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Slack the company really needs to embrace distributed work practices if they want to actually build a tool for distributed work practices. Slack has totally be

Slack the company really needs to embrace distributed work practices if they want to actually build a tool for distributed work practices. Slack has totally become a drag on productivity and a net negative. Channel and message overload is arguably not much better than the email system it is meant to replace. My prediction is that Slack will be replaced quite quickly by the first tool that really nails remote messaging and coordination. Slack is not it.

downerending 6y ago
Not sure, but I think this got me fired from a job. Slack was a main channel for our group of 30. Critical messages in real time on the (several) channels. So, must monitor channels in real time, all day. Whoops, no time left to get real things done. Why aren't you getting anything done? I don't miss it.
- JohnBooty 6y ago
  I’m sorry, but this is poor company culture, not a Slack issue per se. A company with this sort of issue would struggle with any communication tool or medium; the root issue here is an utter lack of understanding about proper working conditions and the concentration needed to do this (and most any) sort of work. I’ve been in a similar boat at a similarly poor company. It is trivial to use Slack in a non-destructive way. Our company follows a simple rule. If you need somebody’s attention, you @mention them. We do not have to monitor anything. It is expected that you will keep an eye on your team’s channel when your time and attention permit as of course there may be some hallway-style conversations going on, but you are never required to monitor any channel, much less several channels. That is what mentions and notifications are for. It is absolutely mind-blowing that some companies screw this up so badly.
  - NhanH 6y ago
    At the extreme, everything is poor company culture, not <insert tool> issue per se. That is not a good argument. Being tagged @mention several times a day, with the expectation that you respond right away (ie < 3-5minutes) is just as much a drag on productivity. And I have not seen any company explicitly (put in their written guidelines) states that you should not be expected to respond to a slack @mention right away.
    - JohnBooty 6y ago
      Being contacted several times per day seems totally reasonable for, I think, the vast majority of jobs in existence. Few jobs would allow one to be totally dark until you arbitrarily decide you would like to crawl out of your figurative cave and interact. If you truly have that kind of job (and certainly, they exist) then yeah, maybe a real-time-ish communications platform is simply not right for you or the team. Now, I am a programmer. One who often struggles with attention issues and getting into the zone. More than many, perhaps, I realize that even a "quick" 1min. interruption can have a far greater drain on one's productivity than would be immediately apparent - it might take 5, 10, or 30 minutes to get "back into the zone" after an interruption. Having said that, though, it still seems reasonable in all engineering jobs I've had for others to ask me questions periodically throughout the day, especially as I have gone from junior to senior engineer. Typically if something is blocking them. I don't want somebody sitting around for 1 hour or 3 days because they are missing a piece of the puzzle, held by me, that is leaving them at a standstill. At the extreme, everything is poor company culture, not <insert tool> issue per se. That is not a good argument. Sure as heck is. It's not realistic to expect a communications tool to somehow magically allow only "good" communication. Therefore, we have to resign ourselves to considering tools that: (a) Make efficient, respectful, productive communication the default. Broadly speaking I would define this as making non-intrusive async communication (but making those conversations easily searchable/browsable so you can "catch up" if desired) the default. (b) Does not somehow encourage bad behavior. I have plenty of nitpicks with Slack but I believe it passes those criteria. Some would say that the existence of @mentions makes it fail (b) but I can not agree. Certainly at my current employer, we have a nice Slack culture and it required zero pain to get there. Makes it a decent tool in my book.
      - NhanH 6y ago
        > Being contacted several times per day seems totally reasonable for, I think, the vast majority of jobs in existence. Sure. I do not agree that developers belong to the same group with the vast majority of jobs with regards to interruption and synchronous communication though (async slack is fine, if the developer got to decide when to see and reply to the @mention). Being blocked for 3 days is definitely bad (although we do not solve it with Slack), but I do not agree that someone being blocked for an hour is worth the interruption of another developer. I just took on an engineering manager role lately, which gave me more time observing others. And one thing I have noticed is that a couple of junior developers pinging each other every 30 mins to ask a question that they might or might not be able to solve with some more effort just ruin everyone's productivity. It seems like we end up agreeing with each other on both your a) and b) point. So I will just make my point more explicit: too many team culture expects synchronous Slack usage. And I do not know how much Slack encourage that, but it is definitely more synchronous than email, which Slack is supposed to replace
  - downerending 6y ago
    Well, yes, it was ultimately stupid for the group to use Slack in this way. And yet, Slack invites it. It's a bit like cocaine. There are certainly good uses, and still it's easy to slip into bad uses. As for the @mention, in my current job, some stupid twat kept doing that in a broad group, and unfortunately our current tool (Teams) doesn't provide an easy way to shut them up. So, fuck that, I removed myself from the (otherwise useful) channel entirely. Fail. Chat is great for useless nonsense. Anything else requires discipline, which rarely exists (the military excepting, perhaps).
    - gizzlon 6y ago
      Maybe people are too polite? Or not strict enough enforcing rules and guidelines? Who would tolerate an employee standing in the middle of the open office screaming at the top of their lungs for attention? :) Of course, we all make mistakes from time to time. Guess the real problem is a lack of learning from them.
    - JohnBooty 6y ago
      I guess this is subjective, but I've never found Slack (or IRC, or Discord, Hipchat, etc) to somehow encourage @mention overuse/abuse. I just don't see it. Perhaps more to the point, I can't really fathom a communication medium that somehow wouldn't allow an overzealous or inconsiderate person to become a distraction. Unless that system made communication super onerous in the first place. Perhaps somebody could write a Slack plugin that limits a person to a certain number of @mentions per week, with the option to "purchase" more by contributing money to the company party fund or something :-)
- travisjungroth 6y ago
