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Slack is the opposite of organizational memory

• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• philwelch 9y ago
  I don’t know what else to add to this. Slack is a bad idea, implemented poorly, and I can think of no redeeming qualities to it. Edit: Looks like Slack’s employees decided to swarm to the thread and downvote anything critical about their shitty product.
  • Anderkent 9y ago
    > and I can think of no redeeming qualities to it Frankly, that says more about you than the tool.
    • philwelch 9y ago
      I can think of redeeming qualities for Slack-like tools, such as IRC. Slack adds nothing of value over IRC, however.
      • geofft 9y ago
        One concrete improvement that Slack offers over IRC is that you get the history of a public channel from before you joined it in your normal client. That means you can start a new channel and invite people later as needed and they can look at history, instead of feeling like you need to keep things in the same channel. (I literally joined a newly-created IRC channel a few days ago where I have been having lots of high-bandwidth discussion with one other person and probably there are plenty of other people who want to see the discussion too.... we'll probably end up summarizing it on a mailing list and hoping we don't leave anything important out.) You could technically implement such a thing on top of IRC (in the same way that bouncers are implemented on top of IRC), but I don't think anyone has done so yet, and the fact that it's not part of IRC means that it's by definition value over IRC.
        • philwelch 9y ago
          IRC logging is a solved problem. Just have a bot log your channels and upload them somewhere. Then you can throw them in the same search index as your wiki and your mailing list archives.
          • geofft 9y ago
            Does it put them in my normal client? That UX is valuable. Also, I forgot about private channels - Slack does the same thing for private channels, synchronizing permissions to join the channel with permissions to read and search the logs, which putting them in a shared site-wide search index wouldn't do. Also Slack does multi-person direct messages.
        • u801e 9y ago
          > One concrete improvement that Slack offers over IRC is that you get the history of a public channel from before you joined it in your normal client. At work, we used to communicate via Jabber/XMPP. When we connected with our client to a group chat, the server would send the discussion history to the client, so we could see messages that were sent to the group chat even when we weren't connected. We now use Slack, and I've tried both the XMPP and IRC gateways. One thing I noticed about the XMPP gateway is that whenever I reconnected, it would repeatedly send me the last message I sent to someone or a channel. Neither gateway will replay the messages that were sent to channels while my client was not connected.
      • jeauxlb 9y ago
        Are you aware of the support for Slack has for web integrations? The myriad other integrations with popular products? The SSO support?
        • philwelch 9y ago
          Ok, SSO support, you got me there. Other than that, IRC bots have existed for decades and already do most of what Slack integrations do.
          • Anderkent 9y ago
            Why does it matter if anything else does it too? Even if everything slack does is possible with irc, fact is slack is much easier to deploy at scale, much easier to get nontechnical people on, much easier to integrate with things like pagerduty or datadog.
        • awinter-py 9y ago
          this may just be an android thing but I had to type my gmail password into the slack app to log in with SSO. No bueno.
  • sctb 9y ago
    We looked, and it seems like regular users who downvoted you for breaking the guidelines by not posting substantively. If you don't know what to add, don't. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
• kator 9y ago
  I'm very comfortable typing /mute in noisy channels and coming back later. I'm also happy to close slack when I need to be in the zone. IMHO Don't blame the tools, it's about discipline, you need to own your time, calendar time for yourself and get stuff done. If management doesn't understand this then time to find a new team.
  • sotojuan 9y ago
    This. I mute all my channels except #engineering (and if it was noisy I'd mute it too). If anything is urgent, people can mention or DM me. I also turn off notifications when I'm busy.
  • matchbok 9y ago
    Doesn't that prove slack doesn't work? What is the point of channels if the average person has to ignore them to get any work done? Coming back later really doesn't help (at least for me). Because chats are interspersed throughout, you can't really follow/search anything.
    • vanderZwan 9y ago
      At which point we basically need to resort to threaded conversations, after which it is just a matter of time until someone re-invents Google Wave.
      • benley 9y ago
        Take a look at Zulip, if you're not already familiar with it. They nailed threaded chat in a way I haven't seen anywhere else, with the possible exception of Zephyr.
        • jkaplowitz 9y ago
          That similarity is very much not an accident - Zulip is based on Zephyr. (I forget whether that's true technically or just in terms of inspiration, but the latter is definitely true.)
• Waterluvian 9y ago
  I wonder if disabling search and restricting chat rooms to a limited buffer would help encourage people to see Slack as a lossy chat service and not an appropriate data store. You would be forced to decide what's important to keep and keep it somewhere. I especially don't like when Slack is used as an official record.
  • Anderkent 9y ago
    Why? It is a great advantage of slack over email / in person that you can later find two people you've never met discussing something similar to your problem, follow their historical discussion, and possibly find a solution. Or even your own previous conversations for issues deemed too minor to record in a more 'official' record (like a jira ticket, or project documentation).
    • philwelch 9y ago
      If you have an internal wiki, email list archives, and maybe an internal StackExchange and set up an ElasticSearch cluster over the whole works, you can answer pretty much any question in a one stop shop.
      • Anderkent 9y ago
        None of those do interactive collaboration like debugging very well. You could copy the result of the collaboration into something like that, but actually getting people to do that is not trivial. If the collaboration happens on slack, you get at least some searchability.
• zippie 9y ago
  As time has wore on our organization has relied on slack less for team collaboration and more for monitoring. Admittedly, the slack client is great at cross platform notifications and we leverage those in our monitoring processes, where alerts are sent via zabbix to pagerduty and slack simultaneously via webhooks. In a real sense the responders have “any activity creates a notification” which enables them to react and others to view a record of what happened. This eliminates the casual “what happened?” conversations. We’ve yet to have an oncall event fall through the cracks.
• jtl999 9y ago
  The problem I have with large group chats like Slack, Riot, IRC is that it's hard to get information from them when you've been "out of the loop" for a while. Much better to read a bunch of forum threads or tickets, then trying to make sense of a long scrollback.
  • Anderkent 9y ago
    You shouldn't be trying to. Slack is a tool used for raid iteration, not an event / decision log. Unless you establish some strict conventions, like having an announce / decision channel with very restricted traffic, you should still record important decisions somewhere else, and give that to people when they need to 'catch up'.
