21 ms·

Unslacking Tideways Company

220 points by beberlei 8y ago

JerryPavlic 8y ago
I can definitely understand this decision. We used to use Slack in my previous company which was a digital agency and being a client manager it was incredibly hard for me to keep track of the numerous chat messages i depended on in Slack but at the same time keeping up with the clients which were always, no matter how hard we tried - active only on email. Altough Slack is a great concept i think in general the biggest problem of proprietary platforms is that usually the original task always starts somewhere else. Slack can work great as an end-point solution, where people don't need any other tools to exchange business content. If you think about it - most of the service driven business across the planet initially starts with a phone call or an email. After it successfully comes down the pipeline to a done deal - you kick it off with a meeting or something, you decide about the desired channel of communication and you can kick off the project. Sure you set up some rules - like separate channels for unimportant topics or maybe you put separate tasks in a different tool etc. If everyone sticks to the plan (including the client), than Slack works this way. But not everyone sticks to the plan. It's because phone calls happen or emails happen in between, where you have to move discussions from where it started back to Slack and this was the whole problem for us. We were working a lot on improving our client's rate of happiness - and there was a clear correlation between them being satisfied with the work that was done and us adopting to their tech stack. Not the other way around. Everything that had to be moved to Slack, so it could be considered as 'a project'and people would keep track off - eventually was missing some sort of information that happened on email sometime during the process. And for us, that didn't help with improving our services. So from my experiences, when working with services, the ideal tech stack situation for companies comes down to how companies work with clients. If clients can be adaptive to the core communication platform, than you'll find enough integrations to make the best work flows to help you optimise how the business work. But if you're working with clients that usually have their own preferred tech stack or involve more people - that the chances of Slack interrupting your workflows are much higher.
marcus_holmes 8y ago
We use email. Amazing how well it works for this. Who'd have thought?
karmelapple 8y ago
Hello! One thing I'm curious about, beberlei: is your company colocated, remote, or a mix of the two?
- beberlei 8y ago
  a mix, "nearmote" :-) We all live in the same city, but everyone works remote a few hours or days per week. Also our workdays don't always match (early risers vs night owls).
anontechworker 8y ago
I can understand the frustration with Slack but the comment about large companies using it doesn’t have much ground. I’m at a 3000+ employee company and slack works great for us. I think that one thing that has helped many people is to remember that you never have to reply immediately. Also, if you’re a stakeholder on something, then a final decision should not be made without your input. I’m sure that if you limit yourself to checking slack as much as you check your email, then it won’t be such an issue.
- stephengillie 8y ago
  > ...remember that you never have to reply immediately. Yeah, but you have to check immediately, unless you have immense willpower. And so the distraction is already made, the focus is lost, and the time spent switching contexts can't be recovered.
- beberlei 8y ago
  Author here. I removed this comment after a few re-reads myself, because as you said, I don't actually have a clue about this.
- z6 8y ago
  How do you conclude that it 'works great' for your company?
dvtrn 8y ago
Slack makes this very difficult and at least for me, is a primary cause of anxiety and fear of missing out I unironically wonder how widespread this problem is among the specific group of people who blame their lack of productivity on Slack, or failing that, how many people would admit their FOMO is enhanced by chat apps. So many of the "productivity killing" problems I hear people griping about with Slack aren't really issues with slack, but human issues with boundaries of what we allow to take our attention not being defined, and ultimately, yes: FOMO. Things are going to get missed, you're going to come in late to certain conversations, but I often wonder do you need to be on the bleeding edge of these talks if they don't directly relate to you or even reside in the periphery of your responsibility radius? Probably not, I would wager-but tl;dr very rarely does it seem like Slack is the cause of productivity problems, it just seems the convenient scapegoat. Especially since: "work never happens in a vacuum" (FTA) is a statement that in my opinion, cuts both ways.
- jedberg 8y ago
  > So many of the "productivity killing" problems I hear people griping about with Slack aren't really issues with slack, They're not specific to Slack, but they are specific to the existence of an official real time chat app. The boss expects you to read the chat, and if you just ignore it, you'll get in trouble and be deemed "irresponsible" if you aren't acting on it and participating in it.
  - lunchables 8y ago
    I think this implicit assumption of how to use Slack is the problem. The only thing that we expect someone to respond to on Slack is an @ or a dm. Anything else is analogous to a conversation that happened in a room you either weren't in, or had your headphones on. An @ is like someone walking over and tapping you and asking you to take your headphones off and join the conversation and a dm is like walking into your office and asking you something.
  - dvtrn 8y ago
    That really sounds like the worst environment to be in, where "the chat" replaces actual planning meetings where assignments are delegated out and expectations set.
Waterluvian 8y ago
When I was at a fully local company, slack was good for conversations where a few people might be actively discussing an issue and then I could come in hours later and skim the history, if it was a channel I felt relevant to be aware of. But slack was also super easy to use wrongly and drain so much time into. It really helped to declare slack a lossy source of comms. You shall not expect people to read it and you shall not use it as a data store. Important things go into email, wiki, tickets. On a fully remote team, slack is so important, but all the same rules need to apply.
- gregmac 8y ago
  Almost agree, but email should also be treated as lossy. It drives me crazy when people send mass company emails with, for example, new policy or forms attached, and don't post them elsewhere. New hires only see them if someone remembers they exist and forwards them, plus it's impossible to figure out current state without spending a bunch of time playing email archeologist.
  - personjerry 8y ago
    Email is generally regarded as the most reliable in my experience.
    - rabidrat 8y ago
      To the parent's point, how do you get a future employee to receive the information in an email that was sent before they started?
      - fsiefken 8y ago
        Exchange has so-called "Public Folders" you could also access through IMAP, but it was more convenient to use and search with Outlook. Conceivably you could make a similar 'public' maibox on a different mail platform, a poor man's newsgroup.
      - personjerry 8y ago
Kaveren 8y ago
Some form of communication that's reasonable to be real-time is important. Slack is one of the better options for this. It makes much more sense to change the expectations / culture surrounding Slack usage at a company than to drop it outright. You can use Slack and related applications for asynchronous communication in direct messages. On the other hand, I don't want to have to wait multiple hours for a reply when I only need a quick clarification in regards to a previous e-mail. I don't want to waste my time with e-mail, and I don't think it's a better alternative. There is real value in Slack and programs like it, and you give that up when you only use e-mail and GitHub issues and such. This is better if you have no one working remote, but it's far from ideal. Besides, if I had an office job I could ignore Slack messages. I couldn't ignore someone walking up and interrupting me in-person.
- goatherders 8y ago
  What's wrong with the phone as a real-time communication tool?
  - Kaveren 8y ago
    1. I can't easily go and look back at everything that was said in a call. Notes are not a replacement for this. 2. Phone calls are too real-time, to the point where you can't manage multiple separate phone calls near the same time or do something else if a phonecall only requires some attention. Calls have their place, but I don't think they're a replacement for written communication.
sdan 8y ago
Definitely agree with your decision. After leaving slack entirely from a robotics team and a science club, our productively increased. No longer were we going off topic wasting precious time and making everyone in the channel read every 500+ messages some people engaged in. We instead chose to make more plans during meetings and through direct chat (Messenger). However, Slack is usefull for forums such as donkeycar.slack.com where many hobbists come in and have questions on this software/hardware project. Slack is easily accessible for anyone to ask questions and with proper use, I was pretty productive in communicating effectively across channels. Despite this, I believe that slack in general is a waste of time in a TEAM. Why not have meetings or meet up in real life rather than hiding behind a screen without any physical interaction? Slack, however, is a great alternative for forums since there is great searching capabilities within channels and there's always someone there to help.