  What’s weird to me about this is no one would have their knowledge workers also be on call for external customer support full time, but for some reason that’s the norm with internal customer support.
- bregma 6y ago
  I've had non-remote jobs that were similar. A lineup forming outside my cubicle. Days when I got absolutely nothing done except address constant interruptions from others who needed help Right Now. Only the medium has changed, not the message.
donmcronald 6y ago
I've never really "got" it when it comes to tools like Slack or Teams. To me they've always felt like a forum with a handful of mega topics that go on forever with worse (or no) pagination. I also don't get why some devs of successful open source projects hang out in Slack. Do they feel like they need to or do they want to? The specific thing I don't get is that a lot of projects have both an issue tracker and a forum so they can filter low level questions into the forum, but then you can get direct access to the devs by visiting the Slack channel. I mean it's cool, but WTF? I guess maybe my thinking is old-fashioned at this point, but I think people seeking out help should RTFM and be held to a certain standard when it comes to the effort they make. I self solve more than 50% of my problems while I'm trying to build a test case or write a good quality forum / SO question. Maybe Slack, etc. are popular because the informal nature lets people skip the part of the process where they're expected to make an effort.
- mxcrossb 6y ago
  I mean, if we’re talking old fashion, before all these fancy issue trackers a lot of times you could find devs on their irc channel.
  - c0l0 6y ago
    For many projects, you still can - if you know where to look. It's what makes FOSS "support" (i.e., having someone to talk to about a technical problem in a meaningful way, so that you get closer to resolving it) so much more effective than costly support contracts with big and faceless corporations that make you jump through all manners of hoops - only to end up with some expert level blame-shifting, and no real solution in the end.
    - 6510 6y ago
      Answering questions on irc is still a great way to learn.
- thdrdt 6y ago
  I think the success of Slack is that it's so easy to set up a team. It feels like Trello: you are up and running in a minute. As a freelancer I got a list of Slack teams and it is just very easy to switch. But like you said: that's about it. It is slow, the text input box is horrible and most of the time you loose track of conversations. What I lately notice is that teams start to use WhatsApp groups as Slack replacement. To me that shows that Slack is just a messenger.
econcon 6y ago
Maybe they've some data based on which they are against remote work, and maybe that data will not be shared to public as they might have come up to conclusion that more remote work in their customers is better for an app like slack
- numpad0 6y ago
  Facebook uses email for important business decisions, Steve Jobs wouldn’t let his children use an iPad, and now Slack don’t tolerate remote work. Interesting, isn’t it.
  - abiogenesis 6y ago
    To be fair, not letting a kid use an iPad is not a good analogy. iPad was not designed or marketed as a toy.
    - KSteffensen 6y ago
      How do you use it?
atoav 6y ago
I've never really loved email, but hell it just works. What I like about email is that people don't interrupt me or try to chitchat with me, they just state the bussines of things and I can decide wether I want to react directly, in which folder to move or with which label to tag it (automatically or not), etc. If somebody forgets something in a mail I could just write back or call. And if I really want to chat, matrix/irc or a signal group should be good. For other things (by no means related to code only) repositories are good, or issue trackers like trac. I never really liked slack although I tried. It doesn't really feels like it focuses the mind of a group and helps you move forward.
- hagy 6y ago
  I think the asynchronous nature of email makes it a superior communication medium. With slack and other messaging apps, we all end up writing short bursts of whatever is on the top of our head, without much thought or organization of the ideas. In contrast, with email, you can take some time to create a concise and well-organized message. I find email threads to generally be shorter than the comparable slack threads with each email adding more useful information.
  - squiggleblaz 6y ago
    I typically check my email once a day, first thing. Occasionally I will also check them if I'm bored around 4. If I have to write an email, I normally suppose that takes half an hour. I don't if emails use less words than slack threads, but I think I spend more time producing them. So "shorter" seems like the wrong measurement.
  - elhudy 6y ago
    >With slack and other messaging apps, we all end up writing short bursts of whatever is on the top of our head, without much thought or organization of the ideas. In contrast, with email, you can take some time to create a concise and well-organized message. This hit close to home. When writing emails I sometimes find gaps in my own logic or alternate recommendations while writing the email, and am able to address those before sending. With Lync, too often I end up "blurting" assumptions or guesswork that doesn't always necessarily end up being true. While blurting out ideas can be useful, depending who you're talking to, it can also make you look like an idiot. With email people also don't leave you hanging with "hey...". Please don't send "hey" to me. Go straight to asking your question or favor.
Abishek_Muthian 6y ago
Moreover email is federated, distributed & seamless. In my previous startup, A Slack account was the second thing I created for a new employee after an email account. Everything from real-time communication, screen-sharing, log/product/system health alerts, analytics to daily tasks summary were handled with the help of slack bots; we ourselves built a bot for the platform. But the productivity benefits of real-time communications are dubious at best. Apart from alerts(read emergency), email communication is better than real-time chat IMO, as the lack of peer pressure to reply fast enables more thoughtful communication. So to test this, In my current work(Startup Coaching) I communicate only via email with my clients, no phone calls, no chats. It's been over a year and it's been great for productivity for both myself & my clients; of course this has been possible because there's no emergency communication involved. When I see people asking for discord channel in Internet forums/subreddit which has no use for a real-time communication, it worries me.
- nicoburns 6y ago
  To me the big benefit of Slack over email is that Slack is only communication with actual humans. My email inbox is chock full of automated emails from various websites / services.
  - mgkimsal 6y ago
    > To me the big benefit of Slack over email is that Slack is only communication with actual humans Until folks in your org start adding in slack integration bots. I have multiple channels that are nothing but alert/notifications about systems. that separation may be useful, but it definitely requires some discipline - I've been on some teams where people wanted to throw in automated slack integration messaging in to the 'regular' channels "so we won't miss anything".
