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Slack is the right tool for the wrong way to work

148 points by jseliger 6y ago

didibus 6y ago
To this day, I still wonder if the app is called Slack because it was designed to help you slack off?
gcblkjaidfj 6y ago
slack IS email. corporate communication changed medium but remained the same. paper/reports/memos > email clients > rich email clients > webmail+blackberry > webmail+email apps > slack (desktop email app) it is just the first, crappy, desktop email app client. The incumbents will eat them soon, just like microsoft and oracle ate all other email clients in the 90s. I mean, slack is already in someone’s plate.
- NikolaeVarius 6y ago
  No its not. What I find frustrating about Slack is that it gives certain people the ability to say "i didn't see that" regarding important work information. I regard properly reading your email part of your job, and if you're missing important emails, you're failing at it. I find that unless you send an email alongside whatever Slack notification, many people will just ignore it.
  - tomtheelder 6y ago
    That's just a specific element of your workplace's culture then. At jobs I've worked at it would have been much more reasonable to say "I didn't see that email" than "I didn't see that Slack message." Like all communication methods, the standards that are set around them are more important than the mechanism itself.
  - thrower123 6y ago
    The problem with Slack-alikes is that you get buried under a deluge of notifications, so it is needlessly difficult to stay on top of things. Email is far better in this regard.
    - FalconSensei 6y ago
      I only have notification for DMs, @'s and threads I'm following. No problem so far. Now, if someone sends me an email, it might get buried between other stuff
  - jordan_curve 6y ago
    I feel the exact opposite. If someone emails me, I’m likely to not see it, but if someone @s me on slack there’s no chance I miss it. The whole upside of slack for me is that it makes it easier for me not to miss the things I absolutely need to see. I get a deluge of automated or templated emails every day. How am I ever supposed to reliably sift through the noise?
    - pseudalopex 6y ago
      You can set up filters. How am I ever supposed to reliably sift through the noise on Slack?
      - edmundsauto 6y ago
        Culturally, you make the onus on the sender to make sure the receiver got the message.
        gcblkjaidfj 6y ago
        And then you get the most toxic slack trope: premptive read receipt. > hi edmundsauto (silence until you reply)
  - nchi3 6y ago
    That's probably because Slack isn't the "main" communication where you are. Where I work it's the opposite, people answer slack but don't notice emails, because Slack is how we're "supposed" to communicate within the company.
- 2sk21 6y ago
  Except that searching through email was a lot easier than searching for something in Slack. Important conversations would be scattered all throughout slack. I had a notes file in which I would store URLs for these important messages. I just retired recently and can say truthfully that simply not having to deal with Slack has improved my sense of wellbeing immensely.
  - gcblkjaidfj 6y ago
    Slack super power is that you can search on other people's "email". So it kinda of make up but don't for the worse search
eightysixfour 6y ago
Slack drives me a bit nuts - everyone at my office loves it because it is very well optimized for engagement and, well, chat. That's great and all but in a work environment I want my tools optimized for communication and work, which are often at odds with chat. The SNR is completely wrong for me.
kungito 6y ago
I mean slack isn't even that good. It's a shame it got so entrenched. I wish Discord makes a business productivity push
- arawde 6y ago
  I've been telling my friends for months that if I were to create a startup I would use discord over slack, and my argument is always predicated around the fact that if you want to have a voice conversation with someone and share your screen the flow for it is easily 5x better than the slack calls. They laugh at me, but I think its a viable use case
  - tomtheelder 6y ago
    Slack has a better ecosystem of work related add-ons, but to be honest I've never found those to be useful. I agree I'd prefer Discord.
    - arawde 6y ago
      The work add-ons for slack is something which is a strong selling point, but I've found Discord hooks to be straightforward to set up for my use cases.
  - paxys 6y ago
    Look up their terms of service before considering it for work use. At the end of the day Discord is not enterprise software, and so will never be considered seriously for it.
    - arawde 6y ago
      This is a good point, one of the points that my friend made is that without a comparable revenue model you always run the risk of Discord shutting down whereas Slack wouldn't. With that said, I would happily pay for an enhanced nitro subscription to discord that allowed for enterprise use
tonymet 6y ago
Slack is a big setback for the labor movement . It undermines any distinction between work and leisure
- Raphmedia 6y ago
  Uninstall it from your phone? Turn off notifications? Make a work profile on your android and get off it once your shift ends? I use Slack daily and I've never brought it home with me.
