Building Remote Teams for Startups | Hacker News Reader

Building Remote Teams for Startups

vadimkravcenko.com

154 pointsbndr88 comments

Good article. Having a lot of experience managing remote teams, I wanted to expand on this point:

> Try to focus on the employees who thrive in such environments rather than those few bad apples.

You can’t let the bad apples define the work experience for everyone, but you do need to identify them and remove them as fast as possible so they don’t poison the well.

One thing I didn’t realize at first was that remote work attracts bad apples at a much higher rate than in-person work. There’s an idea that remote jobs are an easy way to get away with doing less work, so you’ll be flooded with applicants who read books like “The Four Hour Workweek” and think your remote job is their ticket to traveling the world while they answer occasional emails from their phones. Or more commonly, a ticket to working a few hours (or less!) per day while they try to convince their boss that the task is just harder than it looks.

Good performance management is important in any job, but it’s even more critical in remote work. If you let remote slackers thrive at your company, the good employees will notice. They’ll quickly burn out after working normal amounts plus also picking up the tasks that aren’t being done by the remote slackers. Resentment grows quickly and the good employees will be leaving quickly if let the remote slackers coast without consequences.

I actually favor engineers-turned-managers for remote management positions over managers with non-engineer backgrounds for this reason. Former engineers are much better at spotting when someone is lying about the complexity of coding tasks.

Let me expand on that point: "Don't accidentally throw out good apples with the bad ones because you are looking at the wrong metrics."

What I mean is: Bad apples are real, but don't ever do time-tracking or fast response testing in an effort to identify them. There are some excellent apples who will get your 8h-day deliverables done in 2-4h. Don't ever establish any system to find them. If you have a problem with them, you are the problem.

Kick people based on repeatedly violating the deadline for deliverables.

The thing is: Some of the worst remote workers are actually the best at appearing always online. They’ll go out of their way to remind everyone that they were “working” at 8PM or on a weekend because they need to compensate for the lack of actual work done.

One of the worst remote work offenders I ever dealt with had a routine of doing things every Saturday morning that would ping the team: Lots of Slack “@channel” questions. Lots of name tags in Slack to generate pings. Some e-mails with unnecessarily huge recipient lists. If someone had only measured time online or number of Slack messages sent, this guy would have been at the top of the list.

But it was all a show. It was all low-effort, high-volume content designed to give the impression of working hard, and it only came in short bursts. Anyone paying attention knew he wasn’t delivering much but he was generating huge fanfare over tiny things he did.

So yes, focusing too much on perceived hours worked or activity in Slack or e-mail is one of the worst ways to do performance management.

> Kick people based on repeatedly violating the deadline for deliverables.

This is the other game they play: Come sprint planning time, they’ll invest huge effort in exaggerating how long a task will take. Then they’ll go to great lengths to find ways to be “blocked and waiting on so and so” during the week. Eventually they’ll push their deadline back so far that hitting it is trivially easy.

Which is why it’s important to have managers who can spot these exaggerations and investigate the actual code and deliverables when they arrive. Engineers are good at spotting when someone has been lying about effort, but managers without engineering backgrounds can often (but not always) be fooled by charismatic remote workers.

All of these things have in-office parallels that experienced workers have seen plenty of. Why is it that remote workers are especially suspect?

What exactly do people think here? That being able to look over a worker's shoulder at their computer screen a few times a day makes the difference between effective in-office management and remote slackerdom?

If that's all managers do, they can be replaced with spyware that measures how much time the worker is typing in VSCode each week. It'll be easy to game but will STILL work way better than the manager.

> Why is it that remote workers are especially suspect?

Because it's not difficult to get hired into two remote jobs.

It is, however, impossible to be in two physical offices at the same time.

Being in office is not a free pass to ignore performance management. Obviously if you're not paying attention to deliverables then your in-office employees could be doing nothing as well.

But remote jobs are a magnet for people trying to abuse the system (by riding the coattails of their actually productive coworkers).