    - nicoburns 6y ago
      Yeah, we have a few of those at work. But I've muted those channels. Too noisy to be useful. The only one I keep on is downtime notifications, which really do need to be responded to ASAP.
jupp0r 6y ago
> not much better than the email system it is meant to replace it’s much worse because emails can be filtered, while it’s still impossible to mute bots in Slack.
spurdoman77 6y ago
> Slack the company really needs to embrace distributed work practices if they want to actually build a tool for distributed work practices. > Slack has totally become a drag on productivity and a net negative. Channel and message overload is arguably not much better than the email system it is meant to replace. > My prediction is that Slack will be replaced quite quickly by the first tool that really nails remote messaging and coordination. Slack is not it. "Slack the company really needs to embrace distributed work practices if they want to actually build a tool for distributed work practices." The question is, do they? In the companies I have been working in, slack has been a communication tool like email or sms. Doesnt really have stance on whether the work should be remote or not.
avian 6y ago
> Channel and message overload is arguably not much better than the email system it is meant to replace. I still don't understand why this is surprising. Why do people continuously think that moving to another way of receiving messages will somehow help with the overload? At best it's only a short term solution, before all message faucets that are responsible for the overload eventually get migrated over.
- throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
  Is slack meant to replace email? I thought it was intended as a complementary tool (having used slack, I don't see it offers much actually).
  - avian 6y ago
    Slack's home page certainly hints at it being meant to replace email. e.g. "Instead of a single overstuffed inbox...", "Unlike email...".
    - throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
      They say that? Well I for one am convinced by their marketing.
blitmap 6y ago
Because of COVID19 my workplace has rushed right into Microsoft Teams. There's so much efficiency lost creating large-scale meetings and phone conferences. Coming from the land of IRC I've created a few teams with massive rosters, but nobody seems to really understand the paradigm. They see all these messages come in and they leave the team/discussion/channel. I keep saying "mute the discussion" and @mentions will signal you if needed, but it is lost on folks who haven't done this kind of things. They're used to discussion spaces being set up per-incident, instead of just lingering/loitering in a room.
- curryst 6y ago
  I find per-incident discussion spaces far more productive. I.e. if you want to talk to me and some other people about something, create a space (channel in Slack jargon). That way everything about that conversation has it's own isolated history. I can control my notification settings for that conversation sanely. If I need to find a message from that conversation, I can limit my search to that channel. My manager heavily pushes us to use Threads for that purpose in Slack, but Slack's handling of Threads is just miserable. It's one my biggest peeves about Slack. If I get mentioned in a Thread, Slack will ping me for every new message (and I've been pinged on threads that went on for several hundred messages). If I need to find a message in a Thread, scrolling back is useless, I have to use search and just pray I have the right keywords. I think I'm just burned out on Slack; they need to find a method of communicating and invest into it instead of their current "you communicate however you want and we'll halfway support it" method.
ohB9iof7 6y ago
Personally, despite their declared mission, I see Slack as replacing phone calls rather than emails. It suffers the same problems than phone : people writing fast without thinking twice about what they say to have a chance to put their idea in the discussion, lost forever knowledge because searching slack is a mess, short and meaningless interventions in the discussion, etc. It is indeed to me better than phone, because you don't have to reply within 5 secs when someone tries to reach you, so it's less interruptive. But for business sensitive discussions where we expect a lot of efficient brain time and valuable discussions, hell no, send me an email.
notadev 6y ago
We have a lead who creates a new channel for every endeavor, even if it's the same employees. It's so frustrating.
ThomPete 6y ago
The real issue is that no tool really will be able to work well for teams over 10-15 ish users. Its the same issue DropBox, Drive and Box has. They are really “just” glorified network drives. Email by its de-central nature still is the best fundamental design pattern we have for a truly scaleable communication platform and i wonder if we will ever see a perfect mix of asynchronous and realtime messaging.
- jamauro 6y ago
  we're trying to create the perfect mix of asynchronous and realtime message. would love to show it to you and get your feedback: https://usepingpong.com https://usepingpong.com
gfxgirl 6y ago
It's funny the HN crowd complains about the constant distraction of open offices but loves the constant distraction of Slack.
- rleigh 6y ago
  I detest the constant distraction of Slack and I'm thankful that I no longer work in a place which uses it. A lack of discipline on sending out notifications, and you can be spammed all day long with workflow-breaking distractions. Even direct messaging can interfere drastically with your productivity. The requirement to down tools and immediately reply to random requests can really make you lose focus.
darekkay 6y ago
> My prediction is that Slack will be replaced quite quickly by the first tool that really nails remote messaging and coordination Doist, the remote-only company behind Todoist, created Twist [1] to address this issue. [1] https://twist.com/slack-alternative https://twist.com/slack-alternative
- dorian-graph 6y ago
  I hope Twist takes off. I'd like to give it a go. Forums are great for structured conversations, but poor for unstructured—and Slack is the opposite.
- maxgt 6y ago
  We (fully remote team) made the switch from Slack to Twist about two years ago and never looked back. They really focus on asynchronous communication.
- phixiuz 6y ago
  Twist was a true game changer for our remote team, been using it for over a year now after 3 years of slack. Before, with slack, we also experienced the typical frustrations of it being very distracting, and the synchronous communication could often lead to unneeded tensions within the team. Since adopting Twist, our workplace is now much calmer and more productive! They also dogfood their own product, and their team has been remote from the start AFAIK. (fyi, not affiliated with them in any way, just really happy with their product, they deserve a shout-out!)
zafiro17 6y ago
