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Comment by ticmasta | Hacker News Reader

>> scheduled call after lunch, at the end of the day, or first thing tomorrow morning

This sounds great in theory, but one of the key issues with managing remote teams is there is no common time in the day that is "after lunch, end of day or first thing in the morning".

The reality is most remote scenarios require you adopt at least some async process; fighting this is a losing battle.

Some good news: your manager's job was always facilitate internally and protect externally; how this is accomplished has certainly changed but the core essence of management, if anything, is even more crystallized now.

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I feel like I need to mention this in case some eyes see it that need to hear it. If you're running global teams and you have a side of that team that has to show up at the ass-crack of dawn every morning while you get to show up at 4PM with the entire context of a full work day behind you - ROTATE THE TIMES or ASK the engineers on both ends of the spectrum how they feel about it and be understanding if some of them don't want to show up at 8am anymore. Not to mention it puts us into a super weird conversation where we're half asleep and trying to sound like we know what's going on to someone grilling us with full cognition.

Also, async is one thing. Respecting your peoples time is another thing. Slack, etc can show you what time it is in that employees time zone. How do you feel when the first thing you do is open Slack while sipping coffee and eating your bagel and your boss has 10 messages to you from 6am-9am your time?

Probably not the best start to your day. Let people log in, socialize, be humans and colleagues for a little bit before you hammer them, especially now when work is the only real human interaction some people are getting.

> How do you feel when the first thing you do is open Slack while sipping coffee and eating your bagel and your boss has 10 messages to you from 6am-9am your time?

Feels like it’s a day that ends in ‘y’. (My boss and our team get along famously and are all in the same time zone, yet have loads of traffic on our channel(s) between 6 and 9 most days.)

Oh totally in team slacks, I'm talking more about the "do this as soon as you wake up" DM you types, usually the "Hey.."'ers.

Async is the way to go here. The only time an engineer should have to care what time zone somebody is in is when it's an actual emergency.

Yeah. The engineering team I am on uses the [async] tag to make async Slack communications explicit.

Slack is really poorly built for async workflows though. That's why in my product I have all communication be async, and figure out who needs to get notifications (also async) from their role in the interaction. For example, if you're the owner of a story and someone asks a question you get notified, and the asker gets notified when you reply, but everyone else gets to keep their sanity. I also structure comments and require you tag them with the purpose of the comments so people know what it is up front (question, sugestion, todo, etc). That really keeps the stress levels down.

async is not a losing battle. Trying to handle async communication processes manually is.

Right now, most async communication processes (like status updates or daily standups) involve a ton of manual effort to make sure that people share this information.

I strongly recommend creating systems and using automation as much as possible here.

This thread basically enumerates why I started my company. Manual control of workflow and keeping up to speed is at best a waste of time. I want my _Computer_ to do the boring repetitive crap.

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