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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 p

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.
  - yason 9y ago
    > 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. Why did you feel you had to keep it open all the day? Just skim the channels for anything interesting and/or relevant and check for new private messages occasionally when you're not in the zone. That could be once a day or few times a day, depending on your rhythm. For example, I tend to directly continue the work in the morning where I left off the previous day for maximal productivity and it's not until my energy begins to wear out after a few hours when I go check back email, Slack, and other communications. Same for afternoon. I don't let email or instant messages interrupt my flow because the flow is a precious thing that doesn't simply come back when summoned. I always try to give the flow the priority and email/slack/IM are not urgent enough to break that. I can always reply back to messages in detail once the flow breaks down.
    - cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
      I have experienced different types of communities using Slack in their own ways, and for some it works, but for a lot it doesn't. In my experience it works nicely for distributed organizations where people can't physically get together. My point is Slack does introduce more politics into workplace. This is something you as a single user can't control. Maybe you're doing fine there because your org doesn't have this problem, good for you. But I've seen this happen with a lot of different teams, in a lot of different ways, and that was what I was pointing out. If you work at a company where there's office politics, you WILL miss out and lose a lot of opportunities if you don't participate actively.
- michaelmrose 9y ago
  Different people have different methodologies of working. Some could probably perform fine with work interspersed with random chatter at intervals. For others this would completely destroy productivity. Imagine parent poster is one of the latter. Now imagine that people like yourself judged that he was "determined not to make friends" because he didn't opt to participate much or at all in group chats. Then all you need is people talking about other people at work something people do everywhere and shockingly we have exactly the situation parent poster described. There may even be people like that at your work who feel the same way he does.
  - lordCarbonFiber 9y ago
    Perhaps Ive been lucky in this regard but I've never seen that. In fact, the people most disengaged from the tertiary work activities tend to, in my experience, also be the lowest performers. Honestly, if the existence of chatter "destroys" your productivity I don't think it was all that high to begin with.
    - cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
      I have worked with some of the best developers in the world (top developers at top tech companies, and developers who singlehandedly build things that lead the industry), and not all of them are well rounded people. And I can confidently say most of them absolutely do not appreciate anything wasting their time, and most of them prefer to be acknowledged through skills instead of politics, and they do manage to pull it off. If they can't because of the toxic office politics, they simply move to another company that will treat them much better because they never run out of offers. You may think these people are super anti-social and everybody will hate them, but a lot of them are nice people and helpful to coworkers. Unless they act like assholes, most co-workers like them and they get along just fine even though they don't get to interact very often. If you haven't met one of these people in your career, it means you haven't worked with extremely talented people. That is just the reality. Plus, my argument was not even about this type of extreme case. You're the one who's dramatized it into this.
      - 9y ago
- kuschku 9y ago
  Work is work, fun is fun. There's a clear line between them, mixing them leads just to trouble. I don't slack off at work, and in return I expect the minute I leave the office to not get any work messages anymore. All this fake friendliness and clique behaviour is just more stress and distraction.
agumonkey 9y ago
I wonder if mailing lists suffer from this at all. I used to believe that ML were the best ratio of work+content / noise. Because the medium is limiting, so it doesn't invite for smalltalk(sic).
- JoshMnem 9y ago
  I don't think that mailing lists work well any more. I've tried to subscribe to some, but they get buried in my inbox, and I'm so tired of emails by the time I get to the list messages that I usually just highlight them all and delete them without reading, unless there is an interesting title.
  - Yetanfou 9y ago
    That is what Sieve [1] is for. Use it to move all mailing-list traffic into its own mailbox/folder/whatnot and you'll be able to use mailing lists like it still was 1995. Either use a MUA which supports editing sieve filters or just edit the filter definition by hand. It looks like this, more or less: # rule:[spam] if allof (header :contains "X-Spam-Flag" "YES") { fileinto "Shared/SPAM-it"; } # rule:[list] elsif anyof (exists "X-List", exists "List-Id", exists "X-MailingList", exists "X-List-Name", exists "X-ML-Name", exists "X-Mailing-List", exists "MailingList", exists "Mailing-List") { fileinto "INBOX/Lists"; } ... ... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sieve_(mail_filtering_language)
    - JoshMnem 9y ago
      That looks like fun, but also like it requires running your own mail server. :) I use Thunderbird filters to sort incoming emails, but it's still out of control. In 1995 there wasn't this kind of email overload.
      - Yetanfou 9y ago
        Running your own server or convincing those who run the server that Sieve support is a boon for productivity - which it definitely is. If 'those' are the likes of Google or Microsoft, good luck with that.