> If that's all managers do, they can be replaced with spyware that measures how much time the worker is typing in VSCode each week.

I think you misunderstood my comment. I specifically said that measuring hours active at a keyboard or activity in Slack is the worst way to try to do performance management.

The amount of people holding two remote jobs for more than a few months without burning out approaches zero pretty quickly.

In person positions are a magnet for people abusing the system by not being productive. People will feel justified to chit-chat as long as everyone can see them, they will organize meetings or volunteer work hours put on bakeathons. They will meet people in higher positions in these social settings and leverage their relationship for better position often with more success than someone productive.

Productive workers are seen as resources. Non productive social climbers will always leap over the productive.

Non-productive socializers remote or in person will always be holding you back.

The remote double job close to being burned out with no time for socializing is the least of your concerns if they even exist.

> I think you misunderstood my comment. I specifically said that measuring hours active at a keyboard or activity in Slack is the worst way to try to do performance management.

You say that, but then you advocate for butts-in-chairs (BIC) as a critical performance management practice that can't be replicated in the remote model and therefore shows the weakness of the remote model.

If BIC is so critical to performance management, spyware will do a way better job.

> Engineers are good at spotting when someone has been lying about effort, but managers without engineering backgrounds can often (but not always) be fooled by charismatic remote workers.

Then hire better managers. Really, if a manager cannot spot remote slackers, then that manager is doing a poor job.

Work is not all about deadlines. It also requires discipline to be present for meetings (no matter how much you hate them), be available to solve problems (sometimes immediately), collaborate with other team members and many other things. It is called "Team work" for a reason. Good developers can get away with a lot of things for sure especially if they produce code but as someone who runs teams, it is not enough. I would rather work with someone who cares about how their work impacts the overall team vs just them working in silo and happy enough coz they hit their deadlines.

Yes, it is about the deadlines. That's what keeps me getting a paycheck, which is the reason I'm working. What you describe as teamwork is just every day development activity. There is no discipline to attending a meeting when the meeting is mandatory.

I can always spot someone who 'runs teams' by the way they prioritize the company and piss on the workers in the name of the customer and 'teamwork.'

This is why you can't trust a manager. You can't seperate their nose from the company's ass.

"piss on the workers". I made no such remark anywhere in my comment. You can prioritize the company and still take care of the employees. It is not a zero sum game but hating on managers is obviously a cool thing to do.

I've never been at a company where deadlines are what keeps people getting a paycheck. Overall output is what kept the paychecks flowing. Deadlines are an artificial construct in most cases and in most of the remaining they're just a way to synchronize work. If a feature comes out today or in a week or a month has little difference in the vast majority of cases. If you get 1 or 5 or 10 features out this month has a difference.

As someone who is involved in both engineering and management - in my experience 8h days do not exist.

Are there just isn’t an environment allowing for eight hours of deep work without interruptions, emails, meetings, chats etc.

And even if eight hours of deep work were possible, the cognitive load the programming tends to lead to exhaustion within 4 to 6 hours max.

I don’t expect more from myself or others.

Deadlines are also the wrong metric to measure people with unless you're a contracting/consulting shop.

Seriously. This talk of "deadlines are everything" is such bullshit. In my company, I am looking for people who care about their work, first and foremost. They enjoy what they do. Sometimes, deadlines are needed, sure. But it is mostly about growing as an individual and learning how to work in collaboration. What good are deadlines if you churn out crap output ?

This actually makes sense. No need for the big survellance net.

For software engineering, four hours of actual work per day is probably average even on-site.

Yes, but communications, meetings, and being available to answer questions are also part of the job description.

The more someone becomes unavailable for communications, knowledge sharing, and meetings, the more work they create for their teammates and managers who have to compensate by tracking everything down, re-hashing missed meetings, re-communicating things that should have been covered the first time and so on.

It’s not enough to just write four hours of code every day and then disconnect, even if the average coder is also only writing four hours of code.

