
Ask HN: What are the best tools for working with remote developers? - stickydink
We have an existing team in our SF office, but we&#x27;re branching out into full-time domestic remote engineers. I&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;t quite cut it.<p>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?<p>Thanks!
======
rckoepke
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.

------
jdauriemma
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.

~~~
stickydink
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?

~~~
rckoepke
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
[https://tuple.app](https://tuple.app) is supposed to be the best for this.
It's literally build for remote pair programming.

~~~
rckoepke
Anything like this that works on windows as well?

------
gtirloni
[https://twist.com/](https://twist.com/)

