11 ms·

Slack outage: Degraded performance and connectivity issues

108 points by oplav 6y ago

t3rabytes 6y ago
HugOps to them, this is quite the string of issues over the last few weeks.
zakirenish 6y ago
Again?
ibero 6y ago
it is getting harder and harder to convince my higher ups to not switch us on to Microsoft Teams (which they practically consider free vs the thousands we spend monthly just for the dev team). its one saving grace for us is the amount of legacy comments and history of discussions we have built up over years across conversations that is useful for reference.
- Normal_gaussian 6y ago
  I find this kind of usage frightening. I honestly think that a message history of longer than a week encourages poor organisation to such a degree that daily operation is significantly and silently hampered.
  - abluecloud 6y ago
    agree. but ideals dont always match up with reality.
  - abeppu 6y ago
    Do you have suggestions for process or tooling that allows you to quickly / cheaply take the information or insights that arise from conversation and integrate them into a longer term store? And how to make that longer term location really useful? To the degree that teams fall into the habit of just searching slack history for info, I think those are the two key factors: - we remember bits of conversation, and who said something, or in which channel, can be a good way to rediscover the full details; note-taking and aggregating stuff into a knowledge base or docs repository can strip out that info making it harder to rediscover. (The obvious caveat here is that there can be sharp difference between re-finding a conversation you participated in e.g. in your team, vs finding information about a system you depend on from a conversation you didn't participate in.) - the process of getting stuff shared in slack into a longer-term knowledge base can be slow and tedious, and may require someone to spend time deciding which pieces are potentially valuable, generalizing from the specific case discussed to a form that makes sense out of context, condensing what was said over many messages, arbitrating between views which are valuable but conflicting, etc. I would like to see an NLP tool for summarizing threads and extracting the information which is most likely to be reusable.
  - veritas3241 6y ago
    We implemented a 90 day retention policy for all slack messages about a year ago. Everyone was pretty resistant to it at first, but it's been pretty great, honestly. It forces us to put things we'll want to remember in the handbook and encourages a more async culture. Personally I'd be happy with a 30 day retention policy!
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - NationalPark 6y ago
    I find searching chat history much more useful than what people used to do, which is throw anything that might be important into a wiki that never gets updated. At least in Slack you get some context around a piece of information rather than a hasty summary.
- quaffapint 6y ago
  I don't know why we don't switch to Teams. I enjoy slack and the history of comments is useful, but like you said Teams is already included in things we're paying for so why not use it. We might have to re-do some bots, but if it saves the company money and works basically the same it makes sense to switch.
  - zeveb 6y ago
    > I don't know why we don't switch to Teams. If you'd used Teams, you'd know why. It is hilariously bad, gratuitously slow, ludicrously weird. I have periodically had to use Microsoft's team chat tools over the years, dating back to Yammer or perhaps even further, and for whatever reason it seems they just do not get chat. Better question: why not just switch to Mattermost?
    - CharlesW 6y ago
      > If you'd used Teams, you'd know why. It is hilariously bad, gratuitously slow, ludicrously weird. I use both all day, every day. I don't find Teams to be any worse, slower, or weirder than Slack. Teams also does a lot that Slack can't do. As one small examples, it seems amazing that I can't add tabs to a Slack channel like I can in Teams.
  - atraac 6y ago
    > We might have to re-do some bots, You might not even be able to, Teams API is quite badly convoluted and limited. You simply won't be able to f.e. recreate Slackbot experience in group conversations(chats).
  - dividedbyzero 6y ago
    I have to use both heavily at work right now, one part of the company is on Slack, another on Teams, I'm involved with both. Despite its (many) issues, Slack is just so, so much nicer than Teams, the difference has an actual, substantial impact on communication. Teams feels like a disconnected and disorientating mess of ideas copied from other communication solutions in a huge hurry without understanding them fully and without even getting them to a point where they "click" and work as intended, and without thinking about how they fit into the big picture. Sole exception: Video calls are much better, when they work. The rest is a mess and makes communication a much more tedious effort than it has to be.
- altdatathrow 6y ago
  Don't you guys find the MS Teams "chat" interface an absolute mess? When I tried it a few months ago it felt like another ridiculous UI that wanted to emulate mobile phone messages for some reason with giant chat bubbles, tons of wasted white space, emojiis, avatars, etc. Slack's "compact" mode definitely isn't perfect but it's better. We as a tech world need to just revert back to the simple format most IRC clients use.
  - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
    Yeah, I'm not a huge fan of Slack in the first place but Teams's UI just seems like an utter mess. I don't understand how I'm supposed to use it. I'm sure I could figure it out if I spent 15 minutes, but it's a damn chat app. Why is this so hard?
    - thinkharderdev 6y ago
      MSFT just pushed a UI update to Outlook on Mac that is actually really nice. I'm hoping that maybe they've finally got their UX together and Teams will improve. Pretty sure my company will be axing Slack in favor of Teams in the next year or two. Maybe by then it will have a reasonably good UX.
    - toyg 6y ago
      The thing is, their threaded interface kinda sucked, so they built another one ('chat') and tried to push the idea that 'Teams' (threaded) is for 'permanent' info, and 'Chat' is for the ethereal one. Except nobody really bothers with switching back and forth, most teams just choose one or the other and do everything in there. Bit of a mess. I cannot fault them on the meeting functionality and sharepoint integrations though, they are excellent.
