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

238 points aml183 | 6 comments | 15 Nov 24 19:17 UTC | HN request time: 0.224s | 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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why-el ◴[19 Nov 24 17:21 UTC] No.42185886[source]▶
I learned the following:

- Everything public in Slack. Create a fun-sounding moto that discourages DMs. Even if a DM happens, and the back and forth resulted in a consensus, share that consensus in a public channel (which makes it searchable).

- Record your team meetings, preferably with software that can AI-summarize. Folks on vacation / leave can get the rundown easily.

- Encourage the sharing of solutions to various problems (technical or otherwise) in Slack. If a developer is stuck, and someone helped them in a huddle or a pairing app, share the solution afterwards (again, makes it searchable). Discourage the over-sharing of screenshots (of your application and other things). Again, not searchable. If one must be shared, describe it. For instance, many devs share a picture of a stack-trace. Not super helpful for others. Grab the text and dump it to Slack.

- Have a good pairing software setup, unblocks for when Slack back and forth is too tedious. I like Tuple (tuple.app).

- Connect your issue tracker to Slack, if you use one, makes creating issues easy. Linear does this well.

- If feasible, have your team meet in person, cadence up to you, but at least once. Meeting the people in real life humanizes them more. I know it sounds silly to say, but it's very true in my experience. Your people will seem even lovelier.

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patrickhogan1 ◴[19 Nov 24 18:16 UTC] No.42186525[source]▶
Great list. Add a few..

1. Meet in person every quarter. Fly people into the HQ if there is one. If not just rent meeting place.

2. Have a well written handbook like Gitlab that explains how your company works.

3. Onboarding program - remote onboarding sucks. Do onboarding in person (if you can) or assign an onboarding buddy if you can’t.

4. Slack Is Great But (SIGB) - teach people that they don’t need to read everything. Many people get overwhelmed. Great engineers don’t read everything nor should they. Let everyone know that it’s a shared brain or knowledge source - and it’s ok to turn it off to focus.

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1. diggan ◴[19 Nov 24 18:26 UTC] No.42186608[source]▶
> 1. Gitlab somehow statistically tracks public / DMs. Haven’t implemented at my startup but if anyone knows a simple way to do - please let me know.

If you use Slack, I think the admin panel already contains the number of messages in channels VS DMs. Long time I last saw it myself, but I think it was missing a breakdown on how many members of the Slack received the channel/"public" messages (as not everyone is part of every channel, 2 member channels vs 200 member channels for example), maybe it looks different now.

> 5. Slack Is Great But (SIGB) - teach people that they don’t need to read everything. Many people get overwhelmed

I think this happens when Slack is the "source of truth", because the ephemeral feeling it gives since it's a chat ultimately. If you instead use a wiki/whatever to actually collect things that are important, there is less stress about possibly missing out on important things. Make summaries by week/month and it'll be even easier for people to catch up easily, which means even less stress :)

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2. patrickhogan1 ◴[19 Nov 24 19:32 UTC] No.42187211[source]▶
Thank you! I'll check out the Slack admin panel! I removed that item from my main message because I was concerned some people might misinterpret "tracking" as something invasive (e.g., reading messages). What you're describing is exactly what I'm looking for—just the stats—to support public disclosure and knowledge sharing.
3. Buttons840 ◴[19 Nov 24 20:36 UTC] No.42187830[source]▶
The "source of truth" and the place you post dank memes and ask what people are doing for the weekend--those shouldn't be the same place. Slack is not a good "source of truth".
4. mozman ◴[20 Nov 24 08:42 UTC] No.42191921[source]▶
Slack is meant to be addictive. I only use the web client and modify it with tampermonkey

All notifications disabled and I only read when pinged. davison updates are the only mechanism allowed.

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5. j33zusjuice ◴[20 Nov 24 14:09 UTC] No.42194054[source]▶
How the hell do you get by with that? I’m jealous. I’ve gotten pinged by my fucking EVP for not responding to questions in chat fast enough (non-critical, too!). At least no one gets on me for missing emails. I don’t even read those.
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6. diggan ◴[20 Nov 24 14:52 UTC] No.42194392{3}[source]▶
> How the hell do you get by with that?

You have a company policy that allows that. For example, if anything is decided in Slack, it has to be "codified" somewhere else, like a wiki. Then you'll be able to justify not reading through all messages.