Large shop, checking in. We pay for it and have around 1500 technical people on ours, all spread out in a dozen locations. It lets us work as if we're all in t

Large shop, checking in. We pay for it and have around 1500 technical people on ours, all spread out in a dozen locations. It lets us work as if we're all in the same office. One misconception is that slack is not "chat", it's not like IRC. It's more like groupware when used as intended. It handles things like files or code samples, extensibility like webhooks and bots, fine grained notification preferences, decent search across channels or by other criteria. Screen sharing and conference calling is decent if immature. We have a channel for each team, a channel for any big issues that pop up (they get archived), a channel for each product, etc. and yes channels for screwing around. Corporate version has search and archive for Sarbox/HR reqs. There are other products. IRC can only do a few of these things, with many requiring expert scripting to accomplish.