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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: 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 ◴[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. jandrewrogers ◴[19 Nov 24 22:38 UTC] No.42188843[source]▶
The biggest problem with Slack, by far, is that it is effectively ephemeral. An enormous amount of valuable content in Slack quickly becomes undiscoverable for all practical purposes. This creates significant challenges if history matters and this only gets worse as the number of people on it grows. In every organization I've participated in where Slack is the central "everything box", they had to invent parallel processes and systems so that things don't get lost in Slack.

Slack should be treated like the super-IRC that it is, it is poorly designed to be the nominal system of record that people try to use it as.

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2. crystal_revenge ◴[19 Nov 24 22:45 UTC] No.42188884[source]▶
I hear people say this all the time, but at multiple jobs in the past Slack has acted as my own internal Stack Overflow.

Whenever I got a weird build issue, or some error that was related to internal code, I would just search Slack and the majority of the time I would get the answer I was looking for, provided that answer was a problem in the past.

Likewise I've found Slack search invaluable when it comes to remembering conversations I had with someone months ago.

Beyond just search, I've seen teams have lots of luck with task specific channels for major projects. It keeps the chatter low and the information high.

Ultimately I think my favorite thing about Slack is that it is a pretty good de facto internal knowledge base (better than poorly maintained confluence pages for sure).

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3. wingerlang ◴[20 Nov 24 11:14 UTC] No.42192794[source]▶
Same here. Slack provides answers way more often than Confluence. I tend to write conclusions to threads or discussion in a somewhat keyword heavy manner, simply so that I know I can search for it in a year or two.