7 ms·

Slack is not for me

103 points by rishirishi 9y ago

KKKKkkkk1 9y ago
Do this at your own peril. The most important part of your job as an engineer is politics, not engineering. You might think that blocking out pointless meetings and other useless distractions will help you to focus on actual engineering. What you'll find is that within mere weeks, others are taking credit for your work. Before you know it, you will be sidelined and marginalized, and no meaningful work will be assigned to you. Never turn your back to your coworkers.
- cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
  I mentioned this right above but I absolutely agree. The only solution right now is to go along with it and actively participate in all the chats so you don't get alienated. Basically you MUST play politics. And I think this is the core of the problem. Office politics is BAD. And wasting time chatting and sharing GIFS all day instead of working is BAD. An ideal tool for the workplace should minimize office politics, not create more. Also it shouldn't distract people into "Slack"ing off. An organization that incentivizes developers who play politics instead of doing good work is not a great workplace.
  - lobotryas 9y ago
    Do you realize that when you get a sufficiently large or diverse group of people together there will invariably be politics? Even within a family or group of friends there are politics in people promoting their own interests or vying for affection/time of others. This is not an inherent flaw in the system. This is how the system was designed to work.
  - solatic 9y ago
    > wasting time chatting and sharing GIFS all day instead of working is BAD... An organization that incentivizes developers who play politics instead of doing good work is not a great workplace. Precisely - it is management's responsibility to foster an environment in which work gets done. If "fun" channels are really that busy then management needs to wonder whether people either aren't getting their work done or whether they're not being assigned enough work in the first place. > Basically you MUST play politics. Well... That's not necessarily a bad thing. Every organization has politics. Having people pay attention to their coworkers and their interests is a requirement of empathetic and successfully cooperative organizations. But it's management's responsibility to ensure that politics has its dedicated place, where all voices are encouraged and heard equally, and remains healthy (no back-stabbing), without politics becoming all-consuming and preventing real work from getting done.
- dingo_bat 9y ago
  I don't know man that sounds kind of depressing. I think such behaviour is not very common.
- bassman9000 9y ago
  The most important part of your job as an engineer is politics, not engineering God, no. Politics is a necessary evil, sometimes. You might think that blocking out pointless meetings and other useless distractions will help you to focus on actual engineering This is entirely true. What you'll find is that within mere weeks, others are taking credit for your work What kind of organization are you working for, that allows this? In any case, using slack won't prevent anyone who truly, inappropriately wants to take credit from doing so. Soon enough, you will be sidelined and marginalized, and no meaningful work will be assigned to you This is only if your skillset is not relevant enough. Never turn your back to your coworkers. How do you go from not wanting to use slack to that? There are other means of communicating with your coworkers. Email is still superior for anything relevant.
  - deleted 9y ago
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- foepys 9y ago
  Where do you work that you have to constantly fight off others from backstabbing you? That sounds like a really, really stressful and unhealthly work environment.
  - harlanji 9y ago
    Not GP but I've had 5 jobs since coming to SF in 2014; walked off the last 2 within months. I was innocent and naive when I arrived, now I see how my late brother receeded to him bedroom for the final years of his life. People are horrible when they can get away with it. You can bet job quality goes down with each notch. When I was at the top I told him to smile and try harder. Back stabbing is fine, at least you feel that one and it ends. Once you're down the spiral I don't know how to get up, but you're blessed to not understand.
  - aidaman 9y ago
    It doesn't require a want to backstab, just incentive to get ahead.
cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
I agree with OP. Slack is like watercooler, on steroids. I guess having occasional spontaneous watercooler conversations may be good for getting to know your peers better, but in a lot of cases watercooler conversations result in clique behaviors. Slack takes this to whole new level. People hang around on slack channels posting animated Gifs and chatting all day, on topics that have nothing to do with work. The problem with this is you have to keep up all day with the chatter or otherwise you get left out as an "outsider" (the clique effect). Sometimes I would see these people talk behind backs of people who they know are not part of the group. This creates office politics. I know because I saw it first hand. Lastly, there's nothing worse than penalizing people for working hard and not participating in meaningless gossip and chatter all day.
- lordCarbonFiber 9y ago
  If you want to work with robots then you were probably born a few decades too early. I can't imagine a more depressing life than spending 8+ hours a day with a group of people and being so determined not to make any friends (what you describe as "cliques"). If people are "SLACKing" off so much work doesn't get done then that gets escalated just like any other performance concern. If not, it feels a lot more like sour grapes than anything else.
  - cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
    Like I mentioned in another comment below, I am not an anti-social guy. I played the game, and I did just fine. Everybody at work liked me and I had no issues. But I'm not talking about me. I'm talking about how the system is messed up. I didn't enjoy being unproductive. I didn't enjoy having to keep Slack open all day to make sure I don't miss out on what people are up to. I do believe the company lost a lot of talented developers because of the office politics. And you know what? Everyone did just fine before they started using Slack. Everybody was friendly to one another, we regularly had globally inclusive face-to-face social gatherings, many of the team members ate lunch together, the team was pretty social. But with slack, everything became political. It didn't bring people closer together in any way because people were already friendly enough before. What it did do was create more politics and make everyone waste more time than they used to. Before slack, wasting time was a single player thing, you would maybe slack off for a bit reading hacker news but quickly get back to work, but after Slack, slacking off became a multiplayer thing, and just like any other multiplayer architecture, Metcalfe's law applies here too, which means the amount of wasted time grows exponentially.
CodeSheikh 9y ago
We were forced to move to Slack as well. Do not like it. It is more distracting than making us productive. I enjoyed HipChat [https://www.atlassian.com/software/hipchat https://www.atlassian.com/software/hipchat]
- ComputerGuru 9y ago
  > I enjoyed HipChat Is that just due to client fit and polish or for a more fundamental reason?
- strictnein 9y ago
  Ugh... Hipchat. Relatively straightforward things that they don't seem to be able to address: You can't chat with more than 1 person without creating a private room. Slack makes this effortless. It's been on Atlassian's radar for almost 1.5 years with no movement: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Hipchat-questions/chat-with-two-or-more-people-without-to-use-room/qaq-p/125060 https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Hipchat-questions/chat-wi... https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/HCPUB-431 https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/HCPUB-431 And when you're in a private chat with someone, the jumping text you see when the person you're chatting with is typing. Over 1.5 years and they can't fix that? It's horribly distracting and just kinda sucks. https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/HCPUB-950 https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/HCPUB-950 Anyways, the whole thing feels dead and is very clearly a low priority for Atlassian.
  - chrisco255 9y ago
    Atlassian employee here. We moved much of our development efforts to Stride, our next gen team chat software. Be sure to check it out: https://www.stride.com https://www.stride.com
    - vesak 9y ago
      You guys oughta think about pricing. We just moved, a bit reluctantly, to Microsoft Teams (essentially free because existing MS subscription) because even Hipchat was way too expensive. Does Stride really need to be $36/user/year, and double that if we need SAML?
austenallred 9y ago
Do people not realize how customizable Slack is? Everything that bugs OP can be turned off, there’s do not disturb mode. away mode, you can mute every alert with granularity, etc. The idea that “I don’t use this communication channel that all my coworkers do and everything is fine” seems risky at best.
