
Ask HN: Small teams, how do work from home? - njsubedi
I would like to know how start-up and small teams suddenly moved to work-from-home model. Did you completely change anything on your stack, or started using an entirely different stack? How efficiently are you working, and what problems are you facing with the change?<p>For me it had always been:<p>1. Mail-in-a-box for internal &amp; customer support email.
2. Gogs fot git.
3. RocketChat for team communication.
4. NextCloud for files sharing.
5. LastPass for password management.
6. DigitalOcean for DNS and hosting needs.<p>When we started working from home, we introduced Taiga for project management, BookStack for internal documentation, and Collabora app on NextCloud for document editing.<p>Things haven&#x27;t changed much, but it feels like there&#x27;s a lot to manage, including the servers, authentication, onboarding, offboarding, etc.<p>I prefer to self-host everything I can, partly because of the horrible things that happened to startup founders who suddenly lost their accounts on Google, GitHub and alike.
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samdwilson
I think it helps to schedule meetings to socialize. There's a lot of informal
bonding that happens in an office that gets lost when being home.

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Jugurtha
We ramped up remote work before the pandemic to expose inefficiencies in
communication and improve the lives of our colleagues who commute through an
unreliable public transportation system. We figured we'd have to do it, so we
might as well make learn how to.

Our hypotheses was that cumulative fatigue with respect to days of the week
was non-linear, and removing a couple of days to work remotely would _reset_
us and improve recovery. We experimented with the first day of the week
remotely. We thought it would be a nice transition, as people would spend the
week-end, work remotely the first day of the week, then work at the office the
following days.

We noticed improvements in morale and energy levels. We also experimented with
working remotely the whole week to learn what the bottlenecks were.

This lead us to improve our technical writing and information dissemination:
use helpful templatse to write clear issues that allow everyone to understand
and be on the same page asynchronously, and everyone had access to these
issues and knew where we were at.

We haven't changed our stack: we use GitLab for repository management and
issue tracking, Slack for messaging.

One addition is Jitsi for video calls, but we're not using it more than before
the pandemic. I'll die on that hill. There's work to be done, and nobody
messes with the flow of people. We aggressively keep that under control not to
disturb colleagues. We amortize that by taking notes and dispatching them, and
by recording the videos for others to view ad libitum. Ideally, I want to have
colleagues request a Jitsi session just to chat a bit and have a friendly
conversation.

The feedback is that colleagues say they now have long stretches of time to
focus. They say that they miss the interactions. I'd rather have people say
they miss the interactions on a call (i.e: demand), than having to take a low
entropy call.

One thing we've been doing from the beginning, before the pandemic, is get our
colleagues' feedback: how are you feeling? How is working the first day
remotely going for you? What do you like, what don't you like? How was working
for one week remotely for you?

After the pandemic: How are you today? Are you okay? What do you have trouble
with? How can we help?

These questions were important to correct course. Everyone has a different
situations. Some people have less space than others, some don't have a
dedicated space for work, some struggle with interruptions, and others find it
hard to focus. It was important to talk these things through, encourage
people, make it clear that it is an adaptation period and that everyone will
find their rythm.

It was also necessary to set expectations: I returned from Paris in late
January and it was clear that it was only a matter of days before cases would
pop up. We made the decision to start working remotely when the case count was
17. These cases were concentrated in a city where two colleagues lived, and
they took the train to come in. It was an unacceptable risk and we made the
decision to eliminate that risk until we knew more about the virus.

Personally, I set my timeline in February that this whole thing would last at
the very least one year. Having a "one year" timeline helps completely ignore
press releases and government agencies roller-coaster expectation management,
and helps setting colleagues expectation: we're in this for the long run, make
your arrangements. This allows them, for example, to relocate to some other
place and be with their family, which they cannot do if they don't know if
they're going to be called in a week later. This also helps with finances so
they can make the decision not to renew a lease, for example.

We also make a clear committment that the safety of our colleagues is very
important, and as long as this is not sorted out, we'll continue to work as we
are. Some colleagues were worried as their friends who worked at other
companies were called back after the government started pushing for
"reopening", and the point that this wasn't going to happen was important to
make.

I recently switched to OBS Studio for screen-recording. I used Kazam before to
record screens for presentations, but its audio stopped working on Ubuntu
20.04. I applied a patch I found on their bug tracker (replace time.clock()
with time.perf_counter()) and it got the sound to work, but it has an issue
when the sink is a Bluetooth headset.

Happy to answer more questions, as it is working for us very well and we're
actually working better now.