    - selykg 6y ago
      As someone that uses Teams. It's not pleasant to use on a Mac. My coworkers use Windows PCs and they all have a ton of fun problems with things as well. I'm not so sure switching to Teams is a better move than Slack.
- ffpip 6y ago
  Please dont. Microsoft teams is a mess of chat boxes. You'll regret it. Just don't.
- dkdk8283 6y ago
  Keeping comments is a bad practice: If your slack ever gets compromised you’ll wish you deleted everything. We purge every 6 mo. Keep updates in tickets.
  - bawolff 6y ago
    And if your ticket system gets compromised? I get it from the perspective of slack is a disorganized mess in terms of long term history, but moving sensitive data from one system to another with similar security doesnt seem like a win (or loss) for security to me.
    - dkdk8283 6y ago
      When I update a ticket I write it expecting someone else to read it. It’s well written and thought out. When I chat I say whatever is reasonable, it’s low effort. Note I didn’t call out sensitive information specifically. Just that you wished you deleted messages. You shouldn’t store secrets in a ticket system either.
      - kurbin 6y ago
        Still don't quite follow your comment. Is "keeping updates in tickets" separate from the comment on deleting messages?
        dkdk8283 6y ago
        I worked at a place that used Slack pings in lieu of tickets. The history was kept for ~7 years. This is a huge liability IMO. A off comment by the CEO could be misunderstood by an attacker or the public if it was to be leaked. I’m saying it’s ok for quick cursory discussions but those who retain Slack messages for tribal knowledge tend to have larger organizational issues. This knowledge should be in tickets where it’s expected to write well written responses with the intention of documenting knowledge.
  - ciarannolan 6y ago
    We purge daily. We use it as an ephemeral messaging service, not as a wiki.
- eggsaregreat 6y ago
  Try Teams, it's not as bad as most comments here seem to indicate. I understand if you're used to the slack UI (as most users of Hackers News are), it seems like a step backwards, but that's only because you're looking for a 1:1 replacement for slack. Having taking the route of going from Slack to Teams, where Teams is better at, IMHO, is the following: - Within channels, all conversations are, by default, organized into threads. This gives you to the feeling that there are lots of chat boxes, but once we spend a few days with it, our team started noticing that our conversations have become more structured. However starting a new "thread" off the main channel discussion in slack takes significant conscious effort and its very easy for multiple conversations to get interleaved and become a mess. - Integrated video/audio calls, along with call built-in note taking, makes for a very seamless jump from text to voice/video. With Slack, we needed to maintain separate Zoom account, as it's built-in voice/video chat was pretty bad. - If your IT has already sold its soul to Microsoft Enterprise infra, Teams just fits in really really well, with its Active Directory/Azure AD/O365 integrations. It's no wonder that Teams is doing well in the Enterprise space. We still use GSuite for our emails, but given how less our team emails these days, if I were given an option to start from scratch, I'd probably choose to host our email on O365 outlook (even though I feel Gmail's UI is superior). Of course, nothing is without its problems - you're dealing with Microsoft products, so except to hassle around a little bit with licensing, bad markdown abilities and a few other quirks. I've seen complaints of the client being really slow at times, but my team hasn't seen this issue in the recent past, since we switched in, except once or twice, where a restart of the client solves it. One part of our team (~12 people) used Hangouts Chat for a few months, which has been around for more than a few years, and every six months. It sucks. They just released a new update to how their buttons looked every 6 months. I don't know why Google even bothers putting up this product. The criticism for Teams is disproportionate in Hacker News, I don't understand why. I encourage you to try it out for a few days with a select group of people and make up your own mind.
  - atraac 6y ago
    It's not that much about the UI even(which is terrible as a lot of other people here explained), but rather the disgustingly bad performance and costant issues. I use teams every day at work, it eats insane amounts of ram, it leaks memory during video conferences, it's practically unusable during a call, switching tabs from chat to teams takes anywhere from one to five seconds, push notifications simply do not work properly, so does motification badge - it also often takes seconds for teams to acknowledge that you've seen certain activity. Text input has such an insane latency that it's uncomfortable to write, often eating characters from the next message after pressing return if you start typing too quickly. And this is just a tip of the iceberg. Almost all of few hundreads of people in our org hate the app as well and we're almost purely a Microsoft shop. I liked Slack until it became incredibly bloated. But even now, it's still in another league when compared to the abysmal experience that Teams offer.
- agentdrtran 6y ago
  Teams is awful compared to Slack, Slack's UX and feature set blow it out of the water.
  - StavrosK 6y ago
    And Zulip's UX is far better than Slack's. If you haven't tried it, I recommend it.
- mrweasel 6y ago
  I don't understand the fascination with Microsoft Teams, it doesn't work. Sound simply doesn't work in the app, full stop. You need to use the web version, in Chrome, because nothing else works... Well Edge maybe, who knows. There is apparently no way to get sound working in the Mac client, meaning that it might as well not exist.
  - CharlesW 6y ago
    > There is apparently no way to get sound working in the Mac client, meaning that it might as well not exist. FWIW, it works fine for a team in our company who regularly posts audio content for review. Many of us use macOS.
    - mrweasel 6y ago
      But can you use it for a video conference?
      - CharlesW 6y ago