    • white-flame 9y ago
      That doubles the authoring workload, though. If you're talking on something like a forum, with individualized contextual threads, then those are already auto-categorized for reference later. I guess the equivalent would be to start new chat channels per topic, and index them somehow? But realtime chat tends to have more organic topic drift than post-based discussion.
      • jtl999 9y ago
        > I guess the equivalent would be to start new chat channels per topic, and index them somehow? But realtime chat tends to have more organic topic drift than post-based discussion. Well said. It's a shame IMO how much forum software has deteriorated in innovation post 2010 or so. Discourse is nice, but not my cup of tea when compared to the layout of "classic" forum software, phpBB, SMF, etc.
        • isostatic 9y ago
          Classic forums software was pretty much a web based NNTP gateway -- some even supported nntp integration directly. Posts were threaded. Then along came unthreaded forums in late 90s/early 00s. Things like phpBB are not my cup of tea when compared to the layout of usenet or slashcode.
• whistlerbrk 9y ago
  Ai yai yai. People need to stop adopting tools thinking it'll be the panacea of communication and organization. Insofar as the author says that I agree. But I think it is equally short sited to blame the tool. Whatever tool you choose, you have to FULLY adopt. Everyone has to be bought in, learning the features (like do not disturb), setting ground rules which make sense for your company and how people within it like to get things done. Seriously, I never felt more productive than when I used Trac, I don't think issue tracking has really evolved much more than that save useful social features and code review (essentially what killed Trac because the Git integration was never very good). When I look back as to why that was, I realize it was because the WHOLE COMPANY was bought in. We all used it, we all used it well and respectfully. This is the madness of the agile world. Viewing the tool as the solution rather than just that, an implement, a ways to a means that starts before its usage and and ends after its usage. > Remote work culture is a defense mechanism against the distracting open office Disagree as to the reason remote work has become a thing, but I do think it's largely because video conferencing works better every year, tools like Slack exist, and code review tools can be done line-for-line remotely. But, has anyone seen the Slack diagram for whether or not to send a message? It is extremely well thought out, but settings can't be useful if you don't set them. > Chat, at least on slack, isn’t grouped or threaded. Yes they are, now. > ...non-trivial to know what the current topics of conversation are in a slack channel or to assign one of those topics to any given message. Then speak up and tell people to stick to the topic, change it, or open a new room. > ctrl-f, the one constant of web interaction, is broken in channels if you’re searching more than one page up. Use the Slack client > Middle managers will make deliverables.... And here is where I stop reading. This is an organizational problem you see manifesting on the tool and you are incorrectly assigning blame to the tool. -- You have to be committed to using whatever tool is chosen. Just choose one and actually use it. These tools are a discipline not a freedom from discipline.
  • q3k 9y ago
    >Use the Slack client I know it's technicalities, but sadly this isn't possible for everyone. Closest thing is using the IRC gateway, but at that point your company might as well be just using IRC...
• ebiester 9y ago
  It's an interesting argument. When I hear it, I interpret it as "I'm too busy doing stuff to help anyone else do stuff." The people who do this, from my experience, are also the people least likely to write tests, documentation, comments, or self-explanatory code. Then, when someone makes a mistake based on misreading this member's code, they are labeled as "incompetent." I agree that Slack has created an interruptible culture, and I'm not a fan of that, but we have yet to make a tool that transfers knowledge without either human contact or extensive documentation. Structured distraction is the alternative - we call them meetings. Nobody likes meetings either.
  • toomuchtodo 9y ago
    Slack, unintentionally, promotes interruptions under the guise of frictionless communications; it's very difficult to cultivate productivity in such a situation. Email is just as useful for tasking or questions, but without the constant interruptions (the receiver determines when they respond, and there's an asynchronous expectation, unlike Slack). There is nothing you need on a team immediately, unless your infrastructure is burning down, in which case PagerDuty or SMS is letting you know. Source: 3 years of Slack use in a fully remote environment, now working remote for an enterprise using Outlook for email, MS Teams for the occasional group chat 1-2 times/week, and Skype chat/phone calls/conference calls for the remainder. I prefer the later, as I get hours of uninterrupted time to focus each day.
    • geofft 9y ago
      My impression is that companies that use Slack as an email replacement (including Slack themselves) have a culture where it's common to turn off push notifications / popups and check Slack periodically the way you'd check email periodically.
      • toomuchtodo 9y ago
        Possibly. That was not my experience ("turn off push notifications / popups and check Slack periodically the way you'd check email periodically."). I use Slack extensively for personal needs (non-profits, subject matter groups, friends/family teams) but I would not voluntarily use it in a business setting. It's one of the first questions I ask when interviewing for new positions.
• hamandcheese 9y ago
  If not Slack, then what? Nothing? I work as part of a fully remote team and I can't really imagine not using Slack. Generally we discuss in Slack, immortalize in GitHub issues (using ZenHub, thank god), and do ad-hoc video calls for screen sharing and whatnot. Announcements and such usually go out as an email blast. I'm really curious what life would be like using email/issue comments only. Obviously this must be possible since so many open source projects operate this way, right? But they also have a totally different organizational structure. Any insights, HN?
  • Anderkent 9y ago
    I think OP assumes collocation, and would suggest in person discussion. See the 'sheet of paper is all you need to plan' note. Since they also complain about open office, I think their ideal mode of work is a small team with their own office, caring only about their little silo and not much for what the rest of the company is doing. For some types of work, that is indeed optimal! To me, not having an instant messenger at work would be a great loss. You now either have to come to someone in person, and be way more disruptive - after all you can silence slack notifications, but you can't suppress someone coming to you, make calls - same problem, or do with something like email, where the back-and-forth is much slower.
    • Swizec 9y ago
      > where the back-and-forth is much slower. This is a feature. Slower back and forth means people put more thought into it and communicate better.
      • yinyang_in 9y ago
        Even i think so, need to know why people think otherwise
      • Anderkent 9y ago
        Or, more commonly, give up trying to communicate for everyday task and build silos of knowledge.
