Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Managing Remote Teams

klinger.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 48 posts

Re: Managing Remote Teams

#31

Post by nottorp »

konschubert wrote: post #30
nottorp wrote: post #28

You make a long passionate speech about what the team needs to do to win the market, just to be followed up with a “Sorry Sarah, your internet connection dropped for a second, what did you say?” That's why you use text based communication, if the internet drops for someone all they have to do is scroll up a bit when they rejoin...

The problem is that video calls are broken . There are many reasons for that, mostly people using inadequate equipment and bad internet connections.

Video calls are fun for socializing perhaps, but for serious work I prefer having an automatic record.

Re: Managing Remote Teams

#33

Post by sokoloff »

mcny wrote: post #24
lordnacho wrote: post #20

I manage a fully remote team with staff in time zones from Sydney to LA. In fact I've just messaged people in both zones. Culture is key: - People have to be of the mindset that meetings are short and purposeful. Nobody is in the meeting because they are the boss, or forced to join in order to soak up the atmosphere. (Both of those are real things, somehow). - People exercise judgement in deciding how many people to…

» People exercise judgement in deciding how many people to write to: either DM, or 3-way, or dump it in a public channel. I still haven't figured this one out. Unless it is a criticism or "hey you broke this", my thought is the default should be a public channel, no?

That's my default as well, because I value the durable, searchable record.

(In Slack [and presumably others],) You can set notifications per channel and turn some channels into "pull" type consumption.

Re: Managing Remote Teams

#34

Post by jordinl »

schmrz wrote: post #32
jordinl wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a counterpoint, in my last company we used scrum and every developer hated it. In fact, I've never seen scrum work...

What did work in your experience?

I've seen extreme programming work well in some situations, but I've seen it not work in some others...

In my current project we're three people: the owner, front-end dev and back-end dev. We don't really have a methodology other than having a daily call at the same time every day and discuss what needs to be done and any issues we're having. We also have Slack and if there's something urgent we jump on a call. I would say it's worked well so far.

But IMO with smaller teams it's way easier than with larger teams.

Re: Managing Remote Teams

#35

Post by mikemcquaid »

izacus wrote: post #29
lordnacho wrote: post #20

I manage a fully remote team with staff in time zones from Sydney to LA. In fact I've just messaged people in both zones. Culture is key: - People have to be of the mindset that meetings are short and purposeful. Nobody is in the meeting because they are the boss, or forced to join in order to soak up the atmosphere. (Both of those are real things, somehow). - People exercise judgement in deciding how many people to…

> - We tend to only hire highly experienced people. There's nobody with under 8 years of work on the team. Juniors will have to somehow convince us they can do it; it's somehow more believable that an older person will be able to work independently than a younger one. Hm, does that imply that you don't have any process or provisions to train up juniors / begineers?

> does that imply that you don't have any process or provisions to train up juniors

If they don't: that's fine. It's better to not hire juniors if you aren't able to provide the mentorship they require than hire them anyway into an organisation that will fail them.

Re: Managing Remote Teams

#36

Post by xchaotic »

I'd argue that at this point you can still hire the self motivated people that you only need to lead not manage. 'Managing' programmers in general is hard enough, managing remote team in nigh iimpossible so don't do it, just remove the obvious roadblock, be aware of what everyone is up to (roughly) and don't interrupt, if not needed. I dare say the daily standups are not needed - just read the commits to see what's already happened and send an email or a wiki page to edit plan for next week, no need for a meeting involving everyone's full hour. Embrace async and don't manage things that you don't need to.

Re: Managing Remote Teams

#37

Post by dfischer »

xchaotic wrote: post #36

I'd argue that at this point you can still hire the self motivated people that you only need to lead not manage. 'Managing' programmers in general is hard enough, managing remote team in nigh iimpossible so don't do it, just remove the obvious roadblock, be aware of what everyone is up to (roughly) and don't interrupt, if not needed. I dare say the daily standups are not needed - just read the commits to see what's a…

Agreed – with remote teams you have to embrace async. Don't force meetings that everyone has to be apart of unless it's a critical planning session or something in that realm.

Re: Managing Remote Teams

#38

Post by MarkMc »

nottorp wrote: post #28

You make a long passionate speech about what the team needs to do to win the market, just to be followed up with a “Sorry Sarah, your internet connection dropped for a second, what did you say?” That's why you use text based communication, if the internet drops for someone all they have to do is scroll up a bit when they rejoin...

> That's why you use text based communication, if the internet drops for someone all they have to do is scroll up a bit when they rejoin...

And that's partly why working remote is so inefficient that less than 3% of people do it. Talking with someone in the same room communicates so much more effectively than a chat log.

Re: Managing Remote Teams

#39

Post by toast0 »

mcny wrote: post #24
lordnacho wrote: post #20

I manage a fully remote team with staff in time zones from Sydney to LA. In fact I've just messaged people in both zones. Culture is key: - People have to be of the mindset that meetings are short and purposeful. Nobody is in the meeting because they are the boss, or forced to join in order to soak up the atmosphere. (Both of those are real things, somehow). - People exercise judgement in deciding how many people to…

» People exercise judgement in deciding how many people to write to: either DM, or 3-way, or dump it in a public channel. I still haven't figured this one out. Unless it is a criticism or "hey you broke this", my thought is the default should be a public channel, no?

It depends on how many people are in the channel and the expected purpose of the channel.

There is certainly some amount of information dissemination by having discussions in a public forum, but you have to weigh that against the information processing burden it adds to the people in the group.

Also, it may become searchable, but it's only findable if you and your communication partners use consistent, appropriate, and relatively unique keywords. There are likely better ways to document things; although, documentation is one of my worry areas, and I understand the desire to have something rather than nothing.

Re: Managing Remote Teams

#40

Post by nottorp »

MarkMc wrote: post #38
nottorp wrote: post #28

You make a long passionate speech about what the team needs to do to win the market, just to be followed up with a “Sorry Sarah, your internet connection dropped for a second, what did you say?” That's why you use text based communication, if the internet drops for someone all they have to do is scroll up a bit when they rejoin...

> That's why you use text based communication, if the internet drops for someone all they have to do is scroll up a bit when they rejoin... And that's partly why working remote is so inefficient that less than 3% of people do it. Talking with someone in the same room communicates so much more effectively than a chat log.

That depends on your talk/work ratio...
Post reply on HN