It sounds like you are describing a work culture that relies heavily on synchronous communication to make progress. These don’t work well for companies that want to have remote workers and treat them as first class citizens.

The solution is to find ways to knowledgeshare that don’t require everyone’s attention at the same time - like a well maintained wiki, or recorded knowledge sharing sessions.

Consensus building may well require synchronous communication, and it should be made clear to remote workers which meetings are cruft and which are important. This can be accomplished by publishing meeting agendas and goals prior to the actual meeting.

I think at the end of the day it is important to recognize that different people work differently and accommodations have to be made for all sides to contribute effectively. By that I mean some people need to sit in a meeting with a person that is presenting slides to learn, but someone else might pick up the same material via one paragraph and a diagram + access to the code, and someone else might work better with a whiteboard presentation.

I prefer async written communication (email) because it leaves behind an easily searchable record to reference in the future.

So much this. I had a good former engineer manager that left and got replaced by a $bigcorps type and while I have a list of complaints a mile long, this is one of my biggest. Every interaction thats not a single sentence must be done via Zoom! I wrote a long slack explaining the strengths of async communication and that was the only time Ive ever gotten a paragraph in that form; him explaining all the reasons why we should work to meet others communications style in the middle, then ending with more reasons to use zoom...

In all this thread I see a lot comments about bad remote employees, but bad managers often find scapegoats and blame them when they are the real problem, but its easy to cover that up with some of the more blackhat management techniques.

For example, I realized that he was pushing voice comms because then there wasn't a record of what he said. I later found out he takes notes during these voice comms but not accurately, so then he can "reference his notes" to spin the narrative to other team managers or c-suite. He would also then use those notes to misrepresent your statements to other people. arminiusreturns said he loves this idea, umm no I said I was open to the idea... stuff like that.

Managers like this make me want to turn on my corporate machiavelli, but I hate that side of me and just want to do good work, without all that. If thats how the game has to be played though... fine.

For office workers in general, 3 is typical.

https://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/in-an-8-hour-day-the-aver...

Has held true at all 7 jobs I have ever had.

I'm always amazed when people claim they work more than that a day. Between meetings, context switching, and social interactions, I pat myself on the back if I manage to work a total of 4 hours.

I don't understand how you don't count meetings and context switching as part of work hours. You're helping others, making decisions, etc. It's not that what's not coding is not work.

Well said. There also are websites that are openly encouraging working 2 full time remote jobs concurrently/at the same time. I don't want to name those here but wow.

If you read the posts in that blog the guy is barely holding in to positions for a few weeks. You are better off going for the best paying position rather than trying to manage two poorly paid positions.

Not sure if I missed the joke here but a recent thread here had a fair amount of discussion about working two jobs, putting in minimum hours, and calling that 'full time'.

This raises the issue of management measures of effort or time spent versus results; being busy versus getting it done. That has always been a problem in physical offices (otherwise Office Space wouldn't be funny). It is an even more exaggerated management problem when people's appearances can't be casually monitored and/or micromanaged.

One thing that most engineer-turned-managers don't have is any training in management whatsoever. In fact, many of them have only been managed by uneducated managers themselves. This situation, compounded by remote work, is not pretty.

Thankfully, the article was a set of checklists of easy-to-measure items. And it recommended focus on employee results. It is refreshing to see this kind of article on management education!

>managers who weren't former engineers

woah, those exist?

Yep! There’s an entire school of thought that management and engineering are so entirely different that managers don’t need to have an engineering background.

I personally disagree, but I have a friend who insists that the best engineering managers are those who come from professional management backgrounds (project management, then people management usually) instead of engineering backgrounds.

There's also a school of thought that managers are not necessary. I'm a big fan of it.

I worked at one of these companies, actually.

It was actually a lot of fun and very productive when it was a small team of people who knew and respected each other.

Scaled up to a bigger company, it turned into the nastiest political nightmare I've ever seen.