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.
- yason 9y ago
  > 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. Why did you feel you had to keep it open all the day? Just skim the channels for anything interesting and/or relevant and check for new private messages occasionally when you're not in the zone. That could be once a day or few times a day, depending on your rhythm. For example, I tend to directly continue the work in the morning where I left off the previous day for maximal productivity and it's not until my energy begins to wear out after a few hours when I go check back email, Slack, and other communications. Same for afternoon. I don't let email or instant messages interrupt my flow because the flow is a precious thing that doesn't simply come back when summoned. I always try to give the flow the priority and email/slack/IM are not urgent enough to break that. I can always reply back to messages in detail once the flow breaks down.
  - cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
    I have experienced different types of communities using Slack in their own ways, and for some it works, but for a lot it doesn't. In my experience it works nicely for distributed organizations where people can't physically get together. My point is Slack does introduce more politics into workplace. This is something you as a single user can't control. Maybe you're doing fine there because your org doesn't have this problem, good for you. But I've seen this happen with a lot of different teams, in a lot of different ways, and that was what I was pointing out. If you work at a company where there's office politics, you WILL miss out and lose a lot of opportunities if you don't participate actively.
michaelmrose 9y ago
Different people have different methodologies of working. Some could probably perform fine with work interspersed with random chatter at intervals. For others this would completely destroy productivity. Imagine parent poster is one of the latter. Now imagine that people like yourself judged that he was "determined not to make friends" because he didn't opt to participate much or at all in group chats. Then all you need is people talking about other people at work something people do everywhere and shockingly we have exactly the situation parent poster described. There may even be people like that at your work who feel the same way he does.
- lordCarbonFiber 9y ago
  Perhaps Ive been lucky in this regard but I've never seen that. In fact, the people most disengaged from the tertiary work activities tend to, in my experience, also be the lowest performers. Honestly, if the existence of chatter "destroys" your productivity I don't think it was all that high to begin with.
  - cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
    I have worked with some of the best developers in the world (top developers at top tech companies, and developers who singlehandedly build things that lead the industry), and not all of them are well rounded people. And I can confidently say most of them absolutely do not appreciate anything wasting their time, and most of them prefer to be acknowledged through skills instead of politics, and they do manage to pull it off. If they can't because of the toxic office politics, they simply move to another company that will treat them much better because they never run out of offers. You may think these people are super anti-social and everybody will hate them, but a lot of them are nice people and helpful to coworkers. Unless they act like assholes, most co-workers like them and they get along just fine even though they don't get to interact very often. If you haven't met one of these people in your career, it means you haven't worked with extremely talented people. That is just the reality. Plus, my argument was not even about this type of extreme case. You're the one who's dramatized it into this.
    - 9y ago
kuschku 9y ago
Work is work, fun is fun. There's a clear line between them, mixing them leads just to trouble. I don't slack off at work, and in return I expect the minute I leave the office to not get any work messages anymore. All this fake friendliness and clique behaviour is just more stress and distraction.

agumonkey 9y ago

I wonder if mailing lists suffer from this at all. I used to believe that ML were the best ratio of work+content / noise. Because the medium is limiting, so it doesn't invite for smalltalk(sic).

JoshMnem 9y ago
I don't think that mailing lists work well any more. I've tried to subscribe to some, but they get buried in my inbox, and I'm so tired of emails by the time I get to the list messages that I usually just highlight them all and delete them without reading, unless there is an interesting title.
- Yetanfou 9y ago
  That is what Sieve [1] is for. Use it to move all mailing-list traffic into its own mailbox/folder/whatnot and you'll be able to use mailing lists like it still was 1995. Either use a MUA which supports editing sieve filters or just edit the filter definition by hand. It looks like this, more or less: # rule:[spam] if allof (header :contains "X-Spam-Flag" "YES") { fileinto "Shared/SPAM-it"; } # rule:[list] elsif anyof (exists "X-List", exists "List-Id", exists "X-MailingList", exists "X-List-Name", exists "X-ML-Name", exists "X-Mailing-List", exists "MailingList", exists "Mailing-List") { fileinto "INBOX/Lists"; } ... ... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sieve_(mail_filtering_language)
  - JoshMnem 9y ago
    That looks like fun, but also like it requires running your own mail server. :) I use Thunderbird filters to sort incoming emails, but it's still out of control. In 1995 there wasn't this kind of email overload.
    - Yetanfou 9y ago
      Running your own server or convincing those who run the server that Sieve support is a boon for productivity - which it definitely is. If 'those' are the likes of Google or Microsoft, good luck with that.