• kaycebasques 9y ago
  As a technical writer I have a big problem with Slack. It seems like a black hole of unfindable knowledge. I stick to Stack Overflow and mailing lists when I interact in my product’s communities because they are streamlined repositories of linear knowledge. A moment of gratitude to Stack Overflow and mailing lists!
• opportune 9y ago
  For large organizations, a forum/ticket model is a much better way to leverage organizational memory and knowledge. For small teams, and teams within organizations, I actually think the Slack model does fine if people mute it. I'm one of those people that loves to help people with technical challenges and this was a big hurdle for me. Almost all of the problems in the article can be solved by muting and only checking during breaks. I don't think anyone rational would conflate productivity with availability on slack unless their job is to answer questions on slack. It's also just such an obviously bad idea to forgo documentation in favor of Slack that I'd say no rational developer would do that either. Those aren't problems with Slack, those are problems with lazy people who want to blame Slack for poor software development.
• dimal 9y ago
  For all the hate Slack gets, it works great for me. Yes, you can be interrupted, but you can also ignore it very easily. Without Slack, I’d have people coming up to my desk and asking me questions, which would _really_ be distracting. Maybe I work in a company with a good culture, but the middle managers don’t use Slack in the way he describes. Sure, managers can act that way, but they don’t have to. And in my experience, they don’t. I don’t understand his comparisons to Trello and JIRA. Those are project management tools. Slack is a chat tool. Completely different things. And his complaint that it’s a bad tool for documentation also rings hollow. It’s a _chat_ app. Is he also going to complain that his hammer it a terrible tool for tightening screws?
  • labster 9y ago
    Yeah, maybe Slack is bad in OP's workplace. But in mine, it's been great for increasing communication in an all-remote developer company. JIRA is used for task management, docs are stored in the same repo as the code, and Slack is used just to talk to people or solicit opinions. No one ever uses @here because none of us want to be bothered either. I feel like most of the complaints on Slack are either because people use it as something other than logged IRC, or because it's getting misblamed for other company culture problems.
• breeny592 9y ago
  >Another JIRA flaw: highly formalized process is usually a hindrance, especially considering who in your organization invents, applies and benefits from process. Hint: middle managers. This just reads as someone who hasn't had to actually think about what is being built, and who is paying for it. Effective teams are more than just "developers write and push code" - it's about being able to predictably say we are implementing this feature (or fixing this bug), therefore it will be available to customers at X time. As organisations grow, it becomes more and more critical to be able to predictably forecast the work that teams will complete, so that the right work can be planned out and roadmapped. I had plenty of problems with this article, but this one stood out the most.
  • jiaweihli 9y ago
    Your interpretation of the quote is that middle managers don't provide value, but I think that may be too broad. I understood it as "highly formalized process often rewards middle managers", which I do think is true. The best manager I was lucky enough to report to personalized his approach to his direct reports. He recognized that some people are more creative, others prefer more structure, etc. He still had his responsibilities, e.g. report progress on project X and estimate completion, but this was abstracted away from the team. For all we knew, we each had an area of the system we were responsible for, and we had longer-term collaborative projects that would take on the order of months. I didn't realize how great of a manager he was until I had other managers who firmly believed in the One True Way™ of managing projects, and also pretty much required everyone to be heavily involved in it. (Give estimations for things you haven't worked on, and move tasks as you get to each stage of development.) Getting back to my original point - highly formalized process often rewards middle managers because it simplifies work for them. Everything is already tracked in the system, it's a matter of moving around and allocating resources. But why does everyone need to be involved in this? Why isn't heavily formalized process compartmentalized to just managers and the people they report to (and maybe their reports that enjoy that process)? I recognize the value that managers bring - otherwise every individual contributor becomes a mini-PM - but I also believe that the best managers put in the work. They build good personalized relationships with each member of the team, and are able to compile estimates based on their interactions. It's not always a cold science in the vein of "since Alice has 13 points out of a maximum of 18 points per sprint, I should try to allocate 5 more points - the biggest task that fits into that is 4 points, so let's assign that to her."
• cyberferret 9y ago
  We've found this to be partially true in our very small startup. The unstructured nature of Slack conversation do make it hard to go back and reference something that was said only a few days ago, however we have found that the search tool has been very useful in locating a decision or rule that was made a while back in casual conversation. By and large, the biggest problem we have, even with a handful of users, is the fact that everyone tends to just use Slack as an ideas repository, and bug tracking/feature request tool, rather than log it in our actual Phabricator development tracking tool. Also, we have (I believe) gone a little overboard with integrating our other tools into Slack (including Phabricator, AWS, Stripe etc.), so we are almost at a 1:1 ration of bot generated messages to user created messages at the moment - leading to a lot of inadvertent mental filtering of channels, resulting in missed (human) messages.
• mmanfrin 9y ago
  There are two types of memory: long term memory and short term memory. Slack is short term memory. Both kinds are important -- short term memory without long term memory is amnesia.
  • awinter-py 9y ago
    I like this metaphor. Thanks for posting.
• noobiemcfoob 9y ago
  Slack is a tool, and it's all in how you use it. You and your team need to be disciplined and on the same page about how to use it. As for handling organizational memory, we spin up channels as single discussion forums. It's easy enough to archive them when a conversation ends (usually lasting ~2 weeks from describing problem to everyone involved agreeing it was solved).
• tabeth 9y ago
  In regards to "organizational memory", has anyone had any luck not allowing for "private messages?" The idea being that the vast majority of conversations between any two people will be about a work item, if it's about work, and therefore all conversations should be organized around work items, rather than people. Gitlab seems to do this[0] and I'm curious if it's better than ad-hoc conversations. Too bad their UX is too cluttered. I hear Basecamp has similar functionality. [0] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues
  • sytse 9y ago
    Do you have a suggestion to make our UX work better for you?
  • overgard 9y ago
    I can't imagine that being a good idea -- people form friendships in the office, or they just need to have a private conversation -- it seems like it would be weird and draconian to forbid that kind of thing because something important might be in a private chat.
    • tabeth 9y ago
      Ah, I meant forbidding them in the sense that the culture of the organization would discourage people from talking about work related things in a "work context" via ad-hoc messages, not that people literally or practically wouldn't be allowed to message each other. I agree, that would be draconian.
