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238 points aml183 | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source

We are a remote company. Everything is going well. No plans to be in person, but I’d say we can do a better job at communicating. Any tips or articles to read?
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great_wubwub ◴[] No.42150637[source]
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.

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1. quectophoton ◴[] No.42151097[source]
> 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.