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238 points aml183 | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0.611s | 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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patrickhogan1 ◴[] No.42186525[source]
Great list. Add a few..

1. Meet in person every quarter. Fly people into the HQ if there is one. If not just rent meeting place.

2. Have a well written handbook like Gitlab that explains how your company works.

3. Onboarding program - remote onboarding sucks. Do onboarding in person (if you can) or assign an onboarding buddy if you can’t.

4. Slack Is Great But (SIGB) - teach people that they don’t need to read everything. Many people get overwhelmed. Great engineers don’t read everything nor should they. Let everyone know that it’s a shared brain or knowledge source - and it’s ok to turn it off to focus.

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1. lanstein ◴[] No.42188763[source]
s/Slack/Zulip
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2. stavros ◴[] No.42188997[source]
Seconded, Zulip's model is fantastic. It makes it a breeze to catch up or coordinate.
3. wellthisisgreat ◴[] No.42191577[source]
Zulip is amazing