13 ms·

Our Week Without Slack

• wink 10y ago
  As someone having an IRC client open while working since around 15 years this is so mindboggling. (Well, everything regarding the buzz about Slack and how it's a replacement for email, no it's the best thing since sliced bread, no wait, it's horrible.. etc.pp) Why yes, of course you need to restrain yourself from chatting all day. And learn to ignore people or tell them you're not able to talk to them right now - but it can still be immensely helpful to have your network of people available to help you solve your problems - because you're also helping them solve their problems from time to time.
  • gooseyard 10y ago
    same story here, I don't even want to admit how long I've been using IRC. I can imagine that people who are new to using an IRC-like system in an office might lose sight of when it's right to do things in person or over the phone, but once you've got a handle on that, you ought to use the hell out of the chat system, since the more comfortable everybody gets with it, the more they're able to reduce everybody's level of distraction by using IRC judiciously. It also means that on days when you're remote, things feel mostly the same.
  • fiatjaf 10y ago
    Since IRC was available for the last 15 years and only a handful of people used it like you, we should conclude that about the same number would do the same with Slack, all the others are just people who shouldn't be using Slack at all.
    • kazinator 10y ago
      IRC dates back to 1989. I myself first compiled a client on a HP-UX 9 system and connected in 1993. IRC was relatively big because it preceded the web; it was one of the few cool, interactive things you could do over the network. That and some early networked games. MUDs, shooters like Hunt (1986), XPilots (1992?)
      • deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
      • ams6110 10y ago
        Even before IRC there was "talk" which let you chat with anyone logged in to the same host (don't recall if it supported network chat). Remember in those days few people had a computer on their desk, instead they had a terminal that connected to a central host.
        • kazinator 10y ago
          Yes talk did work over the network. The programmers that wrote it, though, made fundamental mistakes in it. They sent raw C structures over the network without marshaling, oops! So talk didn't work very well. The issues were addresses in "ntalk".
          • alblue 10y ago
            And while talk only allowed for 2 people to communicate, ytalk allowed multiple people to talk at the same time.
            • blister 10y ago
              Hey, glad you remember ytalk. I was one of the maintainers for a short period of time (I owned metawire.org and worked with Jessica Peterson on it). We depended on ytalk for collaboration to chat and share shells. Those were happier times when the internet was populated by geeks. :)
  • mixmastamyk 10y ago
    IRC is often mentioned in regards to slack, but I find Instant Messenger(s) a bit closer in spirit. Did everyone stop using those too, in favor of facebook and slack, etc?
    • 1123581321 10y ago
      Same here. We started using Slack because it was the only thing that could break the use of ad hoc AIM and Google Chat accounts. I do think that the Slack homes for user groups and open source projects (the ones set up with auto-invite on Heroku) are direct replacements for "join us on Freenode" invitations.
      • guyzmo 10y ago
        which, TBH, a nightmare, because within slack you need to change "group" to be able to be present in multiple projects, or join multiple slack-irc-server...
    • mkhpalm 10y ago
      True, or Skype.
    • fridsun 10y ago
      IM in a corporate setting has never really take off IMO. Email is usually the choice, which has a more mature in-house management model.
      • SyneRyder 10y ago
        I've seen Lync (Skype For Business) gain some traction in more corporate settings.
        • april1stislame 10y ago
          Why not only use pidgin with local peer discovery? No config needed whatsoever... Well, besides a user name.
      • 10y ago
  • untog 10y ago
    "I've been doing X for 15 years, and I'm amazed that people who are new to X are finding it difficult" Is it really so surprising?
• Animats 10y ago
  From the article: I don't miss it at all, at least not in terms of doing my job well. I miss the memes and the ~banter~. On the other hand, from their picture, it appears that all their people are in the same room. They don't really need an online system for this.
  • kilroy123 10y ago
    They did mention remote workers. I imagine the need to communicate to everyone in the room and the remoties.
    • jkoebler 10y ago
      Yeah, we have three people in the UK, two in Canada, and a handful of remote freelancers / contractors. Slack is definitely useful for keeping in touch with them. The question is, how much constant communication do we actually need to put out a day's worth of content? Most of us can work autonomously or with a little one-on-one chatting with our editors, but we were just on Slack because we were trying to create a virtual office that, while nice, probably isn't necessary to actually put out a product.
• aaronbrethorst 10y ago
  I disagree with the article. Slack is invaluable for my needs as a software engineer. However, none of the people mentioned in the article are software engineers. Different jobs require different levels and forms of collaboration. Maybe collaboration between journalists can and should take a different form than Slack. That doesn't seem very surprising to me.
  • Jade_Jet 10y ago
    I'm also in the same field and I find Slack (really chat in general) to be highly distracting. The problem isn't in chat itself, it's that people use it to post non-work related things, gifs, large scale notifications that should really only be sent to one person as a private message, etc. With email, I can filter these things out much easier. But I'm expected to be available on Slack during working hours.
    • dasil003 10y ago
      Keep it hidden and only reply to @messages and DMs, you can suppress @channel and @here if you want. If people are still pinging you all the time for inane things then it's sort of a human issue of the sort you might have to deal with if someone keeps coming in your office all the time to chat.