The "no managers" thing is also an illusion. There's always someone who can fire people or give them raises. Those people become the de facto managers even if they have some different title.

Employees are extremely good at picking up on who they need to impress to get raises and promotions, even if you try to pretend that they aren't managers.

That only scales up to a certain degree. There are some really good examples of holacracy failing to live up to hype in the software world:

• HN discussion of holacracy at Valve: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9512866

• Holacracy and the mirage of the boss-less workplace: Lessons from the failures at Github, Medium & Buffer: https://medium.com/battle-room/holacracy-and-the-mirage-of-t...

There's also a classic essay, "The Tyranny of Structurelessness", that is about parts of the feminist movement but directly applies to holacracy at companies.

If you're anti-manager, a small or single person company or consultancy can be great.

Google was a fan of it, too. You should look into project oxygen.

Obligatory question here: how are you tuning how you screen for bad apples in your technical interview pre-hire to make sure that over time you have less and less bad apples? Also, what level of scale is your remote eng organization operating at?

Having also had a lot of experience managing remote teams (and to be a little bit hyperbolic for the sake of making a point), saying that remote work attracts "bad apples" at a much higher rate than in-person work seems like a cop out to excuse poor screening hygiene.

I think the applicant pool has a higher concentration of <any given negative> than the employee pool.

I posit that people with negative factors tend to apply/interview more per job start and probably have shorter average tenures [due to getting fired/managed out or quitting because they’re not getting their needs met].

We just experienced a 20-month disruption that caused certain previously latent negatives to be newly and massively amplified. Life’s also been harder than usual on many(most?) people. I’d be somewhat shocked if those negatives didn’t get concentrated into the applicant pool as well. To a hiring manager, that would be nearly indistinguishable from “remote work attracts bad apples at a higher rate”.

I’m quite pro-remote and think it’s going to end up overall wonderful that the tech world was forced into this massive, synchronized pre/post test. I also see employees who did well in the in-office structure struggle in the higher-discipline required remote model. Those employees are probably best served to return to in-office work.

I've been remote for over 10 years, and this article mostly rings true. The employer has to put extra effort into communication and documentation. But that ends up being good for everyone - even in hybrid companies we're not everyone is remote.

I think my current employer, FullStory, gets a lot of this right. Even before they went fully distributed, they were really good at documenting things - from PTO policies to postmortems on every outage we've ever had. The onboarding process is the best I've ever seen.

> There is no Pair-Programming,

That's just not true. I do frequent pair programming, it's just over a screen sharing / video call rather than sitting beside the person I'm pairing with. There's a million tools you can use for this.

The other thing I'll say, is that as a remote employee, having a dedicated quiet space to work in can be really beneficial. Especially if you have young children at home. Usually that means a spare bedroom, where you can shut the door.

For a couple of years after my daughter was born, I actually rented a small private office that was a short bike ride from my house. I didn't go there every single day, but the days that I did were definitely my most productive ones during that time period. It was really the best of all worlds from my perspective.

> The employer has to put extra effort into communication and documentation.

Not just the employer. The employees also need to put extra effort into their own communication and documentation. This needs to be actively mentored to the employees and included as part of performance management with clear expectations.

A common mistake for first-time remote companies or managers is to think that the managers alone can make up for the communication deficits inherent to remote work. Not so. It’s everyone’s job. Managers should be setting examples and mentoring everyone though.

Yeah, that's a fair point. Everyone has to put in the effort.

My thinking was that the employer has to make it part of the duties of the employees, and, more importantly, ensure employees have the time, tools, etc. available to do it.

E.g, when there's an outage, an entire day of someone's time might be spent writing up the post-mortem.

> I do frequent pair programming, it's just over a screen sharing / video call rather than sitting beside the person I'm pairing with

If anything, pair programming with a good headset and good quality audio is better than in person.

100% audio clarity and no external noises.

