6 ms·

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 care

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!
    - jakear 6y ago
      I understand where you’re coming from, but I also think that having a generally-reasonable-ish response time on decade old hardware that was considered lightweight-tier even at the time is not as awful as you make it seem.
      - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
        I'd expect to have the same experience on most $300 Windows laptops, though. And even on better computers, what is that doing to electricity usage and multi-tasking performance?
      - willcipriano 6y ago
        AIM, ICQ and Yahoo Chats would work fine on that machine what features does Slack have that requires the additional resources?
      - maccard 6y ago
        I'm on a 2017 MacBook Pro right now with a 300Mb connection, and using the web interface takes multiple seconds to change channels, has a > 1 second delay in typing (resulting in missing keystrokes). My workstation isn't a particularly pleasant experience and it's _much_ beefier than this machine. My partner uses MS teams on a beater of a windows laptop with at most 4GB of ram and it performs substantially better. I've made multiple support complaints to slack about their memory usage, there's been times where it's been using Gigabytes of memory on my workstation, and I've actually had to kill slack to compile on more than one occasion.
        jakear 6y ago
        > My partner uses MS teams on a beater of a windows laptop with at most 4GB of ram and it performs substantially better. So not an electron issue, an engineering issue. That's I think at the root of all these "electron is bad" comments... poorly engineered code is slow. It will be slow if it's C++ or JS or Perl. But well engineered code is fast. And it can be fast in C++ or JS or Perl.
  - tomxor 6y ago
    I find the biggest perf issue is typing! seriously it actually lags behind my typing at an alarming delay sometimes, this is not being used on a slow or busy machine, there is something going on in slack front end that evaluates on every keystroke and sometimes it's really really fucking slow.
CreRecombinase 6y ago
I think the worst thing you could do in this situation is put the redesign people on the infrastructure team
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Kiro 6y ago
  Exactly. The kind of comment you're replying to is what I expect on a forum where gamers complain about companies not putting content artists on "fixing the servers", not Hacker News.
  - chuckSu 6y ago
    You expect too much of hacker news
- ttul 6y ago
  This. It’s not as if Slack is a tiny startup with three engineers. They’re a large company now of 2,700 or so, with nearly 1,000 working in engineering. At that scale, I am certain they can manage a UX redesign in parallel with any amount of back end engineering required.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 6y ago
  I thought they already were, given what is happening. Sorry, couldn't resist making the joke.
young_unixer 6y ago
I'd focus on improving performance. The web version is so unusably slow that I don't know how Slack is still taken seriously as a company How is a multi-billion dollar company incapable of implementing a web chat in a competent way?
- u801e 6y ago
  I'm forced to use Slack for work and I notice that there's a multi-second delay between my keyboard input and when the characters show up on the screen.
  - adrianpike 6y ago
    I believe you, but I think you're hitting something completely unique to your setup and external to Slack. I've never seen antyhing like that, what are you running it on? Do you have ways to inspect to find where the bottleneck is?
    - u801e 6y ago
      > I believe you, but I think you're hitting something completely unique to your setup and external to Slack. That's entirely possible, but this problem has persisted throughout multiple versions of Firefox and Fedora. For all I know, it could be due to the VPN connection, but even then, the VPN connection isn't that slow. Zoom video conferences still work reasonably well over it.
  - corytheboyd 6y ago
    You must use a different Slack than I do, because I use nothing but the browser client and have had zero issues like this or the parent comment. Get up in arms about the outages, because that’s a bit more justified, but this feels a bit contrived?
- ttul 6y ago
  It’s as if they’re running a gigantic-scale, totally unique collaboration platform the likes of which the world has never seen, during a period in which a global pandemic has increased the use of the platform massively, leading to scaling challenges that anyone outside of Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Dropbox, Slack and a mere handful of other giants would scarcely comprehend...

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!
  - jakear 6y ago
    I understand where you’re coming from, but I also think that having a generally-reasonable-ish response time on decade old hardware that was considered lightweight-tier even at the time is not as awful as you make it seem.
    - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
      I'd expect to have the same experience on most $300 Windows laptops, though. And even on better computers, what is that doing to electricity usage and multi-tasking performance?
    - willcipriano 6y ago
      AIM, ICQ and Yahoo Chats would work fine on that machine what features does Slack have that requires the additional resources?
    - maccard 6y ago
      I'm on a 2017 MacBook Pro right now with a 300Mb connection, and using the web interface takes multiple seconds to change channels, has a > 1 second delay in typing (resulting in missing keystrokes). My workstation isn't a particularly pleasant experience and it's _much_ beefier than this machine. My partner uses MS teams on a beater of a windows laptop with at most 4GB of ram and it performs substantially better. I've made multiple support complaints to slack about their memory usage, there's been times where it's been using Gigabytes of memory on my workstation, and I've actually had to kill slack to compile on more than one occasion.
      - jakear 6y ago
        > My partner uses MS teams on a beater of a windows laptop with at most 4GB of ram and it performs substantially better. So not an electron issue, an engineering issue. That's I think at the root of all these "electron is bad" comments... poorly engineered code is slow. It will be slow if it's C++ or JS or Perl. But well engineered code is fast. And it can be fast in C++ or JS or Perl.
- tomxor 6y ago
  I find the biggest perf issue is typing! seriously it actually lags behind my typing at an alarming delay sometimes, this is not being used on a slow or busy machine, there is something going on in slack front end that evaluates on every keystroke and sometimes it's really really fucking slow.

CreRecombinase 6y ago

I think the worst thing you could do in this situation is put the redesign people on the infrastructure team

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Kiro 6y ago
Exactly. The kind of comment you're replying to is what I expect on a forum where gamers complain about companies not putting content artists on "fixing the servers", not Hacker News.
- chuckSu 6y ago
  You expect too much of hacker news
ttul 6y ago
This. It’s not as if Slack is a tiny startup with three engineers. They’re a large company now of 2,700 or so, with nearly 1,000 working in engineering. At that scale, I am certain they can manage a UX redesign in parallel with any amount of back end engineering required.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Fire-Dragon-DoL 6y ago
I thought they already were, given what is happening. Sorry, couldn't resist making the joke.

young_unixer 6y ago

I'd focus on improving performance. The web version is so unusably slow that I don't know how Slack is still taken seriously as a company How is a multi-billion dollar company incapable of implementing a web chat in a competent way?

u801e 6y ago
I'm forced to use Slack for work and I notice that there's a multi-second delay between my keyboard input and when the characters show up on the screen.
- adrianpike 6y ago
  I believe you, but I think you're hitting something completely unique to your setup and external to Slack. I've never seen antyhing like that, what are you running it on? Do you have ways to inspect to find where the bottleneck is?
  - u801e 6y ago
    > I believe you, but I think you're hitting something completely unique to your setup and external to Slack. That's entirely possible, but this problem has persisted throughout multiple versions of Firefox and Fedora. For all I know, it could be due to the VPN connection, but even then, the VPN connection isn't that slow. Zoom video conferences still work reasonably well over it.
- corytheboyd 6y ago
  You must use a different Slack than I do, because I use nothing but the browser client and have had zero issues like this or the parent comment. Get up in arms about the outages, because that’s a bit more justified, but this feels a bit contrived?
ttul 6y ago
It’s as if they’re running a gigantic-scale, totally unique collaboration platform the likes of which the world has never seen, during a period in which a global pandemic has increased the use of the platform massively, leading to scaling challenges that anyone outside of Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Dropbox, Slack and a mere handful of other giants would scarcely comprehend...