  • tlogan 10y ago
    Can you please explain how do you use Slack for development in your team? For devs, it is just too much noise to have any reasonable conversation: maybe because writing emails ensures that writer/sender thinks more about what to write in email. Or because we try to check email only twice a day (so that we are focusing on actual development). We tried using for checkins and build statuses but web page seems a better way. Just way too distracting.. but maybe we are missing the use case.
    • joshmn 10y ago
      > For devs, it is just too much noise to have any reasonable conversation: maybe because writing emails ensures that writer/sender thinks more about what to write in email. Or because we try to check email only twice a day (so that we are focusing on actual development). Nailed it.
• kordless 10y ago
  > I felt a little bit like I was a freelancer again, which I think was kind of the point ... a lot of us are writers who ended up weighing in on every single little thing in Slack because it felt like that was our job when really it probably isn't. Over analysis leads to paralyzation, which isn't necessarily a Slack problem. Sounds more like they are blaming the messenger rather than themselves, which is exceedingly easy to do in this day and age. There's a similar argument made for gun legislation, where the restriction in distribution of guns leads to less violence. People are still responsible for their actions, but other people's actions (such as turning off Slack) lead to greater awareness that those actions will not be tolerated in a social group.
  • AznHisoka 10y ago
    They're just saying Slack creates an environment that makes it easy to be unproductive. So they made the right decision to not use it rather than force themselves to use up their "discipline energy" and use it properly. It's like going on a diet and deciding not to have any junk food in the house rather than have it around and force yourself to be disciplined. An entirely valid (and correct) approach.
    • kordless 10y ago
      And what of those that don't need to expend "discipline energy" whatever the fuck that is? Slack is not the problem, nor the removal of it the solution. This is corporate bullshit in action.
      • AznHisoka 10y ago
        Then go ahead and use Slack. To each his own. For Vice it obviously didn't cultivate a productive environment.
    • jkoebler 10y ago
      Yeah, I think this is right (I'm on the Motherboard team), I'm the one who made the "silo" comment. I think Derek's point in the article about Slack making it easy to disguise structural / workflow problems is very true. We don't hate slack and I'm sure we'll go back to using it, but by stripping down to nothing, it made the flaws in our workflow / approach more obvious. Now when we go back to it, hopefully we'll use it in a much different way. Frankly, I hope we don't ever go back or go back in a much scaled down way, but I'm not expecting that long term.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• nickpsecurity 10y ago
  It's about what I expected in effect. Very distracting. There's something to be said for making out-of-band communications easier than whatever is usually hard but still take work to reduce frivilous comms. My GPG I use for some chit-chat but mostly important conversations. The reason is that it's a pain in the ass to use. I have to work to send a message. Even easier ones with passwords and such still take work. So, maybe take a little trouble to set up a thread with an expiration that drops out of it in an hour or 30 minutes or something. They'll get trained to only use the tool for things that matter and to know if they receive something in it that it probably matters. Only surprise was in the presentation where I forgot Adrianne was the writer as I read content first followed by author. Gets me to the goods plus eliminates various biases. I thought, "What a bizarre response to a question about how Slack worked for their organization. Is this person trolling the feedback form?" Lol. Anyway, I think it was a nice reminder that it's best to make interviewer's questions stand out from the answers. A good, design pattern. One I recall was, before Q&A begins, to say something like "interviewer's questions in (color here)" with the rest a different color. I figured it out by the second statement with that name that I was reading the interview questions but it mentally interrupted flow in an otherwise good presentation. So, still worth mentioning and trying to avoid in the future.
• a_small_island 10y ago
  (Per the picture in the article) I don't think they pack them in close enough at those desks
  • fapjacks 10y ago
    Yes! I can't believe those people actually get anything done!
• Wonnk13 10y ago
  I too find it distracting. Sooo, I just left our channels with stupid memes and keep only the ones that provide the information I need to do my job. I don't get how people can complain how distracting it is when your not obligated to stay in those channels. n=1 anecdote, but with my team in four offices on two continents Slack (or Hipchat) is valuable.
• carlesfe 10y ago
  Wait, is Slack now so "mainstream" that it's problematic and the cool thing to do is to get off it? > "The longest I can go without checking it even if I'm incredibly busy is probably 10-15 minutes." Well... don't? Maybe close the app? Our team is 100% remote and we use Slack and email constantly, but when somebody needs to finish some urgent task, we just close it, no big deal. Is having a bit of privacy and piece of mind frowned upon now?
  • jkoebler 10y ago
    Hey, I'm the guy on the Motherboard team who said this. You make a fair point, but I think the main difference is that we're a team that publishes 20 or so stories every single day. That's 20 individual pieces of content that go from merely an idea to a finished, public product, usually in the course of a couple hours or so for each one. Each one doesn't require input but input is often useful for each of those. We have relatively few long-term projects (we do have them of course, but we don't use slack for those). That means dropping from slack means you completely lose track / have no input in perhaps many things that you could have helped out with. It's in theory not the end of the world, but we got used to providing input on basically every story, and so that's where I'm coming from on this. I may be completely off base here, but I'm assuming that most Slack teams probably don't have products whose entire development cycle is only a few hours in many cases. Just my theory, maybe I'm a psycho with a short attention span, but I really don't think that's the case.