When I’ve asked friends and coworkers how they like remote work, the answer depends on how comfortable they feel being candid with me. Publicly everyone says they’re more productive being remote. Privately, people admit that their productivity has cratered, being home is very distracting, and the lack of separation between work and home life makes both realms more difficult.

I definitely empathize with the answers I’ve heard. I like convenience of not having to spend hours commuting back and the forth, and being home so I can help my wife take care of our five month old baby. But if I’m being totally honest, my productivity is pretty poor compared to what it was when everybody worked in person from the same office.

Remote != home.

Home _is_ distracting, unless you have black belt concentration ability, and will power.

For a long time I’ve worked from a coworking place near my house.

Before that, when I wasn’t earning as much, I’d work from cafes.

Some days when the weather was especially nasty I chose to stay home and work from home.

Now I have a kid, and I’m forced to work from home due to corona, and my productivity definitely suffers. But I’m being extra aggressively defensive for my work space, and that helps!

> Remote != home.

While technically true, I have yet to talk to a remote candidate or employee who doesn’t work from home.

We had one candidate who wanted us to pay for a monthly remote office for them, but it was curiously expensive for some reason and he had other problems that ended the interview process early so I never followed up on it.

So basically, remote should be assumed to be at home.

My team is distributed, I work out of a coworking space less than a mile from my house (15 minute walk). It's made my mental/emotional state so much better (not to mention how much more productive I am).

We offer all employees the choice to work from home or rent a coworking space, and in either case we cover the cost (home office setup, or coworking cost).

I think what most people don't understand is what we went through with covid isn't normal remote work. In normal circumstances, you can work from a coworking space. And you can have an active social life. Etc. Etc. Your kids aren't stuck at home with you. Covid forced a version of remote work that was much worse.

Just as another data point, I work remotely and I have an office about 3 miles from my house. It makes separation of work and life MUCH easier.

I realize this isn’t normal but it is a much better way of working for me. I think if others could get past paying rent to work remotely that they would generally agree, too.

Coworking space is rather a big-city amenity, while the point of remote working for many people is to avoid big cities.

Coworking doesn’t have to be an official business.

Coworking = people working together. You can self organize.

At one time, I just rented a desk space at a software agency. They rented a larger than necessary space for growth, and we’re happy to rent it out. I was there for 2 years before they filled up.

Many offices have empty seats and small business prefer to save ;)

Also known people who have rented an apartment together and just set up desks there. The legalities of that are murky. But if you don’t disturb anyone around you nobody cares in a large building.

Personally I enjoy going to the office most days, even thought I don't have to. And know plenty people that do as well.

What I hope comes out of all these pandemic adjustments, is more diversity in work modalities to choose from instead only one or the other. That remote employers and employees get better working that way and that on-site/hybrid employees put more effort into making themselves more attractive. E.g. instead of having one massive, packed HQ everyone has to commute to, have smaller and more quieter spaces scattered around, having rules on not allowing taking calls on desk, etc..

I think that companies will need to diverge on whether they are remote or whether they are in office. I did hybrid for a while at my last company and it amounted to people being in the office most days just taking Zoom calls at their desks.

That is not satisfying to anyone.

I am vastly less productive working from home. Many of my friends will (privately, as you say) confess to the same.

I keep seeing this narrative that the pandemic forced everyone to try remote work and surprise! productivity went up. I really, really doubt it.

What actually happened is that you had sufficient organizational momentum to keep things going. Your rate of actual creative work (big new stuff launched, etc) has almost certainly cratered. Your new employees are all struggling. If you've had a spike in turnover, the company as a whole is probably struggling. But it's invisible, because you can't keep your finger on the cultural pulse of the company without an office for that culture to manifest in.

I'd like to chime in with my anecdotal counter example from my big corporate workplace. A colleague recently created some graphs showing commits over time, confluence pages created/updated, tickets fixed, ticket turnaround time, code reviews given, and number of features released. All of these metrics made a sharp improvement as soon as our WFH policy came into effect and have kept its pace for the last 1.5 years. While this might not be the experience at every workplace, as far as I can tell, my workplace seems to have greatly benefitted from more remote work.