• Dowwie 9y ago
  Is anytime using Zulip and would care to comment about your experience?
  • neuracnu 9y ago
    We are at my org, but my only exposure is cross-team / cross-division chatter. I collaborate with my team across offices through an old Jabber client. This isn't ideal, but pulling it away from a browser window allows you to disconnect, set DND status, that sort of thing. Zulip's focus on streams & discussion topics (over people-groups) is terrifically handy for tuning into large-scale group chatter, looking at things that are interesting to you and sharing conversations with others. Project/task management via Slack or any similar tools just seems bonkers to me.
  • St-Clock 9y ago
    We tried Zulip for a week but the team decided to not continue the experiment. I personally really liked the UI and the keyboard-centric workflow, but the lack of polished UI and the suboptimal mobile experience was really difficult to defend. Another problem is that we would often end up replying to the wrong thread because of the way the general view is organized. We are now trying Twist (https://twistapp.com https://twistapp.com) and it is a very good compromise between the efficiency of Zulip and the polished UI of Slack. The main advantage over Zulip is that you only see one complete thread at a time in the main column, but you can see the last message of each thread you've subscribed to in your inbox (second column): when you hit reply, you are certain that you are replying to the right thread.
• pkrumins 9y ago
  You should try Twist (https://twistapp.com/ https://twistapp.com/). I switched to Twist with my team and haven't looked back at Slack. Twist organizes discussions around tasks. When the task is finished, that conversation is pretty much over. Read this post by Amir, the founder of TwistApp - Why We're Betting Against Real Time 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...
  • ScottBurson 9y ago
    How does Twist compare with a forum app like, say, Discourse?
  • atombender 9y ago
    Twist looks promising, if a little simplistic. I've been looking for something like this to complement our Slack channels, and to replace Basecamp (which our sales staff and project managers use for our B2B customer collaboration), which I think is terrible. But the fact that Twist also has real-time chat means that it doesn't really make sense to use both Twist and Slack -- it wants to be the one platform your team uses. At the same time, Twist isn't nearly as polished as Slack (try opening the web app on mobile -- it doesn't scale to the display!). Are there any good tools like this? Something a little more project/task-oriented than Discourse, but not a full-blown task management system like Trello or JIRA?
  • yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago
    Then why not just use comment threads on tickets?
    • jordanpg 9y ago
      Agree, this just looks like a subset of JIRA with a snappier UI. Atlassian would do well to pay attention.
  • dingo_bat 9y ago
    I saw the twist video. And it seems just like slack. Slack, but guys please observe discipline. The UI, design, philosophy everything is identical to slack. You feel forced to respond to slack chats, so just chill and respond only when you want to. This is literally in the video. The thread loses track of the topic, so we have exactly the same hierarchy and groupings like slack, but guys please just use the thread for the topic only. This is literally in the video. Chats are annoying and people keep disturbing you in slack. We have "messages", perfect for small groups and individual conversations. Again, exactly like slack, but let's all promise to be not annoying. The UI and app look great, I can see that folks really worked hard on this thing. But there is zero differentiation from slack. It looks like somebody took slack, re-colored it, and put "calmer and more organized" on the website.
• partycoder 9y ago
  I think how to divide your rooms is key. "development" or "engineering" is probably too vague. You may want more specific things: implementation, testing, release management, incidents and make sure people to stay on topic. Then, have a channel for offtopic, informal things and let people ignore it.
• peterevans 9y ago
  My worry is that if Slack is replacing your documentation, then it may be that your organization did not have good (or any!) documentation that predated its use of Slack. As such, I'm not sure if that's a fair thing to criticize of Slack. Slack is a tool for productivity. (Go on––I'll give you a minute to laugh.) Slack does make it easier to talk to people, particularly so in a group setting. Any company can make use of that; if you are a remote company, you need that. JIRA and Trello are also mentioned as "hates", but these are also tools that make it easier to work (notably, to make it easier to organize and catalog work). If you aren't using them, you've probably written a hack that does something like them, only worse.
  • rtpg 9y ago
    one issue is that Slack _does_ try to sell itself as the repository for information. It tries to suck in Google Docs links, it has its "Files" tab, it sells its search. It's an awesome chat application, of course. Not as much of a fan of it as a document store.
    • tinymollusk 9y ago
      They have those features, and (possibly) those intentions. If I use a chainsaw to slice my morning butter, is that the chainsaw's fault? (I haven't seen Slack identify itself as a document store; I have seen almost every company encompass that use-case. Is that Slack's fault?)
      • rtpg 9y ago
        Well what if the chainsaw says "great for butter"? I'm not trying to nitpick, and this might be misinterpretation, but I do feel like Slack is trying to sell itself as a Basecamp-y tool, instead of chat. From the features page: > It helps everyone find the answers they need (some blurb about the search) There's this ad running in trains in Tokyo for Slack which also shows this notion of Slack consuming everything that used to be e-mail attachments and whatnot + finding stuff in it (can't find a clip of this online). Slack's own Google Drive integration exists almost purely to suck stuff into the system, for easier access. I do think Slack has a huge potential to be powerful in this space, but it will be hard if everything has to be exposed through the lens of chat.
• overgard 9y ago
  Before Slack it seemed like everywhere I worked had chat and IM anyway -- it was just a thinner experience. As a programmer I have mixed feelings about making a point about "distractions". On one hand I'm sympathetic and think people need to be more conscientious... but I also think managing distractions is an important skill as a programmer, and there are a lot of people that seem to relish in acting professionally flustered all the time. At the end of the day sometimes answering questions and coordinating with people is the important work -- even if it might be frustrating. Also, I mean, you can just turn it off or mute the notifications. I see people do that all the time and nobody cares.
  • sundvor 9y ago
    Love your last point; I'd respect someone who'd mute notifications and treat it mainly as an asynchronous communications tool. Combine it with an Urgent channel if need be, where notifications are On, and tell people off for posting crap there..
