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

One thing people miss about remote work is that it's inherently transactional. Show up to a meeting, get or give what's needed, then go back in your hole. This is nice but for many people the lack of genuine social interaction is a killer.

A few jobs ago we set up Donut (donut.com) to set up a couple 15- or 30-minute 1:1s per week and tried to stick to the rule that we weren't supposed to talk about work, just chat about whatever. A replacement for break room chatter, not Yet Another Meeting. It didn't always work very well but when it did, it was great.

Some of the best conversations I had were with an autistic SRE who spent his first month telling everyone how autistic he was in case we needed to know. He did better virtually than he would have in person - lack of eye contact due to camera angles, maybe? So yeah, this has value even for you neuro-atypical, "I don't need chatter, just code" types.

All work (in-office or remote) is inherently transactional. If I am in an office, I have to pretend to have genuine social interactions with people. Social bonds made between colleagues have will happen organically. No in-office mandatory fun.

ALL work is transactional. I solve your problems, you pay me money.

I have family and friends for "social interaction" and "meaning". I do not seek that from a job, nor do I want a job that claims to provide it.

Any recruiter that tells me "our company is like a family" gets a reply that says "so i can cry on your shoulder in case of a bad breakup, and you'll help me move furniture?" and then gets blocked.

Donuts are okay, I've used it at 2 different companies now, but I inevitably find myself disabling it after 2-3 months on the job, usually when I start getting repeats. Maybe it would be okay if you could silently veto who you got paired with. No offense to some of my coworkers but I groan when paired with someone who isn't very conversational where I know I'm going to have to shoulder the burden of finding something to talk about.

This is such a simplistic take. There is a huge gulf between "We are a family" saccharine corporate BS and "I am a cog in the machine. I am forced to make conversation. Hello Coworker How Do You Do" robo-employee mnemonic.

Personally I prefer to work with people who have a sense of humor, self-awareness about the importance (or lack of) of our work, have some interesting things to talk about it, can be surprising, etc. They don't have to be my best friend ever but I don't want to be bored.

I think you can read between the lines of the OC.

They obviously meant social interactions in remote environments are inherently transactional.

You never make a zoom call just to say hi to your coworker when your mouse moves past the icon, but you might say hi if you walk past their desk.

I never pretend that co-workers are my friends. I just understand they are co-workers and treat them as such. so then if I was forced to have mandatory socialization and fun I would quite despise it. if I wanted to interact with them, I would reach out and schedule one-on-ones as would happen IRL

100%

> This is nice but for many people the lack of genuine social interaction is a killer.

Emphasis mine.

This difference of what people consider genuine or not, some people even including the medium itself in their definition of "genuine", sounds like another possible cultural difference that must be kept in mind when communicating with others.

  > but you might say hi if you walk past their desk

No. I would never interrupt someone's flow for a "hi". What an insane take. Those like you, interrupting us for a "hi" and throwing us off a good thought process when you "walk by", is one of the main things which make us all want to work remotely, far from you, protected by a need to have a purpose for your "hi".

The "we're like family" phrase can mean many different things in the work environment, so don't read too deeply into it.

That being said, it's often a sign of poor management; managers will use "we're like family" instead of addressing problems that they need to address. It can create a very stressful situation if you're a high performer, because the expectations and handholding quickly get unreasonable.

(The song "Surface Pressure" from Encanto explains the situation exactly.)

For example, I once worked with a manager who used the "we're like family" excuse when incoming tickets were incomprehensible and missing critical information. He was just copping out of his job, which was to set processes and make sure new employees knew the processes. Instead, his expectation was that I would handhold the organization through the ticketing system.

You sound like a joy to have as a coworker…

Again… read between the lines. Think a little bit into what i said. Think about it a little critically

There are important ad hoc interactions that you have in an office that you don’t when you’re remote.

I personally prefer remote, but recognize that it’s easier to collaborate in real time in person.

> I [...] recognize that it’s easier to collaborate in real time in person.

Not everyone is you and not everyone agrees with that evidence-free claim

there is nobody in my family on whose shoulder i can cry except my wife. the friends that i have where i can do that i all met through work. and yes, coworkers have helped me move too.

