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

We Tried Building a Remote Team and It Sucked

blog.statuspage.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 99 posts

Re: We Tried Building a Remote Team and It Sucked

#81

Post by ericbieller »

ryanSrich wrote: post #62
clay_to_n wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does pair programming work over chat? I feel like pair programming relies on you both looking at the same code + talking things through while one of you is actually coding. It seems like having to switch over to a chat client to communicate would decrease productivity a lot.

I can't comment too much on the pair programming aspect. I know Floobits[1] has been floated around often. It seems most of the pair programming we do is with interns or junior developers, who are located at HQ until joining full-time/gaining more experience. As mentioned below Screenhero is really great for 1v1s (they plan on adding team collaboration early this year). For reference I wrote a post a while ago with s…

How has Teamspeak worked out for you? We're actually building a similar product that's specifically for teams. I'd be curious to hear your feedback on it as it may be helpful for you. Here's a quick walkthrough https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KV7HBXuhT7Q Let me know if you have any thoughts / ideas.

Re: We Tried Building a Remote Team and It Sucked

#82

Post by hacst »

MetaCosm wrote: post #79
hacst wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mumble core developer here. Glad to hear Mumble is useful to you and your coworkers. Always nice to get positive feedback. If anyone has question about the software or the project feel free to ask.

Have any of the core developers considered creating a very polished / simplified / professional supported client for business? Stuff like "native look" on OS-X, some shiny features and ability to be easily pre-configured and shipped to people. So I could just give a pre-configured little bundle and they just run it, it would generate the cert and do the wizard, but we would have stuff like default push-to-talk, a few…

I have actually though about a boiled down client with baked in default configuration before. I wasn't considering business applications though but was thinking about the use in podcasting. Never got started on it though.

We work on Mumble in our spare time and as such developer time is scarce. We try to focus on what we think most users are going to benefit from. There's a long "Would be neat to have X" list ;)

One goal for the future is to make Mumble more modular which should make creating such a specialized client feasible without much extra work.

If someone here is interested in C++ with Qt and wants to contribute to a FOSS project used by nearly 400,000 users monthly we can always use more hands.

Re: We Tried Building a Remote Team and It Sucked

#83

Post by dennisgorelik »

clay_to_n wrote: post #50
ryanSrich wrote: post #31

Although I disagree with the overall sentiment of the article (remote working doesn't work for generalists). I commend the author for at least trying remote work (especially as a YC company, an organization that openly discourages remote work). Full disclosure, I work remotely and it's by far the best decision I've ever made in my entire life. So to address a few points. Collaboration to me is when a group of people,…

How does pair programming work over chat? I feel like pair programming relies on you both looking at the same code + talking things through while one of you is actually coding. It seems like having to switch over to a chat client to communicate would decrease productivity a lot.

Both programmers should have headsets and talk with each other.

One programmer shares screen with another programmer.

Both discuss what they are doing, what they should do.

One programmer codes. Another programmer monitors coding for bugs and sub-optimal implementation.

Communication tool: Skype (or possibly Google hangout?)

Re: We Tried Building a Remote Team and It Sucked

#84

Post by bergie »

Shorel wrote: post #46

What about: Work remote. Get all the company together to a trip to Hawaii each year. I'm sure this can build camaraderie and morale, and I hope someone gives it a try.

We're trying to get most of the people together every couple of months. The recent one was indeed in Hawaii. Nice place

https://medium.com/@brianaxe/the-grid-an-unconventional-star...

Re: We Tried Building a Remote Team and It Sucked

#85

Post by lawnchair_larry »

pre wrote: post #30

I can't imagine how you'd do pair-programming remotely, certainly. Some kind of shared-screen skype-call? Two sessions into a remote-desktop? Collaboration over the wire is slower than collaboration in person and less enthusing, but it's also more considered, more precise. We each have different styles I guess. Introverts likely prefer the considered precise way, extroverts the enthusiastic fast-paced way. People who…

Easy, just don't pair program. It was never a good idea to begin with.

