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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 tha

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.