Sorry to see there has been no mention of Zulip so far. I fooled around with Slack a little, and then Zulip. And in my opinion zulip hit that sweet spot between email and chat. I really like the way conversations can be segregated into actual conversations. The trick to using it, I've found, is to set team expectations that posts might not be replied to until later in the day. There is something subtle about slack that sets your expectation for immediate gratification, and that drives the exhausting 'always on' culture. I imagine you are all relishing that sweet irony/hypocrisy of a tool that facilitates distributed work, not permitting its team to work in a distributed fashion. Culture fail! Fifteen years ago or more, I was able to work pretty effectively with a team using email and IRC. I know IRC is out of fashion now, but my point is that a lot of the challenge is team culture and expectations, and software doesn't really fix that problem.
- StavrosK 6y ago
  I read the GP's comment and wanted to reply, but then I saw your comment. Completely agreed, Zulip is exactly what I've been looking for, and email+XMPP (one on one) was the best communication mode I've ever used, though I have a feeling that Zulip will be very close to that. We've been using Zulip for a year in my company and we love it, the ability to just follow the topics you want and ignore the ones you don't is great for focus, and the stream view is perfect for catching up on everything. I wrote up some thoughts here: https://www.stavros.io/posts/seven-tips-great-remote-culture/ https://www.stavros.io/posts/seven-tips-great-remote-culture... I think one of the strengths of email is that it forces you to be less-synchronous and take the time to craft a somewhat long, point-by-point reply, rather than just fire off a quick message. That's something I'd like to see Zulip encourage more.
joubert 6y ago
If there are organizations where distributed work / remote work is working very well, then I presume those groups have solved the "message overload" and "coordination" issues. Or would you say there's a class of communication and coordination use cases that are best addressed by in-person (currently)?
ShbJbK8mqg 6y ago
FB workplace is an option. It has workplace groups and workchats, this helps differentiate half baked ideas being collaborated vs fully baked ideas to be published as posts. Allows for a lot of conversation and collaboration on workchat a topic while also keeping the signal to noise ratio in the workplace group high. I used slack in my previous company, didn't like FB workplace at first, but I see and appreciate many differences now.
wayoutthere 6y ago
Outside the software development bubble, Microsoft Teams is starting to dominate in the way that Exchange did in the 00s. It's a huge advantage that it's free with Office 365. Basically, if your company is already a Microsoft shop, there's no reason to go out and get another enterprise collaboration tool. Teams has default integrations with the whole Microsoft stack, including Azure DevOps and MS Project. Most of the companies I work with still use Slack for development teams, but even then the devs are usually running both Slack and Teams because the business stakeholders they need to communicate don't use Slack. Slack is already being replaced in a lot of orgs as a result.
hudsonjr 6y ago
I feel much the same way (work at a large company). I feel like Slack is a battle royale of one person's time versus another. - What incentive is there for anyone to ever spend a second searching for anything when they can just DM or @ me? - The @ in a large busy channel can derail me big-time. It churns up a lot of low priority and very unrelated questions/queries. It's like someone asking me to their desk to answer a question, and then announcing to everyone on the floor that I am there to answer their questions. - Are you providing the answers or are you the one asking them? If it's a two way street, or you are the one asking, you probably love Slack. If it's a one way street where you only provide answers/help, you feel differently - Seems to cater to Ask Alexa, Ask Siri type mentality. Things that were once covered by process or documentation, now devolve into "ask person or channel X". - There is often a massive imbalance between what is urgent to me, and what is urgent to the person asking me. This was always an issue to some degree, but the immediate response requirement sometimes puts me in a place where I feel like I am encouraging bad behavior by answering quickly. - Things that are "quick questions" often require a rather lengthy answer. - Context is often often missing. This often happens with the people that hate e-mail, love slack, and end up asking a question to me about something that exists in e-mail. I end up asking for more context and then get forwarded the e-mail where I can figure out what the person was actually answering. - Context again, I have to change focus to see what someone is DM'ing me about. In e-mail I can quick glance to see if actually urgent or not. - No great OOO. With e-mail, if I am away for a bit I can put an OOO with a bunch of common questions/answers. With Slack options are limited, other than letting people know I am not available and to contact someone else. Maybe bots could help, I dunno. - People can't complete full thoughts before hitting Enter. Hi (Enter). Have a quick question (Enter). Joe contacted me(Enter) Can we set him up with X today (Enter). - People seem to be very dense about people in different time zones compared to e-mail. Normally not an issue since I use DND on my phone, but occasionally I've accidentally logged back in off hours on mobile somehow. - Threads vs. No Threads Warriors. "No threads" people complain about not seeing replies in threads or it slowing them down. "Threads" people complain because it becomes impossible to link to it later. I think is where you create a temporary channel to deal with it, but that's too much work for most people. - I had someone accuse me about being set to Away for "4 days" and asking my boss where I was. I went offline on a Friday for a couple hours to meet a deadline, and then was away for meetings for a couple hours on Tuesday (Monday was a holiday for him). If he had just asked his question on Friday, it would have been answered Monday at the latest, but probably Friday. Instead I get a "wtf" because I wasn't on the precise two times he happened to look. In general it seems like the tool is significantly worse now that it's used by the whole company. At one point it seemed to just be a replacement for e-mail dist lists, which I can understand. As usage grew it became more of a synchronous tool (demand wise).
poulsbohemian 6y ago
>by the first tool that really nails remote messaging and coordination. What would that look like? I mean, I hear what you are saying about channel and message overload, but I'm trying to imagine how this gets fixed. Seems like what I've seen is that when a channel gets too much chatter, it subdivides into more granular channels to the point that main channel chat slows. But then you have more channels to read and respond across... and the message overload often feels like a function of either too many people in the discussion and/or a signal to noise issue.