- deleted 9y ago
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- jedberg 9y ago
  "Adjusting notifications, muting channels, leaving channels and pretending to be away helped in alleviating the distraction. However, returning to the app tended to be a time sink; what would be a minute-long exchange in person now took far longer. "
- michaelmrose 9y ago
  Are you actually saying not using slack is risky? Do people not talk in your universe? Send emails? Text messages?
  - jstandard 9y ago
    I don't think that's Austen's point, no. It's more that completely disengaging from a primary communication tool within your company is risky. It might work out for you. There's also a big chance you'll be left out of important conversations, decisions, and been seen as not a team player because the rest of the organization now has to adapt around one person's communication preferences. Communication is tough. There are so many different, competing styles and needs that you'll never build the perfect tool. It's more about building the right habits and processes around your tools.
jedberg 9y ago
Related question for the masses: I run a fully remote startup. My goal is to make as much communication asynchronous as possible, to facilitate people being in multiple time zones and having different optimal work times and places. We have slack right now, but for the most part people understand that it's an async tool -- i.e. don't expect an instant response. Usually the only "instant" convo is if we're having a video meeting and need to share links (which of course we try to avoid since video meetings aren't async but are sadly unavoidable). My question is, as we grow, how to I keep Slack that way, and make sure it doesn't turn into a huge distraction and just a bunch of gifs and watercooler talk, without imposing rules about "the proper use of Slack"?
- lordCarbonFiber 9y ago
  Make a room for "general posting" and collect all the gifs and watercooler talk there. Gives everyone a space where they can go to decompress, doesn't change your normal business use. Im also of the opinion that having a dedicated space for more "real time" communications can be really helpful as well. Team branded support room, for example. Having a space that everyone at least casually keeps an eye on can really save everyone a lot of time (especially when operating remotely) if a team member comes across an issue.
  - iamdave 9y ago
    This is great advice; it's how our team functions, being 100% remote, but are leasing space that we come to if a team ever wants to sit together in person. It's available, but managers have made it clear it's by no means compulsory. So, we have off-topic channels, a channel to plan social events (I Live in Austin Texas and we have more than one musician who will post events, and we've made company outings out of going to see a coworker perform), there's one for movie chats, and even a "LFG" (Looking for games) channel for the folks who like to play and discuss video games. They're all as active and vibrant as our #devops and #product-discussions channels.
    - anonemouse145 9y ago
      If you want to contain the nutters, build a nuthouse. Every message board admin in the world learns you need dumping grounds and pressure relief valves to keep the population in line. My team has "General" for company wide announcements and "random" for dumping gifs and whatnot. There's also stuff like #sysadmin if something goes down or you spot a security bulletin and want to make sure the admin team sees it. Keep those rooms going as necessary. Low traffic, but the right people want an unread marker on them.
dingo_bat 9y ago
I feel that emails and Outlook style meeting systems should be enough for all day to day activities of a software developer. Rarely, there will be a situation that needs immediate attention. In that case a phone call would be sufficient. There is no need for a chat or instant messaging solution. However I must say that Skype's desktop sharing has come in very useful at times, and I don't know of a way to do that without having a chat client.
- mrep 9y ago
  I find instant communication useful for quick "Am I doing this right?" problems people have. Sending something like "I'm getting ssh connection refused while trying to connect to this host. Can someone else try?". That can quickly be answered by multiple people and people can chime in their quick thoughts for what is likely the problem. Trying to communicate a bunch of people with one line question/answers would be super annoying with the latency that email has.
ramzyo 9y ago
The author (OP?) positions the article to blame Slack as the root cause of productivity ills. However, multiple times it’s pointed out that Slack in and of itself isn’t the problem, but can simply exacerbate other root cause issues if misused. >> Although Slack is positioned as a productivity tool, it becomes counterproductive when misused. The conclusion doesn’t follow the premise here. The author concludes that the root cause of counterproducitivty is misuse of the tool, not the tool itself. This doesn’t do anything to discredit the premise, as it’s easy to argue that any tool can be counterproductive/dangerous/etc. when misused. >> Organizations that find enough value in using Slack should introduce rules of engagement. So the OP admits organizations can find value in using Slack, but should address the potential for misuse by introducing rules of engagement. Or rather, that rules of engagement should be put in place to prevent other root cause issues from being worsened by misuse of the tool. Again, the author is arguing that Slack isn’t the problem here. The article may strike a chord with those who don’t like Slack, but the arguments presented are very sloppy. To me, this reads as a plug for a particular work style the OP finds themselves more productive under. The Slack attack is misplaced. The expectation of constant availability and immediate responses sound like cultural issues, exacerbated by the communication channels that Slack provides.
- deleted 9y ago
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NiklasMort 9y ago
I see lot of IRC channels move to Slack and I don't get it, Kubernetes being one of them. Honestly why? I don't mind Slack for a small team but not for a channel with a few thousand user, it's a mess. Furthermore, maybe it's somehow because of my anti-ad addons but slack is generally slow and laggy for me. Takes quite a while to open the channel, lot of features don't work under Firefox.
- snarfy 9y ago
  We've had IRC for so long that it makes me sad it hasn't succeeded more.
  - busterarm 9y ago
    I used Slack over IRC for a while. Other than group chats and downloads/gifs, it worked pretty well. The private messages thing is solved if you have one machine that stays connected to IRC 100% of the time and you connect to that.
yborg 9y ago
It seems to be trendy to blame Slack for all the ills of modern civilization. Is it the somewhat smug tone of all Slack's corporate communication? Maybe. Other than that, it seems to me to be more or less the same general bucket of telegrams, telephone calls, pages, texts, emails, etc. that each preceding generation has blamed on their inability to focus. If you can't resist distractions, whether it's Slack, or watching the ducks in the pond through the window, yes, you should close the blinds. I don't know why this rated a post on Medium...
- ramzyo 9y ago
  Exactly, well said. As humans we’re excellent at blaming pretty much anything else (Slack, email, telephone, telegram, anything really) for what is our own and only our own inability to focus.
  - snarfy 9y ago
    All of these devices are built specifically to steal your focus with buzzers and flashing lights. If anything it's an arms race.
    - ramzyo 9y ago
      I agree. Still our issue and our issue alone as individuals. Nobody’s forcing anybody to use something designed to steal their attention. And if someone is being forced to in a work environment, that sounds to me like a cultural issue, not an issue with the attention stealing tool itself.
  - birksherty 9y ago
    All humans are effected by these distractions of modern communications. We all check them too often and notifications break everyone's focus. Our brains are built like this. When something happens suddenly, we focus on that. May be because of evolution. So, how is this our own individual problem?
    - ramzyo 9y ago
Bitcoin_McPonzi 9y ago
For software developers, the best way to communicate is through the bug database. Developers don't use "slack" at our company. Of course, it may be different for sales and support people, etc.
- jasonlfunk 9y ago
  Well, the best way to communicate about software issues, requests, and bugs would be through a bug database - but certainly there is a lot more communication happening in a business that I would want mucking up my issue tracker.
- erikb 9y ago
  I also used to think that way. But in my current team we have lots of components that are maintainerless and attentionless since their maintainer left the team for another job. When he hwas still active we all considered this component important because many hours of work where flowing into it. Now it's not maintained, receives nearly zero work, and still the impact to the team and sales is not visible. One could say finding out which components are critical should be someone elses job, e.g. the manager's. All true, but still I wouldn't want to end up spending the prime time of my day for multiple years on a piece of software that nobody uses and nobody makes money with. So I'd argue that I as a dev cannot interact with just the bug db. I need to see what sales is doing, product management, join meetings, etc.
