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

238 points aml183 | 3 comments | 15 Nov 24 19:17 UTC | HN request time: 0.808s | 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. sanderjd ◴[19 Nov 24 21:59 UTC] No.42188551[source]▶
I think "everything in public" is actually bad advice. Not everyone is comfortable saying everything valuable that they have to say, to a large audience. It is very intimidating to ask questions in a channel with a lot of members. "Too bad, get over it" is not the optimal answer.

What I do believe is good is to encourage things to be public by default, and to encourage people to be stingy about what they make private.

I think a good balance is:

1. Private DMs with your manager, for sure. This is no different than why managers should have a set schedule of closed-door 1:1s with their reports. Sometimes there is awkward stuff to discuss with managers, and there needs to be a venue for that.

2. Private group for small "leaf node" teams. This is IMO the best place to share "I'm sick today" or "I'll be on vacation on these dates". In my experience, people prefer to share this kind of stuff with a smaller group, and I think that is reasonable. This also gives newer or otherwise more insecure team members a less intimidating place to ask questions they're worried are dumb.

3. Pretty much everything else public.

YMMV of course, but personally, I've seen problems from both too-private and too-public cultures.

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2. sarchertech ◴[19 Nov 24 22:32 UTC] No.42188801[source]▶
Yeah there are plenty of things that shouldn’t be said in a public. Problems that haven’t been verified yet, ideas that haven’t been through etc…

If your company is big enough there’s bound to be someone above you who will hold you to the first version of an idea you threw out or who will freak out about something that may not really be a problem.

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3. crystal_revenge ◴[19 Nov 24 23:05 UTC] No.42189018[source]▶
> Yeah there are plenty of things that shouldn’t be said in a public.

It is worth pointing that one of the value adds for any company using Slack is that nothing is private. Anyone with an admin role can read any conversation, DM or otherwise, and this is considered a good thing since it allows the company visibility into employee communications in cases of illicit activity.

What's odd is very few teams I've been on have made this fact very clear. Which reminds me a bit of Dr Strangelove when the doomsday machine is kept a secret for a birthday surprise. The entire point of being able to monitor private comms is as a deterrence. Employees are less like to send a message that might be considered inappropriate in the first place if they know they're being monitored.