- ekanes 8y ago
  Slack's value isn't communication efficiency. It's value is in enabling people to feel more part of a team. It's a culture tool as much as a communication tool.
- andybak 8y ago
  > where many hobbists come in and have questions on this software/hardware project I'm rather baffled by the use of chat for this kind of problem. (and I never clicked with IRC either) So - I've got a problem and I come to a chat channel. It's probably been asked before. If I'm lucky I'll find my answer in a searchable chat archive and I won't need to visit at all. Otherwise I face two options: 1. Scroll back and try and find any previous mentions. Nearly impossible in my experience. 2. Ask my question and hope that people aren't sick of hearing it. If I'm lucky enough that a) someone is present who knows the answer and b) they respond in a timely manner then I still face the problem that - assuming it's busy enough for a and b to be likely - then my conversation is interspersed with several unrelated discussions. Also - the person helping me is likely to go quiet for long periods or disappear altogether because most probably they are doing other stuff. Note that the final flaw (the interleaving of discussions) is a problem in all cases. Now - can someone explain to me how this is better than a forum or Stack Overflow style site?
swalsh 8y ago
Good luck finding out about free food in the office without Slack.
- stephengillie 8y ago
  My coworkers go out of their way to tell each other, in person, about the free food.
- RandomOpinion 8y ago
  Email works just fine for that.
- bdcravens 8y ago
  Funny thing is free food in the office was a thing before Slack.
sandGorgon 8y ago
>If you wait for a long time to reply to a message on chat, then the discussion thread is already spread in the history of the chat room and messages back and forth interleaved with many additional messages that are not related is not helpful. Use zulip - https://zulipchat.com https://zulipchat.com . Opensource. Designed for threaded context.
- cortesoft 8y ago
  I mean,slack has threads, too.
  - saagarjha 8y ago
    They’re just a usability nightmare.
  - vishnu_ks 8y ago
    Yeah. But threads in Slack are secondary and are mostly meant for having conversations that people don't care about. Zulip has a much superior threading model. Each and every conversation is a new thread and has a topic. This model makes it extremely easier to catch up and participate in conversations. https://zulipchat.com/why-zulip/ https://zulipchat.com/why-zulip/
- radus 8y ago
  Also enjoy Zulip for their very explicit threading system.
- gregmac 8y ago
  The only threaded chat I've used is Microsoft Teams, and I came away hating it. One problem is that if you are trying to catch up on conversions, instead of just being time based, it's thread+time based, so while you can see which threads added messages while you were gone, it's not easy to actually read through them all. The other big problem I found was people inevitably "reply" by (accidentally) creating a new thread, which then splits the conversation. If you're participating in real-time and there's not many separate conversions happening this isn't a big deal: but that's opposite to the situation where threading is actually theoretically useful, and catching up on multiple split threads is the worst combination of everything. Maybe this is only really a problem with Microsoft's implementation, but I'm curious what other people have experienced?
hunta2097 8y ago
If only Slack was the only source of interruptions! The more responsibility you gain, the more interruptions you get. I have to make a conscious effort to ignore people for a few hours in order to get into a "flow" these days. This can lead to some friction but I can't think of another way around the problem.
jedberg 8y ago
Even in my company with just two people I could already see us making bad Slack habits. Things that should be in email/google groups/basecamp were showing up in Slack. I still have Slack, mainly because I like the #github channel that has all the GitHub activity, and the #industrynews channel, which has a bunch of RSS feeds of industry specific news. But those could be easily replaced with google groups/basecamp too. Maybe I will just shut down the Slack...
czardoz 8y ago
Personally, I really like Slack. It's just really useful as a centralized communication place, especially since it integrates with almost every SaaS platform under the sun. I guess it's not suitable for every team though.
- stephengillie 8y ago
  I've only ever seen Slack in 1 of 2 modes: - Dozens of people in every room having multiple conversations, and any comment you make is quickly lost in the flow of other discussions. - Ghost town.
  - metamet 8y ago
    We use Slack and don't have either of those environments. I suppose we make heavy use to group DM's and project specific channels, but it really helps us keep communication streamlined and direct. We don't really use email. If we need to ping someone on a PR review, it's done in Slack. If one of our systems is having issues, it's automated through a specific Slack channel.
    - stephengillie 8y ago
      How much planning, training, and other efforts does your company put into mainlining group DMs and team channels?
- stinos 8y ago
  I guess it's not suitable for every team though. This is the key probably. I can understand it doesn't work the way the author used it but personally I'm fairly happy with it (not to say it's the best, it's just one of the chat apps which mostly just works) and don't use all bells and whistles. We use slack for 2 main things, 1 is chatty stuff which doesn't go to the issue tracker which has the important stuff which still needs to be there in a year (seems the OP had like everything in Slack, probably a source of problems mentioned) and due to me being a freelancer at that company it's perfectly normal I don't answer in a day or more. We learned to use it like that so no FOMO going on. The other use is as a 'dev/ci status channel' which is only viewed at passively: it gets all build info, PR/issue notifications etc which is a great overview, for us at least.
a13n 8y ago
Check out Twist. https://twist.com https://twist.com I have no affiliation with the company/team, but love the product so much that I want to share it here! The whole idea behind Twist is to be a team communication that doesn't have the productivity issues Slack does. I think it's a very well positioned and timed product. We've been using it for months at our startup, Canny. Threads are a useful level of organization, such that it's always easy to find what I'm looking for. However, I don't feel like I need to check it constantly.
- beberlei 8y ago
  Author here. We tried Twist a while ago and it looked great, especially as you mentioned the Threads. But at the time had performance problems with larger threads and the REST API was very complicated to add simple posts. We didn't try it again afterwards. We use Basecamp now, and it has a forum and threads as well per team or project.
- dmarlow 8y ago
  I've always thought that things ought to be thread based, much like forums today are. I'm not sure how I feel yet about how twist does their interface. I'd like to see things more like traditional forums, but incorporate Slack-like features.
artursapek 8y ago
In addition to the points in this article, I've also found real-time chat is much less efficient for deep discussions than email or voice. For some reason, people tend to break up their thoughts and post them as individual sentences. Maybe it's because that's similar to vocal communication - you want peoples' attention as you're speaking and sending what you want to say bit by bit is sort of like "having the floor". Or maybe it's the anxiety that the subject will change before you're done typing. But it's terribly inefficient because typing is slow and it results in people misunderstanding each other due to poorly structured writing. I find discussing significant plans/changes is much better done over email, where you get to craft your argument and make sure it reads well before you make several other people spend their time reading it.
hw 8y ago
Different teams use Slack differently, so it's kind of hard to gauge whether un-slacking works for a team. We have a team of < 20 and Slack (and other comms tools like Hipchat which we used prior) were extremely useful and barely counter productive. There are a few channels that are noisier than others, but we do have a few important ones that are low volume where discussions do take place but are often forked into a separate discussion on another channel. It's all about how your team uses the tool IMO and your team's organization of Slack. The key to FOMO is to not FOMO - missing out on conversations is fine (there are plenty you miss out on if everyone starts communicating and meeting offline), as long as you don't miss out on the important ones (which should be in a shared important channel). Also, in a small company, over-communication is often more important than non-communication
village-idiot 8y ago