jerrycabbage 9y ago
Author would have a better point if he talked about how the widespread use of memes/animated gifs is what makes such platforms into junk.
newscracker 9y ago
I don't like any kind of IM/chat apps used like an endless meeting. They're good for tackling one single issue with probably a handful of people at a time. Even with @mentions, hashtags and channels, chat is still a single stream that pretends to have context like email or forum posts do (with subject lines and conversation threads). As a habit, I don't use any chat group (be it Telegram or any other app or platform) if there are more than five people. The explosion in the number of messages and the frustration in not being able to catch up is too big a cost on one's health and productivity. These tools don't enhance collaboration. On the contrary, they provide a facade of "being busy". We seem to keep trying to reinvent email and forum discussions (that have more context and confine discussions by topic) again and again, but not achieving better results.
jmadsen 9y ago
I dunno. I use Slack for a couple of groups as well as my full-time remote work. I turn off all notifications & just check from time to time. I have a project manager who tends to pester me with DMs a little too much, but if I'm trying to concentrate I just turn it off. I'm 50 years old & still "pre-internet" in much of my thinking, but I don't have a smartphone, turn off ALL notifications and then turn them on one-by-one on a need only basis, and still can't figure out why people have so much trouble managing their internet lives. It's not the tool that's causing your problems.
- ulrikrasmussen 9y ago
  Turning of all notifications is the key, I think. I have a single type of notification enabled which is able to interrupt me, and that is the vibrator on my phone when somebody calls. Everything else I only check when I feel like it, which is fine. Notifications are really overrated.
- petters 9y ago
  I have a policy that if an app sends a single undesired notification, I disable its notifications forever. That even Google violates its own Android notification guidelines is annoying.
  - threatofrain 9y ago
    Some really good mainstream apps will violate at least once, and then you'll have to ask whether following your rule or breaking it leads to better futures.
- wutbrodo 9y ago
  > still can't figure out why people have so much trouble managing their internet lives. I know it sounds really crochety, but I 100% agree. It's getting pretty tiresome to see people continue to put most of their blame onto their tools instead of their habits. It doesn't take that much maturity and self-awareness to realize that certain tools can be double-edged, and that their value sometimes requires a little bit of conscious thought about their usage. I'd say the main difference with chat tools like Slack (vs examples like Facebook) is that I can't get certain people to wrap their heads around how not to abuse them, but it's been pretty easy to ask those people politely once or twice to adhere to basic etiquette around messaging and then simply mute them after that.
Kluny 9y ago
> Without it, days are calm, purpose-driven and productive. Like you can't distract yourself with 40 other apps if not slack. Slack isn't the problem, they're ALL the problem. Anyway, Slack is mandatory if you're remote.
Void_ 9y ago
Here's a nifty counter of Slack activations per day: http://focuslist.co/escape2/ http://focuslist.co/escape2/ Kinda eye opening.
mattbillenstein 9y ago
While this may be great for him, this is probably counter-productive for the org -- and he's preparing to be left out of a lot of decisions and conversation. I've been in an org where there were stragglers who didn't want to use Slack for whatever reason -- "I'm too old" for it was one I found particularly retarded. Communication is key -- get your whole team on one tool - silence notifications if you have to, but you should aim to participate.
- rishirishi 9y ago
  > ... he's preparing to be left out of a lot of decisions ... I struggle to see how substantive decisions can be made legitimately through group chat. How do you facilitate decision making such that it allows people to prepare and participate?
  - mattbillenstein 9y ago
    It depends on the org and I guess how substantive you're referring to, but there are a lot of small decisions that get made this way and those add up.
ravenstine 9y ago
Slack is not hard to ignore. As I've mentioned in previous threads: * Mute all channels. * Take long periods of time to respond to people. Trust me, this isn't ever going to lead to any sense of shame. * Set yourself to away most of the time. * Disable gifs. * Set notifications for keywords like "lunch" and "meeting". * Disable the icon badge. (the red dot if you're using macOS) Now you can be productive with Slack. I know all these things are designed to grab our attention but, seriously, have some agency in your life. Deciding to go "offline" is perfectly legitimate, but I do think Slack can be easily used in a way that doesn't waste time.
- staunch 9y ago
  This is exactly right but it just shows how terrible the default Slack configuration is. It's probably somewhat broken by design. Being noisy and distracting surely increases Slack's usage numbers.
- axaxs 9y ago
  The reasons a lot of people complain about are the same reasons I like slack. First, if i'm intensely busy, I just ignore it. It stays backgrounded, and a little blue or red dot sits there. That's it. When i'm in a general workday, i'll usually try to check red dots, and relegate the others to 'as time allows.' But that's its draw to me. I love seeing the goofy gifs, custom emojis, etc that people come up with. It's a sort of comic relief from the stressful days. In the end, it sounds like a lot of folks just have trouble with self control, so blame a tool. You don't have to click the red/blue dot...just let it be.
lobotryas 9y ago
Working with the kind of person that OP seems to be is a pain. Sometimes I need your help, a code review, feedback or advice. Sometimes I even need it ASAP because I am dealing with something time sensitive. I do my best to be respectful of people's tome, but sometimes a distraction to help a colleague is unavoidable. I'll send an email when appropriate, but in most other cases I'll look for you on Slack. If you're not there then that means I'll just have to walk over to your desk to find you instead.
mathgenius 9y ago
Pretty sure I had some kind of slack PTSD after my last two dev jobs.
trts 9y ago
Slack lowers the friction involved in communicating. Depending on the kind of communication that it is, maybe that's bad or good. In many corporate communications platforms, it is quite effortless to ask an idle question, use an emoticon, paste a giphy image, write a bot to push notifications into your team channel, express a witticism, or vent complaints. It was my experience that Slack made it easier to do all of these things more than any platform I'd previously used. I've been off of it for 3 months and hope I never have to return. The worst problem seemed to be the number of ad-hoc channels I could be automatically invited to, and it was not often clear whether the information exchanged there was something I needed to pay attention to (although in retrospect it is more so). Different organizations will utilize it differently, and feature-wise Slack seems to have gotten pretty far ahead of the competition. But if there's any truth to the medium being the message, then I think that it can be inferred from much of what transpires on Slack is that as a platform it is a big time sink. There don't seem to be a lot of important degrees of urgency between an email, a phone call, or a drop-by. For me about 90% of the value in corporate messaging is pasting web links to resources, which doesn't require the other bells and whistles.
anonemouse145 9y ago
Most offices have bad cultures that don't foster good communication. The odds of people blaming a tool because they don't have good communication is very high. I think the bit about "my team is starting to notice I'm offline" is very telling. Oh you're so fancy, you special person who doesn't tell your team when you're not available and you aren't checking your messages. You sure showed them. I bet you're just the best facilitator of communication. Personally, I tell my team how they can and can't expect to contact me when I'm changing methods of communication. Call me crazy.
perfectstorm 9y ago
I agree with the author here but not for the reasons he stated. my biggest gripe with Slack is that it results in less and less one-to-one conversation. We used Slack at my last job but we were encouraged to stop by the person's desk for any matter that requires immediate attention. I sat near our CTO and sometimes I saw many engineers standing around his desk trying to debug a production issue. This resulted in knowing other people's name/face (which I realized after I joined my current company). At my new company we use Slack for pretty much everything. If there's a production bug you're encouraged to @here on the dedicated channel and someone would take a look at it. There's no one-to-one interaction to debug it. We had our holiday party last month where I introduced myself to some of my coworkers and once we started talking we realized that we have chatted on Slack but never saw each other even though we were all working in the same office. I never associated the engineer's face to the name. I do think Slack is a powerful tool in modern work environment but people shouldn't be too dependent on it.
