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Ask HN: How do you integrate remote developers?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you integrate remote developers?

#61

Post by kzisme »

mariojv wrote: post #43

Pretty much the whole team works remotely. We use IRC for everything, which has the good side effect of preserving knowledge for later. Everyone has a bouncer like ZNC setup so they don't miss anything while they're offline. Managers, directors, and VPs all encourage work from home, and a lot (including my manager) work from home themselves. We have an internal video conferencing system that we use frequently. We hav…

What sort of company do you work for that uses IRC heavily? (IS it a software company or a non-software company)

I assume the latter - but it sounds like a very nice way to do things.

Re: Ask HN: How do you integrate remote developers?

#62

Post by Sondra »

In our team there are 4 remote guys. We communicate in Slack, share Google Docs when needed, track tasks in JIRA, collaborate on the product design in RealtimeBoard app, conduct daily meetings via Skype. To support the team spirit we organized several AMAs within the team via Skype. There was no restriction on the questions, so we also learned some facts about employees private life (f.ex. when they have shown their pets).

Re: Ask HN: How do you integrate remote developers?

#63

Post by dvcc »

dhd415 wrote: post #41
dvcc wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would anyone else find this tiring though? I feel like I am omitting the use of basic communication skills in favor of something less than ideal. I guess I am just not a huge fan of remote work in general though, so I have a hard time coming around to the idea that quick questions must go through a chat at all times.

The problem with that approach is that it inevitably favors the input of people who are physically present even if they are not the ones with the best answer to the question. As a remote development lead in a company without a remote-first culture, I find this happens a lot. The end result is that I end up having to fix a lot of problems that were caused by technical discussions that did not include the people such a…

Do you not hold that more on your team though and less on the communication style? To me, if I know that someone else might have some information that would contribute to the discussion I'll include them.

That feels like it would be more on the individual team members not knowing when to reach out, more so than the in-person meetings causing a remote/local gap.

Re: Ask HN: How do you integrate remote developers?

#64

Post by mafribe »

gautamdivgi wrote: post #31
alistairSH wrote: post #28

My team (I'm the project manager/tech lead) is roughly half remote, with the remotes including my product owner and lead test engineer (among others). As noted elsewhere, thinking remote-first is required for non-co-located teams to be successful. Technical items, in no particular order: All meetings are conducted with full video teleconferencing. Most meetings are configured to default participants as muted (help st…

I work remote most of the time and so do almost all of my colleagues. But I think you've highlighted an important issue here. White-boarding!!! No communication tool comes close to a human drawing pictures to explain complex concepts - a picture is worth a thousand words. What I did is invest in a Wacom tablet (I do not work for Wacom) to be able to explain and draw to people I'm on calls with. It takes a bit getting…

> mimic the actual whiteboard

What do you currently use? I'm looking for a smooth way to do the same thing.

Re: Ask HN: How do you integrate remote developers?

#65

Post by dhd415 »

dvcc wrote: post #63
dhd415 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with that approach is that it inevitably favors the input of people who are physically present even if they are not the ones with the best answer to the question. As a remote development lead in a company without a remote-first culture, I find this happens a lot. The end result is that I end up having to fix a lot of problems that were caused by technical discussions that did not include the people such a…

Do you not hold that more on your team though and less on the communication style? To me, if I know that someone else might have some information that would contribute to the discussion I'll include them. That feels like it would be more on the individual team members not knowing when to reach out, more so than the in-person meetings causing a remote/local gap.

Some teams may be more prone to that problem than others, but it always takes more effort to include the remote folks in the conversations. It's usually true that the really momentous decisions are handled in meetings that include the appropriate workers, whether on-site or remote. The biggest problem is often the "not quite really important" questions for which the on-site folks figure that a answer from another on-site person that is "good enough" will suffice. The end result of that is growing technical debt from a series of decisions that weren't as good as they could have been with the input of the workers with the most knowledge of the problem area.

Re: Ask HN: How do you integrate remote developers?

#67

Post by jmarucci »

jmarucci wrote: post #51

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 o…

++ WORKSTATIONS! We give our remote employees the same workstations our in house employees get. Choice of 1 - 2 screens (27" Dell 4K, 1 34" Curved Dell or a Thunderbolt), keyboard (Apple, PC, or Code), and mouse (trackpad, MX, or PC mouse).

Re: Ask HN: How do you integrate remote developers?

#68

Post by fourfivesix »

- Smalltalk can happen over IM, if you work at it. During standup ask for "consumption updates" meaning what movies, books, TV shows people have consumed - great fast way to learn interests. - Move from oral to written communication. Could a person who could not hear at all make it at your company? Write everything down to keep a remote minority in the loop. - This is harsh, but teach the remote developer that they need to do some of the work themselves to integrate. They might have to go out of their way to push updates, ask questions, etc. They are the canary in the mine and should tell you when they are left out. Be open to this feedback

Re: Ask HN: How do you integrate remote developers?

#69

Post by taurath »

cookiecaper wrote: post #57
up_and_up wrote: post #14

I have worked remotely for 4 years. Start by creating a remote-first culture. Everyone should think "remote" first. Thus it should never matter if a local employee is working from home, the HQ, from the other side of the world. Make all work processes remote friendly. That should be step zero when considering hiring a remote person regardless of the reason. The goal should be to avoid a two-tiered culture. Some diffe…

>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 th…

2-4 times a year is not really asking for much out of anyone. The fact is that relationships and trust especially can fray after a long time without actually meeting with people (most of the time, you may be a special case). Its a lot harder to know what a person has been actually doing and working on without a little bit of occasional face time - you may be in a very special situation where there are almost no benefits to actually knowing your colleagues better than what you can say over IRC, but for me its always been very helpful to get a good feel for who is on the other end of the keyboard, which becomes super useful for collaberations.

Re: Ask HN: How do you integrate remote developers?

#70

Post by Touche »

matwood wrote: post #55
Touche wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess the person who is always interrupting others in favor of their own issues would find it tiring. But the person who is constantly being interrupted would find it refreshing that they can prioritize themselves.

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…

Working with a team doesn't mean synchronous communication. We need to get off of this "I am a special snowflake" and my current issue trumps whatever anyone else is working on.

Hire good people and trust that they will respond to issues appropriately. If your services are down and the company is bleeding cash every second, they will stop what their doing and help fix the issue.

Having communication be synchronous-by-default more easily leads to scenarios where you decide to ask a colleague a question real quick that breaks their flow. I'm guilty of this myself.

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