  - atarian 6y ago
    Pretty much this. If you don't set boundaries, your job will set yours.
    - tonymet 6y ago
      Boundaries are set by the group culture. If your peers are always available, and you are not, you are the odd one out.
  - davidw 6y ago
    Yep. I'm happy to give out my phone number to people at work in case of emergencies, but I do not want work notifications at random hours of the day when I'm not working.
  - mariodiana 6y ago
    Slack has a feature to turn off notifications outside of working hours (or whatever hours you choose). That's what I use.
  - runarberg 6y ago
    Not saying you’re wrong, but it shouldn’t be up to the victim to prevent being abused for labor. A workplace that allows a tool to pervade into their worker’s personal life is not doing a good job protecting their workers, and are complacent in the abuse.
paxys 6y ago
Here's what this conversation always boils down to: Slack is a tool, just like one of probably dozens you use in your day-to-day work. It doesn't set or enforce any guidelines for how it should be used. If left unchecked it has a tendency to amplify the worst parts of your company's culture. If you make an effort to moderate it, it can be a huge asset to productivity. Speaking of the example in the article, there is absolutely no reason clients should have direct message channels with your company's employees and expect to get a response 24/7. This is true with email, Slack, SMS and every other form of communication. The criticism I most often hear is "Slack expects me to be online all the time". No, YOUR COMPANY expects you to be online all the time. Slack can be closed with one click.
- airstrike 6y ago
  > there is absolutely no reason clients should have direct message channels with your company's employees and expect to get a response 24/7. Uhh... except in Investment Banking. I suppose when your client is paying so much, they rightfully expect a 24/7 hotline.
  - Swizec 6y ago
    Often baked into SaaS pricing models as well. At “call us” pricing tier $Company includes 24/7 support with guaranteed response time SLA Oh you want the 30min SLA? Add 2 zeroes The company then institutes the right on-call practices, ensures support staff is trained, triage is correct, etc
    - paxys 6y ago
      Yeah, that's my point though. You can't expect your employees to be permanently on call, watch them burn out, then blame Slack.
      - jkaplowitz 6y ago
        I hope the other commenter's idea of "right on-call practices" involve hiring enough employees to give a humane on-call schedule, and compensating appropriately for the on-call time. That's my idea of the right on-call practices, and would go very well with "add 2 zeroes" in the pricing of that SLA. But, yeah, a lot of places don't do that.
pupppet 6y ago
Slack is like a bad email client. It takes the onus off the message author and instead places it on everyone else. It's not your job to make sure I'm CC'd when necessary, it's now my job to wade through dozens of channels to make sure I'm always up to date.
- girzel 6y ago
  This has to be the core question of how all messaging/communications channels work. How much work is it to effectively send messages? How much work is it to effectively consume messages? I feel like this dichotomy ends up deciding so much about the human effects that eventually arise from these software decisions. I do a lot of work with people in China, and my main complain with WeChat as a "do everything" medium is that it is 100% set up to prioritize the sender. In practice, this means set up to prioritize the boss. It is an absolute disaster for those on the receiving end: it's nearly impossible to keep track of and effectively act on incoming information. You must respond RIGHT NOW or that information is essentially lost. In the end, I believe a messaging channel that requires more upfront work on the part of the sender ends up providing knock-on positive effects for everyone involved. But due to the generally ego-first thought process of all human beings – and the absolutely ego-first though process of most bosses – the channel that affords the least friction in sending appeals the most. Everyone likes to think of themselves as being on the originating end of the firehose.
- cwhiz 6y ago
  If you manage your business through email then your email app eventually look similar to Slack. Folders with rules to route mail to the right place so you don’t miss it.
wpietri 6y ago
Yeah, I think of Slack as the virtual version of the open office. Anybody can bother you at any time. In the real world, if we ever return to it, I like having physical team rooms, the sort of thing you have naturally when it's an early-stage startup in a single space. When everybody knows each other and is focused on the same goal, it's not hard to work out good communication and space-use norms. But scaling that up into large open-plan offices can quickly turn maddening. It's the tragedy of the audio commons, and anybody can walk up and tap you on the shoulder. For me Slack is the same problem, but worse in that it removes some of they physical signals and feedback mechanisms that work in an open-plan office.