I know everyone has their own take on why slack is bad. From the interruption factor to Electron using all their memory. For me, the issue is that it gives teams a false sense about their tech debt. In every case I've seen, Slack slowly replaces persistent documentation. Every issue one runs into can be resolved with a quick @here to the proper channel, or a DM to the tamer of Eldritch horrors (every company has one). This reduces the incentive to eliminate footguns or properly document everything, because look at us being all collaborative and solving problems together! The smell for this behavior is having to search Slack for that last time someone helped you solve your problem. Slack is a great way to spread information, but it's a terrible tool to organize and store information.
- tomjakubowski 8y ago
  > The smell for this behavior is having to search Slack for that last time someone helped you solve your problem. Slack is a great way to spread information, but it's a terrible tool to organize and store information. If you ever have to do this, you take it as a sign to transfer that information into a document somewhere.
  - village-idiot 8y ago
    A good plan, for certain. In my experience very very few people follow this advice, myself definitely included.
goatherders 8y ago
With the fire of 1000 suns I despise Slack. Aside from the interruptions it creates (which is not exclusive to Slack admittedly) the PC version of the app is a resource hog. So is the android mobile version.
IshKebab 8y ago
Sounds like he could have saved a whole lot of hassle just by removing some slack bots and using threads.
jgelsey 8y ago
I don't understand why folks want less information by eliminating Slack. I've adopted Slack and 2 companies so far and find it a tremendous performance optimizer. It's a tool for passively receiving info by choice about many things, and for efficient conversations - especially with folks not sitting next to me - about specific things that are important to me. FWIW my impressions is hatred of Slack is more a hatred of "I can't control by impulse to read everything so it's a tremendous time waster." Slack's not the problem, it's the person's self-control that's the problem in these situations.
- beberlei 8y ago
  Author here. You might be right, we could be using Slack wrong. But have you read the book "Hooked"? The author writes about Slack here: https://www.nirandfar.com/2014/11/slack.html https://www.nirandfar.com/2014/11/slack.html - Slack is built to addict people to use it. I don't want to fight against that, I want to have tools that support my workflow.
orliesaurus 8y ago
Well Slack might have not worked for you. It doesn't work for everyone! Probably it works the worst for devs? Here is a story. I was working with a team of couple people located in different corners of the city. Everyone is remote except two who share an office. Up until a month ago everything was done over email. Sometimes you would send an email and get a reply in minutes, other times after hours. This was highly inefficient, to the point where I would call people to ask them to open emails... Guess what happened since we installed Slack and a couple of general open channels?
- beberlei 8y ago
  Yes, i don't doubt that Slack works for companies. It doesn't work for our company and our value of trying to maximize uninterrupted work time.
  - lmm 8y ago
    I found the great success of Slack was reducing interruptions. It replaces things that would have otherwise been a "hard" interruption (in-person conversation or phone call) with a "softer" interruption (notification). And it provides a much better way for people who need to speak with "someone from the x team" to talk to whoever happens to be relatively free at the moment, rather than picking someone to interrupt. (Also are you sure minimizing interruptions should be a goal? If you cut off all communications you'll avoid interruptions, but that probably won't be good for your business)
- buckminster 8y ago
  Why can't you do something else while you're waiting?
  - orliesaurus 8y ago
    You can, but the thing is that unlike with emails, with Slack most conversation happen in public and no one has to CC you in email (or rather remember to CC you in these convos) basically slack replaces CC and BCC part of the email really well
jasode 8y ago
>I have learned to be productive when I have a quiet space and can tinker on a problem without getting interrupted. Slack makes this very difficult [...] My ultimate goal is to get longer stretches of uninterrupted time to work on features, customer support or operational issues. A question for HN for a hypothetical feature: What if the Slack client app had "ambient awareness" such that it suppressed notifications when the active window with focus is an IDE like MS Visual Studio, JetBrains, Xcode, emacs, etc. Would that help you? Basically, it would work similar to Slack's "Do Not Disturb" feature[1]. DND could be expanded beyond "hours" to include a list of apps that shouldn't be interrupted. Once a programmer switches away from the code IDE to the email program, that's the point the Slack chat notifications would appear. The idea is that programmers already sort of interrupt themselves[2] but since that timing is controlled by the programmer, a Slack notification is less stressful. Thoughts? >Since work never happens in a vacuum, I would be happy to have only a single realtime notification tool (OpsGenie/PagerDuty) that sends notifications to poeple currently on-call, and only about problems that require realtime attention. I don't use chat apps at work these days but when I did, I put AOL AIM, Yahoo Messenger, etc inside of a virtual machine that was minimized on screen. That way, everybody saw that I was "online" but their notifications were blocked behind the vm instead of making it to my desktop's taskbar. The vm acted like a firewall. I could then look at chat messages on my own schedule at my leisure -- typically once or twice and hour. For workplaces that expect you to reply to chat messages in 5 seconds, this hack won't work. [1] https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=slack+do+not+disturb https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=slack+do+not+di... [2] https://xkcd.com/303/ https://xkcd.com/303/
- beberlei 8y ago
  That is something I always wished Slack had. Enable DND mode and then when you return from it, a way to review a summary of everything what happened. But individual chat messages are hard to aggregate for such a summary.
- ishan_chhabra 8y ago
  I really like the idea around "ambient awareness". I'll look into it. Currently, I've built a slack bot for personal use that integrates with my calendar where I can create stretches of times as "Focus" events and during that time, the bot helps me establish an async communication model. The bot sets my status to "Do Not Disturb" during the event and if somebody tries to message me, they get a message that I am in heads down mode. They can then leave a note on why they were contacting me or if I they need me urgently, they can click a button and I get an immediate notification. When my focus time ends, I get a list of notes from my team on why they needed me and I can answer them one by one. Effectively, I've found that once a team moves to Slack, all internal communication moves to Slack (instead of using slack for urgent sync and email for other async), and this brings back email like async model to Slack for the times when you need it. You can try out the slack bot at https://slack.com/apps/A5MJB641F-oliv https://slack.com/apps/A5MJB641F-oliv In full disclosure, I've build the bot for my personal usage and don't intend to monetize it. It's just my way of giving back to the community. It's not very polished and doesn't have an onboarding flow, so if you need any help in using it, contact me at ishan.chhabra [at] gmail.com. I'll be happy to help.
AkshatM 8y ago
I feel that many of these objections already have solutions within Slack. If you don't want to be disturbed by notifications, there is the Do Not Disturb option to snooze notifications. If you don't want to lose context, use Slack threads, which localize discussion around an issue to a single place. If you have a fear of missing out because you're piping everything to Slack - have you considered segregating your alerts into specific channels and muting those you don't care about? (Alerts are a bad example, though - really, you should use Slack for a visibility record during an incident, but the only alerts you should care about should bother you with PagerDuty or OpsGenie - if they're important, they should bother you). I do work for a larger company (some 400 employees) and we use Slack quite effectively. One thing that's really helped us is that, by consensus, we don't make decisions in Slack - everything of actual import should have a ticket to condense everything in. Slack becomes useful for us if we need immediate assistance, have questions or need to communicate in real time during an incident. It's also invaluable when you have remote employees (!).
- hermanradtke 8y ago
  I agree that slack can have a place as long as there are expectations around what to use it for. How do people coordinate around incidents without something like slack? It used to be that everyone had to hop on a conference bridge, which I personally never liked. For important discussions and decisions, we often paste a log of a chat and a link into tickets or change requests. This helps capture the conversation and people can review and/or challenge what happened.
