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

238 points aml183 | 8 comments | 15 Nov 24 19:17 UTC | HN request time: 1.084s | source | bottom

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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paxys ◴[15 Nov 24 20:51 UTC] No.42150868[source]▶
Make conversations public by default. If you use Slack, make team channels, project channels, announcement channels etc. all public. Discourage 1:1 and private communication unless really necessary, especially for engineering topics. This single change will have an immense impact on overall company culture.
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1. marliechiller ◴[19 Nov 24 17:21 UTC] No.42185891[source]▶
I found this can have negative consequences for more timid employees, junior hires or new joiners. People dont like sounding stupid in public, especially not in front of people they dont know. No matter how much of a safe culture you instil, human nature tends to prevail here and you get the loudest personalities being the the users of those public channels whilst others either dont ask those important questions or seek back channels anyway
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2. vel0city ◴[19 Nov 24 17:31 UTC] No.42186014[source]▶
Yeah, I'd agree you want a healthy balance of 1 on 1 and group conversation. A quick aside is one thing, and if it is a question that should lead to documentation then documentation should be written for it instead of just assuming someone is going to search through a year+ of slack messages in some public channels.

Even in person, not every conversation is good to be had in front of the large group for a variety of reasons.

3. mvdtnz ◴[19 Nov 24 18:07 UTC] No.42186424[source]▶
Then these employees should use it as a growth opportunity. If you want to be effective at work you need to accept you'll be uncomfortable at times.
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4. aen1 ◴[19 Nov 24 18:52 UTC] No.42186850[source]▶
1000% agree. I'd rather spin my wheels for an hour on Google than ask a silly question in public
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5. hn_throwaway_99 ◴[19 Nov 24 19:24 UTC] No.42187109[source]▶
I think this is something that can really be mitigated by more senior people modeling good behavior.

For example, as a principal engineer on a new project or working on something I wasn't familiar with, I'd go out of my way to ask things along the lines of "Hey, this might be a dumb question, but I'm new to X so could you explain how I do ..." I think this goes a long way to building up a culture of psychological safety on a team.

6. negus ◴[19 Nov 24 19:29 UTC] No.42187174[source]▶
I would like to work with you. Asking searchable things may be considered disrespectful to one's time
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7. griomnib ◴[19 Nov 24 19:38 UTC] No.42187257{3}[source]▶
Given the rapidly declining quality of search results, and the subtle hallucinations of LLM on advanced topics, I think that attitude is outdated.

We’ve gone backwards in terms of the internet being reliable. Human experience is still useful.

8. 7k5kyrty45 ◴[20 Nov 24 13:26 UTC] No.42193747[source]▶
Hamfisting an ideology to human nature just doesen't seem to work no matter how nice the end result could be. People don't generally do uncomfortable things unless they are forced to, take for example literally anything else in life; entire fields of professions exist because we don't like cleaning thing X or Y