        Yes. We use both Teams and Webex (I haven't used Slack for videoconferencing so I can't compare), and they seem comparable. There's a 49 on-screen participant limit, with a 250 participant limit overall.
  - underwater 6y ago
    That's a pretty silly statement. Microsoft has not built a product where sounds flat out "doesn't work" on any Mac.
    - mrweasel 6y ago
      No one at my company has managed to have a functional video conference using the Mac client, and I talked to people at two major software development companies in Denmark, they have the same problem. The web client works. It’s not as good or easy as Google Meet, or what ever it’s called, but it works. The Mac client does NOT work and have not worked for at least six month.
- whoisburbansky 6y ago
  The "amount of legacy comments and history" is the single most useful thing about Slack, imo. Teams in comparison was an absolute nightmare to try to find references to old conversations in, it felt like throwing away information into a bog, never to be retrieved ever again. Slack's archival search was the biggest reason I was able to onboard to a new team as quickly as I did, especially given WFH, since it removed the need to ask an actual person about so many of my questions.
- underwater 6y ago
  That smacks of a checkbox-driven mentality to software. Similar features don't have the same result. Implementation matters a lot Flip it around and ask, what is the benefit of more effective communication worth to your company? You're already paying at least $10k a month for each person on your team. Making each person just 1% more efficient should be worth $100 a month. It's not unbelievable that a communcation app would make that happen. Reaching out to a coworker saves a couple of hours of digging around. A high quality FYI channel means someone can read a proposal and spot a critical issue. Slack is far from perfect, but choosing Teams instead to save a little cash seems like madness.
nickthegreek 6y ago
Our slackbot was delivering updates 30+ mins after they were supposed to arrive
seibelj 6y ago
If I were slack I would immediately stop whatever nonsense re-design they are probably doing and redirect all resources to getting their system stable. Who cares about where my messages are being reorganized to when the damn chat doesn't even work?
- dkdk8283 6y ago
  I completely agree. While the UI was up to each individual user when we used IRC it was extremely stable. A lot of the Slack-isms are anti patterns and I can’t help but feel schadenfreude when they publicly have problems. They’ve caused enough for me.
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  Or just stop the nonsense redesigns in general. Moving things around every few months doesn't benefit anyone. If the new design was clearly superior, fine, but then if it was clearly superior, they wouldn't do it again a few months down the road. Maybe then Slack could also put resources into creating native apps. Electron supposedly streamlines development and allows teams to move quickly—but I'd rather they move slowly and make performant software.
  - jakear 6y ago
    Curious what perf problems you’ve run into on the frontend (I.e. things electron would impact)? It doesn’t seem to me like they do anything complicated enough to take time.
    - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
      I spend most of my time on a computer with a 4790K and 32 GB of ram. There, admittedly, I don’t have any performance issues—but that’s because I have a ridiculous amount of overhead for something like Slack! I sometimes use lower-end machines to test stuff, like a 2011 Macbook Air with 4GB of memory. There, I have all manner of problems—the fans spin up, and the whole Slack interface becomes extremely slow to respond. Simple things like changing channels and loading threads take seconds at a time. These computers are inherently slower by modern standards, but there’s simply no reason Slack should require so many system resources!
musha68k 6y ago
Good riddance. Better embrace a good ticketing system and go full async. Have an old fashioned call for high-bandwith in-sync issues or just for fun.
- t-writescode 6y ago
  I don't know, I'm quite fond of IRC + automatic picture loading + OAuth Support out of the box + standard client across multiple operating systems + video chat + voice calls + common bot framework + common webhook framework with multiple company's buy-in edit: to be clear, this is what Slack brings to the table.
  - u801e 6y ago
    > standard client across multiple operating systems In my case, it's suboptimal. There's a multi-second delay between when I type and when the characters show up on the screen. If I were able to use an OS specific client that didn't have these performance issues, then it would be a far better experience.
    - ek750 6y ago
      I wonder if you've only tried using the web client. I see the same terrible delays in the web client, even on a monster PC where it seems there should be no excuse for slowness. However, it seems better in their "native" electron client. Still no excuse, performance is terrible in the web client, in my experience, and I'd prefer to use that if I could.
    - iso1631 6y ago
      Just filmed myself pressing a key on slack (linux client). Framerate was 30fps. 5 frames / 160ms for the key to appear at the start of a chat line. 3 frames / 100ms for the next key to appear Firefox in a plain text box takes 2 frames / 65ms What OS you using? I haven't noticed an issue on the rare occasions I use my (7 year old) mac
      - 6y ago
edoceo 6y ago
My teams self hosted mattermost still running fine. $5/mo well spent :) very happy we switched from paid-slack.
- easton 6y ago
  Does it have SSO with Azure AD/Gsuite? that would make it a good deal.
  - daniellarusso 6y ago
    GSuite supports SAML, so it should work. https://docs.mattermost.com/deployment/sso-saml.html https://docs.mattermost.com/deployment/sso-saml.html Not sure about Azure AD.
  - edoceo 6y ago
    We use our own teams SSO/oAuth2 thing. A little homebrew solution to integrate MM, took about 2h to hack in.
  - ablekh 6y ago
    FYI: Zulip (even self-hosted) offers Azure AD and many other AuthN integrations: https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/production/authentication-methods.html https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/production/authentica....
ddevault 6y ago
