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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

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.
- gaius 9y ago
  one issue is that Slack _does_ try to sell itself as the repository for information Right, wasn’t it originally Single Log of All Chat Knowledge or some acronym like that?
bambax 9y ago
> if you are a remote company, you need [to make it easier to talk to people] From the article: > Remote work culture is a defense mechanism against the distracting open office, and slack is the end run around that defense mechanism. Slack kills off any benefit there is of being remote, because it is immediate: you need to be online all the time, and you need to answer / participate / chat instantly. A good alternative to Slack would be a Reddit-like interface with threads and an asynchronous model. That's also the superiority of email over any chat solution. I don't understand why people and organizations get so excited about real-time conversations. We always had real time. Cavemen had real time. Writing was invented to free us from real time, to transfer information in non-real time and to future generations. But now it seems the cavemen are back, with a vengeance.
- ahussain 9y ago
  Surely the two can go hand in hand. Most issue trackers provide an asynchronous/threaded environment, and slack is useful if you have a real time question
- watwut 9y ago
  I think that there are more reasons for remote that just office distractions.
  - lebski88 9y ago
    It sure does help with my, otherwise, 6000 mile commute!
- johannes1234321 9y ago
  It is an organisational question whether a chat like Slack has to be immediate. What's needed are enough channels to split social "noise" from things which need a response so that everybody has a chance to see those things, even if they are five time zones behind or deep in a debugging session. The other thing needed are non-intrusive notifications. A small icon in the notification bar is enough for me, to do a quick check when I have the capacity. (I'm always wonder how those people with big notifications popping up on each mail can work at all, ...)
Slansitartop 9y ago
I find that Slack creates worse "accidental" documentation than some other forms of communication. Prior to my team's adoption of slack, major decisions/designs were usually documented in an email at some point, because they needed to be broadcast. If you can find that email then you have a fairly good self-contained resource for understanding whatever it was about. Slack is easy and it's broadcast, so some people use it preferentially whenever they need to broadcast. However, the form that it takes is lines of text barfed out and interleaved with unrelated lines of text. There's no summary metadata (like subject lines), there's no organization except time, people put very little thought into what they type so it's at best rough draft form. It's hard to search, and even worse, your team or organization may be hip but cheap, and just get the free version that disappears your message history making search moot. In short, we used to get better documentation for free, now we get none. Sometimes, old emails can be immensely useful in trying to figure out why something was done, or recovering old understanding and history.
- ebiester 9y ago
  How many emails just ended up going to a limited distribution list? Worse, many email systems have a retention period. (This is also a problem with Slack, mind you.)
  - Slansitartop 9y ago
    > How many emails just ended up going to a limited distribution list? Worse, many email systems have a retention period. (This is also a problem with Slack, mind you.) I'm not saying that email is perfect and doesn't have its issues, I'm just saying Slack is worse. The kind of use case I was thinking of is myself and others searching through our own personal archives for stuff (which people at my company use to get around server retention policies). That works with email but not with Slack.

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.
gaius 9y ago
one issue is that Slack _does_ try to sell itself as the repository for information Right, wasn’t it originally Single Log of All Chat Knowledge or some acronym like that?

bambax 9y ago

> if you are a remote company, you need [to make it easier to talk to people] From the article: > Remote work culture is a defense mechanism against the distracting open office, and slack is the end run around that defense mechanism. Slack kills off any benefit there is of being remote, because it is immediate: you need to be online all the time, and you need to answer / participate / chat instantly. A good alternative to Slack would be a Reddit-like interface with threads and an asynchronous model. That's also the superiority of email over any chat solution. I don't understand why people and organizations get so excited about real-time conversations. We always had real time. Cavemen had real time. Writing was invented to free us from real time, to transfer information in non-real time and to future generations. But now it seems the cavemen are back, with a vengeance.

ahussain 9y ago
Surely the two can go hand in hand. Most issue trackers provide an asynchronous/threaded environment, and slack is useful if you have a real time question
watwut 9y ago
I think that there are more reasons for remote that just office distractions.
- lebski88 9y ago
  It sure does help with my, otherwise, 6000 mile commute!
johannes1234321 9y ago
It is an organisational question whether a chat like Slack has to be immediate. What's needed are enough channels to split social "noise" from things which need a response so that everybody has a chance to see those things, even if they are five time zones behind or deep in a debugging session. The other thing needed are non-intrusive notifications. A small icon in the notification bar is enough for me, to do a quick check when I have the capacity. (I'm always wonder how those people with big notifications popping up on each mail can work at all, ...)

Slansitartop 9y ago

I find that Slack creates worse "accidental" documentation than some other forms of communication. Prior to my team's adoption of slack, major decisions/designs were usually documented in an email at some point, because they needed to be broadcast. If you can find that email then you have a fairly good self-contained resource for understanding whatever it was about. Slack is easy and it's broadcast, so some people use it preferentially whenever they need to broadcast. However, the form that it takes is lines of text barfed out and interleaved with unrelated lines of text. There's no summary metadata (like subject lines), there's no organization except time, people put very little thought into what they type so it's at best rough draft form. It's hard to search, and even worse, your team or organization may be hip but cheap, and just get the free version that disappears your message history making search moot. In short, we used to get better documentation for free, now we get none. Sometimes, old emails can be immensely useful in trying to figure out why something was done, or recovering old understanding and history.

ebiester 9y ago
How many emails just ended up going to a limited distribution list? Worse, many email systems have a retention period. (This is also a problem with Slack, mind you.)
- Slansitartop 9y ago
  > How many emails just ended up going to a limited distribution list? Worse, many email systems have a retention period. (This is also a problem with Slack, mind you.) I'm not saying that email is perfect and doesn't have its issues, I'm just saying Slack is worse. The kind of use case I was thinking of is myself and others searching through our own personal archives for stuff (which people at my company use to get around server retention policies). That works with email but not with Slack.