downerending 6y ago

Not sure, but I think this got me fired from a job. Slack was a main channel for our group of 30. Critical messages in real time on the (several) channels. So, must monitor channels in real time, all day. Whoops, no time left to get real things done. Why aren't you getting anything done? I don't miss it.

JohnBooty 6y ago
I’m sorry, but this is poor company culture, not a Slack issue per se. A company with this sort of issue would struggle with any communication tool or medium; the root issue here is an utter lack of understanding about proper working conditions and the concentration needed to do this (and most any) sort of work. I’ve been in a similar boat at a similarly poor company. It is trivial to use Slack in a non-destructive way. Our company follows a simple rule. If you need somebody’s attention, you @mention them. We do not have to monitor anything. It is expected that you will keep an eye on your team’s channel when your time and attention permit as of course there may be some hallway-style conversations going on, but you are never required to monitor any channel, much less several channels. That is what mentions and notifications are for. It is absolutely mind-blowing that some companies screw this up so badly.
- NhanH 6y ago
  At the extreme, everything is poor company culture, not <insert tool> issue per se. That is not a good argument. Being tagged @mention several times a day, with the expectation that you respond right away (ie < 3-5minutes) is just as much a drag on productivity. And I have not seen any company explicitly (put in their written guidelines) states that you should not be expected to respond to a slack @mention right away.
  - JohnBooty 6y ago
    Being contacted several times per day seems totally reasonable for, I think, the vast majority of jobs in existence. Few jobs would allow one to be totally dark until you arbitrarily decide you would like to crawl out of your figurative cave and interact. If you truly have that kind of job (and certainly, they exist) then yeah, maybe a real-time-ish communications platform is simply not right for you or the team. Now, I am a programmer. One who often struggles with attention issues and getting into the zone. More than many, perhaps, I realize that even a "quick" 1min. interruption can have a far greater drain on one's productivity than would be immediately apparent - it might take 5, 10, or 30 minutes to get "back into the zone" after an interruption. Having said that, though, it still seems reasonable in all engineering jobs I've had for others to ask me questions periodically throughout the day, especially as I have gone from junior to senior engineer. Typically if something is blocking them. I don't want somebody sitting around for 1 hour or 3 days because they are missing a piece of the puzzle, held by me, that is leaving them at a standstill. At the extreme, everything is poor company culture, not <insert tool> issue per se. That is not a good argument. Sure as heck is. It's not realistic to expect a communications tool to somehow magically allow only "good" communication. Therefore, we have to resign ourselves to considering tools that: (a) Make efficient, respectful, productive communication the default. Broadly speaking I would define this as making non-intrusive async communication (but making those conversations easily searchable/browsable so you can "catch up" if desired) the default. (b) Does not somehow encourage bad behavior. I have plenty of nitpicks with Slack but I believe it passes those criteria. Some would say that the existence of @mentions makes it fail (b) but I can not agree. Certainly at my current employer, we have a nice Slack culture and it required zero pain to get there. Makes it a decent tool in my book.
    - NhanH 6y ago
      > Being contacted several times per day seems totally reasonable for, I think, the vast majority of jobs in existence. Sure. I do not agree that developers belong to the same group with the vast majority of jobs with regards to interruption and synchronous communication though (async slack is fine, if the developer got to decide when to see and reply to the @mention). Being blocked for 3 days is definitely bad (although we do not solve it with Slack), but I do not agree that someone being blocked for an hour is worth the interruption of another developer. I just took on an engineering manager role lately, which gave me more time observing others. And one thing I have noticed is that a couple of junior developers pinging each other every 30 mins to ask a question that they might or might not be able to solve with some more effort just ruin everyone's productivity. It seems like we end up agreeing with each other on both your a) and b) point. So I will just make my point more explicit: too many team culture expects synchronous Slack usage. And I do not know how much Slack encourage that, but it is definitely more synchronous than email, which Slack is supposed to replace
- downerending 6y ago
  Well, yes, it was ultimately stupid for the group to use Slack in this way. And yet, Slack invites it. It's a bit like cocaine. There are certainly good uses, and still it's easy to slip into bad uses. As for the @mention, in my current job, some stupid twat kept doing that in a broad group, and unfortunately our current tool (Teams) doesn't provide an easy way to shut them up. So, fuck that, I removed myself from the (otherwise useful) channel entirely. Fail. Chat is great for useless nonsense. Anything else requires discipline, which rarely exists (the military excepting, perhaps).
  - gizzlon 6y ago
    Maybe people are too polite? Or not strict enough enforcing rules and guidelines? Who would tolerate an employee standing in the middle of the open office screaming at the top of their lungs for attention? :) Of course, we all make mistakes from time to time. Guess the real problem is a lack of learning from them.
  - JohnBooty 6y ago
    I guess this is subjective, but I've never found Slack (or IRC, or Discord, Hipchat, etc) to somehow encourage @mention overuse/abuse. I just don't see it. Perhaps more to the point, I can't really fathom a communication medium that somehow wouldn't allow an overzealous or inconsiderate person to become a distraction. Unless that system made communication super onerous in the first place. Perhaps somebody could write a Slack plugin that limits a person to a certain number of @mentions per week, with the option to "purchase" more by contributing money to the company party fund or something :-)
travisjungroth 6y ago
What’s weird to me about this is no one would have their knowledge workers also be on call for external customer support full time, but for some reason that’s the norm with internal customer support.
bregma 6y ago
I've had non-remote jobs that were similar. A lineup forming outside my cubicle. Days when I got absolutely nothing done except address constant interruptions from others who needed help Right Now. Only the medium has changed, not the message.

