Ask HN: What are the best tools for working with remote developers?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22268745

by stickydink • 6 years ago

4 9 6 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

We have an existing team in our SF office, but we're branching out into full-time domestic remote engineers. I've only ever had short, contract-style remote engineers, but we really want to make this work to leverage some of the great talent we've found. I really want to make sure the remotes are as effective and as involved as those in-office, and I feel like Slack + Google Docs doesn't quite cut it.

We are backend, mobile and web. What are the state-of-the-art tools out there right now that can help us communicate, document, code and problem solve together?

Thanks!

jdauriemma2• 6 years ago

I’m a remote engineer, salaried by a SF company that’s mostly in-office. A good instant messaging client and a good docs suite are essential. Slack and GSuite are good choices. To those I’d add telepresence software like Zoom. That’s all you need. The hard part is setting the right norms and expectations.

stickydink2• 6 years ago

We've been using Slack, GSuite for years, but I've never used Zoom. Is that worth it over just using video calls inside Slack?

jdauriemma2• 6 years ago

Depends on how many participants. It's not uncommon for us to have 50+ attendees at some larger company/engineering meetings. Zoom seems to handle that bandwidth admirably. I've used Slack for smaller calls without incident.

rckoepke3• 6 years ago

Zoom is the most most fantastic software I've used for client-contractor meetings. In those cases, the clients or sub-contractors or other stakeholders will simply not use something that is hard to install and start up, or gets blocked by corporate security policies.

Zoom has always "just worked" no matter how non-computer savvy the other side was. I still use it for all kinds of personal things. I strongly, strongly, strongly recommend it.

It also has good "draw-on-someone-elses-screen" functionality, not sure how many other softwares (Skype, Slack, etc) have that. I think it's very powerful and underutilized.

perryraskin• 6 years ago

https://tuple.app is supposed to be the best for this. It's literally build for remote pair programming.

stickydink2• 6 years ago

Thanks that looks nice, we'll give it a try

rckoepke3• 6 years ago

Anything like this that works on windows as well?

rckoepke3• 6 years ago

I enjoyed using OneNote and Microsoft Teams on projects which had some remote workers and satellite offices.

I think the biggest thing is that everyone has to buy into the communication modes which work for remote work. If 80-90% of the team is using informal communication methods like "walk over to that guy's desk", or "The PM just told me that we might be rearranging the sprint to accomodate problem Y that isn't officially recognized yet so the schedule hasn't actually changed, but it will" then the remote workers will be half as effective as the office workers.

A very strong, very organized, ultra-communicative PM helps a lot with this. It's important to make the online chat rooms (Slack/Teams/etc) the primary hang-out and communicate room. It's important to make Jira/VSTS/Google Docs the primary task list reference that everyone checks mulitiple times per day and uses these tools to communicate with the person they sit next to in the cubicles. It's important that when an officemate asks "How do I do X?" his cubicle mates tell him: "Oh its the X tab in the OneNote document, ill send you a link on Slack" and then posts that to the main channel where other people can learn too.

If the in-office workers are doing this, then everyone is already working remotely, just from the office instead of from home. And remote workers will be 100% as effective as the in-office workers.

gtirloni• 6 years ago

https://twist.com/

Ask HN: What are the best tools for working with remote developers?

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