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Building Remote Teams for Startups

vadimkravcenko.com

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Re: Building Remote Teams for Startups

#81

Post by EricDeb »

synergy20 wrote: post #41

Some ideas to 'manage' remote-work: when you're working, always turn on the camera but in fuzzy mode, i.e. nobody see your real facial expression but knows you're there most of the time. make technical document a personal performance review item. make a system for all to fill out their daily progress, everyone does it before the day is called off.

can't managers just look at github/commits? I feel like that would be enough. Who cares when the work is done as long as people are responsive when they need to be.

Re: Building Remote Teams for Startups

#82

Post by gpm »

paperskull wrote: post #77
slotrans wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am vastly less productive working from home. Many of my friends will (privately, as you say) confess to the same. I keep seeing this narrative that the pandemic forced everyone to try remote work and surprise! productivity went up. I really, really doubt it. What actually happened is that you had sufficient organizational momentum to keep things going. Your rate of actual creative work (big new stuff launched, etc)…

I'd like to chime in with my anecdotal counter example from my big corporate workplace. A colleague recently created some graphs showing commits over time, confluence pages created/updated, tickets fixed, ticket turnaround time, code reviews given, and number of features released. All of these metrics made a sharp improvement as soon as our WFH policy came into effect and have kept its pace for the last 1.5 years. Wh…

Apart from your first and last metric, all of those are measuring "use of remote communication tools", it would be scary if they went down.

(The first and last are interesting though and support your claim.)

Re: Building Remote Teams for Startups

#83

Post by arminiusreturns »

nanidin wrote: post #79
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but communications, meetings, and being available to answer questions are also part of the job description. The more someone becomes unavailable for communications, knowledge sharing, and meetings, the more work they create for their teammates and managers who have to compensate by tracking everything down, re-hashing missed meetings, re-communicating things that should have been covered the first time and so on…

It sounds like you are describing a work culture that relies heavily on synchronous communication to make progress. These don’t work well for companies that want to have remote workers and treat them as first class citizens. The solution is to find ways to knowledgeshare that don’t require everyone’s attention at the same time - like a well maintained wiki, or recorded knowledge sharing sessions. Consensus building m…

So much this. I had a good former engineer manager that left and got replaced by a $bigcorps type and while I have a list of complaints a mile long, this is one of my biggest. Every interaction thats not a single sentence must be done via Zoom! I wrote a long slack explaining the strengths of async communication and that was the only time Ive ever gotten a paragraph in that form; him explaining all the reasons why we should work to meet others communications style in the middle, then ending with more reasons to use zoom...

In all this thread I see a lot comments about bad remote employees, but bad managers often find scapegoats and blame them when they are the real problem, but its easy to cover that up with some of the more blackhat management techniques.

For example, I realized that he was pushing voice comms because then there wasn't a record of what he said. I later found out he takes notes during these voice comms but not accurately, so then he can "reference his notes" to spin the narrative to other team managers or c-suite. He would also then use those notes to misrepresent your statements to other people. arminiusreturns said he loves this idea, umm no I said I was open to the idea... stuff like that.

Managers like this make me want to turn on my corporate machiavelli, but I hate that side of me and just want to do good work, without all that. If thats how the game has to be played though... fine.

Re: Building Remote Teams for Startups

#85

Post by moltar »

closeparen wrote: post #72
moltar wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remote != home. Home _is_ distracting, unless you have black belt concentration ability, and will power. For a long time I’ve worked from a coworking place near my house. Before that, when I wasn’t earning as much, I’d work from cafes. Some days when the weather was especially nasty I chose to stay home and work from home. Now I have a kid, and I’m forced to work from home due to corona, and my productivity definitel…

Coworking space is rather a big-city amenity, while the point of remote working for many people is to avoid big cities.

Coworking doesn’t have to be an official business.

Coworking = people working together. You can self organize.

At one time, I just rented a desk space at a software agency. They rented a larger than necessary space for growth, and we’re happy to rent it out. I was there for 2 years before they filled up.

Many offices have empty seats and small business prefer to save ;)

Also known people who have rented an apartment together and just set up desks there. The legalities of that are murky. But if you don’t disturb anyone around you nobody cares in a large building.

Re: Building Remote Teams for Startups

#86

Post by yeldarb »

ipaddr wrote: post #70
yeldarb wrote: post #12

I think anyone who says remote is strictly better is fooling themselves. There are definitely down-sides. We’ve been doing a lot to try to bring back the benefits of being in-person while maintaining the flexibility of being remote. Wrote about our specific tactics here: https://blog.roboflow.com/remote-not-distant/

"Friday we cap off the week by eating lunch together over Zoom" How awful. I think you are trying to take the benefits of less social activity inspired remote workplaces and adding in forced. some social interaction. I would like to see this type of activity stopped.

