Ask HN: How are small tech companies adapting to remote work permanence?

It is really just about two things - prioritize async written communications for everything related to the business. Yet also have zero hesitation to call each other up for quick, friendly conversations and questions, and feel free to go off-track and just talk to each other.

If you can normalize that type of internal communications, everything else tends to fall into place.

For us (a small bootstrapped company), it hasn't been the best because we mostly hire juniors and train them. Juniors need more in person and collaborative experience at least in our case and hence it is tougher than usual. I know the cavalry will come after me saying "It's just you and not the juniors" but I strongly disagree and believe that if you are starting out in your career, you must work in person next to people. Yes there are exceptions of course but you need to be truly motivated and emotionally mature to handle working alone/remotely.

I haven't run a fully remote shop, but I've worked at many since 2015. Your hiring pool is bigger because you're not limited to commuting distance. You don't even need to be in the same country (although going multinational does open a taxation and labor laws can of worms).

It feels easier at smaller places because you can either start from the ground up that way, or easily pivot to it. Rent, utilities, furnishings etc can cost a surprising amount for a small business, which is why so many of them shared offices or used co-working spaces before the pandemic.

But make no mistake: some people just work better in person, and others work better remote. You should just choose one and stick with it. With hybrid you mostly end up with an office that's almost empty all the time, and lonely in-person types working there.

> some people just work better in person, and others work better remote.

Yes and there is nothing wrong with that; we (company founded in ‘96) never hired people who ‘need’ office and in person stuff. They can if they want but we are not going to facilitate it as the founders (I am one) do not like it; I prefer chat over calls and meetings, email and forums over real life discussions and wiki over whiteboards.

It has been effective for us and it has saved us numerous times: we had Fortune 1000 clients trying to pin things on us when they made mistakes, but as we have literally everything in writing, that ain’t gonna fly.

I digress; I think it’s a matter of hiring the right people depending if you want in or not in office; not sure about hybrid; I cannot really see that work for these distinct personalities: wouldn’t work for me for sure.

Are you hiring? I've been a freelance written communication developer for 20 years.

> 3. What tools and practices have proven most effective in managing distributed teams, especially when budget constraints are a consideration?

For many people remote work comes down to being on zoom calls all day. Some managers take it to the extreme requiring everybody to be on a day long zoom video call.

It's not proven to be the most effective tool yet, but this app can definitely make life easier for remote workers who constantly have to be on video calls:

https://meetingglass.com/

It provides video meetings with the ability to hide behind frosted glass.

Being in the same Zoom call all day long sounds exhausting…

Oh yeah, that's why I mentioned the app that can help you to have easy long video meetings.

Many companies don't concretely define the kind of remote work company they want.

GitLab talks about being completely _asynchronous_ culture, where literally your teammate could be 12 hrs apart timezone wise, and you collaborate via PRs, docs, etc. Like an open source project.

OTOH there is a more interactive, synchronized remote work culture where pairing etc are very central to the culture. Timezones matter, and people are expected to have more synchronized collaborations.

I was the 10th employee at my current company, hired roughly four years ago. I joined during Covid, but it was a fully-remote, geographically distributed company from the beginning before Covid happened (founded about nine months before I joined). I think we're up close to 100 now but I'm not even sure.

I can't say we faced any particular or abnormal challenges around cohesion and productivity. Truth be told, I have often felt I barely knew most other people in the company, but it really didn't matter. I knew the software and I knew the customer I was working with. There typically might be 2-3 fellow employees I'm working with on any given project and I get to know them reasonably well for the duration of the project, but there aren't permanent teams and we're not doing something like playing a team sport that requires careful orchestration and practice. As long as work can be split up into discrete tasks with relatively minimal cross-dependencies, you can mostly work alone and only schedule touch points where those dependencies become blockers.

The tools and practices are Git, e-mail, channel-based chat servers, possibly video calls but only if you need to screenshare. I've never really seen the value in being able to see someone's face, frankly. It's a distraction more often than not. Yeah, body language, but I can still understand and use Linux perfectly well even though I don't know what Linus's face looked like when he wrote it.

Obviously, there was no transition, but as it stands, our customers have often wanted us to hire people who were near them rather than near some arbitrary city we chose to put an office in, so being able to hire from anywhere has always been helpful in actually being able to do that.

Ironically, the last time I had an office-based job, which to be fair, had to be office-based no matter what because the work was classified, much of my team was still geographically distributed anyway and I never met them, either.