• kovrik 9y ago
  Can anyone please explain why Slack is so popular? Isn't it just another IM chat? I've tried it a couple of times and found nothing special about it. Also, in all companies I worked at they either had Lync or Skype (because Enterprise, Windows, Office suite etc.). Even if company decides to try some fancy IM, isn't it better to switch to Atlassian HipChat as it gives nice integration with JIRA, Confluence, Bamboo, BitBucket (assuming company uses Atlassian toolchain)?
  • geofft 9y ago
    It's a high-quality product. My current employer uses Bitbucket for compliance reasons (I wrote the compliance tooling for my previous employer to use Slack) and while it works great, it's just worse in several small papercutty ways. Having a pleasant product causes people to be more likely to use it during the initial migration phase, which increases network effects, which is important for a successful communication system.
  • edwong 9y ago
    It's viral business model, phone/desktop apps, and integrations have made it a leader in workplace messaging. Hooks you with free and hits the sweet spot of UX.
  • a_imho 9y ago
    Same experience. Coupled with the pricing imo it defies logic why Slack is popular but good for them I guess.
• nabla9 9y ago
  There is communication bottleneck in any large team. The goal should be to maximize information sharing and minimize communication. Communication is scare resource and the use should have budget to create incentives to save it. Maybe someone can use blockchain hype to create that monetizes messaging inside companies.
• tammer 9y ago
  This assumes everybody's in the same office. Slack has tremendously improved my team's communication as we're spread across many university buildings.
• jordanpg 9y ago
  In my organization, github PR threads and JIRA comment threads tend to be ignored or forgotten after their inception, and chat gets results right now. We also use Trello, Confluence, google docs, and of course email for some things. I think this sort of thing is common. They all have their strengths and weaknesses, but it strikes me that a bigger barrier to productivity and strong organizational memory than interruptions is the overall dilution of information. Sometimes I think that the narrowing of the available tools (channels for information), whatever the weaknesses of the chosen tools might be, would be wise.
• brongondwana 9y ago
  [shameless plug] This is exactly why we at FastMail made Topicbox! Email is your personal memory, and it made sense to extend that to organizational memory by making mailing lists not suck. And we switched from IRC to Slack for our internal comms a while back, so we know the pros and cons :) Chat's great for real time, but not for long-term memory. https://www.topicbox.com/ https://www.topicbox.com/ [/shameless plug]
• Pokepokalypse 9y ago
  OMG: this guy is 100% right about JIRA. About SLACK; well, it can be used responsibly, if you set ground rules. Honestly, I've never used it within a team, but across teams. So I never had the problems he's describing. I can see how it would be abused that way. But you have the senior leaders set ground rules on usage. (doesn't solve the search problems). Chat is a tool. It can be used responsibly to be helpful, or it can be misused to fuck shit up. Just like any tool.
• rishirishi 9y ago
  Positioned as a tool for collaboration and productivity, how can Slack legitimately be that when it is designed for online, synchronous communication? Is it really collaboration when members in a channel do not have a chance to prepare or struggle to participate at that pace? What is productive about Slack? Perhaps you get questions answered through the tool, but you do not produce through Slack. I think of meetings as productive when progress is made on a problem or a decision is arrived at. How does Slack facilitate that better than scheduled meetings? I have generally stopped using Slack. If a conversation takes longer than three minutes to conduct on Slack, in real/video/phone life please. There is an illusion that work is getting done faster on Slack; the opposite is true, work is slower and of poorer quality.
  • quacker 9y ago
    > How does Slack facilitate that better than scheduled meetings? Slack is not a replacement for scheduled meetings though. > If a conversation takes longer than three minutes to conduct on Slack, in real/video/phone life please. There is an illusion that work is getting done faster on Slack; the opposite is true, work is slower and of poorer quality. People say meetings are high-bandwidth, but getting a bunch of engineers in a room is very expensive (literally - hundreds of dollars an hour) and you get synchronous, blocking discussion (one person speaks at a time - else, chaos). I am much, much less distracted participating in a "long" slack discussion (which I can check in on every few minutes or so) than I am with all my attention paid to listening to a meeting. Personally, I find few people on any given team are able to communicate well on the fly in a meeting and I see people (including myself) frequently asking for clarification due to misunderstandings, which contributes to a meeting dragging. Meetings are also _notorious_ for encouraging unfocused and unstructured discussion, unless you have a good moderator or some structured approach to a meeting (like a lean coffee style). A lot of this is improved in a Slack conversation because people are forced to distill their thoughts into text, they are able to reread messages for clarification, and we've had good success using Slack threads for focused discussion of particular topics. Meetings are also not archived by default, which isolates the people unable to attend the meeting - especially when you have in person meetings that are not remote friendly. Slack discussions are at least discoverable through search. One team I was on started recording meetings and rewatching hour long meeting minutes to get information is actually terrible. Searching through Slack is not perfect, but it's infinitely quicker and I frequently do find what I want.
• shishironline 9y ago
  Great post. Hits exactly the sore point of working in today's environment.
• pcmaffey 9y ago
  Yes— and that’s ok. Slack is more like organizational RAM.
• aorloff 9y ago
  There are 3 primary types of documentation that a growing organization needs : 1. Onboarding 2. Runbook / Troubleshooting 3. Notes and ongoing developer wisdom Slack helps with #3, but is not what #1 and #2 require. New hires should not be digging through slack to get up to speed, and ops or engs trying to deal with catastrophe in the wee hours should have playbooks, not try to dig up what worked last time in slack.
  • awinter-py 9y ago
    do you have any recommendations for good runbook tools? I'm on the market for one of these.
    • softawre 9y ago
      a wiki?
      • aorloff 9y ago
        Yeah a wiki should suffice. Having a good runbook is a process that needs to be tended to every time devs and ops deploy, troubleshoot, and configure services. More of a process than a tool, because it should integrate with all the tools already in use for deployment, logging, debugging, etc.