IRC still works fine 30 years later, in case you were wondering.
- u801e 6y ago
  Though I wonder if it would perform as bad as Slack if people were forced to use an Electron client in a web browser.
  - ddevault 6y ago
    I mean... no one is forced to use an Electron client to access IRC, so. That's kind of one of the main benefits of using an open, standard protocol like IRC.
    - u801e 6y ago
      Slack used to have that benefit when they had their IRC and XMPP gateways online. I know there are clients out there that leverage the API to do the same thing, but it's essentially re-inventing the wheel covered by numerous existing IRC and XMPP clients.
- PieUser 6y ago
  wtf is irc
- bawolff 6y ago
  When even was the last major freenode outage that lasted more than a couple minutes? Its especially noteworthy since freenode is basically a bunch of volunteers and not a big silicon valley company with big operations team.
  - Nextgrid 6y ago
    > a bunch of volunteers and not a big silicon valley company with big operations team This is probably the key, as they're happy to keep using simple, proven tools that worked for decades and will keep working. They're not worried about "scaling", "microservices", creating problems so they can solve them and brag about it at conferences & on the (seemingly mandatory now) engineering blog, etc. It's just a bunch of people running the thing in their spare time and their incentive is to make it so that it requires as little time investment as possible, instead of over-complicating the stack on purpose so they can fill up their resume with buzzwords.
jacquesm 6y ago
So, does this increase or decrease productivity across the board?
- marcinzm 6y ago
  Define productivity. Working really hard on the wrong thing can be seen as productive but is in fact negative productivity. Slack and so on aren't about increasing individual productivity but longer term company productivity.
wortelefant 6y ago
"Degraded performance and connectivity issues" also sums up the effect of slack outages on our team
burlesona 6y ago
> We are currently investigating, and apologise for the inconvenience caused. I just want to say, this is much better than when people say "we apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused." It's really inconvenient, thanks for just acknowledging that up front.
hazelnut 6y ago
Seems like it's becoming an issue on a weekly basis. Stability is essential - if that is not prioritized it's going downhill in the long term.
- ttul 6y ago
  I don’t see how you can state that stability is not a priority. Slack has had a few very bad days, but recall that this is normal with all such rapidly scaling, massive services.
andymoe 6y ago
If they don’t get it together giant company that I work for who had thus far let engineers/product use slack is going to force us into ms teams. I hope they get it together. They are just handing it to Microsoft at this point with unforced errors.
- pojzon 6y ago
  Thing is as soon as people switch to MSTeams and their (running on Azure) infrastructure for MSTeams is going to shit itself and die. The scale of operations between MS and Slack is few leagues inbetween each other. I fear the day Im forced to start using MS products. Nothing but troubles with them - from ms servers, to cloud, to apps and “windows phone OS”. Everything low quality and buggy.
  - manigandham 6y ago
    Azure is second behind AWS and runs at a truly massive scale for all of Microsoft's services. It's not going to die from MS Teams usage which already has millions of people. Perhaps if you actually used MS products, you would have a better idea of how they run.
    - schoolornot 6y ago
      Azure may have significant market share but I don't know anyone who likes it or recommends it. I find it painful to use. I was rubbed the wrong way when I was forced to install a Windows VM on my Mac to run some Powershell commands b/c Microsoft didn't expose some kind of functionality in the console. Like, seriously? I couldn't just call the API with curl?
      - manigandham 6y ago
        You probably can since the portal just uses the same APIs. Azure also has a CLI: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cli/azure/ https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cli/azure/ All 3 major clouds have their own idiosyncrasies. They're all good and bad at different things and I don't find any single one to be definitely better or worse than the rest.
blntechie 6y ago
I’m not intelligent in the huge scale distributed systems stuff but if there are outages every couple of weeks, why would you push code to production several times each day? I honestly don’t know what’s in Slack which requires pushing code to production several times every day. I completely understand having that capability is required for any serious engineering org but what kind of churn is that? Maybe someone knowledgeable can help me understand.
- AznHisoka 6y ago
  Outages are not always caused by bugs you deploy to production. They can be due to capacity issues with too many users at once using the platform.
  - blntechie 6y ago
    Yes, I get that but wouldn’t launching new features be adding pressure during an outage which complicates the things? Capacity issue also could have been caused by a new feature probably acting greedy on the resources too.
    - Groxx 6y ago
      While true in principle... those kinds of causes tend to have pretty clear cause-effect (or at least strong time correlations), and get rolled back. New call patterns / major load changes are generally pretty obvious and at least coarsely traceable if you have monitoring anywhere.
  - rhizome 6y ago
    If that's the cause of biweekly outages, shouldn't they be building or acquiring more capacity? I realize complexity plays a role in the rate at which capacity can be added to the system, but every two weeks is very frequent for that kind of problem. "Too many users" only counts when it's a surprise.
bitwize 6y ago
Oh, thank goodness. Whenever I have difficulty using a piece of corporate infrastructure, the Gary Owens voice from Space Quest IV says in my head: "Oh, by the way, you're about to be fired." So the first thing I do is check to see if it's just me. If others, or in this case the whole freakin' world, experience the same outage issues I breathe a bit easier.
musicale 6y ago
I usually experience improved performance during any Slack outage.