  - chronid 8y ago
    A ticket for tracking the incident (with posts to graphs, alerts, other tickets and so on - what you use slack for) + conference bridge for live discussion focused on restoring availability is what I personally like. As long as you keep it technical and kick the salespeople out of it, the conference call is very useful tool to keep people focused on mitigating the problem ASAP instead of spending time looking for the root cause (ex: restarting the application/reverting the bad commit instead of fixing a bug, creating a new build and pushing it through). If the issue is not killing the company you can chat about it, sure, feel free to use the tool you feel most comfortable with. If we are in a "the site is down" situation though chatting is too slow (and I always promise the SWEs I will insta-revert their last deployment when that happens until I find a good one, though I rarely do so), and talking keeps your hands free.
narinek 8y ago
I suspect all these people who get anxious using Slack have never used IRC or similar stuff; their only experience with IM might be whatsapp, twitter DMs, etc
jahaja 8y ago
I find it hard to follow these kind of no-chat articles since they usually come off as a bit contrarian rather than something that makes sense: * Why does a chat blackout naturally follow a fear of missing out? * What's different from the good ol' IRC days? Mute the channels, see them as transient, and focus on 1on1 conversations. * Important conversations should not be solely communicated through a short-lived channel chat, but be summarized through email or whatever. * You're already missing out on all the 1on1 conversations you're not in. And I write this as someone who chronically checks for slack updates. Maybe the "fear of missing out" isn't really about missing out on important information, as I initially thought, but about missing out on participation and the inevitable social/office dynamics around that?
- beberlei 8y ago
  Author here. I have never used IRC in a company, so I can't compare. Slack is the topic, because we used Slack. If we have had used IRC or HipChat or Microsoft Teams, then maybe we have come to the same conclusion. Yes, summarization is important. However switching to E-Mail causes all its problems. New colleagues don't have the mails for example. Basecamp has chat and a forum/message board or todolists. We can easily link between these.
huebnerob 8y ago
Personally, I find it more helpful to move the locus of control inwards and teach myself how to be productive in a diversity of circumstances. In this case, that would mean being more intentional about how I use Slack, and managing others’ expectations of their Slack messages to me. If you have a coworker who expects broad latitude to demand your undivided attention at a moment’s notice at any time, then that’s a problem that isn’t necessarily exclusive to Slack. More realistically, it’s fine if you batch Slack communications in your down moments like you would for any other communications (email).
k__ 8y ago
I work remote for many years now and I never liked synchronous communication in general. What are your alternative approaches?
lima 8y ago
Our solution to this has been to keep Slack, but only for conversations that need to happen in real time. Anything else goes into our Discourse-based internal forum.
amirathi 8y ago
There's a great opportunity for someone to build a team communication tool that's more forum-centric than channel-centric. Let me explain the core problem with slack (or any channel-centric chat). When I join a wide slack channel (e.g. #Design), I'm not interested in half a dozen different threads of communication happening on it everyday. But there might be couple of discussions per week that are pertinent and important for me to do my job well. There's NO way to ignore 90% of non-pertinent conversations without actually reading all the messages on the channel (yikes!).
chiefalchemist 8y ago
Fwiw, I have found that GitHub/Lab issue work great. Not only do they serve as TODOs but those paper trails (so to speak) become part of the project's DNA and "documentation". Someone new coming on board has a fairly organized point of entry, warts, bumps and all.
baxtr 8y ago
I’d love to see some hard evidence on the effectiveness of slack. I’m at least skeptical. I feel like it’s just another channel to watch. Is there any company that got rid of email and is on slack only?
ishan_chhabra 8y ago
> I have learned to be productive when I have a quiet space and can tinker on a problem without getting interrupted. Slack makes this very difficult. I have personally suffered from this far too long, specially when my work has been a hybrid of maker and manager. It becomes extremely hard to create pockets of maker time. My solution has been to schedule 2-3 hour blocks of focused time around a project (Feature X) or responsibility (customer support) once or twice a day so that at the very least, I can create focus during those times. The key is to not over do it and get hung up on scheduling every minute, but just a few hours per day like this. To facilitate this, I've built a slack bot that integrates with my calendar and I can mark these events as "Focus" events. The bot sets my status to "Do Not Disturb" during the event and if somebody tries to message me, they get a message that I am in heads down mode. They can then leave a note on why they were contacting me or if I they need me urgently, they can click a button and I get an immediate notification. When my focus time ends, I get a list of notes from my team on why they needed me and I can answer them one by one. Effectively, I've found that once a team moves to Slack, all internal communication moves to Slack (instead of using slack for urgent sync and email for other async), and this brings back email like async model to Slack for the times when you need it. You can try out the slack bot at https://slack.com/apps/A5MJB641F-oliv https://slack.com/apps/A5MJB641F-oliv In full disclosure, I've build the bot for my personal usage and don't intend to monetize it. It's just my way of giving back to the community. It's not very polished and doesn't have an onboarding flow, so if you need any help in using it, contact me at ishan.chhabra [at] gmail.com. I'll be happy to help.
RyJones 8y ago
This is a huge problem for the open source project I work on. New users are overwhelmed with channels to plumb, and search is not great. I'm open to advice on how to wean our project from chat to email (probably?) Or some better platform that helps new users and developers onboard without so much static
User23 8y ago
Slack is proprietary IRC and IRC is one of the original Internet time wasters.
stupidbird 8y ago
Doing everything in chat is pure insanity. It's great for the day-to-day collaborating on projects... but it's all short-term memory. Are you going to be referencing a chat from 3 years ago? We use an internal forum in addition to chat. Anything substantive goes in the forum. We'll regularly reference 5 year old posts.
- john_oshea 8y ago
  Any recommendations for sensible forum software? (self-hosted would be ideal)
  - snazz 8y ago
    Discourse?
    - alkonaut 8y ago
      +1 for Discourse. It’s miles ahead of anything else.
    - LaGrange 8y ago
      Second that. Discourse is fantastic, using other forum software feels terrible after it.
  - lvh 8y ago
    Fossil is a source control system that has, among other things, a builtin forum. I'm convinced that tight integration between source control, issue trackers, wiki pages, and forums is a good thing. Generally you can use URLs, but that's often cumbersome.
  - gilbetron 8y ago
    Great question, and I'm eager to hear the results. We're going to try creating a private subreddit to test the idea of forums for "long form discussions". I used vBulletin back around the early 00s, and I loved it, but I've found a number of people don't "get" forums. Discourse is something else I'd like to try. I'm curious why people don't like forums for discussions.
DubiousPusher 8y ago
So basically, the moral of the story is to talk with your team about what kind of communication scenarios are important to them. And find out if your current tools are making those scenarios better or worse.
0x8BADF00D 8y ago
Slack is still good for automated purposes, i.e. piping alerts and messages from a service. I don’t think I’ve ever found it useful for communicating with other people.
rdiddly 8y ago
I'm so wary of this, it has become one of my questions to interviewers - first whether, and then how, they use Slack.
kureikain 8y ago
I think a good way to use Slack is to eliminate channel idea. No one has to constantly monitor a channel and that's expected. Otherwise we know we can muted a channel but we cannot just do that to some certain channel because that's where the team annouencement happens. Email isn't good either. Email can be easily get lost and not easy to search. To me, Slack is super useful in 2 cases: 1. 1-1 or group chat between members on same topic 2. Archive log: I pipe all the information such as AWS activity(login, spin up server, AWS cloudtrait, Audit Log: ssh in out, K8S event...) 1. is useful to discuss on specific topics on a specificed thing. 2. is useful for on-call people to correlate with something, such as when AWS personal dashboard has issue we will know, when a server is added to autoscaling pool trigger Nginx reload, we may have trigger websocket reload and create a spike...those kind of things are very useful and easier to see compare to email to me.

