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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

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.
  - hideo 6y ago
    > leaders who espouse one set of values but reward another in practice are necessarily going to promote a layer of jerks I had to read this comment a few times, because I think it's truly a wonderful insight. This is true for many things. We should be careful as leaders to espouse and reward the same practices. We should be careful as the led to see what people actually reward and ignore what they espouse.
seneca 6y ago
Yep, dead on. Slack isn't the cause, it's a symptom. I worked at a company that adopted HipChat, and then Slack, very early. There was never any of this kind of drama. People were largely professional, aside from some goofing off in team chat. My current company is full of "histrionics and complaining". It is almost entirely (but not completely) kids who would have been too young to be in software 7 years ago. The cause of this, in my experience, is a generational culture shift that seems to have done away with the common etiquette of keeping politics and agitation away from work.

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.
- hideo 6y ago
  > leaders who espouse one set of values but reward another in practice are necessarily going to promote a layer of jerks I had to read this comment a few times, because I think it's truly a wonderful insight. This is true for many things. We should be careful as leaders to espouse and reward the same practices. We should be careful as the led to see what people actually reward and ignore what they espouse.

seneca 6y ago

Yep, dead on. Slack isn't the cause, it's a symptom. I worked at a company that adopted HipChat, and then Slack, very early. There was never any of this kind of drama. People were largely professional, aside from some goofing off in team chat. My current company is full of "histrionics and complaining". It is almost entirely (but not completely) kids who would have been too young to be in software 7 years ago. The cause of this, in my experience, is a generational culture shift that seems to have done away with the common etiquette of keeping politics and agitation away from work.