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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 engineer

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.
- icebraining 10y ago
  Or because we try to check email only twice a day (so that we are focusing on actual development). That's the thing I'd like to have in our chat - a way to mark a message as "not urgent" (or vice-versa), so that it doesn't interrupt their work. Usually I just end up emailing them, but that just adds a bunch of friction to both sides, and even then some of my colleagues are expected to reply to emails with little delay, since they handle client support. On IRC one can configure the client to alert the users only when the message matches certain terms, but we use Hangouts :|
pteredactyl 10y ago
THIS

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.
icebraining 10y ago
Or because we try to check email only twice a day (so that we are focusing on actual development). That's the thing I'd like to have in our chat - a way to mark a message as "not urgent" (or vice-versa), so that it doesn't interrupt their work. Usually I just end up emailing them, but that just adds a bunch of friction to both sides, and even then some of my colleagues are expected to reply to emails with little delay, since they handle client support. On IRC one can configure the client to alert the users only when the message matches certain terms, but we use Hangouts :|

pteredactyl 10y ago

THIS