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238 points aml183 | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.263s | 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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1. 7k5kyrty45 ◴[] No.42193704[source]
>Record your team meetings, preferably with software that can AI-summarize

If the summarizations are trustworthy it sounds like a good idea, however I've yet to see a reliable AI-summarizer that doesen't result in very high costs when wrong assumptions are made because of invalid or downright sabotaging summaries or generated documentation.

I believe minimizing the synchronized time people need to spend together in any task is best; have the least meetings possible while blowing away obstacles with as few people as is necessary. You can save an unbelieveable amount of unproductive time people would be locked in meetings they don't belong or contribute to.