What do you wish you understood about being a remote-first company before you started? Any specific hardware/software recommendations for helping communication? And any "best-practices" (Slack expectations, regular meetings, etc) that have specifically helped? Very interested in benefiting from your insight here :)
On another topic — how often do you go rock climbing? We did a little company "summit" last week and my forearms are still recovering...
Hard to say, to be honest. I don't think there was anything that was completely surprising to me. Maybe that's because I spend a lot of my teenage years in the esport community and on IRC. Because of that, I think, I'm just far more used to online communication, not being able to meet people in person and so on.
The biggest learning was probably around communication. You have to explain everything very well (doesn't mean with a lot of words) all the time, ideally somewhere where it doesn't get lost (PRs, Google Docs, etc.). If you are all in the same office, a lot of stuff can get figured out over lunch, during coffee, random conversations, etc. That's not happening when you are highly distributed. We put a lot of focus on adequately conveying why we are doing what and how it impacts everybody and still have a long way to go to do it well.
A couple of things we do:
Flying whole teams together ~2-3x per year
Weekly 1on1s not just being the manager and the individual contributor but also between the different individual contributors
Weekly team calls (Codeship-wide and team specific)
Lots of wiki articles and Google Docs
A bunch of policies, e.g. for using Slack, working remotely and so on
I try to go climbing a couple of times per week indoors. Recently there was a lot going on so it was only 2, 3 times per week max. I would love to do it 4x per week because then I feel I get better.
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What do you wish you understood about being a remote-first company before you started? Any specific hardware/software recommendations for helping communication? And any "best-practices" (Slack expectations, regular meetings, etc) that have specifically helped? Very interested in benefiting from your insight here :)
On another topic — how often do you go rock climbing? We did a little company "summit" last week and my forearms are still recovering...
Hard to say, to be honest. I don't think there was anything that was completely surprising to me. Maybe that's because I spend a lot of my teenage years in the esport community and on IRC. Because of that, I think, I'm just far more used to online communication, not being able to meet people in person and so on.
The biggest learning was probably around communication. You have to explain everything very well (doesn't mean with a lot of words) all the time, ideally somewhere where it doesn't get lost (PRs, Google Docs, etc.). If you are all in the same office, a lot of stuff can get figured out over lunch, during coffee, random conversations, etc. That's not happening when you are highly distributed. We put a lot of focus on adequately conveying why we are doing what and how it impacts everybody and still have a long way to go to do it well.
A couple of things we do:
I try to go climbing a couple of times per week indoors. Recently there was a lot going on so it was only 2, 3 times per week max. I would love to do it 4x per week because then I feel I get better.