[dead]
Ask HN: How do you communicate in a remote startup?
271–280 of 290 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you communicate in a remote startup?
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 remember…
Same here. Slack provides answers way more often than Confluence. I tend to write conclusions to threads or discussion in a somewhat keyword heavy manner, simply so that I know I can search for it in a year or two.
Re: Ask HN: How do you communicate in a remote startup?
#273I 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…
>Meet in person every quarter
What benefit would you see in doing this? The only thing I've heard is some consider it nice to be in close proximity to others, but that doesen't really sound like a business reason
Re: Ask HN: How do you communicate in a remote startup?
#274I 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…
>Record your team meetings, preferably with software that can AI-summarize
If the summarizations are trustworthy it sounds like a good idea, however I've yet to see a reliable AI-summarizer that doesen't result in very high costs when wrong assumptions are made because of invalid or downright sabotaging summaries or generated documentation.
I believe minimizing the synchronized time people need to spend together in any task is best; have the least meetings possible while blowing away obstacles with as few people as is necessary. You can save an unbelieveable amount of unproductive time people would be locked in meetings they don't belong or contribute to.
Re: Ask HN: How do you communicate in a remote startup?
#275Earlier 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…
Then these employees should use it as a growth opportunity. If you want to be effective at work you need to accept you'll be uncomfortable at times.
Hamfisting an ideology to human nature just doesen't seem to work no matter how nice the end result could be. People don't generally do uncomfortable things unless they are forced to, take for example literally anything else in life; entire fields of professions exist because we don't like cleaning thing X or Y
Re: Ask HN: How do you communicate in a remote startup?
#276Slack / 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…
Nothing team-related should be in email. It's a horrendous place to hide data - worse than even than slack private channels.
Only because we've ruined our email with automated systems that are way too trigger-happy on notifications. I think I've received atleast a thousand-fold amount of mail from JIRA that someone has clicked on something, compared to actually useful, actionable requests.
Re: Ask HN: How do you communicate in a remote startup?
#277I 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 didn’t realize how important meeting people IRL was until I didn’t meet my team at my last job. I felt like an alien or something there. It sucked. A year and a half in, they planned a meeting, then fired me right before it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Place was lame anyway. Adtech is the devil’s work.
Re: Ask HN: How do you communicate in a remote startup?
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Slack is meant to be addictive. I only use the web client and modify it with tampermonkey All notifications disabled and I only read when pinged. davison updates are the only mechanism allowed.
How the hell do you get by with that? I’m jealous. I’ve gotten pinged by my fucking EVP for not responding to questions in chat fast enough (non-critical, too!). At least no one gets on me for missing emails. I don’t even read those.
Re: Ask HN: How do you communicate in a remote startup?
#279Earlier 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…
>Meet in person every quarter What benefit would you see in doing this? The only thing I've heard is some consider it nice to be in close proximity to others, but that doesen't really sound like a business reason
Quarterly would be a gross misuse of budget, imo. I think there’s tremendous value in physically meeting your team—-I can’t quantify it, but I can feel it—-so once a year is good, to me. Maybe twice if one is business and one’s a party or something.
Re: Ask HN: How do you communicate in a remote startup?
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
Slack is meant to be addictive. I only use the web client and modify it with tampermonkey All notifications disabled and I only read when pinged. davison updates are the only mechanism allowed.
How the hell do you get by with that? I’m jealous. I’ve gotten pinged by my fucking EVP for not responding to questions in chat fast enough (non-critical, too!). At least no one gets on me for missing emails. I don’t even read those.
> How the hell do you get by with that?
You have a company policy that allows that. For example, if anything is decided in Slack, it has to be "codified" somewhere else, like a wiki. Then you'll be able to justify not reading through all messages.