donmcronald 6y ago

I've never really "got" it when it comes to tools like Slack or Teams. To me they've always felt like a forum with a handful of mega topics that go on forever with worse (or no) pagination. I also don't get why some devs of successful open source projects hang out in Slack. Do they feel like they need to or do they want to? The specific thing I don't get is that a lot of projects have both an issue tracker and a forum so they can filter low level questions into the forum, but then you can get direct access to the devs by visiting the Slack channel. I mean it's cool, but WTF? I guess maybe my thinking is old-fashioned at this point, but I think people seeking out help should RTFM and be held to a certain standard when it comes to the effort they make. I self solve more than 50% of my problems while I'm trying to build a test case or write a good quality forum / SO question. Maybe Slack, etc. are popular because the informal nature lets people skip the part of the process where they're expected to make an effort.

mxcrossb 6y ago
I mean, if we’re talking old fashion, before all these fancy issue trackers a lot of times you could find devs on their irc channel.
- c0l0 6y ago
  For many projects, you still can - if you know where to look. It's what makes FOSS "support" (i.e., having someone to talk to about a technical problem in a meaningful way, so that you get closer to resolving it) so much more effective than costly support contracts with big and faceless corporations that make you jump through all manners of hoops - only to end up with some expert level blame-shifting, and no real solution in the end.
  - 6510 6y ago
    Answering questions on irc is still a great way to learn.
thdrdt 6y ago
I think the success of Slack is that it's so easy to set up a team. It feels like Trello: you are up and running in a minute. As a freelancer I got a list of Slack teams and it is just very easy to switch. But like you said: that's about it. It is slow, the text input box is horrible and most of the time you loose track of conversations. What I lately notice is that teams start to use WhatsApp groups as Slack replacement. To me that shows that Slack is just a messenger.

econcon 6y ago

Maybe they've some data based on which they are against remote work, and maybe that data will not be shared to public as they might have come up to conclusion that more remote work in their customers is better for an app like slack

numpad0 6y ago
Facebook uses email for important business decisions, Steve Jobs wouldn’t let his children use an iPad, and now Slack don’t tolerate remote work. Interesting, isn’t it.
- abiogenesis 6y ago
  To be fair, not letting a kid use an iPad is not a good analogy. iPad was not designed or marketed as a toy.
  - KSteffensen 6y ago
    How do you use it?

atoav 6y ago

I've never really loved email, but hell it just works. What I like about email is that people don't interrupt me or try to chitchat with me, they just state the bussines of things and I can decide wether I want to react directly, in which folder to move or with which label to tag it (automatically or not), etc. If somebody forgets something in a mail I could just write back or call. And if I really want to chat, matrix/irc or a signal group should be good. For other things (by no means related to code only) repositories are good, or issue trackers like trac. I never really liked slack although I tried. It doesn't really feels like it focuses the mind of a group and helps you move forward.

hagy 6y ago
I think the asynchronous nature of email makes it a superior communication medium. With slack and other messaging apps, we all end up writing short bursts of whatever is on the top of our head, without much thought or organization of the ideas. In contrast, with email, you can take some time to create a concise and well-organized message. I find email threads to generally be shorter than the comparable slack threads with each email adding more useful information.
- squiggleblaz 6y ago
  I typically check my email once a day, first thing. Occasionally I will also check them if I'm bored around 4. If I have to write an email, I normally suppose that takes half an hour. I don't if emails use less words than slack threads, but I think I spend more time producing them. So "shorter" seems like the wrong measurement.
- elhudy 6y ago
  >With slack and other messaging apps, we all end up writing short bursts of whatever is on the top of our head, without much thought or organization of the ideas. In contrast, with email, you can take some time to create a concise and well-organized message. This hit close to home. When writing emails I sometimes find gaps in my own logic or alternate recommendations while writing the email, and am able to address those before sending. With Lync, too often I end up "blurting" assumptions or guesswork that doesn't always necessarily end up being true. While blurting out ideas can be useful, depending who you're talking to, it can also make you look like an idiot. With email people also don't leave you hanging with "hey...". Please don't send "hey" to me. Go straight to asking your question or favor.

Abishek_Muthian 6y ago

Moreover email is federated, distributed & seamless. In my previous startup, A Slack account was the second thing I created for a new employee after an email account. Everything from real-time communication, screen-sharing, log/product/system health alerts, analytics to daily tasks summary were handled with the help of slack bots; we ourselves built a bot for the platform. But the productivity benefits of real-time communications are dubious at best. Apart from alerts(read emergency), email communication is better than real-time chat IMO, as the lack of peer pressure to reply fast enables more thoughtful communication. So to test this, In my current work(Startup Coaching) I communicate only via email with my clients, no phone calls, no chats. It's been over a year and it's been great for productivity for both myself & my clients; of course this has been possible because there's no emergency communication involved. When I see people asking for discord channel in Internet forums/subreddit which has no use for a real-time communication, it worries me.

nicoburns 6y ago
To me the big benefit of Slack over email is that Slack is only communication with actual humans. My email inbox is chock full of automated emails from various websites / services.
- mgkimsal 6y ago
  > To me the big benefit of Slack over email is that Slack is only communication with actual humans Until folks in your org start adding in slack integration bots. I have multiple channels that are nothing but alert/notifications about systems. that separation may be useful, but it definitely requires some discipline - I've been on some teams where people wanted to throw in automated slack integration messaging in to the 'regular' channels "so we won't miss anything".
  - nicoburns 6y ago
    Yeah, we have a few of those at work. But I've muted those channels. Too noisy to be useful. The only one I keep on is downtime notifications, which really do need to be responded to ASAP.