• edwong 9y ago
  Easy to say Slack, JIRA, Trello suck, but what are the alternatives? I used IRC at two 1000 person companies. It was useful, but didn't replace email like slack does now. Likely due to lack of persistence, absence on phones and hard to setup integrations. Echoing a lot of the comments, you can blame tools for altering the culture. Phones disrupted memos, email ended vacuum tube delivery, computers killed the file cabinet. Slack is a reflection of our short attention spans. No one wants to read long emails. People need an easy way to message and get notified on all screens. People pass screen shots across their devices. It solves problems. I've seen people who abuse @mentions and @here, but ultimately you develop filters and need to take responsibility for one's own workflow. I do hear how Slack isn't good at making organizational events searchable and good at archiving in corporate memory. Problem space is: need to search, recall, store and archive better. Maybe tools to record this into some record or doc, (i.e. readthedocs). You can argue Facebook/Yammer style status posts is a better way to broadcast and save announcements. Slack can innovate on UX, but they seeme focused on growth and quality of service. They're not looking to solve small issues at this time.
  • krick 9y ago
    This isn't really about Slack, it's about the whole paradigm. Maybe it's even OPs fault that he phrases it this way, but anyhow, if it really would be about Slack it would imply that something like Facebook Workplace is any better, but in reality it's infinitely worse on about every possible aspect and beyond. Even by OPs own metrics. So it's more about how "emails would be better", and surely not about "how to replace them". Not sure if I agree or disagree though.
    • sundvor 9y ago
      Had Workplace in my last job, just started a new one which uses Slack. I do not in any shape or form miss Workplace. It was sucking my attention dry, blocking meant I'd lose out on things that actually matter. With Slack it's super easy to set notifications to null except for eg mentions or important groups - and can even have different defaults for mobile vs desktop.
      • 9y ago
• zitterbewegung 9y ago
  From my understanding Slack at large organizations (10+ employees) don't make organizations more productive at all. At the place that I work slack is relatively manageable for the most part. For me to make slack useful I just turned off all of the chatrooms and everything and make it so that I only check if it I get @ notified. There are weird parts of slack by default that seem to be designed to make you less productive. Why does the #random channel exist at all? Sure it should cordon off off topic conversations and its designed by slack to increase engagement but is that what should be there by default? For the most part though I see Slack as making me more productive. It is much easier to use than other alternatives. It has a great UI as long as you use the browser version (all of the native apps for linux are largely broken for me). If you are a large organization I think you would want to consider discord (yes I know its targeted for gamers) but it the react community uses it well in this regard.
• jchw 9y ago
  Wow, this is the most dystopian take possible regarding Slack. Half the time I can't tell if they're arguing against real-time chat or for IRC. In any case I think that you could easily argue that most of these things depend on your organization and what use cases you have for Slack. But wow, I'm having a hard time visualizing how it could be this bad. Before Slack, my org had no centralized communication. That sucked way worse than having Slack.
• clintonb 9y ago
  I realize that I am nitpicking the nitpicking here... > JIRA has a screen real estate problem. Have you seen the articles about SERP shrinkage, where a G results page in 2004 was mostly results and now it’s mostly ads? JIRA started out this way. 90% of the text on the screen isn’t your project’s information, it’s JIRA chrome. Press "z" and "[" in JIRA Cloud to hide the top filter bar and sidebar, respectively, when viewing a project board. These were the first shortcuts I learned after the redesign about a year ago.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• harlanji 9y ago
  I miss not having team chat. People figured stuff out and felt it was important enough to document... failing that they got up and walked over. This was 2003ish. Now I end up either being drained by lack-of-effort questions all day on chat, or being reprinanded for not being available on chat. I never progress in my career, and in my mind there's an obvious correlation. I am talented and have one point of focus, which is a good point of attack for aspiring colleagues (effectively competitors, sadly). I can get better at saying no, but it doesn't fly well as most senior member most of the time because I'm called a "blocker".
• loorinm 9y ago
  “it’s like having an old man pee on your face one trickle at a time. I’d rather have it over with quickly and go wash up.” I think we’ve all been there.
• motdiem 9y ago
  I get the author’s frustration - especially with slack’s search features. But I think it’s possible to use slack as a tool for transient conversation and notifications. We routinely copy/paste slack chats in other tools (asana, docs, code comments) when we feel it’s something worth saving. It does require discipline with tools usage though...
• lillesvin 9y ago
  I've often thought about using good old NNTP as a replacement for Slack. It does everything I want from Slack in terms of structured conversation and preservation of information. At the same time it doesn't have the same real-timey feeling (that the OP refers to as urgency).
• jasonkester 9y ago
  My approach to Slack is to treat it like email. It lives in an open browser tab during work hours, tucked away in a corner of the screen where I can't see the "IMPORTANT! EMERGENCY!!! READ ME NOW!!!" warning that is permanently on in the icon. From time to time, when I'm at a natural stopping point, I'll check email then I'll check Slack. Never allow it to send notifications or make noise. Certainly never install any form of native client. That means it's not on your phone or tablet (since the web version doesn't work on mobile devices anymore). That means it can't seek your attention when you're not in your office. It'll send little digest mails if you forget about it for a whole day. For me, that's enough to remind me that it exists and that I should open a Slack window as part of my morning email spin. I've worked with people who have alerts turned on for things, and they can't even hold a conversation for all the bongling going on on their devices. It seems unbearable.
• bluecat22 9y ago
  This looks like a problem to be solved with something like a google search engine for all internal pages and wiki. Perhaps we should start machine learning to start auto tagging discussions in Slack with the context they're being done in and then expose a search engine like interface to all of Slack conversations, wikis etc.
• hohenheim 9y ago
  Slack is a tool, just like kitchen knife is. Used correctly, it is valuable. Otherwise, I agree with all you said.
• bigpeopleareold 9y ago
  Like anything, this is a people problem. I have no issue with Slack because I have no issue with it personally, because there is no fanatic focus on this thing in my company. If it is a problem, it's probably easy to start solving it: don't use it.
• physicsguy 9y ago
  My issue with Slack in our organisation (a University), is that people spawn off new teams for everything, and nobody has a paid group, because it's too expensive with our budgets, so you lose the conversations by age at 20000 messages. This has led to the situation where I'm in (a) My research group's group (b) One for people who program within the University (c) One for a side project I'm involved in (d) Slack channels for some software I use as dependency in my own project (e) One for a language specific group (f) One which is a group we share with collaborators at other Universities (g) About 5 more that have now been abandoned. And because of that, I end up just turning off Slack all day and checking it in the evening, because I don't find it conducive to research work where I mostly work independently anyway.