Apart from your first and last metric, all of those are measuring "use of remote communication tools", it would be scary if they went down.

(The first and last are interesting though and support your claim.)

I would disagree I am personally more productive at home and I love being able to just focus on code without half my brain being distracted by the context of an office. However, I think it's much harder for new employees and weaker engineers because it's difficult to get help/share screen/etc. It's also easy for slackers to slide by which I think just means you need better managers. I also miss the comradery a bit and in-office employees felt like actual friends.

I've worked remotely for almost eight years now. Much of that from home; the last couple from a small office space that I rent down the street from home. I worked in open plan offices for about 15 years prior to going remote.

Both situations are a mixed bag. There are productive days and heavily distracted days in a shared office and there are productive and not so productive days working remotely. Working remotely but not from home is the easy winner for me in terms of overall productivity with a much higher percentage of productive days. Working from home (before the pandemic, when my partner also started working from home) was still significantly better than working in an open plan office, though it did take me the first couple years to work out that I had to be very strict about keeping a separation (work machine gets turned off at 5pm and no work email can reach me outside working hours). When the pandemic hit and my partner started working from home as well (and she's a university professor so it was a lot of loud video calls while she taught her classes), my productivity crashed (but also, pandemic stress). If your home is distracting than, yeah, your productivity is going to crater. But the same is really true for something like an open plan office (I used to get most of my work done by going in extremely early so I could have two productive hours a day before everyone else showed up).

The key factor is what your home environment is like. If you have kids, then very possibly you can be a lot more productive at an office. Likewise if you live in a small place and don't have a comfortable, dedicated space to work in.

I’d be very careful how much you read into this because it’s begging for confirmation bias.

There’s also a difference between working remotely and being thrown into working remotely at the last minute during a pandemic with no prior experience. I’ve been remote for the last 10 years and the vast majority of problems you mentioned get better over time if you work at it.

I wrote Emergency Remote[0], and in my experience there are companies which tried to work the same way remotely and got the wrong impression by doing that.

I'm not as confident as the author that so many companies are onboard with remote because of their past couple of years. It's more likely they go the remote way because of employee pressure.

[0] https://www.emergencyremote.com

From the developer perspective the most enjoyable remote work I have done, has been when I did larger projects (weeks to month duration) with the primary responsibility (choose stack and libraries) and with the customer concerned with the result, not the onboarding, cultural alignment with company values, day-to-day instructions, scrum etc. The latter is just expendable (micro) management noise.

> In my opinion, a decentralized, remote workforce is the future of the digital economy.

This is based on the wonky assumption that this:

> There will always be people who abuse the system, abuse your trust and try to game the mechanics for their benefit. […] A remote gig is not a good fit for these kinds of people.

are just some extreme outliers.

However, we were just yesterday having a discussion on HN about „how to work two or more remote jobs at the same time and game the system“

Is a remote-first economy perhaps a system fundamentally at odds with human instincts?

> Is a remote-first economy perhaps a system fundamentally at odds with human instincts?

Seems like office-first, 9 to 5 economy is at odds with human instincts, if you have to physically keep humans from "gaming the system".

In that sense, taxation is against human instincts, if you have to force people to contribute to welfare payments.

And yet we still do it.

Taxes pay for far more than “welfare payments” unless you expand your definition of “welfare” to include the general welfare (functioning roads etc).

Also, remote just doesn't work for some people. This should be decided on a per-company basis

And being in the office doesn't work well for others. Those people have had (practically) no choice in the matter for all of time.

Perhaps it's okay to try a little of the opposite scenario and see how it plays out.

Sure, I am a great advocate of remote work and that's how I work and worked (mostly).

We just need to recognize that it's not for everybody

All but the smallest companies were already remote by having multiple offices.