jupp0r 6y ago

> not much better than the email system it is meant to replace it’s much worse because emails can be filtered, while it’s still impossible to mute bots in Slack.

spurdoman77 6y ago

> Slack the company really needs to embrace distributed work practices if they want to actually build a tool for distributed work practices. > Slack has totally become a drag on productivity and a net negative. Channel and message overload is arguably not much better than the email system it is meant to replace. > My prediction is that Slack will be replaced quite quickly by the first tool that really nails remote messaging and coordination. Slack is not it. "Slack the company really needs to embrace distributed work practices if they want to actually build a tool for distributed work practices." The question is, do they? In the companies I have been working in, slack has been a communication tool like email or sms. Doesnt really have stance on whether the work should be remote or not.

avian 6y ago

> Channel and message overload is arguably not much better than the email system it is meant to replace. I still don't understand why this is surprising. Why do people continuously think that moving to another way of receiving messages will somehow help with the overload? At best it's only a short term solution, before all message faucets that are responsible for the overload eventually get migrated over.

throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
Is slack meant to replace email? I thought it was intended as a complementary tool (having used slack, I don't see it offers much actually).
- avian 6y ago
  Slack's home page certainly hints at it being meant to replace email. e.g. "Instead of a single overstuffed inbox...", "Unlike email...".
  - throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
    They say that? Well I for one am convinced by their marketing.

blitmap 6y ago

Because of COVID19 my workplace has rushed right into Microsoft Teams. There's so much efficiency lost creating large-scale meetings and phone conferences. Coming from the land of IRC I've created a few teams with massive rosters, but nobody seems to really understand the paradigm. They see all these messages come in and they leave the team/discussion/channel. I keep saying "mute the discussion" and @mentions will signal you if needed, but it is lost on folks who haven't done this kind of things. They're used to discussion spaces being set up per-incident, instead of just lingering/loitering in a room.

curryst 6y ago
I find per-incident discussion spaces far more productive. I.e. if you want to talk to me and some other people about something, create a space (channel in Slack jargon). That way everything about that conversation has it's own isolated history. I can control my notification settings for that conversation sanely. If I need to find a message from that conversation, I can limit my search to that channel. My manager heavily pushes us to use Threads for that purpose in Slack, but Slack's handling of Threads is just miserable. It's one my biggest peeves about Slack. If I get mentioned in a Thread, Slack will ping me for every new message (and I've been pinged on threads that went on for several hundred messages). If I need to find a message in a Thread, scrolling back is useless, I have to use search and just pray I have the right keywords. I think I'm just burned out on Slack; they need to find a method of communicating and invest into it instead of their current "you communicate however you want and we'll halfway support it" method.

ohB9iof7 6y ago

Personally, despite their declared mission, I see Slack as replacing phone calls rather than emails. It suffers the same problems than phone : people writing fast without thinking twice about what they say to have a chance to put their idea in the discussion, lost forever knowledge because searching slack is a mess, short and meaningless interventions in the discussion, etc. It is indeed to me better than phone, because you don't have to reply within 5 secs when someone tries to reach you, so it's less interruptive. But for business sensitive discussions where we expect a lot of efficient brain time and valuable discussions, hell no, send me an email.

notadev 6y ago

We have a lead who creates a new channel for every endeavor, even if it's the same employees. It's so frustrating.

ThomPete 6y ago

The real issue is that no tool really will be able to work well for teams over 10-15 ish users. Its the same issue DropBox, Drive and Box has. They are really “just” glorified network drives. Email by its de-central nature still is the best fundamental design pattern we have for a truly scaleable communication platform and i wonder if we will ever see a perfect mix of asynchronous and realtime messaging.

jamauro 6y ago
we're trying to create the perfect mix of asynchronous and realtime message. would love to show it to you and get your feedback: https://usepingpong.com https://usepingpong.com

gfxgirl 6y ago

It's funny the HN crowd complains about the constant distraction of open offices but loves the constant distraction of Slack.

rleigh 6y ago
I detest the constant distraction of Slack and I'm thankful that I no longer work in a place which uses it. A lack of discipline on sending out notifications, and you can be spammed all day long with workflow-breaking distractions. Even direct messaging can interfere drastically with your productivity. The requirement to down tools and immediately reply to random requests can really make you lose focus.

darekkay 6y ago

> My prediction is that Slack will be replaced quite quickly by the first tool that really nails remote messaging and coordination Doist, the remote-only company behind Todoist, created Twist [1] to address this issue. [1] https://twist.com/slack-alternative https://twist.com/slack-alternative

dorian-graph 6y ago
I hope Twist takes off. I'd like to give it a go. Forums are great for structured conversations, but poor for unstructured—and Slack is the opposite.
maxgt 6y ago
We (fully remote team) made the switch from Slack to Twist about two years ago and never looked back. They really focus on asynchronous communication.
phixiuz 6y ago
Twist was a true game changer for our remote team, been using it for over a year now after 3 years of slack. Before, with slack, we also experienced the typical frustrations of it being very distracting, and the synchronous communication could often lead to unneeded tensions within the team. Since adopting Twist, our workplace is now much calmer and more productive! They also dogfood their own product, and their team has been remote from the start AFAIK. (fyi, not affiliated with them in any way, just really happy with their product, they deserve a shout-out!)

zafiro17 6y ago

Sorry to see there has been no mention of Zulip so far. I fooled around with Slack a little, and then Zulip. And in my opinion zulip hit that sweet spot between email and chat. I really like the way conversations can be segregated into actual conversations. The trick to using it, I've found, is to set team expectations that posts might not be replied to until later in the day. There is something subtle about slack that sets your expectation for immediate gratification, and that drives the exhausting 'always on' culture. I imagine you are all relishing that sweet irony/hypocrisy of a tool that facilitates distributed work, not permitting its team to work in a distributed fashion. Culture fail! Fifteen years ago or more, I was able to work pretty effectively with a team using email and IRC. I know IRC is out of fashion now, but my point is that a lot of the challenge is team culture and expectations, and software doesn't really fix that problem.

