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

238 points aml183 | 9 comments | 15 Nov 24 19:17 UTC | HN request time: 1.072s | 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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1. aen1 ◴[19 Nov 24 18:50 UTC] No.42186829[source]▶
Totally disagree. For introverts, "everything public in slack" means that I would rather not say something than have 50 people see my thoughts/rants/silly questions in public
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2. pasc1878 ◴[19 Nov 24 18:57 UTC] No.42186891[source]▶
The issue is what is best for the company. If a person is not asking or answering questions then they are not a valuable member of the team.

Keeping stuff secret and hidden does not help the project. If your team is 50 you are probably not the only one asking the question and several people would be able to answer the question, limiting to one just annoys the one you asked if they are busy and someone else is not.

3. neilv ◴[19 Nov 24 19:22 UTC] No.42187094[source]▶
Are you sure that's introversion, rather than shyness or insecurity? The answer might help with the solution.
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4. neilv ◴[19 Nov 24 19:37 UTC] No.42187248{3}[source]▶
1. As I said, the answer might help with the solution.

2. It's potentially misleading people on HN (which is full of employers and people's colleagues), about how other people with certain labels work and think.

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5. eddd-ddde ◴[19 Nov 24 19:45 UTC] No.42187333[source]▶
Agreed, you are collaborating with a team, if you are not comfortable sharing thoughts how are you gonna be comfortable sharing _code_.
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6. ◴[19 Nov 24 20:27 UTC] No.42187741{4}[source]▶
7. bezier-curve ◴[19 Nov 24 20:37 UTC] No.42187840{3}[source]▶
There's also such a thing as oversharing context with people that are already burdened with a lot of context related to their own tasks. Splitting off into private conversations helps keep irrelevant members from context switching.
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8. saxelsen ◴[19 Nov 24 21:17 UTC] No.42188171{4}[source]▶
From my experience working remotely for 2 years, this can be accomplished by starting a thread with a descript title and posting the body (with the context) inside the thread. Just like reading across a bunch of article headlines on HN.

For ongoing discussions about a topic, start a channel and perhaps prefix it "temp-" to indicate that it's a temporary channel.

9. lomereiter ◴[20 Nov 24 06:45 UTC] No.42191346[source]▶
IMO the actual difference between introverts and extroverts is that the latter use @here and @channel a lot more frequently