16 ms·

Why a Slack Backlash Is Inevitable

117 points by kantrowitz 6y ago

mushufasa 6y ago
We use Zulip, which is designed to avoid some of these issues. https://zulipchat.com/why-zulip/ https://zulipchat.com/why-zulip/ I'm happy with it.
tus88 6y ago
Isn't everyone on teams now?
- imglorp 6y ago
  No. It's not wonderful. edit, I'll be more helpful with criticism. I feel like Teams is well integrated into their cloud stuff on the good side. The cons are it very much feels like it is aimed at checking some CIO and HR requirements around control and auditability. Spontaneity and usefulness suffer.
rigel_kentaurus 6y ago
This article would've been better with some concrete examples, or a study, or really anything to back it out. "Slack can be used for bad things". Well, so can email, mailing lists, support forums, internal chat systems (jabber), etc. Not even one example, just "A lot of my CEO and founder friends talk about this". As with any tool, it's how you use it. Best implementations I have seen of Slack is when the rules are clear for the beginning. Maybe channels are meant to be public and private is an exception, or the opposite (everything private to avoid noise). And clear guidelines. And to be fair, the discussion is usually a reflection of the company culture that is already present: formal, informal, direct. The tool just facilitates it.
- Cacti 6y ago
  Exactly. “High-school type problems” are created by immature people, not the tool. That kind of behavior would never be tolerated at any of the companies I’ve worked at, no matter what the medium. Tech companies, and startups in particular, tend to have these problems because their culture and leadership is sophomoric and immature, and those people hire and promote (or fail to fire) similar people. If a CEO thinks this is a problem in their company, then they need to, well, be a CEO and do something about it. Leadership sets the tone. Lack of leadership creates a void.
  - sharadov 6y ago
    Exactly I've worked at places like this and the cadence is usually set by the people in leadership. If the boss up top is a drunk and boning every 20 year old ( been at one such place ), it sets the tone for everyone else. Also does not help if everyone in the team is young and DTF.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
staticassertion 6y ago
A lot of these issues seem to come down to: 1. Just fire the shitty people. I don't know why companies don't do this more in the US - it's at-will, just fire them. 2. Why are you trying to stop your employees from organizing???? > “The onus is on the CEO,” Flory said. “Our focus has been on the values,” Agreed on this last statement. Ultimately if Slack is becoming a toxic environment there are obviously other issues - employees being able to quickly communicate and organize is not one of them.
- danudey 6y ago
  This post matches up with every other "We're ditching Slack" post I've seen. It comes down to: 1. Our employees can't behave themselves 2. Our managers can't or won't do anything about it 3. Executives aren't willing to draw a line in the sand 4. I guess Slack is terrible?
  - mlthoughts2018 6y ago
    If a tool is so easily subverted and misused so widely, eventually it’s the tool’s fault. Arguing that it’s just the users’ fault is like trying to boil the ocean. It doesn’t matter if you’re right or not, the component that can actually be addressed is the tool, so the tool is capable of bearing blame.
    - oceanswave 6y ago
      We’ve found the same behavior in normal person to person speech, so we’ve implemented a gag policy that nobody talks to one another during business hours. Ultimately, it’s person to person communication that we’ve found is the broken tool for, granted, a minority of users so we’ve implemented this policy company wide.
      - mlthoughts2018 6y ago
        Your satire rings very flat because it doesn’t happen much in person to person communication. The whole reason it’s noteworthy to talk about it in regards to Slack is that it does happen to a much greater extent in Slack and other chat programs than in almost any other corporate communication system, enough to make it clear that instant messaging, not people, is the core of the issue.
bigyikes 6y ago
If decreasing the friction to communicate is causing problems in your company, then maybe you don’t have a tooling problem or a communication problem, but a culture problem.
scrose 6y ago
As someone who moderates a several hundred person mailing list, the arguments they listed are neither new nor unique to Slack. If anything, Slack is much easier to moderate than e-mail or other mediums of communication.
- koolba 6y ago
  Bingo. Having a user tied to an actual person, and not just a dog with an internet connection and email address must make it orders of magnitude simpler to address offenders.
  - meowface 6y ago
    Isn't this kind of orthogonal to the software you choose to use? Those issues are a factor of public vs. private Slacks or email lists. Internal email isn't just dogs with internet connections, and big public Slack servers may just be 3 people with hundreds of alts and bots for all you know. (Hyperbolizing, but you get the idea.)
chundicus 6y ago
A lot of my CEO and founder friends talk about this"... rephrased: "My CEO and founder friends are upset that their employees use a piece of software to talk about the toxic culture my CEO and founder friends have cultivated"
- steve_adams_86 6y ago
  This reflects my experience. The people I work with now use slack exclusively for work and the odd share of more personal items while on vacation/weekend/walk during lunch. We have similar interests so the content is always welcomed. Any important discussion happens offline or on the phone, though. I can’t imagine us using slack for anything outside of trivial, asynchronous messages and events reported by bots. At most other companies I’ve had people message me about salary concerns, unionization, anger towards a manager or CEO, endless banter about anything but work, etc. The main difference was that these places were run by people who really didn’t care about their employees and slack ended up a reflection of that. A lot of upset, frustrated, resentful venting in private channels. If slack didn’t exist, these conversations would have happened some other way. There’s no way everyone could keep sane in a bad work environment without some degree of venting or comradeship.
- bfung 6y ago
  Agreed. Having been/being a person(s) managers and IC, company culture comes from the head honcho of any subgroup. If the head honcho ignores bad behavior or doesn't tend to it, it's their fault. Having slack expose those faults in the management chain doesn't mean this is an employee/IC problem. These managers of the company should learn how to manage people better for $$$ they're (we're) getting paid for.
colincooke 6y ago
There is really no strong argument made in this article. It seems like most, if not all, of the problems they talk about are _employee_ problems not slack problems. Slack is simply a medium to chat with your company and team, one which is pretty easy to use desipite its flaws. Employees being toxic is just that, it's not because of slack. As others have mentioned, this is a professional communication tool there is no need for fully private conversations. Chats should always be accesible by HR/admins.
- outworlder 6y ago
  > _employee_ problems Employee problems as perceived from some random "CEO"'s perspective.
Olreich 6y ago
I was thinking the article would be about the deteriorating quality of Slack and the lack of improvement in their facilitation of perusing channels. The article was instead that CEOs don’t want to get talked about behind their back and so are going to shut it down. While Slack might increase the ease of that, it’s not like employees couldn’t do it via email or at the water cooler instead. This speaks to leadership problems more than anything else.
Minor49er 6y ago
My coworker wrote a bot for Slack that spams most of our channels with random gifs throughout the day. Most of my other coworkers find it amusing, but to me, it's quite distracting. I opened an issue with Slack to ask them to add an "ignore" feature, but they responded that ignoring anyone is counterproductive so they won't be adding it. Thanks, Slack.
- eloisius 6y ago
  Luckily my company does not have this problem but I’ve felt it before. I will leave channels that turn into distractions like that.
- taneq 6y ago
  Write a bot to raise random requests for an "ignore" feature with them throughout the day until they get the message. ;)
  - leesalminen 6y ago
    Support ticket systems (Zendesk, Freshdesk, Intercom...) definitely have an “ignore” feature.
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  Slack fails to meet the bar of functionality set by Outlook 97. This isn’t a compliment to Outlook.
- JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago
  Just close the app then, right? Does your job obligate you to be on Slack all the time, probably not. You get more time back, and deliver more value to your company's business.
