3 ms·

Sucks for you that you need to be responding ASAP but that's not necessarily the norm. My organization and team clearly set expectations that we are only expect

Sucks for you that you need to be responding ASAP but that's not necessarily the norm. My organization and team clearly set expectations that we are only expected to respond ASAP if it's regular work hours or if you're on call. All other times people can ping you but no one's gonna hold you to it if you don't reply all Sunday. In our team what organically transpires is that we generally get a response time of 3-8 hours over weekends and a few hours in weekday evenings. No one's complaining over lost sleep. And from what I've heard from my friends who all made informed decisions on where to work, that seems to be the norm. I'm perfectly fine with that. Looks more like you've decided these hardass companies are the only places worth working at for various reasons and have concluded that these are the norms everywhere.

adrianmsmith 8y ago
"only expected to respond ASAP if it's regular work hours" - I think InclinedPlane meant regular work hours. It's a problem if you have to respond ASAP during work hours, if your job involves doing deep work during work hours.
InclinedPlane 8y ago
This is not, mostly, my personal anecdotal experience these are my observations of the "way it works" for many people throughout the industry, especially those working at startups. Notice that I said nothing about working outside of the typical 40 hour work week and yet you immediately took my comment to be concerned with that. Absolutely the core problem with slack is that it makes it easier for people to be inconsiderate of other's time by making synchronous communication the norm. Slack normalizes the model of everyone communicating synchronously all the time and everyone interrupting everyone else's work in order to communicate, which is corrosive both to productivity and the overall office environment (for the reasons I outlined above). And yes, there are ways to "use slack better" but the problem here is that most tools encourage a natural pattern of use, and if that pattern has a severe negative impact then using that tool will tend to have a negative impact on work as well, on average. See also: using gotos in code or writing readable Perl programs. If there is a "correct" way to use slack then that should be the default, baked into the software, and it should take work to use slack incorrectly. Unfortunately, the exact opposite is true, using slack well requires an uphill battle. People aren't complaining about slack being impossible to use "correctly", they are complaining that it's an uphill battle to do so.

adrianmsmith 8y ago

"only expected to respond ASAP if it's regular work hours" - I think InclinedPlane meant regular work hours. It's a problem if you have to respond ASAP during work hours, if your job involves doing deep work during work hours.

InclinedPlane 8y ago

This is not, mostly, my personal anecdotal experience these are my observations of the "way it works" for many people throughout the industry, especially those working at startups. Notice that I said nothing about working outside of the typical 40 hour work week and yet you immediately took my comment to be concerned with that. Absolutely the core problem with slack is that it makes it easier for people to be inconsiderate of other's time by making synchronous communication the norm. Slack normalizes the model of everyone communicating synchronously all the time and everyone interrupting everyone else's work in order to communicate, which is corrosive both to productivity and the overall office environment (for the reasons I outlined above). And yes, there are ways to "use slack better" but the problem here is that most tools encourage a natural pattern of use, and if that pattern has a severe negative impact then using that tool will tend to have a negative impact on work as well, on average. See also: using gotos in code or writing readable Perl programs. If there is a "correct" way to use slack then that should be the default, baked into the software, and it should take work to use slack incorrectly. Unfortunately, the exact opposite is true, using slack well requires an uphill battle. People aren't complaining about slack being impossible to use "correctly", they are complaining that it's an uphill battle to do so.