Re: We Tried Building a Remote Team and It Sucked

#86

Post by stonith »

clay_to_n wrote: post #50
ryanSrich wrote: post #31

Although I disagree with the overall sentiment of the article (remote working doesn't work for generalists). I commend the author for at least trying remote work (especially as a YC company, an organization that openly discourages remote work). Full disclosure, I work remotely and it's by far the best decision I've ever made in my entire life. So to address a few points. Collaboration to me is when a group of people,…

How does pair programming work over chat? I feel like pair programming relies on you both looking at the same code + talking things through while one of you is actually coding. It seems like having to switch over to a chat client to communicate would decrease productivity a lot.

We (Aptira) start a screen (as in GNU screen) session on a VM we both log into and use skype for audio. This also allows us to quickly swap who is driving and copy/paste in/out of the shared screen session, which is less fluid when using video based screen sharing.

This wouldn't work for folks who work in an IDE though, since it's terminal based.

Re: We Tried Building a Remote Team and It Sucked

#87

Post by tonyarkles »

s73v3r wrote: post #66
wlesieutre wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For having a remote whiteboard, shared OneNote notebooks on a Surface Pro 3 is fantastic. It's not 100% realtime sync, but it's close. Except that nobody else has a Surface Pro, so the only time I've tried it was with a friend with a Bamboo on the other end. Maybe someday.

One can get a decent drawing tablet for about $50 these days. Pretty minimal investment.

I haven't used it as a remote whiteboard yet, but I've got a Wacom "Intuos Pen". It's about $80 and it has served as a scrap-piece-of-paper replacement over and over. For sketching out architecture diagrams, web page "mock ups", etc, I have completely fallen in love with it.

https://store.wacom.com/us/en/product/CTL480/

Re: We Tried Building a Remote Team and It Sucked

#88

Post by tonyarkles »

wlesieutre wrote: post #75
s73v3r wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One can get a decent drawing tablet for about $50 these days. Pretty minimal investment.

Yeah, but it doesn't really compare to drawing on a screen. And there's much more of a learning curve on those for people who haven't used one before.

Before I got the tablet I mentioned in the sibling comment, I used a stylus with an iPad for a while. It was pretty decent, but whatever software I was using had pretty mediocre palm detection (it'd freak out a bit if I rested my hand on the screen while drawing). I'd also definitely recommend getting a more expensive stylus... the cheap ones I tried generally didn't work well at all.

Re: We Tried Building a Remote Team and It Sucked

#89

Post by smcnally »

alfg wrote: post #54
MetaCosm wrote: post #48

An unexpected tool has helped tremendously for our teams in terms of remote work: Mumble ( http://wiki.mumble.info/wiki/Main_Page ). Mumble is a cross platform, open source VoIP application. Often used for gaming in a group (like Teamspeak or Ventrilo). It has the idea of channels (rooms, offices, etc) is very high quality, low latency and low bandwidth installed on your companies servers in minutes, always encrypted…

Interesting. I know Mumble is used a lot in the gaming community, but I never thought of the idea of using it for workspace/business. I wrote a webapp targeted for gamers to easily setup temporary Mumble servers ( http://guildbit.com ). So I'm sure someone can build a service similar to wrap the Mumble API for workspace users. Similar to Slack with IRC.

This looks polished and simple to set up. Nice work. I'll work it through at least two remote work use cases.

Re: We Tried Building a Remote Team and It Sucked

#90

Post by JoeAltmaier »

bwb wrote: post #73
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sococo (I work there) does a good job. Share apps (not desktops); talk and video, pointers and web apps all work together to make pair programming pretty seamless.

Man I wish sococo supported linux, our team is a mix of linux and mac and we would love to use it and pay for it. We've got 128 people around the world but without linux support we can't :( If you can give me any timeline till a linux version I would appreciate it, bwbbwb@gmail.com

Tried Wine? Some have success with that, though getting audio set up can be tricky.

There's a web version under development right now - it should work with Chrome and Firefox.

Post reply on HN