  - colinmhayes 6y ago
    Many jobs do require Slack open all the time. At my job that's the entire point, if it can wait send an email, if it needs attention now, slack. People get upset if you don't respond within 5 minutes, even if it's just to say I'll get back to you.
macspoofing 6y ago
Yes. It's only a matter of time before there is a backlash to Slack. I won't understand the backlash when it comes, just as I didn't understand the excitement. Slack is just a chat client. Chat has been around forever. Corporate chat clients have been around forever. What am I missing?
- ineedasername 6y ago
  Yeah, from 2005-2009 I had a boss who insisted all staff be on AOL IM, with groups etc. There was an option to automatically save all chats. Slack has more features, but I don't see it as fundamentally different.
- overgard 6y ago
  Honestly it's just the little details... which are huge. For better or worse emoji reactions and gifs really change the tenor of conversations. You can say its just chat, and that's true, but people are complicated and the smallest of chat features changes interactions so much. Just as an example, "heres a new feature" vs "heres a new feature (+100 thumbs up emoji)", for better or worse that changes people.
  - macspoofing 6y ago
    >For better or worse emoji reactions and gifs really change the tenor of conversations. As did emoticons. I miss emoticons.
- ponker 6y ago
  An iPhone is just a phone. The Beatles are just a band. Michael Jordan is just a basketball player. I don’t get the excitement.
  - macspoofing 6y ago
    I get what you're trying to say, but ... I still don't see it. I introduced slack at work a few years ago. It's fine, it's modern and has nice UI (UX on the other hand ... is just OK). I also used chat clients and IRC since the 90s. I don't see slack being the Michael Jordan of Chat clients. I don't see how it is a fundamental change the way the iPhone was.
ponker 6y ago
This is an advantage of Microsoft Teams... the product is so utterly without charm that I doubt anyone is recreationally loitering in it.
- meddlepal 6y ago
  Can confirm, use Teams daily and theres almost no side chatting in it compared to Slack which seems like a near constant watercooler experience.
  - afkmango 6y ago
    Agreed. Curious to hear if you think it's side effect of a more corporate-looking UI? Or is it the association with Microsoft and other "office products"?
- overgard 6y ago
  Yeah, Teams tends to murder conversation. It's not even broken, its just not quite worth engaging with.
  - yborg 6y ago
    This is why it will win.
overgard 6y ago
I think there's something there but I don't think I'd describe it as high school culture. It's more that things are way more permanent/visible. A one off watercooler comment from someone having a bad day is suddenly A THING. Sometimes people need to vent and commune without it going on their permanent record. I personally find myself doing the opposite and censoring myself on slack, because I know a comment that's funny in context might read terribly a year removed.
smitty1e 6y ago
Chat is a technology. Blaming chat for having had a catalytic effect on a toxic corporate culture may underscore the toxicity of the culture. Maybe a cultural detox would be in order?
Jasper_ 6y ago
This article is basically complaining "employees are using Slack to organize and try to push for a union", and then claiming that's a bad thing. Fun!
andycowley 6y ago
This sounds a lot more like your company culture is the issue than the tool. If you think this sort of thing didn't happen via emails, or even in the office kitchen, you're naive. If you're more interested in broad strokes like banning a tool than addressing acute bad behaviour, you shouldn't be managing people.
0xFFFE 6y ago
Bring back the IRC, half the high school problems will go away automatically, fire the immature employees and the remaining half will go away too.
emptyparadise 6y ago
The "high school problems" are the employees organizing, apparently.
outworlder 6y ago
Oh, they are doing "unprofessional" things in a tool that facilitates informal communication now, are they? Well. It's called chatter. That will either happen over the watercooler, or it will happen over text. The only problem is that off the cuff remarks can be part of the permanent record now. But otherwise, they should be harmless. And also... maybe go fix the problems people are "bearish" about? (also what's this stock market lingo doing here) > The problematic employee, the employee who would sit around at the lunchroom and tell people how bad this place is Well, maybe the place IS bad. And if they are bitching about it, they may still care – employees who have "checked out" won't complain nearly as much (or at all), while looking elsewhere. Or maybe they are just venting and had a bad week. Or it's a cry for help. If the place weren't as bad, other employees could help the person. > and it’s amplifying. Oh, so other people agree with the person too? Maybe there is a problem indeed.
- parhamn 6y ago
  I don’t disagree with some of your other points, but having problems and being inclined to complain about them are often separate things. Like at startups, there are often a ton of problems, naturally. At some startups people complain a lot. At some they’re good at fixing or ignoring problem for some greater goal. Aiming for the latter (I.e not amplifying) should be a goal as well while you reduce your problems.
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 6y ago
  > The only problem is that off the cuff remarks can be part of the permanent record now. I don't think you appreciate the scale of how many headaches this can create for a large company. Previously, A says something mean about B at the watercooler, even if somebody overhears it's all he says, she says. With Slack (or any other group chat/IM system), if A says the same thing, it's broadcast to everybody else on the channel and anybody can take out of context screenshots and run squealing to HR/EEOC/lawyers/whoever. And it's all accessible to anybody with a subpoena on a fishing expedition as well. And you can't just fix the company or the people: beyond a certain scale, no matter how good your hiring process and training, no matter how awesome your company culture and benefits, you'll get permanently unhappy people, shit-stirring trolls, wackos with extreme views and all the other weird creatures that populate any Internet forum. So eventually you have to converge on reserving chat only for strictly work-related comms and training people to take anything with the mildest whiff of controversy to talking in person/over video.
gkoberger 6y ago
This seems like a case of shooting the messaging app. It's just human behavior, and it'll happen anywhere.
ashtonkem 6y ago
I hate Slack, but for unrelated reasons. Slack has no priority levels. Slack pings you: is it an alert, a question, an outage, or someone sending you a funny gif? You can’t adjust the relative priority of these alerts, so good luck! I’ve also seen that it regularly replaces documentation for teams. This is an issue, since slack just scrolls forever. You might have memorized the precise sentence to search for (I’ve done this), but good luck to everyone else. All in all I think more companies would be better off with just IRC for ephemeral chats. IRC sets no expectation that you’ll catch up with everything that happened when you were offline, which in this case is good.
- aeyes 6y ago
  Everybody in a Slack channel can pin important messages, when somebody writes something noteworthy I pin it until it is moved to the documentation.
- coffeefirst 6y ago
  Yes! The Noise Machine aspects, the sprawling dumpster that is threads, and the fact that there's no way for all 7 people DMing me at once to see that there are 7 of them DMing me at once make the platform an indispensable nightmare. I'm starting to notice that organizations with long term remote experience like Basecamp and Automatic rely a lot more on longer, async communication over instant messaging. There might be something to that.
  - EForEndeavour 6y ago
    > the sprawling dumpster that is threads Doesn't the Threads view (Ctrl T, Mac: Cmd T) list all threads you're involved with in chronological order, navigable by mouse or keyboard, and searchable? What's your pain point with threads? > the fact that there's no way for all 7 people DMing me at once to see that there are 7 of them DMing me at once This same objection applies to every other text-based communication medium out there that I'm aware of.
- hajile 6y ago
  MS Teams has the ability to mark something as important and it isn't such a great feature IMO. Instead, create groups for whatever purpose and use it (eg, an @<team>_devs to avoid blowing up everyone else in the channel). @mentions stand out when you're scrolling through a feed.
motohagiography 6y ago