- Heliosmaster 6y ago
  What you are describing isn't the problem for Slack, is the problem of requiring a green status icon: https://m.signalvnoise.com/the-presence-prison/ https://m.signalvnoise.com/the-presence-prison/
- telesilla 6y ago
  We make liberal use of emoticon statuses in Slack: the 'away' icon (red circle with a line) is extremely visual and obvious for us to know which staff are out, sick, busy.. It's become like closed doors for us over time as we all agree to respect it. It probably helps we are over several timezones and each work irregular hours according to what's happening (kids pick up, teaching, sports..): we can't count on who is there at any time and consequently run the business asynchronously except for pre-planned meetings.
- PragmaticPulp 6y ago
  > Yeah, I think of Slack as the virtual version of the open office. Anybody can bother you at any time. Open office doesn't mean that anyone can bother you at any time. It's important that companies set expectations about these things and enforce them to avoid that slippery slope. Same goes for Slack. Once you expand beyond intra-team communication, it's important to set some expectations for what is and is not appropriate in Slack. At the least happy point in my career, I had to be a member of over 100 Slack channels to get my job done and I received upwards of 100-200 @here and @channel notifications every day as people competed to stand above the noise. It was miserable. At the worst point, my time tracker was counting upwards of 4 hours per day spent in the Slack app. Ironically, my efforts to push things to e-mails and scheduled calls was met with a lot of resistance from people who were afraid it would hamper flexibility and ruin asynchronous workflows. We also had absurd levels of office politics because people were treating each other as screen names instead of actual people working in other offices. I would take an open-office floorplan over that nonsense any day.
pacificat0r 6y ago
I don't super understand these articles. Before slack we had Lync, and then skype, and now it's slack. It doesn't replace email, it replaced those other communication apps. I am aware that Slack has a crusade against email but the article or that business example didn't ask why not both? There's a need for real-time communication and there's a need for email too.
- kelp 6y ago
  For better or for worse (I think to some degree, worse) I've found Slack has eliminated about 90% of my email use at work. My work email is almost all automated emails, communications with people external to the company, and a small percent of internal communications. Nearly everything else is done over Slack. So in my experience, it certainly is replacing email. Now, I'm not sure that it should. But it is.
- 2sk21 6y ago
  At two companies where I have worked recently (IBM and a small startup), Slack quickly displaced email. Email was hardly used in either organization.
- paxys 6y ago
  Can't speak of other roles, but at least within tech/dev teams I have encountered Slack has replaced email almost 100%.
- cwhiz 6y ago
  For me, Slack has completely replaced internal email. Email is now almost exclusively for external communication and endless newsletters.
Privacy846 6y ago
I have used Slack for two years now and don’t see any problems with it. 35 people at my company.
- rubixdude 6y ago
  You wouldn’t with only 35 people. Wait until you hit 350.
  - FalconSensei 6y ago
    Probably those 350 people will be divided in teams, and those teams will have separate channels, right?
runjake 6y ago
I guess we are in the minority. Slack has been awesome for boosting communication and collaboration in our department. It's effectively killed awful e-mail communication on issues. Instead, we carry on live, highly-interactive communications. Everyone pretty much understands if you are busy, however, and don't respond immediately. Work without Slack would be awful.
- paxys 6y ago
  You are definitely the non-vocal majority.
  - denimnerd42 6y ago
    or the one still in the honeymoon period.
    - DangitBobby 6y ago
      I have been using chat tools for in-office work for 2 years and more recently at home work for another 2 years. I am well past the honeymoon period for these chat tools, and I quite like them.
- ssharp 6y ago
  When I started at a fully-remote company, where most communications happened on Slack, I was prepared to live with it as a necessity that I simply had to deal with, based on my negative perception of it from places like HN. I actually found it to be a very nice way to keep casual communications open to a remote workforce, while also allowing for actual work communications and collaboration. Now that I'm in another position at a company that is remote due to COVID, I find not having a well-managed Slack workspace a minus and I do feel less connected to the team.
mumblemumble 6y ago
There seem to be two kinds of Slack user: People who despise Slack, and people who use Slack at work, but not for work. In other words: The name tells you what it's for.