"we are a family" is still a warning sign though.

it could mean that the team is a tight knit group that a newcomer will have difficulty to break into, especially an introvert.

or it could mean certain expectations towards each other that i would not understand or be comfortable with because i have not experienced any family like that

so instead of rejecting the idea i would ask some questions to find out what they mean by that.

there is a middle ground. if i walk past you and you make eye contact, i say hi. if you are focused on your screen ignoring me, then i remain silent

It’s both well known and self evident that communication is richer in person for the vast majority of people.

Not really something worth arguing about.

Water is also wet, but I don’t have a specific source to link for that.

Please no. This sounds awful tbh.

I miss donut. Is it still around?

Feeks like a relic of the early pandemic times (although there are countless other tools like it now).

That doesn’t account for folks who fail to make eye contact (of which there are many in tech)

it does, because i won't be greeting them, which is exactly what the poster above is asking for

I cannot relate to the notion that interactions over the Internet must be sterile and non-social. It's like reading someone assert that 2+2=5. My brain breaks trying to process it and starts contorting to figure out how it might somehow be true from some off-kilter perspective when it straightforwardly isn't.

I'm not sure where you read that but it certainly wasn't in the comment you responded to.

After reading your comments I have decided if I'm ever a recruiter I'm going to say "we're like a family" on every communication just to weed out folks like you.

> One thing people miss about remote work is that it's inherently transactional. Show up to a meeting, get or give what's needed, then go back in your hole. This is nice but for many people the lack of genuine social interaction is a killer.

"Inherently"

It's simply the premise on which the entire post is based.

I think that you can have genuine social interactions remotely, but that it takes a certain kind of person. Most people, even most younger ones IMO, just aren’t accustomed to interacting with people online via chat. But people who are eg prolific Reddit/twitter/etc users, or heavy users of discord/IRC/chat-heavy MMOs do really well IME (and yeah, a lot of these people are neurodivergent). You also probably either need to be really passionate about your work or have some kind of common interest to chat about to build a genuine connection, and not to be so shy that you self-censor yourself (/have a culture that doesn’t force people to self-censor).

Video calls are nice but I personally think they’re functionally the same as meeting in person. The biggest difference between remote vs in-person work is how you interact with people outside of formally scheduled meetings (eg showing people how to do something or casually conversing with them). Regular “hang out” meetings can’t fill this role, you really need something like chat IMO.

At prior jobs I’d say usually only 5-10% of people I came across directly at work were “good at chat”. If you could figure out how to filter for these people when hiring you could run a remote company very well, and have a strong culture and sense of community.

Remote work feels a lot like Reddit. I don't actually know any of these people I work with, I just have very shallow interactions with them. I started coming in to the office after years of remote work and its unreal how much more social and friendly it is. People who I would hardly have more than the most transactional of chats with on Teams are now sharing their personal lives freely.

I'm Gen Z so remote work has been most of my work history. I'm just genuinely shocked at how much more effective and fun it is to work with people in person.

I can

I've got friends who work great over chat. Beyond keeping up the conversation just like someone would irl, the choice or lack of a smiley, the lengths of messages, sentence capitalisation and punctuation, timing of messages and read markers or typing notifications... everything combined works the same as nonverbal communication: how they are feeling, are they busy or can I interrupt, are they at their desk or on the move... It's not that different to sitting across from them

Other people, though, don't work this way. A few aren't as familiar with computers so the cues are hidden under a layer of technical struggles; others simply don't seem to communicate well by text. As colleagues, you're somewhat forced to make it work and so the success rate is much higher than with friends in my experience (probably by saying things more explicitly and less nonverbally), but it can still be a damper and make conversations transactional and sterile

Especially if you had a disagreement or misunderstanding with someone you're not very familiar with, the more-universal nonverbal IRL communication is easier to pick up on than their digital cues. Calling is a decent middle ground but requires synchronicity (often worth it, of course)

The internet doesn't need to make things sterile, but for many people, it does seem to, so I can understand what the person means even if it isn't my only experience

You're not getting genuine social interactions from people who are paid to spend time with you. If you want genuine social interaction, get a dog.

You're being downvoted because you aren't being a team player. Now please sign this PIP from your "family".

Love it, love the spite, but you will actually legitimately lose people who don't want to join a cult. If you wouldn't drive me to the airport for free, then we're not family, sorry. Save that term for, like... people who aren't paid to spend time with you.

I think you mean get a cat.