Ask HN: How do you communicate in a remote startup?

Video calls. If you aren't having at least one video call a day something is probably wrong. Configure it such that starting a video call takes no more than 4 clicks.

Have a company-wide General/Coffee chat where people talk about arbitrary things. It's better if this chat has history which expires in 24 hours.

Write lots of short documents -- especially for designs. Review them much like you would review code. This can be as simple as Markdown documents in your repository using your normal code review tool. Ensure all documents are listed in a single easy-to-find index of some sort.

Agree with the occasional relaxed "coffee chat", and having a repository full of good documentation, but...

>If you aren't having at least one video call a day something is probably wrong.

That seems excessive to me, especially if everyone is also staying connected via chat, emails, etc. Weekly meetings are about my limit, considering I also have work to do, meetings with external stakeholders, ad-hoc meetings, etc.

> It's better if this chat has history which expires in 24 hours.

Probably wise to run that by counsel.

> It's better if this chat has history which expires in 24 hours.

This sounds fun to have a b.s./watercooler chat channel. It'd be cool if Slack had that feature but I wonder if that's a non-starter for corporate reasons.

> If you aren't having at least one video call a day something is probably wrong.

Depends on how you work? A video call every day would be too much for me, but two a week seems alright. I'm also not a fan of daily meetings in person either, though.

> It's better if this chat has history which expires in 24 hours.

Your legal and HR departments will be much less enthusiastic about this idea if your org is big enough to have either.

Workspace Owners and Org Owners can adjust retention settings for public channels. Private Channels and DMs can also be set by members if allowed by admins.

it is insane that we can have face to face and even video meetings that are not logged, but we can't have text based chats like that? what if we meet on IRC? should that be illegal without a bot to log the conversation?

At least one video call a day is more about socialization than work; chat and email doesn't really strengthen psychological feelings of connection to the team. Regularly putting a face to the nickname is important.

I consider small meetings (say <10 people) within the team, ad-hoc or otherwise, to count against the once a day minimum. It doesn't need to be a purely social call to be effective.

My vague understanding of the related laws is that as long as the company has a consistent retention policy and is under neither a court order to increase retention nor retaining records for specific incidents as part of policy, that a short retention period is fine.

I expect legal would actually be happy about shorter retention periods since it makes their job easier. HR of course wants infinite retention periods because it gives them a bigger stick, but universally longer retention is not the only way to address those desires.

Different people want different levels of socialization attached to their job duties. If the meetings are a requirement, having them daily is too much for my taste and is more likely to strengthen my psychological feelings of being annoyed.

In any case, not having a daily meeting does not mean something is wrong, as the parent poster stated.

Sadly, I'm sure that the only reason that face to face meetings are not logged is technical capability more than anything else. The law just hasn't metaphorically noticed yet that those can all be recorded to. It's still on the pricy side at the moment. (Don't forget not every business is a tech business that still reasonably expects 20%+ profit margins.)

I often bang on the fact that laws made in the 20th century are often written against an implicit background of what is physically possible that people underestimate, like, the number of laws that people nominally break every day but are impossible to enforce because we don't all have an assigned police presence assigned to us. We should not casually assume that once we acquire the capability to enforce these things that we should. Another example of this is that while I understand the drive to document what a company is doing, we need a certain amount of ability to speak to each other off the record, even in a corporate environment. Yes, it is used to do bad things, but we are humans, we need that slack, and it is used to do good things too.

“Slack” under the law is quite an interesting concept. “Inherent logistic pseudo-discretion” might make me think less about a friendly guy smoking a pipe, but it has some disadvantages, too.

I’m interested by the fact that you and I could travel to Nebraska and whisper to each other in a cornfield in ways that violate the law left and right. Why is this not a huge problem? Because inherent in the logistics of getting there is a presumption that most law enforcement will use their discretion not to care.

Is cornfield-whispering becoming more powerful as other comms get weaker? Is it becoming less powerful as fewer of us choose to go to those lengths? Interesting stuff to consider in the golden age of surveillance.

Set it to retain (for legal purposes) but make invisible (even to CxOs). You can still pull the data with a proper request.

The friendly guy smoking a pipe was merely ahead of his time. If we are flinging ourselves into an AI-driven total surveillance state we're all going to miss slack more than ever. Hopefully if anyone survives the AI-driven total surveillance state will eventually realize that with the degree of control it has it doesn't have to crack down on literally everything just because it can.

well, it depends on the country. in germany this kind of surveillance is illegal unless ordered by a judge, and there is a high bar to get that order. even at work recording of conversations is generally illegal to protect employees privacy. however i think logging of text chats and storing emails is legal. and i believe some people want to make it mandatory.

it is a constant back and forth between both sides.

earlier i have made the argument why written communication should be treated just like the spoken one:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41913176

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41912666

in the culture series iain banks paints an optimistic picture of an AI driven idealistic utopian post scarcity society where nothing is secret, from the AIs at least.

some of the ideas seem to be that in post scarcity many crimes become meaningless, and that the AIs keep your privacy.

Note that not everyone likes being filmed. I somehow find it quite different to meet irl compared to being on camera, perhaps because then I can observe what they're looking at. Video calling is like being on stage. (I don't mind being on stage much, just like how video is not a big deal either, but the feeling is similar)

I've had a lot of productive days where I wasn't forced to broadcast my face for an hour. Can you tell me what I was doing wrong?