- erikb 9y ago
  how do you figure out the solution to the bugs in a reasonable time without having 1:1 sessions? If you just hand over the bug and the other guy has to deal with it alone then that's really inefficient. That's also why it's hard for me to imagine that it's true what you say. The need for quick results will always create smaller meetings at this or that guy's desk.
daveFNbuck 9y ago
I've found exactly the opposite. People love to randomly interrupt me by showing up at my desk with questions. I tell them to use Slack instead, as this allows for asynchronous communication that doesn't interrupt my workflow. I also push people to ask questions in a channel instead of directly to me, as usually someone else will help them before I even see the question.
amix 9y ago
Slack is a great product, but with a wrong communication model. We have for the last three years developed Twist, which focuses on asynchronous communication by default. It includes some of the best features of Slack and email. We currently have about 1000 teams actively using it. Read more of our reasoning here: “Why We’re Betting Against Real-Time Team Messaging” https://blog.doist.com/why-were-betting-against-real-time-team-messaging-521804a3da09 https://blog.doist.com/why-were-betting-against-real-time-te...
- erikb 9y ago
  I've read your link and it's unclear to me why I wouldn't want both, relatively slow threaded conversations and quick real-time chat. And also I don't understand why slack+email wouldn't fulfill these needs already. My personal problem with most of this conversation is that in bigger teams (e.g. 500 people spread through 5-10 countries) it is really the truth that you are left behind if you are not constantly up to date on emails and chat. And it's not just that you are required to read incredible amounts of both, it's also that if you don't interact you are left out of many discussions that are important to your work, while not having a way to opt out of the discussions that are just spam from your tasks' perspective. Therefore I'd say the problem is not so much the communication medium, but the ability to interact with it en masse. I'm still interacting with each message one-on-one. But usually it would be enough if I could search all emails from my company that are not marked private or confidential for keywords, and get a sorted result back that prioritises based on what topics I'm working on. Basically google search for my company emails/chats, including these that are not addressed to me, preferably with a powerful query language like SQL.
  - yason 9y ago
    > My personal problem with most of this conversation is that > in bigger teams (e.g. 500 people spread through 5-10 > countries) it is really the truth that you are left > behind if you are not constantly up to date on emails > and chat. That is not a team: that is a department. You cannot meaningfully follow more than a couple of dozen people at a time, and you cannot deeply interact with maybe at most ten people at time. You also cannot follow more than a handful of subjects with reasonable comprehension: assumedly you work on one or two things full time and that knowledge fills most of your brain anyway. The 500 other people are those from whom you hear summaries from company or department wide meetings once a month or so. The communication overhead grows exponentially with the number of people. That's why departments form teams of maybe a dozen people and let the managers communicate and filter information back to the team so that the team members can focus on doing what they know best instead of trying to track everything that is happening. You can always talk with specific people when you need to know more about something specific: you don't have to know everything by default.
yason 9y ago
I don't get that, really. For at least a couple of decades there has generally been some internal instant messaging system at whichever company I've worked for. Nerds used to like plain local IRC server. In some places the expected tool was Windows Messenger despite it sucked bad and kept disconnecting. Slack is just another communication system: if you have problems with Slack you're likely to have problems with any messaging system if you configure them to allow interrupting your work. The very reason I've personally always preferred online communications for anything non-urgent at work is because nobody gets to interrupt me and I get to check messages when I have an idle moment. The alternative is face-to-face communication which means someone is interrupting you at your desk several times a day which I ten times worse. I currently use Slack over their irc gateway which works just fine. I have an Slack-connected irc client running in one tmux window and when I have time I can easily see if someone called for me or if the team channel has new activity.
- erikb 9y ago
  I think it's also possible to snooze Slack notifications for a few hours.
mcintyre1994 9y ago
I find the "All Unread" view works really well to use Slack asynchronously. You can just check it every so often, marking entire channels as read in one click if a skim doesn't interest you.
amriksohata 9y ago
I find it very useful for those who are quick to reply on slack, there are some who check slack once a day and those for types it's easier to get up and talk to them or email them. There is the downside which I find more common amongst the younger users straight out of uni just using it as a social chat mechanism
erikb 9y ago
> Instant messaging applications enable communication that is online, synchronous and on-demand. No. It's totally wrong. One needs to learn how to configure his chat tool that it doesn't disturb one in productive times, but is easily available when free. It's possible. I do it since ICQ. Unread chat messages will also still be unread if you continue to work 4 hours on your current task. > Without [instant messaging], days are calm, purpose-driven and productive. How can days be purpose driven if you don't sync your own work with your colleague's work any more? I'd argue that people who act like that are the least productive because they only work on things that are not valuable for the team at large.
- rishirishi 9y ago
  > How can days be purpose driven if you don't sync your own work with your colleague's work any more? Work does get synced. It gets discussed at our desks, usually in the mornings. If the work presents blockers requiring a lengthy discussion then we hop into a meeting room. I find we get better participation and arrive at a solution with less friction.
arnarbi 9y ago
We've had this kind of of posts as long as I remember. People blaming tools because they can't figure out the most basic skills of work, communication, planning, division and focusing of attention, etc. It's always a panacea to turn something off completely. But it's never about the tool. It's just the author learning how to operate themselves. What they did has minimal relevance to others in general, except perhaps for some validating "me too!"-s. It's much more valuable to step back and think critically about how you approach tasks and decisions, how you feel and what it tells you, and how much you can actually control all of it.
lwhi 9y ago
Communication is necessary. Slack is one way of communicating .. by all means get rid of it, but if you do .. make sure the replacement medium serves you better. I'd rather receive a DM than a phone call in most cases.
aembleton 9y ago
I find it useful for asking 'has anyone changed x because I'm seeing this stacktrace when I do abc?'. I don't expect an immediate result but when a devleoper has some downtime then they can check and respond. It's better than email because they can see the chat from other devs around the issue. The only thing I'd like to do is be able to stop auto-playing gifs and block @here from certain people who abuse it.
ravitation 9y ago
To be perfectly honest... It's hard for me to look at quitting Slack as anything but deeply selfish. How much more time is someone now spending writing you an email? Or waiting for you to answer one? How much more time are they spending walking over to your desk? Or wondering if they even should, since you're that one guy who refuses to use Slack? If you need long periods of quiet time to work, locking yourself in a closet is extremely effective, but that doesn't mean it also positively affects your organization. Slack is an organizational productivity tool. Nearly every post I read about people quitting Slack focuses on how much better they are able to work without it, not how much better their team or organization is without them on Slack... You're right, Slack isn't for you. It's for your team.
kapauldo 9y ago
In general, all notifications are awful for productivity because of the volume. Putting slack and your phone on DND for hour blocks is a huge productivity enhance.