Companies that had problems to grow out of that early phase struggled in the past and will struggle with that in times of remote work. The only thing that remote work changes is to move that problem more to the beginning of a companies lifecycle. This should be seen as a chance and not a problem.

Remote doesn't really refer to the geography, but the asynchronous workflow. In the manner, many of those companies are far from remote.

A lot of good would come from being able to personality search companies, especially by career level.

> However, they probably need a stricter environment to function correctly, more robust control over their work – meaning they thrive when someone is looking over their shoulder. A remote gig is not a good fit for these kinds of people.

There's a lot more of those folks than you might think. We have a fairly "skewed" sample set, with geeks (especially the ones that frequent HN).

A lot of us love to work, and we'll do it; no matter the environment. Naturally, we tend to thrive in environments that reduce interruptions, and remove tangential stressors.

Other types of industries may not have a workforce with the same motivation. Also, personal self-discipline is crucial. That is not necessarily something they teach in college. I attended a vocational school, where that kind of thing was a significant part of the curriculum. It's never been an issue, for me.

As far as managers that need to have people at hand to bully? Unfortunately, they are learning to adapt, and have discovered that they can be just as bad, over Zoom, as in person. Worse, even.

> Also, personal self-discipline is crucial. That is not necessarily something they teach in college. I attended a vocational school, where that kind of thing was a significant part of the curriculum.

How did they teach this?

Strict attendance. Strict schedule. Behavioral rules. Dress code. Inflexible deadlines, etc.

Tough gig, but just like a workplace.

I think anyone who says remote is strictly better is fooling themselves. There are definitely down-sides.

We’ve been doing a lot to try to bring back the benefits of being in-person while maintaining the flexibility of being remote.

Wrote about our specific tactics here: https://blog.roboflow.com/remote-not-distant/

"Friday we cap off the week by eating lunch together over Zoom"

How awful. I think you are trying to take the benefits of less social activity inspired remote workplaces and adding in forced. some social interaction. I would like to see this type of activity stopped.

None of this is sacred, and if the team wants to change or eliminate things, we’re open to it and re-evaluate regularly.

This is a tradition that has stayed with the company since the very earliest days when we were in YC. I’ve never heard anyone complain about it, and it’s something I know many on the team (including myself) look forward to each week.

That said, it’s not one size fits all. The culture probably isn’t for everyone; hopefully, being open about how we operate helps people decide whether it’s the ideal environment for them.

Very good article. Echoes most things I have been looking for. But I would like to add some things as an offshore dev.

It is darn hard to build a remote team unless you have a thorough understanding of what needs to be done and how it should be done. My opinion is that if you are hiring people remotely you should be operationally skilled to understand their effort, struggle and deadlines. BE EMPATHATIC. If you are running a remote team and you follow the mantra of "hire slow, fire fast" good luck keeping your employees. Make your decisions by getting a second opinion from the employees mentor.

For the feeling of belonging, I would say send your employees merch or an old laptop or something that shows that they are part of the team. I say give people very small bonuses but that is a whole thing. The "thank you"s you say to the other guy on an hourly basis, maybe give a bonus or something on the 10th Thank You, like a small small bonus. Thank yous over chat sound generic. In a super objective straightforward world of remote work money is the convenient way to show appreciation....here I go ranting again.

For pair programming, use VS Code live share with Google Meets. If you and your team is comfortable with it set up a period of time where all of you guys are working together over a group video chat like streamers do. I personally would love seeing my fellow coworker working on something halfway across the world.

If your work environment is super feature-execution driven, having a "fun" slack channel is meaningless. Office noises almost never happen in remote work environment as the employers is paying by the hour. But it is important IMO. But I don't think anyone out there is any employer out there would say, "let's have a weekly virtual meeting where we exclusively don't talk about work, but I will pay you guys anyway; We can drink and talk about stuff".

I had to work from home fulltime like everybody else. I liked it at first, after a few months however I hated it. I put on weight, I missed my colleagues and being a manager of 2d zoom faces is extremely different from managing real people. Not to mention all the energy lost on misunderstandings or lack of time to properly convey communication that takes a simple glance at each other in real life. I'm far from an exception or a bad apple as the article puts it.