108 points by oplav 6y ago

t3rabytes 6y ago

HugOps to them, this is quite the string of issues over the last few weeks.

zakirenish 6y ago

Again?

ibero 6y ago

it is getting harder and harder to convince my higher ups to not switch us on to Microsoft Teams (which they practically consider free vs the thousands we spend monthly just for the dev team). its one saving grace for us is the amount of legacy comments and history of discussions we have built up over years across conversations that is useful for reference.

Normal_gaussian 6y ago
I find this kind of usage frightening. I honestly think that a message history of longer than a week encourages poor organisation to such a degree that daily operation is significantly and silently hampered.
- abluecloud 6y ago
  agree. but ideals dont always match up with reality.
- abeppu 6y ago
  Do you have suggestions for process or tooling that allows you to quickly / cheaply take the information or insights that arise from conversation and integrate them into a longer term store? And how to make that longer term location really useful? To the degree that teams fall into the habit of just searching slack history for info, I think those are the two key factors: - we remember bits of conversation, and who said something, or in which channel, can be a good way to rediscover the full details; note-taking and aggregating stuff into a knowledge base or docs repository can strip out that info making it harder to rediscover. (The obvious caveat here is that there can be sharp difference between re-finding a conversation you participated in e.g. in your team, vs finding information about a system you depend on from a conversation you didn't participate in.) - the process of getting stuff shared in slack into a longer-term knowledge base can be slow and tedious, and may require someone to spend time deciding which pieces are potentially valuable, generalizing from the specific case discussed to a form that makes sense out of context, condensing what was said over many messages, arbitrating between views which are valuable but conflicting, etc. I would like to see an NLP tool for summarizing threads and extracting the information which is most likely to be reusable.
- veritas3241 6y ago
  We implemented a 90 day retention policy for all slack messages about a year ago. Everyone was pretty resistant to it at first, but it's been pretty great, honestly. It forces us to put things we'll want to remember in the handbook and encourages a more async culture. Personally I'd be happy with a 30 day retention policy!
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- NationalPark 6y ago
  I find searching chat history much more useful than what people used to do, which is throw anything that might be important into a wiki that never gets updated. At least in Slack you get some context around a piece of information rather than a hasty summary.
quaffapint 6y ago
I don't know why we don't switch to Teams. I enjoy slack and the history of comments is useful, but like you said Teams is already included in things we're paying for so why not use it. We might have to re-do some bots, but if it saves the company money and works basically the same it makes sense to switch.
- zeveb 6y ago
  > I don't know why we don't switch to Teams. If you'd used Teams, you'd know why. It is hilariously bad, gratuitously slow, ludicrously weird. I have periodically had to use Microsoft's team chat tools over the years, dating back to Yammer or perhaps even further, and for whatever reason it seems they just do not get chat. Better question: why not just switch to Mattermost?
  - CharlesW 6y ago
    > If you'd used Teams, you'd know why. It is hilariously bad, gratuitously slow, ludicrously weird. I use both all day, every day. I don't find Teams to be any worse, slower, or weirder than Slack. Teams also does a lot that Slack can't do. As one small examples, it seems amazing that I can't add tabs to a Slack channel like I can in Teams.
- atraac 6y ago
  > We might have to re-do some bots, You might not even be able to, Teams API is quite badly convoluted and limited. You simply won't be able to f.e. recreate Slackbot experience in group conversations(chats).
- dividedbyzero 6y ago
  I have to use both heavily at work right now, one part of the company is on Slack, another on Teams, I'm involved with both. Despite its (many) issues, Slack is just so, so much nicer than Teams, the difference has an actual, substantial impact on communication. Teams feels like a disconnected and disorientating mess of ideas copied from other communication solutions in a huge hurry without understanding them fully and without even getting them to a point where they "click" and work as intended, and without thinking about how they fit into the big picture. Sole exception: Video calls are much better, when they work. The rest is a mess and makes communication a much more tedious effort than it has to be.
altdatathrow 6y ago
Don't you guys find the MS Teams "chat" interface an absolute mess? When I tried it a few months ago it felt like another ridiculous UI that wanted to emulate mobile phone messages for some reason with giant chat bubbles, tons of wasted white space, emojiis, avatars, etc. Slack's "compact" mode definitely isn't perfect but it's better. We as a tech world need to just revert back to the simple format most IRC clients use.
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  Yeah, I'm not a huge fan of Slack in the first place but Teams's UI just seems like an utter mess. I don't understand how I'm supposed to use it. I'm sure I could figure it out if I spent 15 minutes, but it's a damn chat app. Why is this so hard?
  - thinkharderdev 6y ago
    MSFT just pushed a UI update to Outlook on Mac that is actually really nice. I'm hoping that maybe they've finally got their UX together and Teams will improve. Pretty sure my company will be axing Slack in favor of Teams in the next year or two. Maybe by then it will have a reasonably good UX.
  - toyg 6y ago
    The thing is, their threaded interface kinda sucked, so they built another one ('chat') and tried to push the idea that 'Teams' (threaded) is for 'permanent' info, and 'Chat' is for the ethereal one. Except nobody really bothers with switching back and forth, most teams just choose one or the other and do everything in there. Bit of a mess. I cannot fault them on the meeting functionality and sharepoint integrations though, they are excellent.
  - selykg 6y ago
    As someone that uses Teams. It's not pleasant to use on a Mac. My coworkers use Windows PCs and they all have a ton of fun problems with things as well. I'm not so sure switching to Teams is a better move than Slack.
ffpip 6y ago
Please dont. Microsoft teams is a mess of chat boxes. You'll regret it. Just don't.
dkdk8283 6y ago
Keeping comments is a bad practice: If your slack ever gets compromised you’ll wish you deleted everything. We purge every 6 mo. Keep updates in tickets.
- bawolff 6y ago
  And if your ticket system gets compromised? I get it from the perspective of slack is a disorganized mess in terms of long term history, but moving sensitive data from one system to another with similar security doesnt seem like a win (or loss) for security to me.
  - dkdk8283 6y ago