103 points by rishirishi 9y ago

Do this at your own peril. The most important part of your job as an engineer is politics, not engineering. You might think that blocking out pointless meetings and other useless distractions will help you to focus on actual engineering. What you'll find is that within mere weeks, others are taking credit for your work. Before you know it, you will be sidelined and marginalized, and no meaningful work will be assigned to you. Never turn your back to your coworkers.

cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
I mentioned this right above but I absolutely agree. The only solution right now is to go along with it and actively participate in all the chats so you don't get alienated. Basically you MUST play politics. And I think this is the core of the problem. Office politics is BAD. And wasting time chatting and sharing GIFS all day instead of working is BAD. An ideal tool for the workplace should minimize office politics, not create more. Also it shouldn't distract people into "Slack"ing off. An organization that incentivizes developers who play politics instead of doing good work is not a great workplace.
- lobotryas 9y ago
  Do you realize that when you get a sufficiently large or diverse group of people together there will invariably be politics? Even within a family or group of friends there are politics in people promoting their own interests or vying for affection/time of others. This is not an inherent flaw in the system. This is how the system was designed to work.
- solatic 9y ago
  > wasting time chatting and sharing GIFS all day instead of working is BAD... An organization that incentivizes developers who play politics instead of doing good work is not a great workplace. Precisely - it is management's responsibility to foster an environment in which work gets done. If "fun" channels are really that busy then management needs to wonder whether people either aren't getting their work done or whether they're not being assigned enough work in the first place. > Basically you MUST play politics. Well... That's not necessarily a bad thing. Every organization has politics. Having people pay attention to their coworkers and their interests is a requirement of empathetic and successfully cooperative organizations. But it's management's responsibility to ensure that politics has its dedicated place, where all voices are encouraged and heard equally, and remains healthy (no back-stabbing), without politics becoming all-consuming and preventing real work from getting done.
dingo_bat 9y ago
I don't know man that sounds kind of depressing. I think such behaviour is not very common.
bassman9000 9y ago
The most important part of your job as an engineer is politics, not engineering God, no. Politics is a necessary evil, sometimes. You might think that blocking out pointless meetings and other useless distractions will help you to focus on actual engineering This is entirely true. What you'll find is that within mere weeks, others are taking credit for your work What kind of organization are you working for, that allows this? In any case, using slack won't prevent anyone who truly, inappropriately wants to take credit from doing so. Soon enough, you will be sidelined and marginalized, and no meaningful work will be assigned to you This is only if your skillset is not relevant enough. Never turn your back to your coworkers. How do you go from not wanting to use slack to that? There are other means of communicating with your coworkers. Email is still superior for anything relevant.
- deleted 9y ago
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foepys 9y ago
Where do you work that you have to constantly fight off others from backstabbing you? That sounds like a really, really stressful and unhealthly work environment.
- harlanji 9y ago
  Not GP but I've had 5 jobs since coming to SF in 2014; walked off the last 2 within months. I was innocent and naive when I arrived, now I see how my late brother receeded to him bedroom for the final years of his life. People are horrible when they can get away with it. You can bet job quality goes down with each notch. When I was at the top I told him to smile and try harder. Back stabbing is fine, at least you feel that one and it ends. Once you're down the spiral I don't know how to get up, but you're blessed to not understand.
- aidaman 9y ago
  It doesn't require a want to backstab, just incentive to get ahead.

cocktailpeanuts 9y ago

I agree with OP. Slack is like watercooler, on steroids. I guess having occasional spontaneous watercooler conversations may be good for getting to know your peers better, but in a lot of cases watercooler conversations result in clique behaviors. Slack takes this to whole new level. People hang around on slack channels posting animated Gifs and chatting all day, on topics that have nothing to do with work. The problem with this is you have to keep up all day with the chatter or otherwise you get left out as an "outsider" (the clique effect). Sometimes I would see these people talk behind backs of people who they know are not part of the group. This creates office politics. I know because I saw it first hand. Lastly, there's nothing worse than penalizing people for working hard and not participating in meaningless gossip and chatter all day.

lordCarbonFiber 9y ago
If you want to work with robots then you were probably born a few decades too early. I can't imagine a more depressing life than spending 8+ hours a day with a group of people and being so determined not to make any friends (what you describe as "cliques"). If people are "SLACKing" off so much work doesn't get done then that gets escalated just like any other performance concern. If not, it feels a lot more like sour grapes than anything else.
- cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
  Like I mentioned in another comment below, I am not an anti-social guy. I played the game, and I did just fine. Everybody at work liked me and I had no issues. But I'm not talking about me. I'm talking about how the system is messed up. I didn't enjoy being unproductive. I didn't enjoy having to keep Slack open all day to make sure I don't miss out on what people are up to. I do believe the company lost a lot of talented developers because of the office politics. And you know what? Everyone did just fine before they started using Slack. Everybody was friendly to one another, we regularly had globally inclusive face-to-face social gatherings, many of the team members ate lunch together, the team was pretty social. But with slack, everything became political. It didn't bring people closer together in any way because people were already friendly enough before. What it did do was create more politics and make everyone waste more time than they used to. Before slack, wasting time was a single player thing, you would maybe slack off for a bit reading hacker news but quickly get back to work, but after Slack, slacking off became a multiplayer thing, and just like any other multiplayer architecture, Metcalfe's law applies here too, which means the amount of wasted time grows exponentially.

CodeSheikh 9y ago

We were forced to move to Slack as well. Do not like it. It is more distracting than making us productive. I enjoyed HipChat [https://www.atlassian.com/software/hipchat https://www.atlassian.com/software/hipchat]

ComputerGuru 9y ago
> I enjoyed HipChat Is that just due to client fit and polish or for a more fundamental reason?
strictnein 9y ago
Ugh... Hipchat. Relatively straightforward things that they don't seem to be able to address: You can't chat with more than 1 person without creating a private room. Slack makes this effortless. It's been on Atlassian's radar for almost 1.5 years with no movement: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Hipchat-questions/chat-with-two-or-more-people-without-to-use-room/qaq-p/125060 https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Hipchat-questions/chat-wi... https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/HCPUB-431 https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/HCPUB-431 And when you're in a private chat with someone, the jumping text you see when the person you're chatting with is typing. Over 1.5 years and they can't fix that? It's horribly distracting and just kinda sucks. https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/HCPUB-950 https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/HCPUB-950 Anyways, the whole thing feels dead and is very clearly a low priority for Atlassian.
- chrisco255 9y ago
  Atlassian employee here. We moved much of our development efforts to Stride, our next gen team chat software. Be sure to check it out: https://www.stride.com https://www.stride.com
  - vesak 9y ago
    You guys oughta think about pricing. We just moved, a bit reluctantly, to Microsoft Teams (essentially free because existing MS subscription) because even Hipchat was way too expensive. Does Stride really need to be $36/user/year, and double that if we need SAML?

austenallred 9y ago

Do people not realize how customizable Slack is? Everything that bugs OP can be turned off, there’s do not disturb mode. away mode, you can mute every alert with granularity, etc. The idea that “I don’t use this communication channel that all my coworkers do and everything is fine” seems risky at best.

