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Were you using the same HipChat that I was? I recall the engineers at my employer (including me) clamoring to get off HipChat and onto Slack. Search was terribl

Were you using the same HipChat that I was? I recall the engineers at my employer (including me) clamoring to get off HipChat and onto Slack. Search was terrible, integrations/automation were clunky, and it was difficult to post code into chat. Slack was a breath of fresh air when we switched. Also, I think Slack's threads are useful. You can have channels where you just post a single message for your question/issue and then have people reply in a thread, so that messages are naturally grouped together by topic instead of being a firehose of interleaved messages. Combined with good search, this makes Slack more of a valuable knowledge store than just an ephemeral chat tool.

ljm 7y ago
We didn't need an all-in-one hub for realtime chat. Hipchat worked great for us, we had a separate WhatsApp group (with the founders and everyone else in there) for the social stuff. We all mingled but if you didn't want to, they'd find the preferred way to talk to you. I don't want to name the exact place this happened but it was certainly a unique culture that I now miss. It was neither British or American. It was the only place I've worked where I had easy and direct access to the founders, the C level, and the VPs, as a lowly senior engineer. And not because I brown-nosed my way up; we'd connect outside of work because we liked the same things. A total tangent, but it's just to say that we never needed Slack in the first place. I doubt many places do.
jsjohnst 7y ago
> Search was terrible, integrations/automation were clunky, and it was difficult to post code into chat Ok, so Slack solved #2 I feel and formerly solved #3 (but has regressed significantly in recent months). Not sure gaining #2 was worth the new negatives we got.
dreamcompiler 7y ago
Wait, search on Hipchat was worse than Slack's? I never used Hipchat but worse search than Slack is a high bar.

ljm 7y ago

We didn't need an all-in-one hub for realtime chat. Hipchat worked great for us, we had a separate WhatsApp group (with the founders and everyone else in there) for the social stuff. We all mingled but if you didn't want to, they'd find the preferred way to talk to you. I don't want to name the exact place this happened but it was certainly a unique culture that I now miss. It was neither British or American. It was the only place I've worked where I had easy and direct access to the founders, the C level, and the VPs, as a lowly senior engineer. And not because I brown-nosed my way up; we'd connect outside of work because we liked the same things. A total tangent, but it's just to say that we never needed Slack in the first place. I doubt many places do.

jsjohnst 7y ago

> Search was terrible, integrations/automation were clunky, and it was difficult to post code into chat Ok, so Slack solved #2 I feel and formerly solved #3 (but has regressed significantly in recent months). Not sure gaining #2 was worth the new negatives we got.

dreamcompiler 7y ago

Wait, search on Hipchat was worse than Slack's? I never used Hipchat but worse search than Slack is a high bar.