oneplane 6y ago
Slack is fine and works fine. As a user, you can very easily turn it off and on at will, mute it, even set status messages like "I will check my messages twice a day". There are plenty of 'product X is bad' write-ups, but all of them try to blame something while the blame is for something intangible which is much harder to write a clever title for. Same goes for the open office; that can work just fine if you make sure everyone shuts their mouth while working; having your 'own' office space with lots of distractions isn't any better than having a 'shared' space with the same distractions. The problem is the distraction, not the space. At best you would state that a certain type of space makes a certain type of distraction easier to occur. But that's a lot more words when you catch more eyeballs with 'office bad, isolation good'. Before we complained about the office, home, or Slack, we complained about Email. And before that about the phone and the pager. This isn't new. What's new is the scale and the amount of people not taking steps to do what works for them.
- PragmaticPulp 6y ago
  > Slack is fine and works fine. As a user, you can very easily turn it off and on at will, mute it, even set status messages like "I will check my messages twice a day". From a workflow standpoint, this is optimal. The catch is that many people view Slack as e-mail but with an expectation of instant response. The farther your Slack communications stray from engineers, the more likely you are to encounter this mindset. Years ago I would have argued that Slack is merely a tool and these are personal problems, but after setting Slack up at a few workplaces I've realized that they structure the defaults and notification settings to encourage this "always connected, always on" mode by default.
  - zaphar 6y ago
    I maintain "API documentation" for my coworkers to refer to when they interface with me. In them I specifically call out that I do not view Slack as an instant response channel. I have a cell phone they can use if they need that type of SLA. Slack and Email are asynchronous. I have stuck with that since I started here and everyone seems to understand that those are the SLAs I commit to. So far no one is upset with me about it.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
dev12341 6y ago
armchair expert opinions
Solvitieg 6y ago
This morning I had three members of my team private message me to tell me about their weekend. On one hand, maybe I'm an asshole because I don't care to have three separate conversations about my weekend. But there's something about Internet Messaging which makes it highly inefficient and basic small talk that should last 30 seconds in the office, last 30 minutes. I tend to use phrases like "ttyl" or "cya" to try to escape the conversation. But it doesn't always work. So I end up just not responding after awhile. Either way I look like an asshole. Slack or not, online communication lacks etiquette.
- munro 6y ago
  I don't know you or your coworkers, but dang, trash talking them on HN? Sounds like a great place to work </sarcasm>. Definitely sounds like some communication issues going on. I've worked for the past 8 years on remote teams, and from my experience, having a shared mind is very important to a highly productive team. My suggestion to you would be to communicate with your coworkers that you've already talked about your weekend with so-and-so, building resentment with your coworkers is never good. Maybe even create a channel specifically to talk about your weekends! Who knows, you may like it. :)
  - Solvitieg 6y ago
    You're right I might be insensitive and ideally I would have the time (and patience) to have a useful, thoughtful conversation with each person I talk to. I don't have 8 years experience working from home, so it's possible this is something I can improve. I like the idea of having an open-channel for weekend discussion.
- sumedh 6y ago
  > Slack or not, online communication lacks etiquette. Its probably you not them. If you dont like people message you about non work topics, just ignore their message or directly tell them that you are busy. They will get the message and stop being friendly with you.
da39a3ee 6y ago
> I do not dislike Slack as much as people assume given that I wrote a book titled “Deep Work,” which advocates for the importance of long, undistracted stretches of work. This marks the author out as a fantasist. Once a company gets above a couple of hundred employees, the majority of the new employees simply are not the sort of people who do "long, undistracted stretches of work". You can't carry on for ever hiring people who both have that sort of mentality and intellectual fortitude, and also want their job to completely dominate their day rather than just 9-5.
chmaynard 6y ago
"... e-mail was struggling to keep up with the world of hyper-messaging that it helped create." What tripe. Author Calvin Newport is a professor of computer science at Georgetown University. He seems to have a nice side gig as a tech pundit: https://www.calnewport.com https://www.calnewport.com
tengbretson 6y ago
Do other people not just wait to respond if you're busy?
