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

238 points aml183 | 1 comments | 15 Nov 24 19:17 UTC | HN request time: 0.21s | 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 ◴[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. m0rphling ◴[19 Nov 24 21:27 UTC] No.42188264[source]▶
I get that a lot of people see Slack as a panacea for all communications, but too often it ends up a dumping ground for anything and everything for which searches might not be as effective over time. Also, that data in Slack can and will be a liability risk to you when it comes to data privacy, compliance, and any litigation hold requests. Do understand that larger organizations (especially FAANG) will purge slack conversation data after a certain period of time for these reasons.

Finally, I feel DHH's article on group chat still provides valid criticisms and recommendations to retain your sanity and prevent the feeling of FOMO: https://signalvnoise.com/svn3/is-group-chat-making-you-sweat...