »

lanstein wrote: post #232
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…

s/Slack/Zulip

Seconded, Zulip's model is fantastic. It makes it a breeze to catch up or coordinate.

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

#243

Post by crystal_revenge »

sarchertech wrote: post #233
sanderjd wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Yeah there are plenty of things that shouldn’t be said in a public.

It is worth pointing that one of the value adds for any company using Slack is that nothing is private. Anyone with an admin role can read any conversation, DM or otherwise, and this is considered a good thing since it allows the company visibility into employee communications in cases of illicit activity.

What's odd is very few teams I've been on have made this fact very clear. Which reminds me a bit of Dr Strangelove when the doomsday machine is kept a secret for a birthday surprise. The entire point of being able to monitor private comms is as a deterrence. Employees are less like to send a message that might be considered inappropriate in the first place if they know they're being monitored.

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

#244

Post by crystal_revenge »

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…

What's happened here is precisely why communication should be public, it's revealed a real problem in the company you're at.

I've been on teams exactly like this, but the problem isn't public channels, it's "leadership" not knowing how to let go and trust their teams. Doing more work in private is the negative consequence of this bad practice, but I assure you this issue will eventually cause problems no matter how clever people are in avoiding public conversations.

And startups that are on the path to long term success will have leadership abandon this type of butting into every day communication very early in their growth. A good C-level must learn the build teams that can scale beyond their individual interventions. You literally cannot grow beyond a 30 person organization (and survive) if this much intervention is required.

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

#245

Post by tracerbulletx »

A little bit on the softer side, but It's good to encourage a feeling that you can just say something publicly even if it might make you sound slightly naive, because it's WAY more common that everyone else actually has the same misconception or bad assumption. People tend to do that once, someone makes a rude comment about them not already knowing, then they pretend to know things from then on. I think that has to come from the top by example. People will emulate sounding like the highest up person they're interacting with on a project or in a meeting.

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

#246

Post by whiplash451 »

crystal_revenge wrote: post #241
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…

Worked remote most of my life. Quarterly meetups are exhausting for people that didn't sign up for travel for their job. Many people doing remote work do so because they have a lot of responsibilities at home and benefit from being able to work around family, pets, etc. However, my experience is the difference between 0 in person meetups and even 1 per year is astounding. I was at one company that didn't have in pers…

Agreed. The sweet spot in my experience is twice a year but your point is very valid. Once a quarter, sustained, is heavy on personal lives.

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

#247

Post by mushufasa »

oDot wrote: post #209
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'd say avoid slack as much as possible. Use evergreen communication: https://www.emergencyremote.com/emergencyremote#h.vvx9who9kf...

zulip is like a version of slack but designed for evergreen communication

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

#248

Post by whiplash451 »

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…

The CIO is the problem here, not your setup.

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

#249

Post by Aachen »

gorfian_robot wrote: post #186
kingkongjaffa wrote: post #3

Slack / IM often, don't demand a response instantly though, async & remote go hand in hand. Put important stuff in email not slack/IM Have a company wiki Prefer video calls for alignment Write to each other often, spend time crafting written narratives, 1-pagers, amazon 6-pagers etc. to share ideas, make people read them, use google docs or ms word online and get comments inline in the document using those tools, fol…

a wiki is much better than google docs IMHO as the later quickly becomes an unmanageable dumpster fire. I like mediawiki a lot since most people are familiar with it from wikipedia and linking to yet-to-be-created pages encourages participation.

Agreed on the broad points. Personally I found simpler wiki systems to be worth it because you'll spend less time making stuff work and less time debugging because it's less complex. MediaWiki, at least from my experience with -pedia, the OpenStreetMap wiki, and others, is that it's complex and slows down to a crawl for hours~days if you bust the cache by making a change to a central template. DokuWiki runs smooth without needing to concern oneself with caches at all—but, of course, is less versatile if you have a 10'000-people organisation and need advanced features for managing all the information (we don't; it works great for us). I'm sure there are also other great options besides DokuWiki, especially if they use a markup language everyone already knows like Markdown instead of some custom syntax only used on your wiki. Another consideration: GitLab, Gitea, and friends iirc all didn't have page locking when I looked at those options ~2 years ago, so you overwrite each other's changes without noticing. Anyway, just some thoughts on implementation details. Wikis are definitely the way to go as compared to a set of documents on a drive!

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

#250

Post by Aachen »

vundercind wrote: post #131
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 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 can

I've got friends who work great over chat. Beyond keeping up the conversation just like someone would irl, the choice or lack of a smiley, the lengths of messages, sentence capitalisation and punctuation, timing of messages and read markers or typing notifications... everything combined works the same as nonverbal communication: how they are feeling, are they busy or can I interrupt, are they at their desk or on the move... It's not that different to sitting across from them

Other people, though, don't work this way. A few aren't as familiar with computers so the cues are hidden under a layer of technical struggles; others simply don't seem to communicate well by text. As colleagues, you're somewhat forced to make it work and so the success rate is much higher than with friends in my experience (probably by saying things more explicitly and less nonverbally), but it can still be a damper and make conversations transactional and sterile

Especially if you had a disagreement or misunderstanding with someone you're not very familiar with, the more-universal nonverbal IRL communication is easier to pick up on than their digital cues. Calling is a decent middle ground but requires synchronicity (often worth it, of course)

The internet doesn't need to make things sterile, but for many people, it does seem to, so I can understand what the person means even if it isn't my only experience

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