220 points by beberlei 8y ago

I can definitely understand this decision. We used to use Slack in my previous company which was a digital agency and being a client manager it was incredibly hard for me to keep track of the numerous chat messages i depended on in Slack but at the same time keeping up with the clients which were always, no matter how hard we tried - active only on email. Altough Slack is a great concept i think in general the biggest problem of proprietary platforms is that usually the original task always starts somewhere else. Slack can work great as an end-point solution, where people don't need any other tools to exchange business content. If you think about it - most of the service driven business across the planet initially starts with a phone call or an email. After it successfully comes down the pipeline to a done deal - you kick it off with a meeting or something, you decide about the desired channel of communication and you can kick off the project. Sure you set up some rules - like separate channels for unimportant topics or maybe you put separate tasks in a different tool etc. If everyone sticks to the plan (including the client), than Slack works this way. But not everyone sticks to the plan. It's because phone calls happen or emails happen in between, where you have to move discussions from where it started back to Slack and this was the whole problem for us. We were working a lot on improving our client's rate of happiness - and there was a clear correlation between them being satisfied with the work that was done and us adopting to their tech stack. Not the other way around. Everything that had to be moved to Slack, so it could be considered as 'a project'and people would keep track off - eventually was missing some sort of information that happened on email sometime during the process. And for us, that didn't help with improving our services. So from my experiences, when working with services, the ideal tech stack situation for companies comes down to how companies work with clients. If clients can be adaptive to the core communication platform, than you'll find enough integrations to make the best work flows to help you optimise how the business work. But if you're working with clients that usually have their own preferred tech stack or involve more people - that the chances of Slack interrupting your workflows are much higher.

marcus_holmes 8y ago

We use email. Amazing how well it works for this. Who'd have thought?

karmelapple 8y ago

Hello! One thing I'm curious about, beberlei: is your company colocated, remote, or a mix of the two?

beberlei 8y ago
a mix, "nearmote" :-) We all live in the same city, but everyone works remote a few hours or days per week. Also our workdays don't always match (early risers vs night owls).

anontechworker 8y ago

I can understand the frustration with Slack but the comment about large companies using it doesn’t have much ground. I’m at a 3000+ employee company and slack works great for us. I think that one thing that has helped many people is to remember that you never have to reply immediately. Also, if you’re a stakeholder on something, then a final decision should not be made without your input. I’m sure that if you limit yourself to checking slack as much as you check your email, then it won’t be such an issue.

stephengillie 8y ago
> ...remember that you never have to reply immediately. Yeah, but you have to check immediately, unless you have immense willpower. And so the distraction is already made, the focus is lost, and the time spent switching contexts can't be recovered.
beberlei 8y ago
Author here. I removed this comment after a few re-reads myself, because as you said, I don't actually have a clue about this.
z6 8y ago
How do you conclude that it 'works great' for your company?

dvtrn 8y ago

Slack makes this very difficult and at least for me, is a primary cause of anxiety and fear of missing out I unironically wonder how widespread this problem is among the specific group of people who blame their lack of productivity on Slack, or failing that, how many people would admit their FOMO is enhanced by chat apps. So many of the "productivity killing" problems I hear people griping about with Slack aren't really issues with slack, but human issues with boundaries of what we allow to take our attention not being defined, and ultimately, yes: FOMO. Things are going to get missed, you're going to come in late to certain conversations, but I often wonder do you need to be on the bleeding edge of these talks if they don't directly relate to you or even reside in the periphery of your responsibility radius? Probably not, I would wager-but tl;dr very rarely does it seem like Slack is the cause of productivity problems, it just seems the convenient scapegoat. Especially since: "work never happens in a vacuum" (FTA) is a statement that in my opinion, cuts both ways.

jedberg 8y ago
> So many of the "productivity killing" problems I hear people griping about with Slack aren't really issues with slack, They're not specific to Slack, but they are specific to the existence of an official real time chat app. The boss expects you to read the chat, and if you just ignore it, you'll get in trouble and be deemed "irresponsible" if you aren't acting on it and participating in it.
- lunchables 8y ago
  I think this implicit assumption of how to use Slack is the problem. The only thing that we expect someone to respond to on Slack is an @ or a dm. Anything else is analogous to a conversation that happened in a room you either weren't in, or had your headphones on. An @ is like someone walking over and tapping you and asking you to take your headphones off and join the conversation and a dm is like walking into your office and asking you something.
- dvtrn 8y ago
  That really sounds like the worst environment to be in, where "the chat" replaces actual planning meetings where assignments are delegated out and expectations set.

Waterluvian 8y ago

When I was at a fully local company, slack was good for conversations where a few people might be actively discussing an issue and then I could come in hours later and skim the history, if it was a channel I felt relevant to be aware of. But slack was also super easy to use wrongly and drain so much time into. It really helped to declare slack a lossy source of comms. You shall not expect people to read it and you shall not use it as a data store. Important things go into email, wiki, tickets. On a fully remote team, slack is so important, but all the same rules need to apply.

gregmac 8y ago
Almost agree, but email should also be treated as lossy. It drives me crazy when people send mass company emails with, for example, new policy or forms attached, and don't post them elsewhere. New hires only see them if someone remembers they exist and forwards them, plus it's impossible to figure out current state without spending a bunch of time playing email archeologist.
- personjerry 8y ago
  Email is generally regarded as the most reliable in my experience.
  - rabidrat 8y ago
    To the parent's point, how do you get a future employee to receive the information in an email that was sent before they started?
    - fsiefken 8y ago
      Exchange has so-called "Public Folders" you could also access through IMAP, but it was more convenient to use and search with Outlook. Conceivably you could make a similar 'public' maibox on a different mail platform, a poor man's newsgroup.
    - personjerry 8y ago

Kaveren 8y ago

Some form of communication that's reasonable to be real-time is important. Slack is one of the better options for this. It makes much more sense to change the expectations / culture surrounding Slack usage at a company than to drop it outright. You can use Slack and related applications for asynchronous communication in direct messages. On the other hand, I don't want to have to wait multiple hours for a reply when I only need a quick clarification in regards to a previous e-mail. I don't want to waste my time with e-mail, and I don't think it's a better alternative. There is real value in Slack and programs like it, and you give that up when you only use e-mail and GitHub issues and such. This is better if you have no one working remote, but it's far from ideal. Besides, if I had an office job I could ignore Slack messages. I couldn't ignore someone walking up and interrupting me in-person.

goatherders 8y ago
What's wrong with the phone as a real-time communication tool?
- Kaveren 8y ago
  1. I can't easily go and look back at everything that was said in a call. Notes are not a replacement for this. 2. Phone calls are too real-time, to the point where you can't manage multiple separate phone calls near the same time or do something else if a phonecall only requires some attention. Calls have their place, but I don't think they're a replacement for written communication.

sdan 8y ago

Definitely agree with your decision. After leaving slack entirely from a robotics team and a science club, our productively increased. No longer were we going off topic wasting precious time and making everyone in the channel read every 500+ messages some people engaged in. We instead chose to make more plans during meetings and through direct chat (Messenger). However, Slack is usefull for forums such as donkeycar.slack.com where many hobbists come in and have questions on this software/hardware project. Slack is easily accessible for anyone to ask questions and with proper use, I was pretty productive in communicating effectively across channels. Despite this, I believe that slack in general is a waste of time in a TEAM. Why not have meetings or meet up in real life rather than hiding behind a screen without any physical interaction? Slack, however, is a great alternative for forums since there is great searching capabilities within channels and there's always someone there to help.