    When I update a ticket I write it expecting someone else to read it. It’s well written and thought out. When I chat I say whatever is reasonable, it’s low effort. Note I didn’t call out sensitive information specifically. Just that you wished you deleted messages. You shouldn’t store secrets in a ticket system either.
    - kurbin 6y ago
      Still don't quite follow your comment. Is "keeping updates in tickets" separate from the comment on deleting messages?
      - dkdk8283 6y ago
        I worked at a place that used Slack pings in lieu of tickets. The history was kept for ~7 years. This is a huge liability IMO. A off comment by the CEO could be misunderstood by an attacker or the public if it was to be leaked. I’m saying it’s ok for quick cursory discussions but those who retain Slack messages for tribal knowledge tend to have larger organizational issues. This knowledge should be in tickets where it’s expected to write well written responses with the intention of documenting knowledge.
- ciarannolan 6y ago
  We purge daily. We use it as an ephemeral messaging service, not as a wiki.
eggsaregreat 6y ago
Try Teams, it's not as bad as most comments here seem to indicate. I understand if you're used to the slack UI (as most users of Hackers News are), it seems like a step backwards, but that's only because you're looking for a 1:1 replacement for slack. Having taking the route of going from Slack to Teams, where Teams is better at, IMHO, is the following: - Within channels, all conversations are, by default, organized into threads. This gives you to the feeling that there are lots of chat boxes, but once we spend a few days with it, our team started noticing that our conversations have become more structured. However starting a new "thread" off the main channel discussion in slack takes significant conscious effort and its very easy for multiple conversations to get interleaved and become a mess. - Integrated video/audio calls, along with call built-in note taking, makes for a very seamless jump from text to voice/video. With Slack, we needed to maintain separate Zoom account, as it's built-in voice/video chat was pretty bad. - If your IT has already sold its soul to Microsoft Enterprise infra, Teams just fits in really really well, with its Active Directory/Azure AD/O365 integrations. It's no wonder that Teams is doing well in the Enterprise space. We still use GSuite for our emails, but given how less our team emails these days, if I were given an option to start from scratch, I'd probably choose to host our email on O365 outlook (even though I feel Gmail's UI is superior). Of course, nothing is without its problems - you're dealing with Microsoft products, so except to hassle around a little bit with licensing, bad markdown abilities and a few other quirks. I've seen complaints of the client being really slow at times, but my team hasn't seen this issue in the recent past, since we switched in, except once or twice, where a restart of the client solves it. One part of our team (~12 people) used Hangouts Chat for a few months, which has been around for more than a few years, and every six months. It sucks. They just released a new update to how their buttons looked every 6 months. I don't know why Google even bothers putting up this product. The criticism for Teams is disproportionate in Hacker News, I don't understand why. I encourage you to try it out for a few days with a select group of people and make up your own mind.
- atraac 6y ago
  It's not that much about the UI even(which is terrible as a lot of other people here explained), but rather the disgustingly bad performance and costant issues. I use teams every day at work, it eats insane amounts of ram, it leaks memory during video conferences, it's practically unusable during a call, switching tabs from chat to teams takes anywhere from one to five seconds, push notifications simply do not work properly, so does motification badge - it also often takes seconds for teams to acknowledge that you've seen certain activity. Text input has such an insane latency that it's uncomfortable to write, often eating characters from the next message after pressing return if you start typing too quickly. And this is just a tip of the iceberg. Almost all of few hundreads of people in our org hate the app as well and we're almost purely a Microsoft shop. I liked Slack until it became incredibly bloated. But even now, it's still in another league when compared to the abysmal experience that Teams offer.
agentdrtran 6y ago
Teams is awful compared to Slack, Slack's UX and feature set blow it out of the water.
- StavrosK 6y ago
  And Zulip's UX is far better than Slack's. If you haven't tried it, I recommend it.
mrweasel 6y ago
I don't understand the fascination with Microsoft Teams, it doesn't work. Sound simply doesn't work in the app, full stop. You need to use the web version, in Chrome, because nothing else works... Well Edge maybe, who knows. There is apparently no way to get sound working in the Mac client, meaning that it might as well not exist.
- CharlesW 6y ago
  > There is apparently no way to get sound working in the Mac client, meaning that it might as well not exist. FWIW, it works fine for a team in our company who regularly posts audio content for review. Many of us use macOS.
  - mrweasel 6y ago
    But can you use it for a video conference?
    - CharlesW 6y ago
      Yes. We use both Teams and Webex (I haven't used Slack for videoconferencing so I can't compare), and they seem comparable. There's a 49 on-screen participant limit, with a 250 participant limit overall.
- underwater 6y ago
  That's a pretty silly statement. Microsoft has not built a product where sounds flat out "doesn't work" on any Mac.
  - mrweasel 6y ago
    No one at my company has managed to have a functional video conference using the Mac client, and I talked to people at two major software development companies in Denmark, they have the same problem. The web client works. It’s not as good or easy as Google Meet, or what ever it’s called, but it works. The Mac client does NOT work and have not worked for at least six month.
whoisburbansky 6y ago
The "amount of legacy comments and history" is the single most useful thing about Slack, imo. Teams in comparison was an absolute nightmare to try to find references to old conversations in, it felt like throwing away information into a bog, never to be retrieved ever again. Slack's archival search was the biggest reason I was able to onboard to a new team as quickly as I did, especially given WFH, since it removed the need to ask an actual person about so many of my questions.
underwater 6y ago
That smacks of a checkbox-driven mentality to software. Similar features don't have the same result. Implementation matters a lot Flip it around and ask, what is the benefit of more effective communication worth to your company? You're already paying at least $10k a month for each person on your team. Making each person just 1% more efficient should be worth $100 a month. It's not unbelievable that a communcation app would make that happen. Reaching out to a coworker saves a couple of hours of digging around. A high quality FYI channel means someone can read a proposal and spot a critical issue. Slack is far from perfect, but choosing Teams instead to save a little cash seems like madness.