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jedberg 9y ago
"Adjusting notifications, muting channels, leaving channels and pretending to be away helped in alleviating the distraction. However, returning to the app tended to be a time sink; what would be a minute-long exchange in person now took far longer. "
michaelmrose 9y ago
Are you actually saying not using slack is risky? Do people not talk in your universe? Send emails? Text messages?
- jstandard 9y ago
  I don't think that's Austen's point, no. It's more that completely disengaging from a primary communication tool within your company is risky. It might work out for you. There's also a big chance you'll be left out of important conversations, decisions, and been seen as not a team player because the rest of the organization now has to adapt around one person's communication preferences. Communication is tough. There are so many different, competing styles and needs that you'll never build the perfect tool. It's more about building the right habits and processes around your tools.

jedberg 9y ago

Related question for the masses: I run a fully remote startup. My goal is to make as much communication asynchronous as possible, to facilitate people being in multiple time zones and having different optimal work times and places. We have slack right now, but for the most part people understand that it's an async tool -- i.e. don't expect an instant response. Usually the only "instant" convo is if we're having a video meeting and need to share links (which of course we try to avoid since video meetings aren't async but are sadly unavoidable). My question is, as we grow, how to I keep Slack that way, and make sure it doesn't turn into a huge distraction and just a bunch of gifs and watercooler talk, without imposing rules about "the proper use of Slack"?

lordCarbonFiber 9y ago
Make a room for "general posting" and collect all the gifs and watercooler talk there. Gives everyone a space where they can go to decompress, doesn't change your normal business use. Im also of the opinion that having a dedicated space for more "real time" communications can be really helpful as well. Team branded support room, for example. Having a space that everyone at least casually keeps an eye on can really save everyone a lot of time (especially when operating remotely) if a team member comes across an issue.
- iamdave 9y ago
  This is great advice; it's how our team functions, being 100% remote, but are leasing space that we come to if a team ever wants to sit together in person. It's available, but managers have made it clear it's by no means compulsory. So, we have off-topic channels, a channel to plan social events (I Live in Austin Texas and we have more than one musician who will post events, and we've made company outings out of going to see a coworker perform), there's one for movie chats, and even a "LFG" (Looking for games) channel for the folks who like to play and discuss video games. They're all as active and vibrant as our #devops and #product-discussions channels.
  - anonemouse145 9y ago
    If you want to contain the nutters, build a nuthouse. Every message board admin in the world learns you need dumping grounds and pressure relief valves to keep the population in line. My team has "General" for company wide announcements and "random" for dumping gifs and whatnot. There's also stuff like #sysadmin if something goes down or you spot a security bulletin and want to make sure the admin team sees it. Keep those rooms going as necessary. Low traffic, but the right people want an unread marker on them.

dingo_bat 9y ago

I feel that emails and Outlook style meeting systems should be enough for all day to day activities of a software developer. Rarely, there will be a situation that needs immediate attention. In that case a phone call would be sufficient. There is no need for a chat or instant messaging solution. However I must say that Skype's desktop sharing has come in very useful at times, and I don't know of a way to do that without having a chat client.

mrep 9y ago
I find instant communication useful for quick "Am I doing this right?" problems people have. Sending something like "I'm getting ssh connection refused while trying to connect to this host. Can someone else try?". That can quickly be answered by multiple people and people can chime in their quick thoughts for what is likely the problem. Trying to communicate a bunch of people with one line question/answers would be super annoying with the latency that email has.

ramzyo 9y ago

The author (OP?) positions the article to blame Slack as the root cause of productivity ills. However, multiple times it’s pointed out that Slack in and of itself isn’t the problem, but can simply exacerbate other root cause issues if misused. >> Although Slack is positioned as a productivity tool, it becomes counterproductive when misused. The conclusion doesn’t follow the premise here. The author concludes that the root cause of counterproducitivty is misuse of the tool, not the tool itself. This doesn’t do anything to discredit the premise, as it’s easy to argue that any tool can be counterproductive/dangerous/etc. when misused. >> Organizations that find enough value in using Slack should introduce rules of engagement. So the OP admits organizations can find value in using Slack, but should address the potential for misuse by introducing rules of engagement. Or rather, that rules of engagement should be put in place to prevent other root cause issues from being worsened by misuse of the tool. Again, the author is arguing that Slack isn’t the problem here. The article may strike a chord with those who don’t like Slack, but the arguments presented are very sloppy. To me, this reads as a plug for a particular work style the OP finds themselves more productive under. The Slack attack is misplaced. The expectation of constant availability and immediate responses sound like cultural issues, exacerbated by the communication channels that Slack provides.

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NiklasMort 9y ago

I see lot of IRC channels move to Slack and I don't get it, Kubernetes being one of them. Honestly why? I don't mind Slack for a small team but not for a channel with a few thousand user, it's a mess. Furthermore, maybe it's somehow because of my anti-ad addons but slack is generally slow and laggy for me. Takes quite a while to open the channel, lot of features don't work under Firefox.

snarfy 9y ago
We've had IRC for so long that it makes me sad it hasn't succeeded more.
- busterarm 9y ago
  I used Slack over IRC for a while. Other than group chats and downloads/gifs, it worked pretty well. The private messages thing is solved if you have one machine that stays connected to IRC 100% of the time and you connect to that.

yborg 9y ago

It seems to be trendy to blame Slack for all the ills of modern civilization. Is it the somewhat smug tone of all Slack's corporate communication? Maybe. Other than that, it seems to me to be more or less the same general bucket of telegrams, telephone calls, pages, texts, emails, etc. that each preceding generation has blamed on their inability to focus. If you can't resist distractions, whether it's Slack, or watching the ducks in the pond through the window, yes, you should close the blinds. I don't know why this rated a post on Medium...

ramzyo 9y ago
Exactly, well said. As humans we’re excellent at blaming pretty much anything else (Slack, email, telephone, telegram, anything really) for what is our own and only our own inability to focus.
- snarfy 9y ago
  All of these devices are built specifically to steal your focus with buzzers and flashing lights. If anything it's an arms race.
  - ramzyo 9y ago
    I agree. Still our issue and our issue alone as individuals. Nobody’s forcing anybody to use something designed to steal their attention. And if someone is being forced to in a work environment, that sounds to me like a cultural issue, not an issue with the attention stealing tool itself.
- birksherty 9y ago
  All humans are effected by these distractions of modern communications. We all check them too often and notifications break everyone's focus. Our brains are built like this. When something happens suddenly, we focus on that. May be because of evolution. So, how is this our own individual problem?
  - ramzyo 9y ago

Bitcoin_McPonzi 9y ago

For software developers, the best way to communicate is through the bug database. Developers don't use "slack" at our company. Of course, it may be different for sales and support people, etc.

jasonlfunk 9y ago
Well, the best way to communicate about software issues, requests, and bugs would be through a bug database - but certainly there is a lot more communication happening in a business that I would want mucking up my issue tracker.
erikb 9y ago
I also used to think that way. But in my current team we have lots of components that are maintainerless and attentionless since their maintainer left the team for another job. When he hwas still active we all considered this component important because many hours of work where flowing into it. Now it's not maintained, receives nearly zero work, and still the impact to the team and sales is not visible. One could say finding out which components are critical should be someone elses job, e.g. the manager's. All true, but still I wouldn't want to end up spending the prime time of my day for multiple years on a piece of software that nobody uses and nobody makes money with. So I'd argue that I as a dev cannot interact with just the bug db. I need to see what sales is doing, product management, join meetings, etc.