StavrosK 6y ago
I read the GP's comment and wanted to reply, but then I saw your comment. Completely agreed, Zulip is exactly what I've been looking for, and email+XMPP (one on one) was the best communication mode I've ever used, though I have a feeling that Zulip will be very close to that. We've been using Zulip for a year in my company and we love it, the ability to just follow the topics you want and ignore the ones you don't is great for focus, and the stream view is perfect for catching up on everything. I wrote up some thoughts here: https://www.stavros.io/posts/seven-tips-great-remote-culture/ https://www.stavros.io/posts/seven-tips-great-remote-culture... I think one of the strengths of email is that it forces you to be less-synchronous and take the time to craft a somewhat long, point-by-point reply, rather than just fire off a quick message. That's something I'd like to see Zulip encourage more.

joubert 6y ago

If there are organizations where distributed work / remote work is working very well, then I presume those groups have solved the "message overload" and "coordination" issues. Or would you say there's a class of communication and coordination use cases that are best addressed by in-person (currently)?

ShbJbK8mqg 6y ago

FB workplace is an option. It has workplace groups and workchats, this helps differentiate half baked ideas being collaborated vs fully baked ideas to be published as posts. Allows for a lot of conversation and collaboration on workchat a topic while also keeping the signal to noise ratio in the workplace group high. I used slack in my previous company, didn't like FB workplace at first, but I see and appreciate many differences now.

wayoutthere 6y ago

Outside the software development bubble, Microsoft Teams is starting to dominate in the way that Exchange did in the 00s. It's a huge advantage that it's free with Office 365. Basically, if your company is already a Microsoft shop, there's no reason to go out and get another enterprise collaboration tool. Teams has default integrations with the whole Microsoft stack, including Azure DevOps and MS Project. Most of the companies I work with still use Slack for development teams, but even then the devs are usually running both Slack and Teams because the business stakeholders they need to communicate don't use Slack. Slack is already being replaced in a lot of orgs as a result.

hudsonjr 6y ago

I feel much the same way (work at a large company). I feel like Slack is a battle royale of one person's time versus another. - What incentive is there for anyone to ever spend a second searching for anything when they can just DM or @ me? - The @ in a large busy channel can derail me big-time. It churns up a lot of low priority and very unrelated questions/queries. It's like someone asking me to their desk to answer a question, and then announcing to everyone on the floor that I am there to answer their questions. - Are you providing the answers or are you the one asking them? If it's a two way street, or you are the one asking, you probably love Slack. If it's a one way street where you only provide answers/help, you feel differently - Seems to cater to Ask Alexa, Ask Siri type mentality. Things that were once covered by process or documentation, now devolve into "ask person or channel X". - There is often a massive imbalance between what is urgent to me, and what is urgent to the person asking me. This was always an issue to some degree, but the immediate response requirement sometimes puts me in a place where I feel like I am encouraging bad behavior by answering quickly. - Things that are "quick questions" often require a rather lengthy answer. - Context is often often missing. This often happens with the people that hate e-mail, love slack, and end up asking a question to me about something that exists in e-mail. I end up asking for more context and then get forwarded the e-mail where I can figure out what the person was actually answering. - Context again, I have to change focus to see what someone is DM'ing me about. In e-mail I can quick glance to see if actually urgent or not. - No great OOO. With e-mail, if I am away for a bit I can put an OOO with a bunch of common questions/answers. With Slack options are limited, other than letting people know I am not available and to contact someone else. Maybe bots could help, I dunno. - People can't complete full thoughts before hitting Enter. Hi (Enter). Have a quick question (Enter). Joe contacted me(Enter) Can we set him up with X today (Enter). - People seem to be very dense about people in different time zones compared to e-mail. Normally not an issue since I use DND on my phone, but occasionally I've accidentally logged back in off hours on mobile somehow. - Threads vs. No Threads Warriors. "No threads" people complain about not seeing replies in threads or it slowing them down. "Threads" people complain because it becomes impossible to link to it later. I think is where you create a temporary channel to deal with it, but that's too much work for most people. - I had someone accuse me about being set to Away for "4 days" and asking my boss where I was. I went offline on a Friday for a couple hours to meet a deadline, and then was away for meetings for a couple hours on Tuesday (Monday was a holiday for him). If he had just asked his question on Friday, it would have been answered Monday at the latest, but probably Friday. Instead I get a "wtf" because I wasn't on the precise two times he happened to look. In general it seems like the tool is significantly worse now that it's used by the whole company. At one point it seemed to just be a replacement for e-mail dist lists, which I can understand. As usage grew it became more of a synchronous tool (demand wise).

poulsbohemian 6y ago

>by the first tool that really nails remote messaging and coordination. What would that look like? I mean, I hear what you are saying about channel and message overload, but I'm trying to imagine how this gets fixed. Seems like what I've seen is that when a channel gets too much chatter, it subdivides into more granular channels to the point that main channel chat slows. But then you have more channels to read and respond across... and the message overload often feels like a function of either too many people in the discussion and/or a signal to noise issue.