My experience with Slack was it is a litmus test for your company culture. If you have people prone to histrionics and complaining, it's going to encourage that. If you have cliquish attrition-game players, they're going to create their own parallel channel scheme. If you have grandstanding drama queens who work an audience, it's the weapon of choice for the sort of people who send emails with long cc' lists. If you have hustlers who pretend you owe them things and always seem to cc' your boss, they will use public channels for off hours callouts that sit for hours before you can respond. The one anti-pattern personality that Slack does mitigate well is people who use in person meetings and phone calls to make after the fact misrepresentations, and I suppose, sales.
- lambdasquirrel 6y ago
  Yeah, I wonder what ever happened to the common-sense idea that culture flows outward from the people with the "power." Maybe it's by example, or maybe it's by unintended consequence. Maybe it's caused by some moralistic / idealistic sort of policy, or maybe it's through ignorance of the unconscious biases that people have. To that end, Slack, being a communications enabler, merely accelerates the rate of these things happening. You can turn it off, but then you can turn off the company too. You can try to make everything out in the open open, but then you quench creativity as well as meaningful 1-1 interactions between people.
  - motohagiography 6y ago
    We get what we reward, and leaders who espouse one set of values but reward another in practice are necessarily going to promote a layer of jerks. It's the literal recipe for a jerk factory. To me, if there were a backlash against Slack, it is because it makes a great scapegoat. It's different from a social media platform because social platforms have to deal with the public, where a company has every tool it needs to evolve its culture. Personally, I think Slack could be a much needed twitter-killer by letting channels and instances promote messages to being public facing, while providing much of the value twitter doesn't.
    - 6y ago
dleslie 6y ago
> “They create problems, high-school-type problems,” one CEO of a midsized firm told me. “People are making fun of co-workers, they’re acting unprofessionally, and it’s technically a company system.” The crux of this is that Slack enables long, heated arguments that normally would be defused by: 1. Being surrounded by your coworkers 2. The frown of your manager 3. The strain on the faces of those around you It basically comes down to 80s/90s era concepts of netiquette: try to imagine that the person you're writing your response to is a thinking and feeling individual, and imagine their reaction to your words. Read out your words that you've written in the heat of the moment and think hard about how they'll be felt when read. If you have an employee who is prone to ridiculing others and won't desist from doing so when asked... FIRE THEM
- Loughla 6y ago
  >If you have an employee who is prone to ridiculing others and won't desist from doing so when asked... >FIRE >THEM Honestly, why does this have anything to do with slack. If it's not there, it will be in the break room or hallway or bathroom or wherever. That's a toxic person being enabled by technology. Not toxic technology magically transforming a person.
  - toss1 6y ago
    What it has to do with Slack and every other social media platform is that (vs. break-room trash-talk) it magnifies the harassment - it's instantly amplified, spread more broadly, and is more durable. It also reduces the dampening influences of people's emotional responses in meatspace. Slack may or may not be better/worse than FB, Twitter, etc. in this regard, but all can definitely magnify divisions in any group of people, from a clique to a nation. It is just the dark side of reducing the communication friction that helps people work together better (kind of like a hammer is better than a rock for both setting nails and breaking skulls).
    - hajile 6y ago
      As a manager/owner, if your team/company has such toxic people, you're better off losing them. I also wonder if tech ageism isn't at play here. The social rules of high-school and college are nothing like the social rules of the rest of society. In those places, a person can create a group of friends and only interact with them for the most part. In a real job without high turnover, you have to learn to get along with everyone all the time. Startups (the ones complaining here) aren't known for having lots of older workers who've had time to polish their social skills and have the rough edges worn down (programmers generally aren't known for their amazing social skills in the first place). I'd conjecture that moving 2-3 older devs onto each of those teams could drastically improve the group dynamics.
pontus 6y ago
Feel like they missed an obvious opportunity to coin the term slacklash...
catchmeifyoucan 6y ago
Twist. We’ve been using it as a slack alternative and it truly works as a better email replacement. It’s great for announcements, and isn’t super overwhelming with every channel organized like an inbox. The UX is super simple. Haven’t played with it too much just yet, but like it so far
- steviedotboston 6y ago
  which one?
Brendinooo 6y ago
I see articles like this periodically here, and I never understand them. I've used Slack for 6 years with an organization, it's been indispensable, and since I'm remote it's been my window into the company culture, which I'd characterize as healthy. But then again, my job before that one tried to start a corporate intranet blog and then mothballed it while HR dragged their feet on a proper company policy for the comments section. So...maybe it's not about the tools of communication, but the people behind them.
- gameswithgo 6y ago
  It has been fine at my work as well. I understand that people get mad that is uses more resources than is necessary, I have that same aversion but that is a pretty ubiquitous software problem today, and is why I asked for the 6 core xeon laptop =)
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
dwighttk 6y ago
Is slack really causing these things, or were they just happening in secret before? I could see it increasing the instances, but it could also just be making the instances more visible.
aeyes 6y ago
Turn off Slack and you'll have your employees in WhatsApp groups. What do you prefer? Nobody is going back to email. If people behave unprofessionally on Slack then that is because they are unprofessional. I've been working with different corporate chat tools for years and haven't seen any major drama. And if the former lunchroom conversation moved to Slack, you can now hold the bad actors accountable.
- wayoutthere 6y ago
  Heck the WhatsApp groups probably already exist. At my last company, the malicious shit (e.g. "marry, fuck, kill" lists of coworkers, racist / casteist memes, etc.) happened on WhatsApp, not the company chat platform. If you don't discourage a "frat boy" culture, one can develop outside your control. People who do that crap aren't stupid, so they'll keep it off company systems but they'll still do it.
  - EForEndeavour 6y ago
    Did you say anything in any of these problematic WhatsApp groups to "discourage a 'frat boy' culture"? Or did you stay in the groups to quietly lurk, or did you laugh along to fit in?
    - wayoutthere 6y ago
      I did quietly lurk until I came out as trans, when I stopped being invited to join them. No great loss to me, but you can understand why I was hesitant to speak up in them.
robot 6y ago
is the problem slack or people? same argument is said for facebook and facebook serves people since they use it a lot. This only validates the existence of slack for me.
peteretep 6y ago
> The problematic employee, the employee who would sit around at the lunchroom and tell people how bad this place is — that’s just happening on Slack, and it’s amplifying Great, on Slack it’s documented, so you can fire them.
beamatronic 6y ago
I remember when HipChat was in the position that Slack is in now. At the time it seemed unassailable.
irjustin 6y ago
I don't disagree that a Slack 'backlash' is coming because anything that grows eventually has to stop growing as teams find whatever, NoSQL, NoCode, Slack, Kubernetes, Docker, AWS, was not the panacea they thought it was. That's okay. I thoroughly dislike the basis for the argument. The author does clear it up in the end that Slack isn't the problem, the culture is, but why wrap the story that way just to sound good. It reminds me of anti-maskers who blame restaurants for forcing them to wear masks. Wrong attribution.
nashashmi 6y ago
So slack is amplifying a problem... one that happens to be quite common in more paralyzed mediums such as the water cooler ... And before CEOs would ignore it or sweep it under the rug but now it is getting in their way. Awesome! STOP ignoring your employees! Stop dismissing their complaints. And start LEADING! Yes, when employees complain, leaders are put in the hot seat. Yes, when employees organize, they are being ridiculous. Yes, when babies cry, they need to be consoled. Yet, the solution is not to keep the baby sleeping or be threatening or just dump the baby. These CEOs need to lead. And the employees need to speak louder. This article is is all about Slack. And designed to make slack look bad. Other communication platforms have the same problem. But the author only focuses on slack. This looks like the opposite of a PR article.