ekanes 8y ago
Slack's value isn't communication efficiency. It's value is in enabling people to feel more part of a team. It's a culture tool as much as a communication tool.
andybak 8y ago
> where many hobbists come in and have questions on this software/hardware project I'm rather baffled by the use of chat for this kind of problem. (and I never clicked with IRC either) So - I've got a problem and I come to a chat channel. It's probably been asked before. If I'm lucky I'll find my answer in a searchable chat archive and I won't need to visit at all. Otherwise I face two options: 1. Scroll back and try and find any previous mentions. Nearly impossible in my experience. 2. Ask my question and hope that people aren't sick of hearing it. If I'm lucky enough that a) someone is present who knows the answer and b) they respond in a timely manner then I still face the problem that - assuming it's busy enough for a and b to be likely - then my conversation is interspersed with several unrelated discussions. Also - the person helping me is likely to go quiet for long periods or disappear altogether because most probably they are doing other stuff. Note that the final flaw (the interleaving of discussions) is a problem in all cases. Now - can someone explain to me how this is better than a forum or Stack Overflow style site?

swalsh 8y ago

Good luck finding out about free food in the office without Slack.

stephengillie 8y ago
My coworkers go out of their way to tell each other, in person, about the free food.
RandomOpinion 8y ago
Email works just fine for that.
bdcravens 8y ago
Funny thing is free food in the office was a thing before Slack.

sandGorgon 8y ago

>If you wait for a long time to reply to a message on chat, then the discussion thread is already spread in the history of the chat room and messages back and forth interleaved with many additional messages that are not related is not helpful. Use zulip - https://zulipchat.com https://zulipchat.com . Opensource. Designed for threaded context.

cortesoft 8y ago
I mean,slack has threads, too.
- saagarjha 8y ago
  They’re just a usability nightmare.
- vishnu_ks 8y ago
  Yeah. But threads in Slack are secondary and are mostly meant for having conversations that people don't care about. Zulip has a much superior threading model. Each and every conversation is a new thread and has a topic. This model makes it extremely easier to catch up and participate in conversations. https://zulipchat.com/why-zulip/ https://zulipchat.com/why-zulip/
radus 8y ago
Also enjoy Zulip for their very explicit threading system.
gregmac 8y ago
The only threaded chat I've used is Microsoft Teams, and I came away hating it. One problem is that if you are trying to catch up on conversions, instead of just being time based, it's thread+time based, so while you can see which threads added messages while you were gone, it's not easy to actually read through them all. The other big problem I found was people inevitably "reply" by (accidentally) creating a new thread, which then splits the conversation. If you're participating in real-time and there's not many separate conversions happening this isn't a big deal: but that's opposite to the situation where threading is actually theoretically useful, and catching up on multiple split threads is the worst combination of everything. Maybe this is only really a problem with Microsoft's implementation, but I'm curious what other people have experienced?

hunta2097 8y ago

If only Slack was the only source of interruptions! The more responsibility you gain, the more interruptions you get. I have to make a conscious effort to ignore people for a few hours in order to get into a "flow" these days. This can lead to some friction but I can't think of another way around the problem.

jedberg 8y ago

Even in my company with just two people I could already see us making bad Slack habits. Things that should be in email/google groups/basecamp were showing up in Slack. I still have Slack, mainly because I like the #github channel that has all the GitHub activity, and the #industrynews channel, which has a bunch of RSS feeds of industry specific news. But those could be easily replaced with google groups/basecamp too. Maybe I will just shut down the Slack...

czardoz 8y ago

Personally, I really like Slack. It's just really useful as a centralized communication place, especially since it integrates with almost every SaaS platform under the sun. I guess it's not suitable for every team though.

stephengillie 8y ago
I've only ever seen Slack in 1 of 2 modes: - Dozens of people in every room having multiple conversations, and any comment you make is quickly lost in the flow of other discussions. - Ghost town.
- metamet 8y ago
  We use Slack and don't have either of those environments. I suppose we make heavy use to group DM's and project specific channels, but it really helps us keep communication streamlined and direct. We don't really use email. If we need to ping someone on a PR review, it's done in Slack. If one of our systems is having issues, it's automated through a specific Slack channel.
  - stephengillie 8y ago
    How much planning, training, and other efforts does your company put into mainlining group DMs and team channels?
stinos 8y ago
I guess it's not suitable for every team though. This is the key probably. I can understand it doesn't work the way the author used it but personally I'm fairly happy with it (not to say it's the best, it's just one of the chat apps which mostly just works) and don't use all bells and whistles. We use slack for 2 main things, 1 is chatty stuff which doesn't go to the issue tracker which has the important stuff which still needs to be there in a year (seems the OP had like everything in Slack, probably a source of problems mentioned) and due to me being a freelancer at that company it's perfectly normal I don't answer in a day or more. We learned to use it like that so no FOMO going on. The other use is as a 'dev/ci status channel' which is only viewed at passively: it gets all build info, PR/issue notifications etc which is a great overview, for us at least.

a13n 8y ago

Check out Twist. https://twist.com https://twist.com I have no affiliation with the company/team, but love the product so much that I want to share it here! The whole idea behind Twist is to be a team communication that doesn't have the productivity issues Slack does. I think it's a very well positioned and timed product. We've been using it for months at our startup, Canny. Threads are a useful level of organization, such that it's always easy to find what I'm looking for. However, I don't feel like I need to check it constantly.

beberlei 8y ago
Author here. We tried Twist a while ago and it looked great, especially as you mentioned the Threads. But at the time had performance problems with larger threads and the REST API was very complicated to add simple posts. We didn't try it again afterwards. We use Basecamp now, and it has a forum and threads as well per team or project.
dmarlow 8y ago
I've always thought that things ought to be thread based, much like forums today are. I'm not sure how I feel yet about how twist does their interface. I'd like to see things more like traditional forums, but incorporate Slack-like features.

artursapek 8y ago

In addition to the points in this article, I've also found real-time chat is much less efficient for deep discussions than email or voice. For some reason, people tend to break up their thoughts and post them as individual sentences. Maybe it's because that's similar to vocal communication - you want peoples' attention as you're speaking and sending what you want to say bit by bit is sort of like "having the floor". Or maybe it's the anxiety that the subject will change before you're done typing. But it's terribly inefficient because typing is slow and it results in people misunderstanding each other due to poorly structured writing. I find discussing significant plans/changes is much better done over email, where you get to craft your argument and make sure it reads well before you make several other people spend their time reading it.

hw 8y ago

Different teams use Slack differently, so it's kind of hard to gauge whether un-slacking works for a team. We have a team of < 20 and Slack (and other comms tools like Hipchat which we used prior) were extremely useful and barely counter productive. There are a few channels that are noisier than others, but we do have a few important ones that are low volume where discussions do take place but are often forked into a separate discussion on another channel. It's all about how your team uses the tool IMO and your team's organization of Slack. The key to FOMO is to not FOMO - missing out on conversations is fine (there are plenty you miss out on if everyone starts communicating and meeting offline), as long as you don't miss out on the important ones (which should be in a shared important channel). Also, in a small company, over-communication is often more important than non-communication

village-idiot 8y ago

I know everyone has their own take on why slack is bad. From the interruption factor to Electron using all their memory. For me, the issue is that it gives teams a false sense about their tech debt. In every case I've seen, Slack slowly replaces persistent documentation. Every issue one runs into can be resolved with a quick @here to the proper channel, or a DM to the tamer of Eldritch horrors (every company has one). This reduces the incentive to eliminate footguns or properly document everything, because look at us being all collaborative and solving problems together! The smell for this behavior is having to search Slack for that last time someone helped you solve your problem. Slack is a great way to spread information, but it's a terrible tool to organize and store information.

tomjakubowski 8y ago
> The smell for this behavior is having to search Slack for that last time someone helped you solve your problem. Slack is a great way to spread information, but it's a terrible tool to organize and store information. If you ever have to do this, you take it as a sign to transfer that information into a document somewhere.
- village-idiot 8y ago
  A good plan, for certain. In my experience very very few people follow this advice, myself definitely included.

goatherders 8y ago

With the fire of 1000 suns I despise Slack. Aside from the interruptions it creates (which is not exclusive to Slack admittedly) the PC version of the app is a resource hog. So is the android mobile version.