None of this is sacred, and if the team wants to change or eliminate things, we’re open to it and re-evaluate regularly.

This is a tradition that has stayed with the company since the very earliest days when we were in YC. I’ve never heard anyone complain about it, and it’s something I know many on the team (including myself) look forward to each week.

That said, it’s not one size fits all. The culture probably isn’t for everyone; hopefully, being open about how we operate helps people decide whether it’s the ideal environment for them.

Re: Building Remote Teams for Startups

#87

Post by xyzzy21 »

I wouldn't say this is a "startup stage" scenario - once you have things as well documented as described you have either: 1) a late stage, nearly non-startup, or 2) you aren't really addressing anything innovative - you are just like any other existent company doing a project; the "startup" appellation isn't valid in the traditional Silicon Valley Tech Startup sense but you are no different than Starbucks opening a new location.

Re: Building Remote Teams for Startups

#88

Post by drewcoo »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #18

Good article. Having a lot of experience managing remote teams, I wanted to expand on this point: > Try to focus on the employees who thrive in such environments rather than those few bad apples. You can’t let the bad apples define the work experience for everyone, but you do need to identify them and remove them as fast as possible so they don’t poison the well. One thing I didn’t realize at first was that remote wo…

This raises the issue of management measures of effort or time spent versus results; being busy versus getting it done. That has always been a problem in physical offices (otherwise Office Space wouldn't be funny). It is an even more exaggerated management problem when people's appearances can't be casually monitored and/or micromanaged.

One thing that most engineer-turned-managers don't have is any training in management whatsoever. In fact, many of them have only been managed by uneducated managers themselves. This situation, compounded by remote work, is not pretty.

Thankfully, the article was a set of checklists of easy-to-measure items. And it recommended focus on employee results. It is refreshing to see this kind of article on management education!

Re: Building Remote Teams for Startups

#89

Post by dang »

zerocount wrote: post #50
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is: Some of the worst remote workers are actually the best at appearing always online. They’ll go out of their way to remind everyone that they were “working” at 8PM or on a weekend because they need to compensate for the lack of actual work done. One of the worst remote work offenders I ever dealt with had a routine of doing things every Saturday morning that would ping the team: Lots of Slack “@channel” q…

Quoted post unavailable.

Whoa, you can't attack other users like this on HN. We ban accounts that do this sort of thing.

You've unfortunately been breaking the site guidelines in other places too. I don't want to ban you, so if you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

Re: Building Remote Teams for Startups

#90

Post by blackhaz »

alexslobodnik wrote: post #84
blackhaz wrote: post #11

Running a remote-only company for 19 years. This is a very nice guide. Still can't figure out what holds us all together.

Did your company start remote from day one? What were some of your painful lessons you wished you learned sooner?

From day one it was only me. I was working from anywhere, so I guess that means yes, it was remote from the start. Current pain points we are still trying to figure out:

- Gathering the whole team effectively and periodically (once a year or so).

- People speaking different languages, so everyone must switch to English when the whole team gathers, which degrades the communication flow a little - only a small percentage are native speakers. This requires good team-building activities. Still trying to figure out what activities would excite the whole team without breaking the bank.

- Disseminating our "corporate culture" - supposes daily human office interaction. Having everyone in an online chat helps a lot.

- Taking care of pension schemes, as everyone is scattered around the globe, with different systems, expenditure levels, etc.

- Having a system that shows who's at the desk, who is on a vacation, and so on. Our service business needs real-time operations, so we need to rely on people coming in at work in the morning and staying full-time.

Things we wish we would have done sooner:

- Identified a jurisdiction and settled down at some place, call it an HQ. A company has to have a physical home where it banks and pays tax, even if it is 100% remote. An Accountant and a person with a PoA from the Director should be present there physically all the time to interact with authorities and the bank.

- This was in the original article, but I wish we would have introduced the tradition of online meetings with webcams on sooner. May sound silly, but this helps avoid turning into a bunch of cave warriors and keeping personal relationships alive.

- Introduced a single office closure dates document spanning multiple countries to accommodate for different holiday schedules.

I'd say the most important lesson of all is having the right people on the ground to handle relationships with local authorities and the bank. We can all choose to be nomads, but our business would not have survived if we weren't lucky to find a great Accountant and Director's Assistant who live in our jurisdiction, and a person on our "nomadic team" to handle that relationship.

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