nickthegreek 6y ago

Our slackbot was delivering updates 30+ mins after they were supposed to arrive

seibelj 6y ago

If I were slack I would immediately stop whatever nonsense re-design they are probably doing and redirect all resources to getting their system stable. Who cares about where my messages are being reorganized to when the damn chat doesn't even work?

dkdk8283 6y ago
I completely agree. While the UI was up to each individual user when we used IRC it was extremely stable. A lot of the Slack-isms are anti patterns and I can’t help but feel schadenfreude when they publicly have problems. They’ve caused enough for me.
Wowfunhappy 6y ago
Or just stop the nonsense redesigns in general. Moving things around every few months doesn't benefit anyone. If the new design was clearly superior, fine, but then if it was clearly superior, they wouldn't do it again a few months down the road. Maybe then Slack could also put resources into creating native apps. Electron supposedly streamlines development and allows teams to move quickly—but I'd rather they move slowly and make performant software.
- jakear 6y ago
  Curious what perf problems you’ve run into on the frontend (I.e. things electron would impact)? It doesn’t seem to me like they do anything complicated enough to take time.
  - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
    I spend most of my time on a computer with a 4790K and 32 GB of ram. There, admittedly, I don’t have any performance issues—but that’s because I have a ridiculous amount of overhead for something like Slack! I sometimes use lower-end machines to test stuff, like a 2011 Macbook Air with 4GB of memory. There, I have all manner of problems—the fans spin up, and the whole Slack interface becomes extremely slow to respond. Simple things like changing channels and loading threads take seconds at a time. These computers are inherently slower by modern standards, but there’s simply no reason Slack should require so many system resources!

musha68k 6y ago

Good riddance. Better embrace a good ticketing system and go full async. Have an old fashioned call for high-bandwith in-sync issues or just for fun.

t-writescode 6y ago
I don't know, I'm quite fond of IRC + automatic picture loading + OAuth Support out of the box + standard client across multiple operating systems + video chat + voice calls + common bot framework + common webhook framework with multiple company's buy-in edit: to be clear, this is what Slack brings to the table.
- u801e 6y ago
  > standard client across multiple operating systems In my case, it's suboptimal. There's a multi-second delay between when I type and when the characters show up on the screen. If I were able to use an OS specific client that didn't have these performance issues, then it would be a far better experience.
  - ek750 6y ago
    I wonder if you've only tried using the web client. I see the same terrible delays in the web client, even on a monster PC where it seems there should be no excuse for slowness. However, it seems better in their "native" electron client. Still no excuse, performance is terrible in the web client, in my experience, and I'd prefer to use that if I could.
  - iso1631 6y ago
    Just filmed myself pressing a key on slack (linux client). Framerate was 30fps. 5 frames / 160ms for the key to appear at the start of a chat line. 3 frames / 100ms for the next key to appear Firefox in a plain text box takes 2 frames / 65ms What OS you using? I haven't noticed an issue on the rare occasions I use my (7 year old) mac
    - 6y ago

edoceo 6y ago

My teams self hosted mattermost still running fine. $5/mo well spent :) very happy we switched from paid-slack.

easton 6y ago
Does it have SSO with Azure AD/Gsuite? that would make it a good deal.
- daniellarusso 6y ago
  GSuite supports SAML, so it should work. https://docs.mattermost.com/deployment/sso-saml.html https://docs.mattermost.com/deployment/sso-saml.html Not sure about Azure AD.
- edoceo 6y ago
  We use our own teams SSO/oAuth2 thing. A little homebrew solution to integrate MM, took about 2h to hack in.
- ablekh 6y ago
  FYI: Zulip (even self-hosted) offers Azure AD and many other AuthN integrations: https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/production/authentication-methods.html https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/production/authentica....