IshKebab 8y ago

Sounds like he could have saved a whole lot of hassle just by removing some slack bots and using threads.

jgelsey 8y ago

I don't understand why folks want less information by eliminating Slack. I've adopted Slack and 2 companies so far and find it a tremendous performance optimizer. It's a tool for passively receiving info by choice about many things, and for efficient conversations - especially with folks not sitting next to me - about specific things that are important to me. FWIW my impressions is hatred of Slack is more a hatred of "I can't control by impulse to read everything so it's a tremendous time waster." Slack's not the problem, it's the person's self-control that's the problem in these situations.

beberlei 8y ago
Author here. You might be right, we could be using Slack wrong. But have you read the book "Hooked"? The author writes about Slack here: https://www.nirandfar.com/2014/11/slack.html https://www.nirandfar.com/2014/11/slack.html - Slack is built to addict people to use it. I don't want to fight against that, I want to have tools that support my workflow.

orliesaurus 8y ago

Well Slack might have not worked for you. It doesn't work for everyone! Probably it works the worst for devs? Here is a story. I was working with a team of couple people located in different corners of the city. Everyone is remote except two who share an office. Up until a month ago everything was done over email. Sometimes you would send an email and get a reply in minutes, other times after hours. This was highly inefficient, to the point where I would call people to ask them to open emails... Guess what happened since we installed Slack and a couple of general open channels?

beberlei 8y ago
Yes, i don't doubt that Slack works for companies. It doesn't work for our company and our value of trying to maximize uninterrupted work time.
- lmm 8y ago
  I found the great success of Slack was reducing interruptions. It replaces things that would have otherwise been a "hard" interruption (in-person conversation or phone call) with a "softer" interruption (notification). And it provides a much better way for people who need to speak with "someone from the x team" to talk to whoever happens to be relatively free at the moment, rather than picking someone to interrupt. (Also are you sure minimizing interruptions should be a goal? If you cut off all communications you'll avoid interruptions, but that probably won't be good for your business)
buckminster 8y ago
Why can't you do something else while you're waiting?
- orliesaurus 8y ago
  You can, but the thing is that unlike with emails, with Slack most conversation happen in public and no one has to CC you in email (or rather remember to CC you in these convos) basically slack replaces CC and BCC part of the email really well

jasode 8y ago

>I have learned to be productive when I have a quiet space and can tinker on a problem without getting interrupted. Slack makes this very difficult [...] My ultimate goal is to get longer stretches of uninterrupted time to work on features, customer support or operational issues. A question for HN for a hypothetical feature: What if the Slack client app had "ambient awareness" such that it suppressed notifications when the active window with focus is an IDE like MS Visual Studio, JetBrains, Xcode, emacs, etc. Would that help you? Basically, it would work similar to Slack's "Do Not Disturb" feature[1]. DND could be expanded beyond "hours" to include a list of apps that shouldn't be interrupted. Once a programmer switches away from the code IDE to the email program, that's the point the Slack chat notifications would appear. The idea is that programmers already sort of interrupt themselves[2] but since that timing is controlled by the programmer, a Slack notification is less stressful. Thoughts? >Since work never happens in a vacuum, I would be happy to have only a single realtime notification tool (OpsGenie/PagerDuty) that sends notifications to poeple currently on-call, and only about problems that require realtime attention. I don't use chat apps at work these days but when I did, I put AOL AIM, Yahoo Messenger, etc inside of a virtual machine that was minimized on screen. That way, everybody saw that I was "online" but their notifications were blocked behind the vm instead of making it to my desktop's taskbar. The vm acted like a firewall. I could then look at chat messages on my own schedule at my leisure -- typically once or twice and hour. For workplaces that expect you to reply to chat messages in 5 seconds, this hack won't work. [1] https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=slack+do+not+disturb https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=slack+do+not+di... [2] https://xkcd.com/303/ https://xkcd.com/303/

beberlei 8y ago
That is something I always wished Slack had. Enable DND mode and then when you return from it, a way to review a summary of everything what happened. But individual chat messages are hard to aggregate for such a summary.
ishan_chhabra 8y ago
I really like the idea around "ambient awareness". I'll look into it. Currently, I've built a slack bot for personal use that integrates with my calendar where I can create stretches of times as "Focus" events and during that time, the bot helps me establish an async communication model. The bot sets my status to "Do Not Disturb" during the event and if somebody tries to message me, they get a message that I am in heads down mode. They can then leave a note on why they were contacting me or if I they need me urgently, they can click a button and I get an immediate notification. When my focus time ends, I get a list of notes from my team on why they needed me and I can answer them one by one. Effectively, I've found that once a team moves to Slack, all internal communication moves to Slack (instead of using slack for urgent sync and email for other async), and this brings back email like async model to Slack for the times when you need it. You can try out the slack bot at https://slack.com/apps/A5MJB641F-oliv https://slack.com/apps/A5MJB641F-oliv In full disclosure, I've build the bot for my personal usage and don't intend to monetize it. It's just my way of giving back to the community. It's not very polished and doesn't have an onboarding flow, so if you need any help in using it, contact me at ishan.chhabra [at] gmail.com. I'll be happy to help.

AkshatM 8y ago

I feel that many of these objections already have solutions within Slack. If you don't want to be disturbed by notifications, there is the Do Not Disturb option to snooze notifications. If you don't want to lose context, use Slack threads, which localize discussion around an issue to a single place. If you have a fear of missing out because you're piping everything to Slack - have you considered segregating your alerts into specific channels and muting those you don't care about? (Alerts are a bad example, though - really, you should use Slack for a visibility record during an incident, but the only alerts you should care about should bother you with PagerDuty or OpsGenie - if they're important, they should bother you). I do work for a larger company (some 400 employees) and we use Slack quite effectively. One thing that's really helped us is that, by consensus, we don't make decisions in Slack - everything of actual import should have a ticket to condense everything in. Slack becomes useful for us if we need immediate assistance, have questions or need to communicate in real time during an incident. It's also invaluable when you have remote employees (!).

hermanradtke 8y ago
I agree that slack can have a place as long as there are expectations around what to use it for. How do people coordinate around incidents without something like slack? It used to be that everyone had to hop on a conference bridge, which I personally never liked. For important discussions and decisions, we often paste a log of a chat and a link into tickets or change requests. This helps capture the conversation and people can review and/or challenge what happened.
- chronid 8y ago
  A ticket for tracking the incident (with posts to graphs, alerts, other tickets and so on - what you use slack for) + conference bridge for live discussion focused on restoring availability is what I personally like. As long as you keep it technical and kick the salespeople out of it, the conference call is very useful tool to keep people focused on mitigating the problem ASAP instead of spending time looking for the root cause (ex: restarting the application/reverting the bad commit instead of fixing a bug, creating a new build and pushing it through). If the issue is not killing the company you can chat about it, sure, feel free to use the tool you feel most comfortable with. If we are in a "the site is down" situation though chatting is too slow (and I always promise the SWEs I will insta-revert their last deployment when that happens until I find a good one, though I rarely do so), and talking keeps your hands free.

