Hacker News Reader

Comment by cj | Hacker News Reader

Our company is fully remote. We have an always-on Google Hangout that everyone is on all day.

The key for this to work is that everyone has their mic + camera turned off except when we have a scheduled meeting (ie. standups, team meetings).

Throughout the day, people often pop in the hangout by unmuting themselves to ask the team a quick question, which also works great. In practice, this doesn't cause very many interruptions because people know to ping someone 1-1 if they have a question meant for a specific person rather than the whole team.

Even on days when everyone's mic + camera is muted all day except for standup, it's still effective at creating the feeling that you aren't sitting there working alone (I guess it acts as a reminder that you really do have teammates working alongside you, albeit virtually).

View on HN

I find I have to keep these sorts of always-on things (some kind of text chat aside) on a dedicated device (iPad, another laptop) or they drive me nuts. The resource use of Yet Another (probably) webtech memory hog in the age of 750MB-memory-use browser tabs and three electron apps to interact with your company's basic work tools, and a kind of constant nagging in the back of my head knowing they're open on my main machine.

I enjoy remote work because I want to feel alone – I can't help but think preferences like this alienate some of your employees. Like me, if I worked with you.

What level of human communication would be non-alienating for you?

Slack with access to video calls at need.

I've worked remotely for over 8 years at 3 different companies. Two have had some variation of this (Hipchat/Slack + Google Hangout / GoToMeeting or Slack calls) and it works great. We have a daily standup meeting on video and then we can jump on a video call through out the day if we find a need for it.

Otherwise, I have clear focus through out the day - I can choose whether to respond to slack notifications or turn them off and work through them later.

I wonder if these remote working tools come from people who worked in an open office space. I have an office, and before that I always had a cube. If somebody wants to start a conversation it starts by knocking on the door, or the entry area to my cube.

I'm not used to the idea that somebody on my team can just start talking and assume the team will hear them. So I don't feel the need for that kind of communication with remote employees.

That's a fantastic idea! there's something like focusmate.com to do something similar, 1 hour blocks of being on video with another person, both of you share your goals in the first minute, and then mute microphones, work and then recap at the end of the 50 minutes session

Reply on news.ycombinator.com