Ask HN: How do you integrate remote developers?

We have a 40% remote staff at DigitalOcean. So this is really important to us. Initially, they come to the office for 1-2 weeks when they first start to get face to face introductions with everyone on their team and as much of the company as possible. Part of our standard onboarding is for each manager to take them out to lunch and to host a team event while they are in town. This is social time to get to know them on a personal level. We conduct a remote-exclusive on boarding for an hour to provide them with key tips on being remote and how to be a successful remote at DigitalOcean. This includes booking travel in the future, expensing items when in town, information about corporate apartments, and an introduction to our people team Remote Point of Contact. After they return home with a better sense of the role and company they just started for, the full “remote” experience starts. We have a slack channel that our remotees “hang out” in all day. They created a weather bot to share their local weather, greet each other with a “good morning” and continue on to chat all day as if they were next to each other in a space. This is actually my favorite channel on slack because it encompasses all the random water cooler conversations around the office into 1 area. We do a lot for our employees in house and remote. The key is to not make our remote staff feel like they were a second thought. For example, we had a large company Thanksgiving dinner in November so we sent Thanksgiving pies to all of our remote staff. They received it right around the same time we were all going out to eat. We had a holiday dance party, so we sent our remotes speakers in the shape of droplets (which is our product here). We went to Tribeca Film Festival at HQ, so we sent each remote a box of movie candy and gift cards to the movie theater for them AND their families.

We have built our current office space to be as remote friendly as possible. We integrated Google Chromebox for meetings in every conference room and telephone room. This prevents about 5 minutes of initial setup for microphone and camera. We have already invested in, and continue to invest in, state of the art technology for our All Hands Meetings. Proper microphones, speakers, and cameras in our “Atlantis”. Once all presentations are are complete, we switch to the camera view so we can see all of our remotes in the room with us as we continue through our AMA portion.

These are just the baseline of things that we have done to make our remotes feel connected even when they are not in our office. We continue to upgrade the experience often and are continuing to grow our remote staff Internationally.

In addition to everything said here, one thing I find that helps is framing video meeting. Are you calling to mainly shoot the breeze and talk a little bit about work? Or is it literally 5 minutes to get a specific answer? Or a 30 minutes formal meeting with an agenda and take always?

If you don't some people will become very reluctant to video conf as they'll see it as constant water cooler talk that prevent them from working.

We need to get off of this 'I am a special snowflake' that cannot be bothered to work with a team. If you want to solo develop than go be a solo app developer. If you want to deliver software as part of a team, then working with the team is part of the gig. I know it is hard to believe, but the act of coding is only one part of many required to deliver working software that meets the requirements.

Great function you wrote there that does the wrong thing because you were too busy to be bothered.

>Have in-person meetups 2-4 x a year for beneficial face-time and for people to get to know each other better on a personal level.

This is a turn-off for me as a full-time remote worker. When I browse remote job listings, a lot of companies list this like it's a perk. Maybe it's a perk if you're a 23-year-old single guy, but it's not a perk for me; it actually flies in the face of why I'm a remote worker, which is that I want to focus on my work with minimal interference on the other components of my life (which are what really matter to me).

I don't want to travel. I find planes immensely uncomfortable and telling the employer that I only fly first-class is usually not an option. I don't want to be stuck in a room with everyone from the company for a week or more while I miss everything that's going on at home, and like most company functions, skipping out on this also isn't really an option if one wants to remain politically viable.

One of the great things about remote work is that it takes a great deal of bullshit out of the employment process; you don't have to worry about if you're making the wrong facial contortions, if you're offending someone by slouching, if you look bored, or if you laugh hard enough at someone's bad attempt at a joke. The work is the focus.

There are few social signals to misinterpret or blow out of proportion. I think a remote-first culture is one of the best ways to secure a meritocratic working atmosphere, simply because it removes so much of the irrelevant noise, like personal charisma, that people misinterpret as being relevant to the performance of job duties.

Occasional company meetups only serve to dampen this focus on actual working output. I prefer to keep a professional emotional distance from my co-workers, generally speaking, which I think is for the best. If we really hit it off, there's no reason we can't arrange our own meetups, but for most colleagues, we develop a strong sense of professional respect for one another and that's plenty sufficient. No need to mess that up with personal elements.

I understand that these company meetups may be great if you're looking for companionship, but I don't really think a lonely person is well suited to remote work anyway. At home, I have a wife and several children to hang out with, plus a few close friends and a group of loose associates from hacker meetups, community functions, and/or church.

Smartboards exist! Also, some competitors are creating comparable items as well. I am looking into this myself so that our engineering team can white board together.