Remote work is definitely a flexibility and fulltime option that makes sense, a new string to our bow of accommodating the workforce. But it cannot be all, we need offices, I don't want to be alone at home with 2d zoom faces, I want humans. If there are people that like it, good for them, but heck I don't, and I can assure you I'm not alone.

I wouldn't say this is a "startup stage" scenario - once you have things as well documented as described you have either: 1) a late stage, nearly non-startup, or 2) you aren't really addressing anything innovative - you are just like any other existent company doing a project; the "startup" appellation isn't valid in the traditional Silicon Valley Tech Startup sense but you are no different than Starbucks opening a new location.

Some ideas to 'manage' remote-work:

    when you're working, always turn on the camera but in fuzzy mode, i.e. nobody see your real facial expression but knows you're there most of the time.
    make technical document a personal performance review item.
    make a system for all to fill out their daily progress, everyone does it before the day is called off.

can't managers just look at github/commits? I feel like that would be enough. Who cares when the work is done as long as people are responsive when they need to be.

Running a remote-only company for 19 years. This is a very nice guide. Still can't figure out what holds us all together.

Did your company start remote from day one?

What were some of your painful lessons you wished you learned sooner?

From day one it was only me. I was working from anywhere, so I guess that means yes, it was remote from the start. Current pain points we are still trying to figure out:

- Gathering the whole team effectively and periodically (once a year or so).

- People speaking different languages, so everyone must switch to English when the whole team gathers, which degrades the communication flow a little - only a small percentage are native speakers. This requires good team-building activities. Still trying to figure out what activities would excite the whole team without breaking the bank.

- Disseminating our "corporate culture" - supposes daily human office interaction. Having everyone in an online chat helps a lot.

- Taking care of pension schemes, as everyone is scattered around the globe, with different systems, expenditure levels, etc.

- Having a system that shows who's at the desk, who is on a vacation, and so on. Our service business needs real-time operations, so we need to rely on people coming in at work in the morning and staying full-time.

Things we wish we would have done sooner:

- Identified a jurisdiction and settled down at some place, call it an HQ. A company has to have a physical home where it banks and pays tax, even if it is 100% remote. An Accountant and a person with a PoA from the Director should be present there physically all the time to interact with authorities and the bank.

- This was in the original article, but I wish we would have introduced the tradition of online meetings with webcams on sooner. May sound silly, but this helps avoid turning into a bunch of cave warriors and keeping personal relationships alive.

- Introduced a single office closure dates document spanning multiple countries to accommodate for different holiday schedules.

I'd say the most important lesson of all is having the right people on the ground to handle relationships with local authorities and the bank. We can all choose to be nomads, but our business would not have survived if we weren't lucky to find a great Accountant and Director's Assistant who live in our jurisdiction, and a person on our "nomadic team" to handle that relationship.

The point around transparency is so important. I see so many issues that could be solved by just having discussions 'in public' on open Slack channels, with thought processes and outcomes available for all (or more) to see and potentially be a part of.

Public and asynchronous.

If you have more than two chatty people in Slack, nobody finds anything anymore.

Some thoughts on this:

- A different environment can improve creativity, but the effect is obviously limited.

- If you have a difficult/long commute then that's a plus to remove it.

- If you're alone at home you could get lonely really quickly.

“Fix-it Fridays” are a great idea, and something that should be adopted beyond remote teams.

Onboarding is much more important in remote work. I actually left my Engineering job at a large YC backed company a month ago to focus on an onboarding/documentation idea that I came up with while seeing smart employees not being able to get up-to-speed. We would just throw them high level confluence docs without any context. They said they read the documentation, but without context they really had no idea what it meant. https://www.gainknowhow.com uses a skill dependency tree kinda like the game Civilization to incrementally get employees up-to-speed.

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