    • carlesfe 10y ago
      I can understand that different teams use Slack differently. However, I assume you did manage to work before Slack existed, right? I'm not saying this sarcastically. We sometimes forget that there are many different ways to produce the same result. You can perfectly use it less. It should provide value; if it doesn't, reduce its usage. > That means dropping from slack means you completely lose track / have no input in perhaps many things that you could have helped out with. It's in theory not the end of the world, but we got used to providing input on basically every story, and so that's where I'm coming from on this I always think of this quote when one of these dilemmas hits me: "You are not as important as you think you are". You think you need input or to contribute constantly, but that's not usually the case. Slow down on your communication, it's fine. Don't check Slack every 15 minutes when you're writing, check it less often. Easier said than done :)
• flavor8 10y ago
  Our teams are entirely remote, and slack fills in for some of the things we miss by not being in the same room. Async tech conversations, status and reachability, crisis coordination, a feed from various other systems, and some banter. I actually like that the free tier deletes messages; we have other tools (wiki, bug tracker) to serve as a permanent record, so everyone is clear that anything that needs to be documented should be written up elsewhere. If it didn't exist, irc would for us almost fully replace it; it's just a slightly nicer ux.
• Mendenhall 10y ago
  I like slack as a tool. How I used it mostly was for important things right then. We would have slack up and if something was posted you looked, because it was most likely urgent. No meme sending or idle chat allowed. I dont want my time wasted by looking at a stupid meme. Work and work only on slack is what works for us. (exception we use it when ordering lunch lol)
• fapjacks 10y ago
  How do those people get any work done in a room like the one in the headline photo?
  • percept 10y ago
    The new norm...
  • swozey 10y ago
    Most of them don't even have monitors. I'm assuming it's some shitty hip cowork space. Best thing about slack for me is that it's an interface to send alerts/reminders/metrics to my team and I, but I'm one of those people who loathe email.
  • parasubvert 10y ago
    Most modern office layouts at younger companies are open like this. It takes getting used to but can be very productive, especially if your work is collaborative or requires frequent/brief cross-team communication without 'booking a meeting'.
  • trhway 10y ago
    It works just fine when you're young. Look at the age of people there. Beside keeping leasing costs down, it is a very efficient way of keeping old farts out. I worked in an even bit more overcrowded conditions around 20 years ago surrounded by the guys of my age, and we were very productive with no issues caused by overcrowding and with all the benefits of instant collaboration/teamwork/etc. These days, the open floor office is felt like a big downer for me, and the office like this in the photo - i'd have to be really desperate to agree to work there.
• kethinov 10y ago
  They claim Slack is distracting while the picture at the top of the article is a bunch of people working in cramped quarters in an open office. I think they have bigger fish to fry here. Slack has a mute button. All that requires is self control. You can't mute coworkers sitting too close to you. Even with headphones (which notice half the people in the photo are wearing) you can only somewhat filter out the distracting people.
  • eddieroger 10y ago
    I agree that they have other issues beyond Slack with respect to productivity, but playing Devil's Advocate, muting Slack has the downside of just creating a large backlog of missed messages, and if the culture is to be dependent on it, mute only shifts distractions to later instead of eliminating them. This is worse if the culture holds impromptu Slack meetings that you can easily miss by being on mute. In that case it would be the culture and not the tool, admittedly, but any tool will have a similar problem.
    • kethinov 10y ago
      Firstly, impromptu is bad. Work requires focus, not "oh look a squirrel!" People learn delayed gratification in life. The same goes for the urgency of someone in your org randomly deciding everyone needs to talk about my random thoughts right fricking now. Secondly, messages piling up is a feature, not a bug. You engage when you need a mental break and you're in an engagement mood. If other people are in that mood at the same time, great. If not, then if you force them to engage with you anyway you are harming their productivity. People need to learn this. People get in the zone at different times and this needs to be respected.
  • thinkingkong 10y ago
    To play on this, theres a big difference between ignoring messages for awhile and having a shared understanding that everyone is ignoring messages. I think thats where we need to focus.
  • ydt 10y ago
    No kidding. That office layout is a nightmare. My last 2 gigs have been pretty weighted towards slack as the preferred communication medium amongst the team. My experience has been that it allows me safely ignore my email inbox with the assurance that anything truly vital will be directly messaged to me on slack. It's lived up to the hype for me.
• finalight 10y ago
  i have stop using slack for a year kudos to me
• beilabs 10y ago
  Has anyone noticed how the Slack client seems to just consume resources. I don't recall my IRC clients down the years use as much memory / CPU as my slack client seems to do. Surely there should not be too much computational overhead involved here or am I missing something?
  • halotrope 10y ago
    It halves my macbooks battery life. I wonder if this is a result of the php/js stack. I would not be suprised all these cpu cycles are burnt with busy waiting for new messages.
• fallenshell 10y ago
  I'd quit the same day if I had to work in that office. Exaggeration aside, how do you guys get anything done?