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

238 points aml183 | 4 comments | 15 Nov 24 19:17 UTC | HN request time: 0.804s | 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 ◴[15 Nov 24 20:32 UTC] 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. vundercind ◴[19 Nov 24 17:37 UTC] No.42186072[source]▶
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.
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2. mvdtnz ◴[19 Nov 24 18:11 UTC] No.42186459[source]▶
I'm not sure where you read that but it certainly wasn't in the comment you responded to.
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3. vundercind ◴[19 Nov 24 18:42 UTC] No.42186769[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.

"Inherently"

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

4. Aachen ◴[19 Nov 24 23:50 UTC] No.42189341[source]▶
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