Falkon1313 6y ago
"Ultimately, many CEOs and analysts I spoke with said it’s up to company leaders to create a healthy culture and make sure it’s lived out." That's the key takeaway from that article. It has nothing to do with Slack or any other specific form of communication. The headline is just clickbait. Even the CEOs complaining about it admit that the problem isn't the media, it's the culture that they create and control that's the problem.
mr_tristan 6y ago
A favorite quote: "culture eats strategy for breakfast". Slack and Teams just feed this instinct to spew thoughts without thinking about your communication first. Everything about modern society reinforces this. And it's not remotely generational; or, I haven't noticed much of a difference between generations in regards to depth of conversation. It's just different tools of choice. So, I'm sure everyone will hate these tools, but really, they just haven't figured out how to communicate deeply and meaningfully together. And no tool is gonna make that happen for you. It's a culture problem. I'm 100% sure if they ban Slack and Teams, and go back to email, everyone is just gonna hack email to say all the same stupid crap they're saying right now. Maybe it'll slow things down a bit, but I can't see it transforming much of anything.
aogaili 6y ago
It easier to blame the tool then the culture and human nature. Those tools just exposed many people subjective/inner feelings/views to the surface. It is up to leader to learn how to deal with the exposure. I agree that these need to better managed and leaders need to step up, but the older culture of repressing and hiding info is gone in this age, and leader need to learn how to lead in today's world effectively.
stunt 6y ago
I don't understand the argument against Slack. Obviously this is not about people making fun of co-workers. That's just a bad culture and toxic environment and can happen even at the office. It's also not about Slack creating distraction. That's just how they're utilizing it if they have that issue, which is easy to fix. Employees organizing union and protest is the big problem for some companies. And I don't think they can live without a communication tool either. Perhaps those companies wouldn't be happy about any tool for this matter unless it can provide some surveillance features.
JackPoach 6y ago
At first, I thought it was a repost of an article from 2017 or 2018. But yeah, Slack sucks in many situations, especially in large companies. But it's a great tool for a small group high intensity collaboration (small=8-9 people max).
- geephroh 6y ago
  Right now, Slack and Zoom are probably the only things holding my small org's collective culture together. Email just doesn't cut it when we're not in the same physical space anymore.
xwdv 6y ago
Your organizations are doing a bad job at mitigating high-school type problems because they are not clearly defining what bad behavior is nor the common stereotypes of problematic Slack users. If these were clearly defined, people could reference this information when they identify it, and people's behavior would become more policed. Without a strong definition, people can inflict harm from safe gray areas.
neves 6y ago
Sorry people, this isn't about about "high school" behavior. This is about preventing workers organization. They are just building the narrative for whats comes next. Just other day, The Economist also said that Google must "grow up": https://www.economist.com/briefing/2020/07/30/googles-problems-are-bigger-than-just-the-antitrust-case https://www.economist.com/briefing/2020/07/30/googles-proble... It looks like, big media point of view is that it is a childish behavior to do anything against the company bottom line. Combat racial discrimination, government surveillance or any corporation misdeed are insignificant compared to the shareholders profits. Google employees walkout was an alert for the Big Money. The backslash is coming. Big Brother is watching you.
- core-questions 6y ago
  > Combat racial discrimination Interestingly, it has been shown that more diverse groups of employees are less likely to organize and form unions or demand collective bargaining.
  - toss1 6y ago
    Interesting, got any citations handy?
    - core-questions 6y ago
      Yes. On the more academic front: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0019793915602253 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0019793915602253 On a more anecdotal front, Whole Foods is aware of this at the corporate level and so is (apparently) deliberately pushing for a more diverse employee base not to actually improve race relations, but to prevent unionization. https://observer.com/2020/04/amazon-whole-foods-anti-union-technology-heat-map/ https://observer.com/2020/04/amazon-whole-foods-anti-union-t...
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - Nasrudith 6y ago
at_a_remove 6y ago
At first I was prepared to despise Slack as it being part of the baggage of that job's sudden interest in Agile Cosplay, but then it looked IRC-like and I figured I would give it a chance. Ah, I should have known. My reasons, in no particular order: First, it was Yet Another Communications Channel to Check. You know, email, phone, voicemail, meetings, standups, calendar appointments, and so on. It was one more place I had to scan through on an event loop. I would pay more attention to Slack only to miss something somewhere else. Where was communication happening? Anywhere. And Slack made it worse because we had a skillion channels proliferate, so it wasn't as if Slack were one email inbox, it was dozens. Second, Agile Cosplayer #1 was busy posting random things like his Spotify playlist for the day (I don't have Spotify) and other stuff. You can't even /ignore like in IRC. It seemed especially silly when all of us were within ten feet of each other. Partially my fault: I was late to the smartphone game and have no idea what roughly half the emojis meant, and so I was missing whatever emotional tenor of a lot of messages. Probably the worst part was that the expectation was that always had one eye on Slack instead of, you know, focusing on programming. There was no "getting back to" someone on it. It was expected I would have it on my smartphone (newly purchased) and have it just running all the freakin' time. Most of this comes down to local implementation, hence I can point the finger quite a bit at Agile Cosplay, but boy oh boy, does Slack enable and encourage some lousy local implementations.
- core-questions 6y ago
  > have no idea what roughly half the emojis meant, I really honestly am curious which ones confused you
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
    Probably most of them. The big problem with emoji is that there are a ludicrous number of them, like kanji, but unlike kanji most of them have no agreed upon semantic meaning, so everything but the basics and things that are just graphics of some every day object have meaning determined by intuition and culture.
  - at_a_remove 6y ago
maxehmookau 6y ago
This has cause and effect wrong. Slack may make bad culture worse, but it won't be the cause.
yalogin 6y ago
If something as toxic as described in the post is feared, it says nothing about Slack/Teams. It means the company is dysfunctional and the culture is bad. It will happen with or without slack.
gdsdfe 6y ago
I don't get it, so if you use a hammer to wreck a car or whatever now hammers are bad? and we should ban hammers?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
eric4smith 6y ago
The biggest problem with Slack is not even the "politics" or inappropriate use. It's the fact that chat is a super-horrible way to farm out tasks. Go ahead. Ask someone to do something over chat. Very soon, that request is buried in succeeding messages and no one remember the original task. To me that's why we will stop using Slack, even if it causes some friction in casual communications. The problem is that managers (i'm guilty) use Slack as a way to farm out tasks to subordinates and then we're not thrilled when those tasks don't get done. Ssshhhhoooocking....
- imiric 6y ago
  > The biggest problem with Slack is not even the "politics" or inappropriate use. It's the fact that chat is a super-horrible way to farm out tasks. I would file that under "inappropriate use". Slack is not a task or issue tracker, use more appropriate tools for that. While it's certainly flexible and can be adapted to many workflows, there are still limits with features it arguably shouldn't have.
  - hajile 6y ago
    I'd also add that it might be better to PM someone if you want to be sure they got a specific message.
ykevinator 6y ago
I miss hipchat, I truly don't understand why slack exists

