[noufalibrahim]

Since there are a lot of founders here, I'm curious about what your positions are whether you have any guides/references to creating a good environment.

My own experience has been that with junior talent, they don't gel with the team and don't have anything in common with the rest of the employees outside of the project they're working on.

[carom]

I have been a remote employee (starting years before the pandemic) at a number of companies. The biggest thing I've noticed is the importance of communication. More specifically, you need a chat-first workforce. Seeing some places that were awful at remote and some that were really good, it really comes down to how comfortable people were communicating via chat.

If I were building a remote company I would hire people out of chats. I would rather hire someone off of IRC than off of LinkedIn, because I know the people on IRC can communicate (and argue!) via text. This may mean Discord now. That's my strongest opinion.

Following that is managerial. I have had places that did not have 1:1s with your direct manager, just bi-weekly or daily 15 minute standups with everyone. That is a good way to sabotage your company. Employees have nowhere to air problems besides in front of the whole group, so problems don't get mentioned until they are breaking (e.g. I have been working on other stuff for 2 months waiting for this guy to deliver something, but I need it now).

Being good enough to know what needs to be done, and being able to hire good talent and then trust them to get that stuff done. I have seen non-technical founders being run around by a D-tier CTO. You need good people to get good people as well. That place had a very difficult time landing talent.

Finally, pay well. I think the standard early startup pay range (180k + 1%) will not get you the technical talent you need. Maybe I am overestimating the technical challenges many companies face, but I would not build a business off of $180k engineers. I would rather pay double that (while being selective about talent) and get something (better) built with fewer people.

[FreakLegion]

> Finally, pay well. I think the standard early startup pay range (180k + 1%) will not get you the technical talent you need. Maybe I am overestimating the technical challenges many companies face, but I would not build a business off of $180k engineers. I would rather pay double that (while being selective about talent) and get something (better) built with fewer people.

This was my view, too, but I've been trying the 'fewer, better' route for a while now and seniors seem to be only marginally ahead of the curve, if at all. Now I wonder whether hiring twice as many juniors and aggressively promoting the ones who prove themselves wouldn't be more effective. (This isn't a good idea for other, pragmatic reasons, but I do wonder if it would work.)

[anal_reactor]

I worked at a company whose business model was hiring students for internship. Not even juniors, just students. The place was bad, the product was bad, everything was bad, but they're still in business, which means that this model does work. I checked their website and they even started offering IT outsourcing services.

My prayers to whoever signs a contract with them.

[miki123211]

Komarch (a very large Polish IT company) is famous for this. They don't have any products of their own, they specialize in box-ticking, contract work and winning tender offers from the government. Because of how tender offers work, anything which cannot be measured doesn't matter, and any system which fulfills the pre-established requirements has to be accepted, no matter how bad it is. This usually means terrible UX and terrible code quality.

There's even a "law of Komarch", "anything that can be done by one senior can also be done by 50 interns."

[benterix]

If you are creating an MVP, this strategy may work. You could then hire more experienced people to rewrite everything if the product takes off.

[ProxCoques]

> you need a chat-first workforce

I second this. Worked for a large retail operation and people used to sometimes move between departments. These had very different communication styles: one group had communal rolling chats about all sorts of stuff all the time. Others only chatted if they had planned to do so, or created a specific private chat for a topic. Far easier to work in the department in which you could just fling out a question or comment any time and people would get back to you almost instantly and hash things out.

[celdon25]

> but I would not build a business off of $180k engineers. I would rather pay double that (while being selective about talent) and get something (better) built with fewer people.

Where are these 360k jobs posted? I never see anything close to that.

[carom]

Major metro big tech, toward the senior side of things. Check out [1]. Salaries in the 200s are very realistic. 300s is senior or long tenure with stock appreciation. It is worth grinding leetcode for a few months.

1. https://levels.fyi/

[celdon25]

Ah, thought you were referring to salary, not IOUs. I'll stick with consulting.

[carom]

Common misunderstanding. RSU grants at public companies vest regularly. At Google I had no cliff and my shares vested monthly. With auto sell it was just another ~10k of cash per month. Smaller grants would vest quarterly.

