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

243 points aml183 | 1 comments | 15 Nov 24 19:17 UTC | HN request time: 0.2s | 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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KronisLV ◴[16 Nov 24 10:06 UTC] No.42155607[source]▶
> Discourage 1:1 and private communication unless really necessary, especially for engineering topics.

Working at an established org right now, where the team is still remote first. I tried suggesting this, but got pushback and the team actually settled on the opposite. For example, they want any optional changes (e.g. suggestions) in pull requests not to be left as comments but discussed in private which 90% of the time means calls. They seem to dislike discussion threads in Slack and want meetings for things instead. I’ve also noticed things like the person who reviews a pull request being the one who has to merge it and essentially take responsibility for it, versus just giving approval and the author merging it and making sure everything is okay after CD.

I’m very much the opposite and prefer to have things in writing and like asynchronous communication. But when it is written messages, usually people either ask for a call or just do “Hey.” I actually made this a while ago hah: https://quick-answers.kronis.dev Either way, people also really seem to dislike writing README files, or all that many code comments, or making the occasional onboarding script or introducing tooling to do some things automatically. I don't get it.

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1. pavel_lishin ◴[19 Nov 24 18:09 UTC] No.42186441[source]▶
> they want any optional changes (e.g. suggestions) in pull requests not to be left as comments but discussed in private which 90% of the time means calls.

This sounds like a hellish existence to me, tbh.

I'm not saying that either my preference or these folks' preference is objectively correct, but I am saying that I don't think I could work in this sort of environment long-term.