117 points by kantrowitz 6y ago

We use Zulip, which is designed to avoid some of these issues. https://zulipchat.com/why-zulip/ https://zulipchat.com/why-zulip/ I'm happy with it.

tus88 6y ago

Isn't everyone on teams now?

imglorp 6y ago
No. It's not wonderful. edit, I'll be more helpful with criticism. I feel like Teams is well integrated into their cloud stuff on the good side. The cons are it very much feels like it is aimed at checking some CIO and HR requirements around control and auditability. Spontaneity and usefulness suffer.

rigel_kentaurus 6y ago

This article would've been better with some concrete examples, or a study, or really anything to back it out. "Slack can be used for bad things". Well, so can email, mailing lists, support forums, internal chat systems (jabber), etc. Not even one example, just "A lot of my CEO and founder friends talk about this". As with any tool, it's how you use it. Best implementations I have seen of Slack is when the rules are clear for the beginning. Maybe channels are meant to be public and private is an exception, or the opposite (everything private to avoid noise). And clear guidelines. And to be fair, the discussion is usually a reflection of the company culture that is already present: formal, informal, direct. The tool just facilitates it.

Cacti 6y ago
Exactly. “High-school type problems” are created by immature people, not the tool. That kind of behavior would never be tolerated at any of the companies I’ve worked at, no matter what the medium. Tech companies, and startups in particular, tend to have these problems because their culture and leadership is sophomoric and immature, and those people hire and promote (or fail to fire) similar people. If a CEO thinks this is a problem in their company, then they need to, well, be a CEO and do something about it. Leadership sets the tone. Lack of leadership creates a void.
- sharadov 6y ago
  Exactly I've worked at places like this and the cadence is usually set by the people in leadership. If the boss up top is a drunk and boning every 20 year old ( been at one such place ), it sets the tone for everyone else. Also does not help if everyone in the team is young and DTF.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]

staticassertion 6y ago

A lot of these issues seem to come down to: 1. Just fire the shitty people. I don't know why companies don't do this more in the US - it's at-will, just fire them. 2. Why are you trying to stop your employees from organizing???? > “The onus is on the CEO,” Flory said. “Our focus has been on the values,” Agreed on this last statement. Ultimately if Slack is becoming a toxic environment there are obviously other issues - employees being able to quickly communicate and organize is not one of them.

danudey 6y ago
This post matches up with every other "We're ditching Slack" post I've seen. It comes down to: 1. Our employees can't behave themselves 2. Our managers can't or won't do anything about it 3. Executives aren't willing to draw a line in the sand 4. I guess Slack is terrible?
- mlthoughts2018 6y ago
  If a tool is so easily subverted and misused so widely, eventually it’s the tool’s fault. Arguing that it’s just the users’ fault is like trying to boil the ocean. It doesn’t matter if you’re right or not, the component that can actually be addressed is the tool, so the tool is capable of bearing blame.
  - oceanswave 6y ago
    We’ve found the same behavior in normal person to person speech, so we’ve implemented a gag policy that nobody talks to one another during business hours. Ultimately, it’s person to person communication that we’ve found is the broken tool for, granted, a minority of users so we’ve implemented this policy company wide.
    - mlthoughts2018 6y ago
      Your satire rings very flat because it doesn’t happen much in person to person communication. The whole reason it’s noteworthy to talk about it in regards to Slack is that it does happen to a much greater extent in Slack and other chat programs than in almost any other corporate communication system, enough to make it clear that instant messaging, not people, is the core of the issue.

bigyikes 6y ago

If decreasing the friction to communicate is causing problems in your company, then maybe you don’t have a tooling problem or a communication problem, but a culture problem.

scrose 6y ago

As someone who moderates a several hundred person mailing list, the arguments they listed are neither new nor unique to Slack. If anything, Slack is much easier to moderate than e-mail or other mediums of communication.

koolba 6y ago
Bingo. Having a user tied to an actual person, and not just a dog with an internet connection and email address must make it orders of magnitude simpler to address offenders.
- meowface 6y ago
  Isn't this kind of orthogonal to the software you choose to use? Those issues are a factor of public vs. private Slacks or email lists. Internal email isn't just dogs with internet connections, and big public Slack servers may just be 3 people with hundreds of alts and bots for all you know. (Hyperbolizing, but you get the idea.)

chundicus 6y ago

A lot of my CEO and founder friends talk about this"... rephrased: "My CEO and founder friends are upset that their employees use a piece of software to talk about the toxic culture my CEO and founder friends have cultivated"

steve_adams_86 6y ago
This reflects my experience. The people I work with now use slack exclusively for work and the odd share of more personal items while on vacation/weekend/walk during lunch. We have similar interests so the content is always welcomed. Any important discussion happens offline or on the phone, though. I can’t imagine us using slack for anything outside of trivial, asynchronous messages and events reported by bots. At most other companies I’ve had people message me about salary concerns, unionization, anger towards a manager or CEO, endless banter about anything but work, etc. The main difference was that these places were run by people who really didn’t care about their employees and slack ended up a reflection of that. A lot of upset, frustrated, resentful venting in private channels. If slack didn’t exist, these conversations would have happened some other way. There’s no way everyone could keep sane in a bad work environment without some degree of venting or comradeship.
bfung 6y ago
Agreed. Having been/being a person(s) managers and IC, company culture comes from the head honcho of any subgroup. If the head honcho ignores bad behavior or doesn't tend to it, it's their fault. Having slack expose those faults in the management chain doesn't mean this is an employee/IC problem. These managers of the company should learn how to manage people better for $$$ they're (we're) getting paid for.

colincooke 6y ago

There is really no strong argument made in this article. It seems like most, if not all, of the problems they talk about are _employee_ problems not slack problems. Slack is simply a medium to chat with your company and team, one which is pretty easy to use desipite its flaws. Employees being toxic is just that, it's not because of slack. As others have mentioned, this is a professional communication tool there is no need for fully private conversations. Chats should always be accesible by HR/admins.

outworlder 6y ago
> _employee_ problems Employee problems as perceived from some random "CEO"'s perspective.

Olreich 6y ago

I was thinking the article would be about the deteriorating quality of Slack and the lack of improvement in their facilitation of perusing channels. The article was instead that CEOs don’t want to get talked about behind their back and so are going to shut it down. While Slack might increase the ease of that, it’s not like employees couldn’t do it via email or at the water cooler instead. This speaks to leadership problems more than anything else.