FWIW I consult now and make more than I ever did at a company, so also find a niche and raise your rates.

[celdon25]

Yeah that's my plan right now. I've thought about going back to full time every now and then but it is often too hard to advance and many companies with high growth end up failing. I have a lot of freedom where I'm at now (transitioned to a consultant with more pay and mostly choosing my own hours) and it was hard work to earn it at that company. Sometimes you get in too early and get burned out, sometimes you get in too late to make a difference. Big corporations aren't really for me either and I don't want to move back to a major coastal city, it ends up costing more than the difference in pay.

The company I'm currently with is doing pretty well too and I have a lot of time there so there's always a possibility of advancement there too. Though if there were jobs with 300k cash salary or more that didn't require relocation I'd have to really think about it. There's always a risk that the new job doesn't work out for whatever reason and I've been burned badly by that before. Never fully recovered from the 2016 move to Palo Alto!

[benterix]

> don't have anything in common with the rest of the employees outside of the project they're working on.

I fail to grasp this part. How is this negative? I often have nothing in common with the rest of the guys in my team but it doesn't affect my work in any way.

[anal_reactor]

I'm a junior.

First I worked at a small company that was oriented towards remote work. At the beginning I would show up in the office, but the company had a policy "instead of talking to me, can you write a message on public Slack channel, or even better, make a github issue I'll get back to later?", which made me furious because I'm a naturally talkative person. So I spent two years working remotely. Not gonna lie, that was amazing, I had work on one screen and porn on the other at all times.

Then I moved to a much bigger company that's remote-friendly. I make a point coming to the office every day, although never for full 8 hours, more like 3, and I'm slowly making some friends. There's people I can talk to beyond "howareyou howareyou", which is a huge thing, because we're social animals and as an immigrant, I just don't have the out-of-office social network most people do.

What I have noticed is that I'm always on much better terms with people I actually talk to, and in the office it's much easier to have these random chats about everything and nothing. These chats are incredibly important because they allow us to see coworkers as human beings rather than API calls.

A friend of mine lives with her boyfriend who's working fully remotely, the company doesn't even have an office in his area. She complained to me about the guy just not doing well in general. His entire social life is her, and that's not a healthy dynamic.

[mlrtime]

"instead of talking to me, can you write a message on public Slack channel, or even better, make a github issue"

Right because context switches are very expensive, and you are just one person. If everyone did what you did, the other end would be busy talking and not doing.

Instead, file your bug/report and give some indication of criticality. I understand why you don't like this approach but think of it from the other side's perspective.

[anal_reactor]

> I understand why you don't like this approach but think of it from the other side's perspective.

I did and my opinion remains unchanged.

[ryathal]

A minor delay in progress for someone else to be unblocked is generally a win.

[atmavatar]

That depends on a lot of factors:

* How minor is the delay?

  The more senior the person being asked, the more likely they're working on something complex enough such that the delay incurred by an interruption is non-trivial.

* Is the person asking actually blocked?

  Often times, people get into a mode where they will interrupt others to ask questions they could have answered themselves with a little additional research.

* How important is the blocked task relative to the delayed task?

  More often, the person asking the question is more junior, making it likely they're working on more trivial tasks.  The person being asked, often more senior, is more likely to be working on more valuable tasks.  It's possible even a slight delay in the latter's task is a greater cost to the business than leaving the former person's task blocked.

As an extreme example: you don't want an intern interrupting someone trying to resolve a downtime event just so the intern can get unblocked on a throwaway project.

[anal_reactor]

Fantastic.

The problem is, having a well-organized and cooperative team massively outweights having a bunch of rockstar developers each pulling in their own direction, unless we're talking about the tiniest of organizations. And I'm not going to be on friendly terms with someone I'm not allowed to talk to.

[vundercind]

> which made me furious because I'm a naturally talkative person.

Huh. Every “I’ll just come over” or “can we hop on a quick call?” for something I’m 90% sure can be sorted out within 20 messages makes me want to go take a walk instead. Writing’s great because I can refer back to it. If it’s in a channel with the rest of the team, it keeps them up to speed on what’s happening. Unless we really need to screen share or something (it happens!) turning a few messages into a call or an at-desk conversation drives me nuts.