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

243 points aml183 | 3 comments | 15 Nov 24 19:17 UTC | HN request time: 0.501s | 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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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. lutorm ◴[19 Nov 24 17:55 UTC] No.42186302[source]▶
My experience (being fully remote for over a decade) is that it's extremely distracting to have all discussions public. It creates a lot of noise and it's very hard for people to not get drawn into conversations that doesn't directly affect them. It's definitely good to have finished conclusions available for everyone, but the "sausage making" is more distracting than useful.

Of course it depends on the size of the team we're talking about.

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2. Cthulhu_ ◴[19 Nov 24 18:26 UTC] No.42186609[source]▶
It depends on your self-discipline as well, as in, leave Slack or whatever alone for X hours a day, leave channels that aren't important, and if the volume is higher than you can manage in a reasonable time, Slack has AI powered summarization tools nowadays which are pretty decent. Ultimately though, your attention span and information management is your own responsibility, nobody else will filter it for you.
3. pasc1878 ◴[19 Nov 24 19:02 UTC] No.42186931[source]▶
It helps to have lots of channels that specialise. I was effectively remote for 15 years (I was in London other in US). ` If you are concentrating then you don't notice the chats, unless they are made urgent. When your focus has finished look at the channels that are nearest your speciality or sub team.