• deobald 9y ago
  Relay is a Slack alternative: https://www.relay-chat.com https://www.relay-chat.com So far, a Relay organization is a hosted Mattermost instance. Slack isn't exactly revolutionary software and it seems silly that persistent IRC (that's all Slack is) should cost so much money or run on a proprietary, users-as-inventory, data-gobbling platform. 1. Why does Relay exist? We built Relay for precisely this reason. Mattermost is pretty cool but we (nilenso.com) are not a military contractor or a bank. We didn't need Mattermost hidden deep in our datacenter; we just wanted hosted Mattermost so we could stop handing over every byte of our internal data to Slack, Inc. If Relay existed a year ago, we would have paid for it. So we built it (for) ourselves. 2. What's the plan, Stan? As long as we can, we want to stay in sync with the Mattermost mainline. All our code is open source (https://gitlab.com/nilenso/relay-backend https://gitlab.com/nilenso/relay-backend and https://gitlab.com/nilenso/relay-ops https://gitlab.com/nilenso/relay-ops so far) but we'd like it if our users could move to their own self-hosted Mattermost instance as easily as a self-hosted Relay instance. We have some pretty specific near-term plans: First, Integrations are a pain with Mattermost and we'll be releasing a server to make that a one-click operation (like it is on Slack) soon. Second, a fully-automated (one-click) Matterbridge server so you can migrate from Slack slowly or keep or IRC users happy. But beyond that? We're not sure. There are some UI/UX bugs that annoy us (especially on the Mattermost/Relay mobile clients). Some of the issues Abe mentions are low-hanging usability fruit, but from a lot of the replies on this thread, it sounds like not everyone feels the pain. It's not immediately obvious to use what we should prioritize; we don't have an issue people at nilenso sending us photos of their cats, for example. We're probably far from the norm, though. If you want to shout at us about how we can fix Relay (née Slack) and, as a consequence, Mattermost, usability we'd really like to hear it. This is our 9-to-5. Shout on Twitter: https://twitter.com/relay_chat/status/962936101919838208 https://twitter.com/relay_chat/status/962936101919838208 Shout on Open Relay [1]: https://open.relay-chat.com/signup_email https://open.relay-chat.com/signup_email Or shout on this thread, obviously. Thanks HN. -steven [1] This is our open Relay server. Create channels, teams, whatever. Think Freenode or any other community IRC network. No 10k message limits or any of that garbage (it seems insane to me that language communities like Elixir and Clojure moved chat to Slack, given this restriction).
• cmcginty 9y ago
  I think people forget what it was like before Slack. Sitting down to 30+ emails by 9:00AM and over 200 in a single day. It was death by email threads and following them was a horrible time suck. Worse off, email was treated like a real time conversation so you were expected to tracking it all the time through the day. Slack solves a lot of this. The channels are opt in. If you don't want to follow something, just leave. Email is now just for async messages and is less of a distraction during core hours. If your team or Co uses one channel for all your discussions, then I suggest that you find a way to split out the primary topics in a way that lets everyone filter the wheat from the chaff. Like others are saying, don't blame the tools for being misused. Ultimately you have to learn how to efficiently communicate with your team and be disciplined enough to know what tool to use for each type of task.
  • i_shankar 9y ago
    Agree 100% on the last para.
• StreamBright 9y ago
  Well, this is why i disabled notification for Slack, so i did to everything else. I read emails when I want to read emails and so on. During meetings phones should be put on silent and this must be enforced. I think it is very simple to remain productive in a environment that has so many interruptions. You just need to follow basic principles.
• rowyourboat 9y ago
  Thing is, I have always used IM in one form or other for work. Slack is finally one that can handle code snippets well. It's not worse at interruption than any other IM (and you can tell it to shut up, so), it does not replace documentation, and it does not solve any organisational problems (it's a technical solution, how could it). What it is, however, is a chat client that can handle code snippets well. So yay for that.
• Joeri 9y ago
  In any team development context you need a way of interrupting people when blocked, so regardless of whether it is slack or skype or something else, you will need some chat-like tool, unless everyone sits in the same office every day. That doesn’t mean that pointless interruptions should be encouraged or even allowed. I’ve always made it a policy of telling people in chat to send me an email if their question was not blocking, but that only works if your manager allows it. Another aspect here is to what degree these tools are introduced for the right reasons. I’ve seen from the inside (facility services industry) how open plan offices and flex desks are pushed for cost reasons (fewer sq. m. per employee) while being marketed as promoting team interaction (studies show it harms productivity more than helping). Cost is a bad reason, but at least it has an internal logic. But then you get people who see everyone is going to open plan and move to open plan also but with lots of empty space, nullifying the cost advantage and keeping only the downsides. Maybe with slack there’s also a degree of cargo culting going on.
• matchagaucho 9y ago
  /giphy amen
• skc 9y ago
  Never used Slack but I've followed the cycle from little tool that could, to hip tech buzzword, to celebrity startup and now seemingly back down to...do we really need this? I wonder what will come next.
• hokus 9y ago
  I one time kept saying that one shouldn't have a General forum - but no one understood. The only way to have the desired archive structures is to not have a dumping ground. Non of any kind.
• xab9 9y ago
  my slack strategies lately: * mute everything, except my team's chat; * turn off the "is typing" feedback; * use the web version in a standalone browser (eats 200mb ram only instead of 2+gb, in srware iron at least); * mute colors with custom "theme"; * turn off emoji display (falls back to :foo: :bar:); * remove the rest of the emojis with greasemonkey extension (and mute more colors); * collapse documents by default (really helps with big animated gifs). But I still am trying to cope with some of the problems mentioned in the article and sometimes I have this feeling that I'm part of the problem (expecting fast replies, whining at times, not being constructive enough etc).
• seanhandley 9y ago
  Slack, like all tools with built-in notifications, works out much better for me when I disable the notifications. I alt+tab to the window now and then to see if anyone's trying to get my attention and it tells me who, and how many unreads I have. The key is to not have the notification sound/popup and I can just bury Slack under my editor, browser etc until I decide I'm available.
