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238 points aml183 | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | 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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neilv ◴[] 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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eddd-ddde ◴[] 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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bezier-curve ◴[] No.42187840[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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1. saxelsen ◴[] No.42188171[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.