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243 points aml183 | 1 comments | | HN request time: 1.034s | 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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why-el ◴[] 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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aen1 ◴[] 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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1. pasc1878 ◴[] 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.