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My personal experience is that the people willing to answer the questions on slack are also the ones who take those answers and put them in documentation so the

My personal experience is that the people willing to answer the questions on slack are also the ones who take those answers and put them in documentation so they don't have to keep answering the same questions. My experience is also that those who don't bother to be responsive to questions aren't pained enough to write the documentation. Further, due to the blindness of expertise, they document the wrong things. It's precisely the pain of interruption that leads to empathy and good documentation. My team, as one who sources multiple teams, does a significant amount of work in documentation precisely because we know the pain points. I had a pain point recently when some behavior changed that broke a consumer. I could track to the change, but I couldn't tell why because this person didn't make a meaningful git commit. They didn't create a changelog that explained neither the technical changes nor the product rationale. So, off to slack, and waiting because someone was "too busy" to do any of this. I have an idea that teams should have a "slack on call" person who rotates daily to interface with other teams. This means that one person is impacted every couple of days. It sort-of works in practice.

philwelch 9y ago
I’m not dogmatically opposed to chat, or helping people, or anything like that, and I’ve seen much the same dynamic at play. My problem is more with the culture that arises when conversations move from email to Slack, when interrupting people becomes the preferred mechanism over RTFM, and when I can’t do a goddamn thing without a chat app pinging me because someone @here’d a channel I’m in with something I can’t help with. Basically, I miss long-form written communication. Slack and PowerPoint are tools that destroy that.
- icelancer 9y ago
  >> Basically, I miss long-form written communication. Slack and PowerPoint are tools that destroy that. Only if your business allows them to be. We use Slack with specific reasons on how it should be used, with Basecamp as the documentation/project management layer. Slack is not meant to be abused like it is in the article, and the fact that people do it like that isn't a fault of the tool.
  - philwelch 9y ago
    That sounds really nice from an idealistic perspective, and I guess Slack's business model isn't as dependent on them focusing on "engagement" over value added, but I still worry. The problem with Slack and PowerPoint is that they're cheap and easy and you don't necessarily have an incentive to step up from there to full written literacy.
    - icelancer 9y ago
      >> idealistic perspective There is nothing idealistic about it. We use them like that, all the time. It works. It isn't hard. You just instruct your managers that this is how you are going to use it, and you are judged in reviews how well you manage people and projects. If you screw it up enough, you are fired. You treat documentation and conversation like anything else in the company - not some esoteric thing that gets in the way / assists work. The documentation itself should be subject to performance review, and in our company, it is. We get what we incentivize. Unsurprisingly, we have good documentation and good communication throughout.
- dingo_bat 9y ago
  > when interrupting people becomes the preferred mechanism over RTFM Oh god, this is the bane of my existence. Slack, skype, even in-person. Some people will never read the docs. They will seek out people who "know" and disturb them. Earlier they would fire off an email. Now I'll get a message at 2am when I just want to get this last commit in and go to sleep.
- NLips 9y ago
  You may have tried this / it may not help. We have dedicated help channels - a company-wide 'help' (for anything, but normally related to technical issues or looking for general advice on a topic where you don't know who could help), and product / team-specific help channels. There's no need to @here those channels, because there's already the intermediate-level flag of "this channel has new messages, meaning someone needs help" without going all all the way to "notify everyone". There are enough people around that someone will take a look at the channel in the near future, and they can either answer or point you to a good person to ask, at which point you're back to non-slack-specific style comms i.e. "I want to contact person X, I can either interupt them or send them some async comms". I probably get 1 or 0 notifications a day from channels as opposed to DMs - there's just no need to @here if you have specific channels for certain types of request.
milesvp 9y ago
So you may be right about responding to @soandso, or even &here. The problem isn't responding to those, it's feeling the need to constantly be reading and responding to random conversations that should have actually been a scheduled meeting with an agenda. Or worse constantly checking back for all the random hits of dopamine you get from pretending that reading random low quality comments is actually work. Working on anything but the most basic of features requires getting your head in the right place, and as such you should be expected to ignore chat for sometimes hours at a time.

philwelch 9y ago

I’m not dogmatically opposed to chat, or helping people, or anything like that, and I’ve seen much the same dynamic at play. My problem is more with the culture that arises when conversations move from email to Slack, when interrupting people becomes the preferred mechanism over RTFM, and when I can’t do a goddamn thing without a chat app pinging me because someone @here’d a channel I’m in with something I can’t help with. Basically, I miss long-form written communication. Slack and PowerPoint are tools that destroy that.

icelancer 9y ago
>> Basically, I miss long-form written communication. Slack and PowerPoint are tools that destroy that. Only if your business allows them to be. We use Slack with specific reasons on how it should be used, with Basecamp as the documentation/project management layer. Slack is not meant to be abused like it is in the article, and the fact that people do it like that isn't a fault of the tool.
- philwelch 9y ago
  That sounds really nice from an idealistic perspective, and I guess Slack's business model isn't as dependent on them focusing on "engagement" over value added, but I still worry. The problem with Slack and PowerPoint is that they're cheap and easy and you don't necessarily have an incentive to step up from there to full written literacy.
  - icelancer 9y ago
    >> idealistic perspective There is nothing idealistic about it. We use them like that, all the time. It works. It isn't hard. You just instruct your managers that this is how you are going to use it, and you are judged in reviews how well you manage people and projects. If you screw it up enough, you are fired. You treat documentation and conversation like anything else in the company - not some esoteric thing that gets in the way / assists work. The documentation itself should be subject to performance review, and in our company, it is. We get what we incentivize. Unsurprisingly, we have good documentation and good communication throughout.
dingo_bat 9y ago
> when interrupting people becomes the preferred mechanism over RTFM Oh god, this is the bane of my existence. Slack, skype, even in-person. Some people will never read the docs. They will seek out people who "know" and disturb them. Earlier they would fire off an email. Now I'll get a message at 2am when I just want to get this last commit in and go to sleep.
NLips 9y ago
You may have tried this / it may not help. We have dedicated help channels - a company-wide 'help' (for anything, but normally related to technical issues or looking for general advice on a topic where you don't know who could help), and product / team-specific help channels. There's no need to @here those channels, because there's already the intermediate-level flag of "this channel has new messages, meaning someone needs help" without going all all the way to "notify everyone". There are enough people around that someone will take a look at the channel in the near future, and they can either answer or point you to a good person to ask, at which point you're back to non-slack-specific style comms i.e. "I want to contact person X, I can either interupt them or send them some async comms". I probably get 1 or 0 notifications a day from channels as opposed to DMs - there's just no need to @here if you have specific channels for certain types of request.

milesvp 9y ago

So you may be right about responding to @soandso, or even &here. The problem isn't responding to those, it's feeling the need to constantly be reading and responding to random conversations that should have actually been a scheduled meeting with an agenda. Or worse constantly checking back for all the random hits of dopamine you get from pretending that reading random low quality comments is actually work. Working on anything but the most basic of features requires getting your head in the right place, and as such you should be expected to ignore chat for sometimes hours at a time.