Minor49er 6y ago

My coworker wrote a bot for Slack that spams most of our channels with random gifs throughout the day. Most of my other coworkers find it amusing, but to me, it's quite distracting. I opened an issue with Slack to ask them to add an "ignore" feature, but they responded that ignoring anyone is counterproductive so they won't be adding it. Thanks, Slack.

eloisius 6y ago
Luckily my company does not have this problem but I’ve felt it before. I will leave channels that turn into distractions like that.
taneq 6y ago
Write a bot to raise random requests for an "ignore" feature with them throughout the day until they get the message. ;)
- leesalminen 6y ago
  Support ticket systems (Zendesk, Freshdesk, Intercom...) definitely have an “ignore” feature.
ashtonkem 6y ago
Slack fails to meet the bar of functionality set by Outlook 97. This isn’t a compliment to Outlook.
JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago
Just close the app then, right? Does your job obligate you to be on Slack all the time, probably not. You get more time back, and deliver more value to your company's business.
- colinmhayes 6y ago
  Many jobs do require Slack open all the time. At my job that's the entire point, if it can wait send an email, if it needs attention now, slack. People get upset if you don't respond within 5 minutes, even if it's just to say I'll get back to you.

macspoofing 6y ago

Yes. It's only a matter of time before there is a backlash to Slack. I won't understand the backlash when it comes, just as I didn't understand the excitement. Slack is just a chat client. Chat has been around forever. Corporate chat clients have been around forever. What am I missing?

ineedasername 6y ago
Yeah, from 2005-2009 I had a boss who insisted all staff be on AOL IM, with groups etc. There was an option to automatically save all chats. Slack has more features, but I don't see it as fundamentally different.
overgard 6y ago
Honestly it's just the little details... which are huge. For better or worse emoji reactions and gifs really change the tenor of conversations. You can say its just chat, and that's true, but people are complicated and the smallest of chat features changes interactions so much. Just as an example, "heres a new feature" vs "heres a new feature (+100 thumbs up emoji)", for better or worse that changes people.
- macspoofing 6y ago
  >For better or worse emoji reactions and gifs really change the tenor of conversations. As did emoticons. I miss emoticons.
ponker 6y ago
An iPhone is just a phone. The Beatles are just a band. Michael Jordan is just a basketball player. I don’t get the excitement.
- macspoofing 6y ago
  I get what you're trying to say, but ... I still don't see it. I introduced slack at work a few years ago. It's fine, it's modern and has nice UI (UX on the other hand ... is just OK). I also used chat clients and IRC since the 90s. I don't see slack being the Michael Jordan of Chat clients. I don't see how it is a fundamental change the way the iPhone was.

ponker 6y ago

This is an advantage of Microsoft Teams... the product is so utterly without charm that I doubt anyone is recreationally loitering in it.

meddlepal 6y ago
Can confirm, use Teams daily and theres almost no side chatting in it compared to Slack which seems like a near constant watercooler experience.
- afkmango 6y ago
  Agreed. Curious to hear if you think it's side effect of a more corporate-looking UI? Or is it the association with Microsoft and other "office products"?
overgard 6y ago
Yeah, Teams tends to murder conversation. It's not even broken, its just not quite worth engaging with.
- yborg 6y ago
  This is why it will win.

overgard 6y ago

I think there's something there but I don't think I'd describe it as high school culture. It's more that things are way more permanent/visible. A one off watercooler comment from someone having a bad day is suddenly A THING. Sometimes people need to vent and commune without it going on their permanent record. I personally find myself doing the opposite and censoring myself on slack, because I know a comment that's funny in context might read terribly a year removed.

smitty1e 6y ago

Chat is a technology. Blaming chat for having had a catalytic effect on a toxic corporate culture may underscore the toxicity of the culture. Maybe a cultural detox would be in order?

Jasper_ 6y ago

This article is basically complaining "employees are using Slack to organize and try to push for a union", and then claiming that's a bad thing. Fun!

andycowley 6y ago

This sounds a lot more like your company culture is the issue than the tool. If you think this sort of thing didn't happen via emails, or even in the office kitchen, you're naive. If you're more interested in broad strokes like banning a tool than addressing acute bad behaviour, you shouldn't be managing people.

0xFFFE 6y ago

Bring back the IRC, half the high school problems will go away automatically, fire the immature employees and the remaining half will go away too.

emptyparadise 6y ago

The "high school problems" are the employees organizing, apparently.

outworlder 6y ago

Oh, they are doing "unprofessional" things in a tool that facilitates informal communication now, are they? Well. It's called chatter. That will either happen over the watercooler, or it will happen over text. The only problem is that off the cuff remarks can be part of the permanent record now. But otherwise, they should be harmless. And also... maybe go fix the problems people are "bearish" about? (also what's this stock market lingo doing here) > The problematic employee, the employee who would sit around at the lunchroom and tell people how bad this place is Well, maybe the place IS bad. And if they are bitching about it, they may still care – employees who have "checked out" won't complain nearly as much (or at all), while looking elsewhere. Or maybe they are just venting and had a bad week. Or it's a cry for help. If the place weren't as bad, other employees could help the person. > and it’s amplifying. Oh, so other people agree with the person too? Maybe there is a problem indeed.

parhamn 6y ago
I don’t disagree with some of your other points, but having problems and being inclined to complain about them are often separate things. Like at startups, there are often a ton of problems, naturally. At some startups people complain a lot. At some they’re good at fixing or ignoring problem for some greater goal. Aiming for the latter (I.e not amplifying) should be a goal as well while you reduce your problems.
9nGQluzmnq3M 6y ago
> The only problem is that off the cuff remarks can be part of the permanent record now. I don't think you appreciate the scale of how many headaches this can create for a large company. Previously, A says something mean about B at the watercooler, even if somebody overhears it's all he says, she says. With Slack (or any other group chat/IM system), if A says the same thing, it's broadcast to everybody else on the channel and anybody can take out of context screenshots and run squealing to HR/EEOC/lawyers/whoever. And it's all accessible to anybody with a subpoena on a fishing expedition as well. And you can't just fix the company or the people: beyond a certain scale, no matter how good your hiring process and training, no matter how awesome your company culture and benefits, you'll get permanently unhappy people, shit-stirring trolls, wackos with extreme views and all the other weird creatures that populate any Internet forum. So eventually you have to converge on reserving chat only for strictly work-related comms and training people to take anything with the mildest whiff of controversy to talking in person/over video.

gkoberger 6y ago

This seems like a case of shooting the messaging app. It's just human behavior, and it'll happen anywhere.

ashtonkem 6y ago

I hate Slack, but for unrelated reasons. Slack has no priority levels. Slack pings you: is it an alert, a question, an outage, or someone sending you a funny gif? You can’t adjust the relative priority of these alerts, so good luck! I’ve also seen that it regularly replaces documentation for teams. This is an issue, since slack just scrolls forever. You might have memorized the precise sentence to search for (I’ve done this), but good luck to everyone else. All in all I think more companies would be better off with just IRC for ephemeral chats. IRC sets no expectation that you’ll catch up with everything that happened when you were offline, which in this case is good.

aeyes 6y ago
Everybody in a Slack channel can pin important messages, when somebody writes something noteworthy I pin it until it is moved to the documentation.
coffeefirst 6y ago
Yes! The Noise Machine aspects, the sprawling dumpster that is threads, and the fact that there's no way for all 7 people DMing me at once to see that there are 7 of them DMing me at once make the platform an indispensable nightmare. I'm starting to notice that organizations with long term remote experience like Basecamp and Automatic rely a lot more on longer, async communication over instant messaging. There might be something to that.
- EForEndeavour 6y ago
  > the sprawling dumpster that is threads Doesn't the Threads view (Ctrl T, Mac: Cmd T) list all threads you're involved with in chronological order, navigable by mouse or keyboard, and searchable? What's your pain point with threads? > the fact that there's no way for all 7 people DMing me at once to see that there are 7 of them DMing me at once This same objection applies to every other text-based communication medium out there that I'm aware of.
hajile 6y ago
MS Teams has the ability to mark something as important and it isn't such a great feature IMO. Instead, create groups for whatever purpose and use it (eg, an @<team>_devs to avoid blowing up everyone else in the channel). @mentions stand out when you're scrolling through a feed.

