3 ms·

A few questions for the Slack engineering team

14 points by andrewfromx 10y ago

After using mattermost for a week now, I have a few questions for the slack engineering team: 1) do you have recent build of mattermost for osx running all day on your machines to test what it can do? 2) are you dogfooding their app by using it INSTEAD of your own product? At least for a week to get real world use out of it. Because I just went through that experience and wow do I like mattermost better now compared to slack. And I'm a huge slack fan. I lead a campaign at www.bitium.com to replace skype with slack. It was game changing. I think Steward Butterfield is a genius. But man, I have to say, the mattermost product is now better in this fundamental way: It's FAST and LIGHT MEMORY USE. You can type faster in it. For real. As a developer I'm typing as fast as I possibly can during the day to other programmers and I can tell Slack throttles my maximum typing speed by like a factor of 5. Try typing fast in both you'll see what I mean. 1.5 GB of ram? Really? That's like not okay to ship. What are you doing with all that memory. I need some of it back for other apps I'm running. You're not the only app in my like Slack. Want to know MM's number? It's 32 MB, and a couple other helper processes for a total of maybe 100 MB but it's stays like that throughout the day. Slack I have to quit and re-open to get it's ram back down to just 400 MB.

dreamdu5t 10y ago
We finally ditched Slack and went back to email. Everyone (25+) has email, knows how to use it, and gets them instantly on their smartphones. We have a rule that if it can't be written in email, then to have a phone or real-life conversation. It's been a couple weeks since we made the change, people were very skeptical, but now everyone feels a lot less stressed-out and engineering is overjoyed and its been a boon to productivity. Turns out a lot of time was wasted just chatting and being interrupted. I'd be very reluctant to use a team chat service ever again.
- atomical 10y ago
  Slack requires a lot of configuration and training. For example, users may not know how to mute or disable notifications for certain channels. They may not understand the implications of using @channel in a channel with 100 people in it on a Saturday morning. The API integrations may have to be dialed back or restricted to a separate non-public channel with keyword notification (i.e. continuous integration results). Once these problems are solved it becomes very efficient work with other team members in real time. We've also built out some bot functionality to answer common questions that stakeholders ask. We use Slack for conference calls. If they add the ability to screen share no one on the team will ever use Skype again. Good riddance.

14 points by andrewfromx 10y ago

dreamdu5t 10y ago

We finally ditched Slack and went back to email. Everyone (25+) has email, knows how to use it, and gets them instantly on their smartphones. We have a rule that if it can't be written in email, then to have a phone or real-life conversation. It's been a couple weeks since we made the change, people were very skeptical, but now everyone feels a lot less stressed-out and engineering is overjoyed and its been a boon to productivity. Turns out a lot of time was wasted just chatting and being interrupted. I'd be very reluctant to use a team chat service ever again.

atomical 10y ago
Slack requires a lot of configuration and training. For example, users may not know how to mute or disable notifications for certain channels. They may not understand the implications of using @channel in a channel with 100 people in it on a Saturday morning. The API integrations may have to be dialed back or restricted to a separate non-public channel with keyword notification (i.e. continuous integration results). Once these problems are solved it becomes very efficient work with other team members in real time. We've also built out some bot functionality to answer common questions that stakeholders ask. We use Slack for conference calls. If they add the ability to screen share no one on the team will ever use Skype again. Good riddance.