jerrycabbage 9y ago

Author would have a better point if he talked about how the widespread use of memes/animated gifs is what makes such platforms into junk.

newscracker 9y ago

I don't like any kind of IM/chat apps used like an endless meeting. They're good for tackling one single issue with probably a handful of people at a time. Even with @mentions, hashtags and channels, chat is still a single stream that pretends to have context like email or forum posts do (with subject lines and conversation threads). As a habit, I don't use any chat group (be it Telegram or any other app or platform) if there are more than five people. The explosion in the number of messages and the frustration in not being able to catch up is too big a cost on one's health and productivity. These tools don't enhance collaboration. On the contrary, they provide a facade of "being busy". We seem to keep trying to reinvent email and forum discussions (that have more context and confine discussions by topic) again and again, but not achieving better results.

jmadsen 9y ago

I dunno. I use Slack for a couple of groups as well as my full-time remote work. I turn off all notifications & just check from time to time. I have a project manager who tends to pester me with DMs a little too much, but if I'm trying to concentrate I just turn it off. I'm 50 years old & still "pre-internet" in much of my thinking, but I don't have a smartphone, turn off ALL notifications and then turn them on one-by-one on a need only basis, and still can't figure out why people have so much trouble managing their internet lives. It's not the tool that's causing your problems.

ulrikrasmussen 9y ago
Turning of all notifications is the key, I think. I have a single type of notification enabled which is able to interrupt me, and that is the vibrator on my phone when somebody calls. Everything else I only check when I feel like it, which is fine. Notifications are really overrated.
petters 9y ago
I have a policy that if an app sends a single undesired notification, I disable its notifications forever. That even Google violates its own Android notification guidelines is annoying.
- threatofrain 9y ago
  Some really good mainstream apps will violate at least once, and then you'll have to ask whether following your rule or breaking it leads to better futures.
wutbrodo 9y ago
> still can't figure out why people have so much trouble managing their internet lives. I know it sounds really crochety, but I 100% agree. It's getting pretty tiresome to see people continue to put most of their blame onto their tools instead of their habits. It doesn't take that much maturity and self-awareness to realize that certain tools can be double-edged, and that their value sometimes requires a little bit of conscious thought about their usage. I'd say the main difference with chat tools like Slack (vs examples like Facebook) is that I can't get certain people to wrap their heads around how not to abuse them, but it's been pretty easy to ask those people politely once or twice to adhere to basic etiquette around messaging and then simply mute them after that.

Kluny 9y ago

> Without it, days are calm, purpose-driven and productive. Like you can't distract yourself with 40 other apps if not slack. Slack isn't the problem, they're ALL the problem. Anyway, Slack is mandatory if you're remote.

Void_ 9y ago

Here's a nifty counter of Slack activations per day: http://focuslist.co/escape2/ http://focuslist.co/escape2/ Kinda eye opening.

mattbillenstein 9y ago

While this may be great for him, this is probably counter-productive for the org -- and he's preparing to be left out of a lot of decisions and conversation. I've been in an org where there were stragglers who didn't want to use Slack for whatever reason -- "I'm too old" for it was one I found particularly retarded. Communication is key -- get your whole team on one tool - silence notifications if you have to, but you should aim to participate.

rishirishi 9y ago
> ... he's preparing to be left out of a lot of decisions ... I struggle to see how substantive decisions can be made legitimately through group chat. How do you facilitate decision making such that it allows people to prepare and participate?
- mattbillenstein 9y ago
  It depends on the org and I guess how substantive you're referring to, but there are a lot of small decisions that get made this way and those add up.

ravenstine 9y ago

Slack is not hard to ignore. As I've mentioned in previous threads: * Mute all channels. * Take long periods of time to respond to people. Trust me, this isn't ever going to lead to any sense of shame. * Set yourself to away most of the time. * Disable gifs. * Set notifications for keywords like "lunch" and "meeting". * Disable the icon badge. (the red dot if you're using macOS) Now you can be productive with Slack. I know all these things are designed to grab our attention but, seriously, have some agency in your life. Deciding to go "offline" is perfectly legitimate, but I do think Slack can be easily used in a way that doesn't waste time.

staunch 9y ago
This is exactly right but it just shows how terrible the default Slack configuration is. It's probably somewhat broken by design. Being noisy and distracting surely increases Slack's usage numbers.
axaxs 9y ago
The reasons a lot of people complain about are the same reasons I like slack. First, if i'm intensely busy, I just ignore it. It stays backgrounded, and a little blue or red dot sits there. That's it. When i'm in a general workday, i'll usually try to check red dots, and relegate the others to 'as time allows.' But that's its draw to me. I love seeing the goofy gifs, custom emojis, etc that people come up with. It's a sort of comic relief from the stressful days. In the end, it sounds like a lot of folks just have trouble with self control, so blame a tool. You don't have to click the red/blue dot...just let it be.

lobotryas 9y ago

Working with the kind of person that OP seems to be is a pain. Sometimes I need your help, a code review, feedback or advice. Sometimes I even need it ASAP because I am dealing with something time sensitive. I do my best to be respectful of people's tome, but sometimes a distraction to help a colleague is unavoidable. I'll send an email when appropriate, but in most other cases I'll look for you on Slack. If you're not there then that means I'll just have to walk over to your desk to find you instead.

mathgenius 9y ago

Pretty sure I had some kind of slack PTSD after my last two dev jobs.

trts 9y ago

Slack lowers the friction involved in communicating. Depending on the kind of communication that it is, maybe that's bad or good. In many corporate communications platforms, it is quite effortless to ask an idle question, use an emoticon, paste a giphy image, write a bot to push notifications into your team channel, express a witticism, or vent complaints. It was my experience that Slack made it easier to do all of these things more than any platform I'd previously used. I've been off of it for 3 months and hope I never have to return. The worst problem seemed to be the number of ad-hoc channels I could be automatically invited to, and it was not often clear whether the information exchanged there was something I needed to pay attention to (although in retrospect it is more so). Different organizations will utilize it differently, and feature-wise Slack seems to have gotten pretty far ahead of the competition. But if there's any truth to the medium being the message, then I think that it can be inferred from much of what transpires on Slack is that as a platform it is a big time sink. There don't seem to be a lot of important degrees of urgency between an email, a phone call, or a drop-by. For me about 90% of the value in corporate messaging is pasting web links to resources, which doesn't require the other bells and whistles.

anonemouse145 9y ago

Most offices have bad cultures that don't foster good communication. The odds of people blaming a tool because they don't have good communication is very high. I think the bit about "my team is starting to notice I'm offline" is very telling. Oh you're so fancy, you special person who doesn't tell your team when you're not available and you aren't checking your messages. You sure showed them. I bet you're just the best facilitator of communication. Personally, I tell my team how they can and can't expect to contact me when I'm changing methods of communication. Call me crazy.