motohagiography 6y ago

My experience with Slack was it is a litmus test for your company culture. If you have people prone to histrionics and complaining, it's going to encourage that. If you have cliquish attrition-game players, they're going to create their own parallel channel scheme. If you have grandstanding drama queens who work an audience, it's the weapon of choice for the sort of people who send emails with long cc' lists. If you have hustlers who pretend you owe them things and always seem to cc' your boss, they will use public channels for off hours callouts that sit for hours before you can respond. The one anti-pattern personality that Slack does mitigate well is people who use in person meetings and phone calls to make after the fact misrepresentations, and I suppose, sales.

lambdasquirrel 6y ago
Yeah, I wonder what ever happened to the common-sense idea that culture flows outward from the people with the "power." Maybe it's by example, or maybe it's by unintended consequence. Maybe it's caused by some moralistic / idealistic sort of policy, or maybe it's through ignorance of the unconscious biases that people have. To that end, Slack, being a communications enabler, merely accelerates the rate of these things happening. You can turn it off, but then you can turn off the company too. You can try to make everything out in the open open, but then you quench creativity as well as meaningful 1-1 interactions between people.
- motohagiography 6y ago
  We get what we reward, and leaders who espouse one set of values but reward another in practice are necessarily going to promote a layer of jerks. It's the literal recipe for a jerk factory. To me, if there were a backlash against Slack, it is because it makes a great scapegoat. It's different from a social media platform because social platforms have to deal with the public, where a company has every tool it needs to evolve its culture. Personally, I think Slack could be a much needed twitter-killer by letting channels and instances promote messages to being public facing, while providing much of the value twitter doesn't.
  - 6y ago

dleslie 6y ago

> “They create problems, high-school-type problems,” one CEO of a midsized firm told me. “People are making fun of co-workers, they’re acting unprofessionally, and it’s technically a company system.” The crux of this is that Slack enables long, heated arguments that normally would be defused by: 1. Being surrounded by your coworkers 2. The frown of your manager 3. The strain on the faces of those around you It basically comes down to 80s/90s era concepts of netiquette: try to imagine that the person you're writing your response to is a thinking and feeling individual, and imagine their reaction to your words. Read out your words that you've written in the heat of the moment and think hard about how they'll be felt when read. If you have an employee who is prone to ridiculing others and won't desist from doing so when asked... FIRE THEM

Loughla 6y ago
>If you have an employee who is prone to ridiculing others and won't desist from doing so when asked... >FIRE >THEM Honestly, why does this have anything to do with slack. If it's not there, it will be in the break room or hallway or bathroom or wherever. That's a toxic person being enabled by technology. Not toxic technology magically transforming a person.
- toss1 6y ago
  What it has to do with Slack and every other social media platform is that (vs. break-room trash-talk) it magnifies the harassment - it's instantly amplified, spread more broadly, and is more durable. It also reduces the dampening influences of people's emotional responses in meatspace. Slack may or may not be better/worse than FB, Twitter, etc. in this regard, but all can definitely magnify divisions in any group of people, from a clique to a nation. It is just the dark side of reducing the communication friction that helps people work together better (kind of like a hammer is better than a rock for both setting nails and breaking skulls).
  - hajile 6y ago
    As a manager/owner, if your team/company has such toxic people, you're better off losing them. I also wonder if tech ageism isn't at play here. The social rules of high-school and college are nothing like the social rules of the rest of society. In those places, a person can create a group of friends and only interact with them for the most part. In a real job without high turnover, you have to learn to get along with everyone all the time. Startups (the ones complaining here) aren't known for having lots of older workers who've had time to polish their social skills and have the rough edges worn down (programmers generally aren't known for their amazing social skills in the first place). I'd conjecture that moving 2-3 older devs onto each of those teams could drastically improve the group dynamics.

pontus 6y ago

Feel like they missed an obvious opportunity to coin the term slacklash...

catchmeifyoucan 6y ago

Twist. We’ve been using it as a slack alternative and it truly works as a better email replacement. It’s great for announcements, and isn’t super overwhelming with every channel organized like an inbox. The UX is super simple. Haven’t played with it too much just yet, but like it so far

steviedotboston 6y ago
which one?

Brendinooo 6y ago

I see articles like this periodically here, and I never understand them. I've used Slack for 6 years with an organization, it's been indispensable, and since I'm remote it's been my window into the company culture, which I'd characterize as healthy. But then again, my job before that one tried to start a corporate intranet blog and then mothballed it while HR dragged their feet on a proper company policy for the comments section. So...maybe it's not about the tools of communication, but the people behind them.

gameswithgo 6y ago
It has been fine at my work as well. I understand that people get mad that is uses more resources than is necessary, I have that same aversion but that is a pretty ubiquitous software problem today, and is why I asked for the 6 core xeon laptop =)

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

dwighttk 6y ago

Is slack really causing these things, or were they just happening in secret before? I could see it increasing the instances, but it could also just be making the instances more visible.

aeyes 6y ago

Turn off Slack and you'll have your employees in WhatsApp groups. What do you prefer? Nobody is going back to email. If people behave unprofessionally on Slack then that is because they are unprofessional. I've been working with different corporate chat tools for years and haven't seen any major drama. And if the former lunchroom conversation moved to Slack, you can now hold the bad actors accountable.

wayoutthere 6y ago
Heck the WhatsApp groups probably already exist. At my last company, the malicious shit (e.g. "marry, fuck, kill" lists of coworkers, racist / casteist memes, etc.) happened on WhatsApp, not the company chat platform. If you don't discourage a "frat boy" culture, one can develop outside your control. People who do that crap aren't stupid, so they'll keep it off company systems but they'll still do it.
- EForEndeavour 6y ago
  Did you say anything in any of these problematic WhatsApp groups to "discourage a 'frat boy' culture"? Or did you stay in the groups to quietly lurk, or did you laugh along to fit in?
  - wayoutthere 6y ago
    I did quietly lurk until I came out as trans, when I stopped being invited to join them. No great loss to me, but you can understand why I was hesitant to speak up in them.

robot 6y ago

is the problem slack or people? same argument is said for facebook and facebook serves people since they use it a lot. This only validates the existence of slack for me.

peteretep 6y ago

> The problematic employee, the employee who would sit around at the lunchroom and tell people how bad this place is — that’s just happening on Slack, and it’s amplifying Great, on Slack it’s documented, so you can fire them.

beamatronic 6y ago

I remember when HipChat was in the position that Slack is in now. At the time it seemed unassailable.

irjustin 6y ago

I don't disagree that a Slack 'backlash' is coming because anything that grows eventually has to stop growing as teams find whatever, NoSQL, NoCode, Slack, Kubernetes, Docker, AWS, was not the panacea they thought it was. That's okay. I thoroughly dislike the basis for the argument. The author does clear it up in the end that Slack isn't the problem, the culture is, but why wrap the story that way just to sound good. It reminds me of anti-maskers who blame restaurants for forcing them to wear masks. Wrong attribution.

nashashmi 6y ago

So slack is amplifying a problem... one that happens to be quite common in more paralyzed mediums such as the water cooler ... And before CEOs would ignore it or sweep it under the rug but now it is getting in their way. Awesome! STOP ignoring your employees! Stop dismissing their complaints. And start LEADING! Yes, when employees complain, leaders are put in the hot seat. Yes, when employees organize, they are being ridiculous. Yes, when babies cry, they need to be consoled. Yet, the solution is not to keep the baby sleeping or be threatening or just dump the baby. These CEOs need to lead. And the employees need to speak louder. This article is is all about Slack. And designed to make slack look bad. Other communication platforms have the same problem. But the author only focuses on slack. This looks like the opposite of a PR article.