ddevault 6y ago

IRC still works fine 30 years later, in case you were wondering.

u801e 6y ago
Though I wonder if it would perform as bad as Slack if people were forced to use an Electron client in a web browser.
- ddevault 6y ago
  I mean... no one is forced to use an Electron client to access IRC, so. That's kind of one of the main benefits of using an open, standard protocol like IRC.
  - u801e 6y ago
    Slack used to have that benefit when they had their IRC and XMPP gateways online. I know there are clients out there that leverage the API to do the same thing, but it's essentially re-inventing the wheel covered by numerous existing IRC and XMPP clients.
PieUser 6y ago
wtf is irc
bawolff 6y ago
When even was the last major freenode outage that lasted more than a couple minutes? Its especially noteworthy since freenode is basically a bunch of volunteers and not a big silicon valley company with big operations team.
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  > a bunch of volunteers and not a big silicon valley company with big operations team This is probably the key, as they're happy to keep using simple, proven tools that worked for decades and will keep working. They're not worried about "scaling", "microservices", creating problems so they can solve them and brag about it at conferences & on the (seemingly mandatory now) engineering blog, etc. It's just a bunch of people running the thing in their spare time and their incentive is to make it so that it requires as little time investment as possible, instead of over-complicating the stack on purpose so they can fill up their resume with buzzwords.

jacquesm 6y ago

So, does this increase or decrease productivity across the board?

marcinzm 6y ago
Define productivity. Working really hard on the wrong thing can be seen as productive but is in fact negative productivity. Slack and so on aren't about increasing individual productivity but longer term company productivity.

wortelefant 6y ago

"Degraded performance and connectivity issues" also sums up the effect of slack outages on our team

burlesona 6y ago

> We are currently investigating, and apologise for the inconvenience caused. I just want to say, this is much better than when people say "we apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused." It's really inconvenient, thanks for just acknowledging that up front.

hazelnut 6y ago

Seems like it's becoming an issue on a weekly basis. Stability is essential - if that is not prioritized it's going downhill in the long term.

ttul 6y ago
I don’t see how you can state that stability is not a priority. Slack has had a few very bad days, but recall that this is normal with all such rapidly scaling, massive services.

andymoe 6y ago

If they don’t get it together giant company that I work for who had thus far let engineers/product use slack is going to force us into ms teams. I hope they get it together. They are just handing it to Microsoft at this point with unforced errors.

pojzon 6y ago
Thing is as soon as people switch to MSTeams and their (running on Azure) infrastructure for MSTeams is going to shit itself and die. The scale of operations between MS and Slack is few leagues inbetween each other. I fear the day Im forced to start using MS products. Nothing but troubles with them - from ms servers, to cloud, to apps and “windows phone OS”. Everything low quality and buggy.
- manigandham 6y ago
  Azure is second behind AWS and runs at a truly massive scale for all of Microsoft's services. It's not going to die from MS Teams usage which already has millions of people. Perhaps if you actually used MS products, you would have a better idea of how they run.
  - schoolornot 6y ago
    Azure may have significant market share but I don't know anyone who likes it or recommends it. I find it painful to use. I was rubbed the wrong way when I was forced to install a Windows VM on my Mac to run some Powershell commands b/c Microsoft didn't expose some kind of functionality in the console. Like, seriously? I couldn't just call the API with curl?
    - manigandham 6y ago
      You probably can since the portal just uses the same APIs. Azure also has a CLI: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cli/azure/ https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cli/azure/ All 3 major clouds have their own idiosyncrasies. They're all good and bad at different things and I don't find any single one to be definitely better or worse than the rest.

blntechie 6y ago

I’m not intelligent in the huge scale distributed systems stuff but if there are outages every couple of weeks, why would you push code to production several times each day? I honestly don’t know what’s in Slack which requires pushing code to production several times every day. I completely understand having that capability is required for any serious engineering org but what kind of churn is that? Maybe someone knowledgeable can help me understand.

AznHisoka 6y ago
Outages are not always caused by bugs you deploy to production. They can be due to capacity issues with too many users at once using the platform.
- blntechie 6y ago
  Yes, I get that but wouldn’t launching new features be adding pressure during an outage which complicates the things? Capacity issue also could have been caused by a new feature probably acting greedy on the resources too.
  - Groxx 6y ago
    While true in principle... those kinds of causes tend to have pretty clear cause-effect (or at least strong time correlations), and get rolled back. New call patterns / major load changes are generally pretty obvious and at least coarsely traceable if you have monitoring anywhere.
- rhizome 6y ago
  If that's the cause of biweekly outages, shouldn't they be building or acquiring more capacity? I realize complexity plays a role in the rate at which capacity can be added to the system, but every two weeks is very frequent for that kind of problem. "Too many users" only counts when it's a surprise.

bitwize 6y ago

Oh, thank goodness. Whenever I have difficulty using a piece of corporate infrastructure, the Gary Owens voice from Space Quest IV says in my head: "Oh, by the way, you're about to be fired." So the first thing I do is check to see if it's just me. If others, or in this case the whole freakin' world, experience the same outage issues I breathe a bit easier.

musicale 6y ago

I usually experience improved performance during any Slack outage.