• solatic 9y ago
  Reading through this thread, it seems like Slack is really missing more fine-grained control over channel permissions. There are largely four types of communication and they need four different permission designs: * Important and immediate - stuff like production monitoring and incident resolution. These channels should typically be quiet but they should have the power to notify and interrupt people doing normal work when activity happens. If you have support channels, they should be staffed by dedicated support people whose primary job is to be interrupted by support requests, and not engineers trying to buckle down on their work. * Important but not immediate - ordinary corporate alignment discussions. These channels should be globally administratively enforced as read-only except for predefined, enforced "meeting hours" which are blocked out organization-wide on everybody's calendar, which is when discussion on issues actually happens. If people have an issue they need to bring up on a particular topic, it can wait until tomorrow, and not interrupt engineers trying to get their work done. People no longer mute these channels because they're not interrupting them during get-work-done hours. If it's too difficult to follow the "meeting" in a dozen different channels then it's probably a sign that your organization has you in charge of too many responsibilities and you should stop looking at the tool as a means of fixing your organizational problems. * Not important (and either immediate or not immediately): there's a time and place for watercooler channels, and it's not interrupting you in your cubicle. Notifications should be globally administratively disabled entirely for these channels, for everyone, including the people who care about following along in those channels, because nobody should be standing around the watercooler all day long. Slack's product teams should be looking at mute as a sign of failure that says "either this tool or this tool's configuration is preventing me from doing my job" and the product team should respond accordingly (remember: tool misconfigurations are an admin UX failure that harms your product by damaging its reputation, and you should fix the UX failure that lead to the misconfiguration so as to protect your product's reputation). The only mute button in Slack should be a Slack-wide mute button for vacation etc.
• marenkay 9y ago
  IMHO Slack should be used only as informal communication tool. Neither Slack nor Discord or others facilitate the most important part: long-term result from communication. Why? People are used to WhatsApp, FB Messenger, etc. and chat these days is mostly without consequences. That also translates to Slack and others. Effective communication producing results IMHO requires investment. Chat is the opposite of that. Anecdotal part from various companies: Slack is mostly a place for slacking off, doing silly things or send "untraceable" reprimands (since free tier does not archive) long-term. Organisation has to be company culture before using tools like Slack, or Slack will do you no good. ... feel free to replace Slack with any other messaging app.
• DoubleGlazing 9y ago
  The author nails my thoughts on Slack (and its OS clone Mattermost). It is less a communications tool, more of a productivity tracker. I've worked in places where it was unofficially compulsory to have Slack always open. If you didn't respond to a message is a timely fashion then you'd be asked why. It became the case that Activity on Slack = Productivity. This wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact that I think Slack is a pretty poor way to do workplace communication. It's the textual equivalent of shouting out a question to the whole office. Everything seems to mush together in to one big conversation about everything that is hard to track and search.
  • scottishfiction 9y ago
    My thoughts on your comments are the same as my thoughts on the article. These are cultural problems that Slack is simply exposing. If there was no Slack, something else would fill the need for your middle management to track everyone's 'productivity'.
• maxsavin 9y ago
  The "ADD" that Slack creates might be the killer feature. I suspect that many middle managers may not know how to organize work, and this lets them get away from that. The name Slack becomes even more ironic in this context.
• douglaswlance 9y ago
  Slack should be used as a CLI for your business. It not only a chat room. If you want documentation, then add a command for `/doc "title"` and start a collaborative document. If you want to add a task, `/task add "title"` etc. Its a shared command line, not only chat.
• noir-york 9y ago
  Mediums create expectations around availability, presence, and response times. Phone (excluding VOIP): availability is not expected, but once call is picked up, response is immediate. Email: availability is guaranteed (if you know their email), and a response times range from minutes to next day. IM / Slack: Availability is known and a response expected in the seconds / minutes range if you are available. It comes down to using the right tool for the job@ "hej Jeb, you in the office?" - use IM. Then go over to Jeb's office to continue the discussion on whether to go with solution A or solution B. Its an indepth discussion that takes over an hour and Jeb closes his door so the two of you can discuss without interruption. Back in your own office, you email Jeb with a summary of the discussion and the points agreed. Jeb calls back saying "hey, i'm not sure about para X"... You discuss it over the phone, issue is resolved in a couple of minutes. You post the updated document to the internal wiki and email the team. Feeling productive, you decide its time for a coffee, you slack the channel asking who would care to join you. When a company normalises the expectation of getting a response to anything in seconds, interruptions happen all the time and productivity takes a hit. Also, I hate open offices and thank heavens I only have had to work in one for a few months. The only true progress we ever made was going through the lunch menus of all the nearby restuarants. On the other hand having say, a handful of people in a room (three or four) is a good balance between the chaos of open office (and real estate cost efficiencies) and giving everyone their own (potentially isolating) office.
• sh_tinh_hair 9y ago
  The article author is working in the wrong industry.
• krausejj 9y ago
  What about the argument that since email is built atop an open standard, you can (theoretically) migrate to different email servers and clients, but with Slack, your "organizational memory" is owned by Slack?
• chmaynard 9y ago
  I think something useful could be implemented using a distributed model. No server, no company, just a network of nodes communicating together using the Internet as it was originally intended to be used. No one makes money on email and no one should make money on chat. The underlying implementation could use Git, which would preserve history and give everyone a complete copy of the repository.
• rorygibson 9y ago
  The "organisational memory" point is one of the driving factors behind the tool / startup I'm building. https://getctx.io https://getctx.io tl;dr - It's basically all the good bits of Enterprise Search, but set up to pull in the data from the cloud based SaaS tools we all use in 2018, and designed for digital / product teams. The rationale is, I think that there is no sensible, central place for a company to store all the types of info they have. Slack doesn't do it all, Confluence, JIRA or Trello aren't enough, Google Drive is good for some things... In my experience (and from many people I've surveyed and spoken to) most companies end up with loads of these tools, and it's a nightmare to find specific pieces of content when you have 5+ options for where it could be. The answer isn't one tool to rule 'em all - it has to be an abstraction - make the data available but store it (master it) in the various locations. So, my product indexes Trello, Slack, Google Drive, GitHub and email (and, in beta, JIRA). It'd be great to get some HN-style feedback :-)