How to Build a Remote Team: Resources and Advice from Remote Companies | Hacker News Reader

How to Build a Remote Team: Resources and Advice from Remote Companies

remotehub.io

77 pointsraunometsa15 comments

How about be willing to hire experienced engineers who don't have remote experience?

Every time I've applied for a remote job, this seems to have been the sticking point. I'd just like employers to start with the assumption that I'm a professional who wouldn't slack off all day if I didn't have someone to babysit me.

I think this just depends on the employer. I saw that statistic from an Upwork report. 40% of companies are not good with remote. If you have ever worked out of a coffee shop or home, you have remote experience!

Just lie.

I just wanted to buy a ticket for the Running Remote conference, and then I saw that there are only on-site tickets ...

One thing I have been thinking about is that remote companies will have difficulty with leadership that doesn’t understand the tech they are working with. When I look at my current company even one or two levels up there are people who have no understanding of a lot of technology and aren’t able to make quick judgement calls. So they need a lot of meetings and salesmanship within the company to make decisions. When I look at successful remote companies like Automatic, 37 Signals or StackOverflow they all have very strong leaders who can’t be bullshitted in technology but have a pretty good idea what they want to do. They also can judge the output of their people. It’s hard to be the boss of a remote worker whose work you don’t understand. How can you tell if somebody is good or not?

Building a successful remote company is no different than building a successful on-site company.

It's about culture, and about setting the right processes with the right toolset.

Establishing a great communication flow [1] is key for remote companies, and you have to help your teams to:

· Create a community feeling

· Get to see each other face-to-face daily

· Be open about feelings

I recently wrote a few tips on how to set the right environment for remote work [2].

[1] https://standups.io/blog/communicating-better-in-distributed...

[2] https://standups.io/blog/a-productive-environment-for-remote...

The things you need to do to succeed may not be different, but how you go about it obviously is. So I don't think it's fair to say that it's "no different".

Also, your posts you linked to are kind of fluff pieces (no offense intended). For example "By creating a strong community feeling and a sense of commitment to your company, your employees are excited about team calls and much more open with one another". Yeah ok, but how? I don't think creating community is a point of contention, but you're not explaining how to do so in a distributed environment.

we are just building a new remote team, and what we are missing is a good/affordable collaborative whiteboard or mindmap solution.

something where we can visually structure our work.

for the rest we have etherpad (as alfernative to google docs) and gitlab with all its tools to structure issues

Made a virtual office space for my team for just these reasons! https://www.mydigitaloffice.io/

With over 40% of companies allowing some weekdays to be at home, this is the future!

COOL! How's this compare to Sococo?

The easy answer is just try it and see. It is free to try!

Sococo has been around forever and always gets a major eye-roll from the HN community whenever mentioned in a thread.

But I don't think I know a single engineer that has actually used it.

I like the idea of seeing who is chatting with who. If I'm working on something, and I have two colleagues that are also working on the same project and I can virtually see them chatting, I'd probably approach to see if there's anything I know or if they're discussing ideas.

The article appears to end prematurely - last item I see is "Start Slowly"

same for me. it feels like there should be more

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