perfectstorm 9y ago

I agree with the author here but not for the reasons he stated. my biggest gripe with Slack is that it results in less and less one-to-one conversation. We used Slack at my last job but we were encouraged to stop by the person's desk for any matter that requires immediate attention. I sat near our CTO and sometimes I saw many engineers standing around his desk trying to debug a production issue. This resulted in knowing other people's name/face (which I realized after I joined my current company). At my new company we use Slack for pretty much everything. If there's a production bug you're encouraged to @here on the dedicated channel and someone would take a look at it. There's no one-to-one interaction to debug it. We had our holiday party last month where I introduced myself to some of my coworkers and once we started talking we realized that we have chatted on Slack but never saw each other even though we were all working in the same office. I never associated the engineer's face to the name. I do think Slack is a powerful tool in modern work environment but people shouldn't be too dependent on it.

erikb 9y ago
how do you figure out the solution to the bugs in a reasonable time without having 1:1 sessions? If you just hand over the bug and the other guy has to deal with it alone then that's really inefficient. That's also why it's hard for me to imagine that it's true what you say. The need for quick results will always create smaller meetings at this or that guy's desk.

daveFNbuck 9y ago

I've found exactly the opposite. People love to randomly interrupt me by showing up at my desk with questions. I tell them to use Slack instead, as this allows for asynchronous communication that doesn't interrupt my workflow. I also push people to ask questions in a channel instead of directly to me, as usually someone else will help them before I even see the question.

amix 9y ago

Slack is a great product, but with a wrong communication model. We have for the last three years developed Twist, which focuses on asynchronous communication by default. It includes some of the best features of Slack and email. We currently have about 1000 teams actively using it. Read more of our reasoning here: “Why We’re Betting Against Real-Time Team Messaging” https://blog.doist.com/why-were-betting-against-real-time-team-messaging-521804a3da09 https://blog.doist.com/why-were-betting-against-real-time-te...

erikb 9y ago
I've read your link and it's unclear to me why I wouldn't want both, relatively slow threaded conversations and quick real-time chat. And also I don't understand why slack+email wouldn't fulfill these needs already. My personal problem with most of this conversation is that in bigger teams (e.g. 500 people spread through 5-10 countries) it is really the truth that you are left behind if you are not constantly up to date on emails and chat. And it's not just that you are required to read incredible amounts of both, it's also that if you don't interact you are left out of many discussions that are important to your work, while not having a way to opt out of the discussions that are just spam from your tasks' perspective. Therefore I'd say the problem is not so much the communication medium, but the ability to interact with it en masse. I'm still interacting with each message one-on-one. But usually it would be enough if I could search all emails from my company that are not marked private or confidential for keywords, and get a sorted result back that prioritises based on what topics I'm working on. Basically google search for my company emails/chats, including these that are not addressed to me, preferably with a powerful query language like SQL.
- yason 9y ago
  > My personal problem with most of this conversation is that > in bigger teams (e.g. 500 people spread through 5-10 > countries) it is really the truth that you are left > behind if you are not constantly up to date on emails > and chat. That is not a team: that is a department. You cannot meaningfully follow more than a couple of dozen people at a time, and you cannot deeply interact with maybe at most ten people at time. You also cannot follow more than a handful of subjects with reasonable comprehension: assumedly you work on one or two things full time and that knowledge fills most of your brain anyway. The 500 other people are those from whom you hear summaries from company or department wide meetings once a month or so. The communication overhead grows exponentially with the number of people. That's why departments form teams of maybe a dozen people and let the managers communicate and filter information back to the team so that the team members can focus on doing what they know best instead of trying to track everything that is happening. You can always talk with specific people when you need to know more about something specific: you don't have to know everything by default.

yason 9y ago

I don't get that, really. For at least a couple of decades there has generally been some internal instant messaging system at whichever company I've worked for. Nerds used to like plain local IRC server. In some places the expected tool was Windows Messenger despite it sucked bad and kept disconnecting. Slack is just another communication system: if you have problems with Slack you're likely to have problems with any messaging system if you configure them to allow interrupting your work. The very reason I've personally always preferred online communications for anything non-urgent at work is because nobody gets to interrupt me and I get to check messages when I have an idle moment. The alternative is face-to-face communication which means someone is interrupting you at your desk several times a day which I ten times worse. I currently use Slack over their irc gateway which works just fine. I have an Slack-connected irc client running in one tmux window and when I have time I can easily see if someone called for me or if the team channel has new activity.

erikb 9y ago
I think it's also possible to snooze Slack notifications for a few hours.

mcintyre1994 9y ago

I find the "All Unread" view works really well to use Slack asynchronously. You can just check it every so often, marking entire channels as read in one click if a skim doesn't interest you.

amriksohata 9y ago

I find it very useful for those who are quick to reply on slack, there are some who check slack once a day and those for types it's easier to get up and talk to them or email them. There is the downside which I find more common amongst the younger users straight out of uni just using it as a social chat mechanism

erikb 9y ago

> Instant messaging applications enable communication that is online, synchronous and on-demand. No. It's totally wrong. One needs to learn how to configure his chat tool that it doesn't disturb one in productive times, but is easily available when free. It's possible. I do it since ICQ. Unread chat messages will also still be unread if you continue to work 4 hours on your current task. > Without [instant messaging], days are calm, purpose-driven and productive. How can days be purpose driven if you don't sync your own work with your colleague's work any more? I'd argue that people who act like that are the least productive because they only work on things that are not valuable for the team at large.

rishirishi 9y ago
> How can days be purpose driven if you don't sync your own work with your colleague's work any more? Work does get synced. It gets discussed at our desks, usually in the mornings. If the work presents blockers requiring a lengthy discussion then we hop into a meeting room. I find we get better participation and arrive at a solution with less friction.

arnarbi 9y ago

We've had this kind of of posts as long as I remember. People blaming tools because they can't figure out the most basic skills of work, communication, planning, division and focusing of attention, etc. It's always a panacea to turn something off completely. But it's never about the tool. It's just the author learning how to operate themselves. What they did has minimal relevance to others in general, except perhaps for some validating "me too!"-s. It's much more valuable to step back and think critically about how you approach tasks and decisions, how you feel and what it tells you, and how much you can actually control all of it.

lwhi 9y ago

Communication is necessary. Slack is one way of communicating .. by all means get rid of it, but if you do .. make sure the replacement medium serves you better. I'd rather receive a DM than a phone call in most cases.

aembleton 9y ago

I find it useful for asking 'has anyone changed x because I'm seeing this stacktrace when I do abc?'. I don't expect an immediate result but when a devleoper has some downtime then they can check and respond. It's better than email because they can see the chat from other devs around the issue. The only thing I'd like to do is be able to stop auto-playing gifs and block @here from certain people who abuse it.

ravitation 9y ago

To be perfectly honest... It's hard for me to look at quitting Slack as anything but deeply selfish. How much more time is someone now spending writing you an email? Or waiting for you to answer one? How much more time are they spending walking over to your desk? Or wondering if they even should, since you're that one guy who refuses to use Slack? If you need long periods of quiet time to work, locking yourself in a closet is extremely effective, but that doesn't mean it also positively affects your organization. Slack is an organizational productivity tool. Nearly every post I read about people quitting Slack focuses on how much better they are able to work without it, not how much better their team or organization is without them on Slack... You're right, Slack isn't for you. It's for your team.

kapauldo 9y ago

In general, all notifications are awful for productivity because of the volume. Putting slack and your phone on DND for hour blocks is a huge productivity enhance.