Falkon1313 6y ago

"Ultimately, many CEOs and analysts I spoke with said it’s up to company leaders to create a healthy culture and make sure it’s lived out." That's the key takeaway from that article. It has nothing to do with Slack or any other specific form of communication. The headline is just clickbait. Even the CEOs complaining about it admit that the problem isn't the media, it's the culture that they create and control that's the problem.

mr_tristan 6y ago

A favorite quote: "culture eats strategy for breakfast". Slack and Teams just feed this instinct to spew thoughts without thinking about your communication first. Everything about modern society reinforces this. And it's not remotely generational; or, I haven't noticed much of a difference between generations in regards to depth of conversation. It's just different tools of choice. So, I'm sure everyone will hate these tools, but really, they just haven't figured out how to communicate deeply and meaningfully together. And no tool is gonna make that happen for you. It's a culture problem. I'm 100% sure if they ban Slack and Teams, and go back to email, everyone is just gonna hack email to say all the same stupid crap they're saying right now. Maybe it'll slow things down a bit, but I can't see it transforming much of anything.

aogaili 6y ago

It easier to blame the tool then the culture and human nature. Those tools just exposed many people subjective/inner feelings/views to the surface. It is up to leader to learn how to deal with the exposure. I agree that these need to better managed and leaders need to step up, but the older culture of repressing and hiding info is gone in this age, and leader need to learn how to lead in today's world effectively.

stunt 6y ago

I don't understand the argument against Slack. Obviously this is not about people making fun of co-workers. That's just a bad culture and toxic environment and can happen even at the office. It's also not about Slack creating distraction. That's just how they're utilizing it if they have that issue, which is easy to fix. Employees organizing union and protest is the big problem for some companies. And I don't think they can live without a communication tool either. Perhaps those companies wouldn't be happy about any tool for this matter unless it can provide some surveillance features.

JackPoach 6y ago

At first, I thought it was a repost of an article from 2017 or 2018. But yeah, Slack sucks in many situations, especially in large companies. But it's a great tool for a small group high intensity collaboration (small=8-9 people max).

geephroh 6y ago
Right now, Slack and Zoom are probably the only things holding my small org's collective culture together. Email just doesn't cut it when we're not in the same physical space anymore.

xwdv 6y ago

Your organizations are doing a bad job at mitigating high-school type problems because they are not clearly defining what bad behavior is nor the common stereotypes of problematic Slack users. If these were clearly defined, people could reference this information when they identify it, and people's behavior would become more policed. Without a strong definition, people can inflict harm from safe gray areas.

neves 6y ago

Sorry people, this isn't about about "high school" behavior. This is about preventing workers organization. They are just building the narrative for whats comes next. Just other day, The Economist also said that Google must "grow up": https://www.economist.com/briefing/2020/07/30/googles-problems-are-bigger-than-just-the-antitrust-case https://www.economist.com/briefing/2020/07/30/googles-proble... It looks like, big media point of view is that it is a childish behavior to do anything against the company bottom line. Combat racial discrimination, government surveillance or any corporation misdeed are insignificant compared to the shareholders profits. Google employees walkout was an alert for the Big Money. The backslash is coming. Big Brother is watching you.

core-questions 6y ago
> Combat racial discrimination Interestingly, it has been shown that more diverse groups of employees are less likely to organize and form unions or demand collective bargaining.
- toss1 6y ago
  Interesting, got any citations handy?
  - core-questions 6y ago
    Yes. On the more academic front: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0019793915602253 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0019793915602253 On a more anecdotal front, Whole Foods is aware of this at the corporate level and so is (apparently) deliberately pushing for a more diverse employee base not to actually improve race relations, but to prevent unionization. https://observer.com/2020/04/amazon-whole-foods-anti-union-technology-heat-map/ https://observer.com/2020/04/amazon-whole-foods-anti-union-t...
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- Nasrudith 6y ago

at_a_remove 6y ago

At first I was prepared to despise Slack as it being part of the baggage of that job's sudden interest in Agile Cosplay, but then it looked IRC-like and I figured I would give it a chance. Ah, I should have known. My reasons, in no particular order: First, it was Yet Another Communications Channel to Check. You know, email, phone, voicemail, meetings, standups, calendar appointments, and so on. It was one more place I had to scan through on an event loop. I would pay more attention to Slack only to miss something somewhere else. Where was communication happening? Anywhere. And Slack made it worse because we had a skillion channels proliferate, so it wasn't as if Slack were one email inbox, it was dozens. Second, Agile Cosplayer #1 was busy posting random things like his Spotify playlist for the day (I don't have Spotify) and other stuff. You can't even /ignore like in IRC. It seemed especially silly when all of us were within ten feet of each other. Partially my fault: I was late to the smartphone game and have no idea what roughly half the emojis meant, and so I was missing whatever emotional tenor of a lot of messages. Probably the worst part was that the expectation was that always had one eye on Slack instead of, you know, focusing on programming. There was no "getting back to" someone on it. It was expected I would have it on my smartphone (newly purchased) and have it just running all the freakin' time. Most of this comes down to local implementation, hence I can point the finger quite a bit at Agile Cosplay, but boy oh boy, does Slack enable and encourage some lousy local implementations.

core-questions 6y ago
> have no idea what roughly half the emojis meant, I really honestly am curious which ones confused you
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
  Probably most of them. The big problem with emoji is that there are a ludicrous number of them, like kanji, but unlike kanji most of them have no agreed upon semantic meaning, so everything but the basics and things that are just graphics of some every day object have meaning determined by intuition and culture.
- at_a_remove 6y ago

maxehmookau 6y ago

This has cause and effect wrong. Slack may make bad culture worse, but it won't be the cause.

yalogin 6y ago

If something as toxic as described in the post is feared, it says nothing about Slack/Teams. It means the company is dysfunctional and the culture is bad. It will happen with or without slack.

gdsdfe 6y ago

I don't get it, so if you use a hammer to wreck a car or whatever now hammers are bad? and we should ban hammers?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

eric4smith 6y ago

The biggest problem with Slack is not even the "politics" or inappropriate use. It's the fact that chat is a super-horrible way to farm out tasks. Go ahead. Ask someone to do something over chat. Very soon, that request is buried in succeeding messages and no one remember the original task. To me that's why we will stop using Slack, even if it causes some friction in casual communications. The problem is that managers (i'm guilty) use Slack as a way to farm out tasks to subordinates and then we're not thrilled when those tasks don't get done. Ssshhhhoooocking....

imiric 6y ago
> The biggest problem with Slack is not even the "politics" or inappropriate use. It's the fact that chat is a super-horrible way to farm out tasks. I would file that under "inappropriate use". Slack is not a task or issue tracker, use more appropriate tools for that. While it's certainly flexible and can be adapted to many workflows, there are still limits with features it arguably shouldn't have.
- hajile 6y ago
  I'd also add that it might be better to PM someone if you want to be sure they got a specific message.

ykevinator 6y ago

I miss hipchat, I truly don't understand why slack exists