narinek 8y ago

I suspect all these people who get anxious using Slack have never used IRC or similar stuff; their only experience with IM might be whatsapp, twitter DMs, etc

jahaja 8y ago

I find it hard to follow these kind of no-chat articles since they usually come off as a bit contrarian rather than something that makes sense: * Why does a chat blackout naturally follow a fear of missing out? * What's different from the good ol' IRC days? Mute the channels, see them as transient, and focus on 1on1 conversations. * Important conversations should not be solely communicated through a short-lived channel chat, but be summarized through email or whatever. * You're already missing out on all the 1on1 conversations you're not in. And I write this as someone who chronically checks for slack updates. Maybe the "fear of missing out" isn't really about missing out on important information, as I initially thought, but about missing out on participation and the inevitable social/office dynamics around that?

beberlei 8y ago
Author here. I have never used IRC in a company, so I can't compare. Slack is the topic, because we used Slack. If we have had used IRC or HipChat or Microsoft Teams, then maybe we have come to the same conclusion. Yes, summarization is important. However switching to E-Mail causes all its problems. New colleagues don't have the mails for example. Basecamp has chat and a forum/message board or todolists. We can easily link between these.

huebnerob 8y ago

Personally, I find it more helpful to move the locus of control inwards and teach myself how to be productive in a diversity of circumstances. In this case, that would mean being more intentional about how I use Slack, and managing others’ expectations of their Slack messages to me. If you have a coworker who expects broad latitude to demand your undivided attention at a moment’s notice at any time, then that’s a problem that isn’t necessarily exclusive to Slack. More realistically, it’s fine if you batch Slack communications in your down moments like you would for any other communications (email).

k__ 8y ago

I work remote for many years now and I never liked synchronous communication in general. What are your alternative approaches?

lima 8y ago

Our solution to this has been to keep Slack, but only for conversations that need to happen in real time. Anything else goes into our Discourse-based internal forum.

amirathi 8y ago

There's a great opportunity for someone to build a team communication tool that's more forum-centric than channel-centric. Let me explain the core problem with slack (or any channel-centric chat). When I join a wide slack channel (e.g. #Design), I'm not interested in half a dozen different threads of communication happening on it everyday. But there might be couple of discussions per week that are pertinent and important for me to do my job well. There's NO way to ignore 90% of non-pertinent conversations without actually reading all the messages on the channel (yikes!).

chiefalchemist 8y ago

Fwiw, I have found that GitHub/Lab issue work great. Not only do they serve as TODOs but those paper trails (so to speak) become part of the project's DNA and "documentation". Someone new coming on board has a fairly organized point of entry, warts, bumps and all.

baxtr 8y ago

I’d love to see some hard evidence on the effectiveness of slack. I’m at least skeptical. I feel like it’s just another channel to watch. Is there any company that got rid of email and is on slack only?

ishan_chhabra 8y ago

> I have learned to be productive when I have a quiet space and can tinker on a problem without getting interrupted. Slack makes this very difficult. I have personally suffered from this far too long, specially when my work has been a hybrid of maker and manager. It becomes extremely hard to create pockets of maker time. My solution has been to schedule 2-3 hour blocks of focused time around a project (Feature X) or responsibility (customer support) once or twice a day so that at the very least, I can create focus during those times. The key is to not over do it and get hung up on scheduling every minute, but just a few hours per day like this. To facilitate this, I've built a slack bot that integrates with my calendar and I can mark these events as "Focus" events. The bot sets my status to "Do Not Disturb" during the event and if somebody tries to message me, they get a message that I am in heads down mode. They can then leave a note on why they were contacting me or if I they need me urgently, they can click a button and I get an immediate notification. When my focus time ends, I get a list of notes from my team on why they needed me and I can answer them one by one. Effectively, I've found that once a team moves to Slack, all internal communication moves to Slack (instead of using slack for urgent sync and email for other async), and this brings back email like async model to Slack for the times when you need it. You can try out the slack bot at https://slack.com/apps/A5MJB641F-oliv https://slack.com/apps/A5MJB641F-oliv In full disclosure, I've build the bot for my personal usage and don't intend to monetize it. It's just my way of giving back to the community. It's not very polished and doesn't have an onboarding flow, so if you need any help in using it, contact me at ishan.chhabra [at] gmail.com. I'll be happy to help.

RyJones 8y ago

This is a huge problem for the open source project I work on. New users are overwhelmed with channels to plumb, and search is not great. I'm open to advice on how to wean our project from chat to email (probably?) Or some better platform that helps new users and developers onboard without so much static

User23 8y ago

Slack is proprietary IRC and IRC is one of the original Internet time wasters.

stupidbird 8y ago

Doing everything in chat is pure insanity. It's great for the day-to-day collaborating on projects... but it's all short-term memory. Are you going to be referencing a chat from 3 years ago? We use an internal forum in addition to chat. Anything substantive goes in the forum. We'll regularly reference 5 year old posts.

john_oshea 8y ago
Any recommendations for sensible forum software? (self-hosted would be ideal)
- snazz 8y ago
  Discourse?
  - alkonaut 8y ago
    +1 for Discourse. It’s miles ahead of anything else.
  - LaGrange 8y ago
    Second that. Discourse is fantastic, using other forum software feels terrible after it.
- lvh 8y ago
  Fossil is a source control system that has, among other things, a builtin forum. I'm convinced that tight integration between source control, issue trackers, wiki pages, and forums is a good thing. Generally you can use URLs, but that's often cumbersome.
- gilbetron 8y ago
  Great question, and I'm eager to hear the results. We're going to try creating a private subreddit to test the idea of forums for "long form discussions". I used vBulletin back around the early 00s, and I loved it, but I've found a number of people don't "get" forums. Discourse is something else I'd like to try. I'm curious why people don't like forums for discussions.

DubiousPusher 8y ago

So basically, the moral of the story is to talk with your team about what kind of communication scenarios are important to them. And find out if your current tools are making those scenarios better or worse.

0x8BADF00D 8y ago

Slack is still good for automated purposes, i.e. piping alerts and messages from a service. I don’t think I’ve ever found it useful for communicating with other people.

rdiddly 8y ago

I'm so wary of this, it has become one of my questions to interviewers - first whether, and then how, they use Slack.

kureikain 8y ago

I think a good way to use Slack is to eliminate channel idea. No one has to constantly monitor a channel and that's expected. Otherwise we know we can muted a channel but we cannot just do that to some certain channel because that's where the team annouencement happens. Email isn't good either. Email can be easily get lost and not easy to search. To me, Slack is super useful in 2 cases: 1. 1-1 or group chat between members on same topic 2. Archive log: I pipe all the information such as AWS activity(login, spin up server, AWS cloudtrait, Audit Log: ssh in out, K8S event...) 1. is useful to discuss on specific topics on a specificed thing. 2. is useful for on-call people to correlate with something, such as when AWS personal dashboard has issue we will know, when a server is added to autoscaling pool trigger Nginx reload, we may have trigger websocket reload and create a spike...those kind of things are very useful and easier to see compare to email to me.