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238 points aml183 | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.213s | 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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paxys ◴[] No.42150868[source]
Make conversations public by default. If you use Slack, make team channels, project channels, announcement channels etc. all public. Discourage 1:1 and private communication unless really necessary, especially for engineering topics. This single change will have an immense impact on overall company culture.
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KronisLV ◴[] No.42155607[source]
> Discourage 1:1 and private communication unless really necessary, especially for engineering topics.

Working at an established org right now, where the team is still remote first. I tried suggesting this, but got pushback and the team actually settled on the opposite. For example, they want any optional changes (e.g. suggestions) in pull requests not to be left as comments but discussed in private which 90% of the time means calls. They seem to dislike discussion threads in Slack and want meetings for things instead. I’ve also noticed things like the person who reviews a pull request being the one who has to merge it and essentially take responsibility for it, versus just giving approval and the author merging it and making sure everything is okay after CD.

I’m very much the opposite and prefer to have things in writing and like asynchronous communication. But when it is written messages, usually people either ask for a call or just do “Hey.” I actually made this a while ago hah: https://quick-answers.kronis.dev Either way, people also really seem to dislike writing README files, or all that many code comments, or making the occasional onboarding script or introducing tooling to do some things automatically. I don't get it.

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1. Gigachad ◴[] No.42188414[source]
Async PR reviews are an absolute nightmare. Very simple conversations take forever. Reviewers will see something that’s not an actual problem, just something they are confused about and leave a comment rather than approve, and then your PR is blocked for a minimum of most of the day while you want for them to see your response. I just approve any PR that doesn’t have obvious issues now.

Meanwhile if you have a call to discuss it or do it in person, you can rapidly answer any questions and get the reviewer to fully understand what they are looking at.