neonate 6y ago
https://archive.is/ny3Q4 https://archive.is/ny3Q4
btown 6y ago
At my company, we use WhatsApp alongside Slack. It's primarily for legacy reasons, but we're seeing actually a really interesting phenomenon: because WhatsApp exists as a way to ping someone with an emergency request that should disrupt their flow, we can have a culture where direct messages and mentions in Slack should be answered reasonably promptly but not immediately, and should not disrupt bandwidth. So Slack, even with little red icons appearing, becomes a safe haven for creative thought, and operational craziness can be isolated elsewhere. I wonder how many more productivity and sanity points society would have gained in the past few years if Slack had built in an @@ or @! symbol for a "SuperPing" that's differentiated from a normal ping (five knocks after the brush, perhaps?). Or even provide a structured way to set a priority on a mention, letting you reference that someone was involved in a thing you're writing about or that they should see it as an FYI, but make it clear that they don't need to worry about it immediately. You can make the UI have sane defaults so it's not overwhelming, then you either let culture sort itself out if people are misusing the system, or otherwise ensure there are speed-bumps to misuse. It's ironic that even YouTube streamers benefit from being able to triage Superchats, with color coding based on the monetary value the sender ascribes to getting the streamer's immediate attention. Why is donation-based entertainment more sane than the business environment? At the end of the day, humans don't work well when they're "always on." There's a balance between UI simplicity and the fundamental UX principal that not everything can be important. I do wonder if there's research on how many classes of things people can handle on a screen - rather than a binary classification between mentions and non-mentions, is there anything preventing us from handling a third priority level?
- pseudalopex 6y ago
  Email has priority levels. Sorting tasks into quadrants is a popular technique. People understand who should see a message, if it's important, and if it's urgent are 3 different questions. Slack just doesn't have a way to tell them apart.
cranekam 6y ago
IMO Facebook Workplace is vastly superior to Slack when you have a decent number of people around because: a) posts and comments logically group discussion better than multiple interleaved discussions in a channel b) the newsfeed does a decent job of surfacing interesting content (posts from groups/people you interact most with) c) notifications in one place (with per-group options like “notify for every post” or “only when tagged” or whatever) beats clicking through each channel to scan everything that happened since you last looked. It puts the power to choose what to consume back in the hands of the recipient. Sure, it’s not a real-time discussion platform but, IMO, most things at work don’t need this anyway. For the times this is useful (incident response, etc) small messenger groups work well. YMMV, opinions mine, contents may settle in transit, etc
denton-scratch 6y ago
No mention of IRC? It's still widely used for developer collaboration. It has most of the features of Slack, apart from the ability to share pictures of cats with coworkers.

148 points by jseliger 6y ago

To this day, I still wonder if the app is called Slack because it was designed to help you slack off?

slack IS email. corporate communication changed medium but remained the same. paper/reports/memos > email clients > rich email clients > webmail+blackberry > webmail+email apps > slack (desktop email app) it is just the first, crappy, desktop email app client. The incumbents will eat them soon, just like microsoft and oracle ate all other email clients in the 90s. I mean, slack is already in someone’s plate.

NikolaeVarius 6y ago
No its not. What I find frustrating about Slack is that it gives certain people the ability to say "i didn't see that" regarding important work information. I regard properly reading your email part of your job, and if you're missing important emails, you're failing at it. I find that unless you send an email alongside whatever Slack notification, many people will just ignore it.
- tomtheelder 6y ago
  That's just a specific element of your workplace's culture then. At jobs I've worked at it would have been much more reasonable to say "I didn't see that email" than "I didn't see that Slack message." Like all communication methods, the standards that are set around them are more important than the mechanism itself.
- thrower123 6y ago
  The problem with Slack-alikes is that you get buried under a deluge of notifications, so it is needlessly difficult to stay on top of things. Email is far better in this regard.
  - FalconSensei 6y ago
    I only have notification for DMs, @'s and threads I'm following. No problem so far. Now, if someone sends me an email, it might get buried between other stuff
- jordan_curve 6y ago
  I feel the exact opposite. If someone emails me, I’m likely to not see it, but if someone @s me on slack there’s no chance I miss it. The whole upside of slack for me is that it makes it easier for me not to miss the things I absolutely need to see. I get a deluge of automated or templated emails every day. How am I ever supposed to reliably sift through the noise?
  - pseudalopex 6y ago
    You can set up filters. How am I ever supposed to reliably sift through the noise on Slack?
    - edmundsauto 6y ago
      Culturally, you make the onus on the sender to make sure the receiver got the message.
      - gcblkjaidfj 6y ago
        And then you get the most toxic slack trope: premptive read receipt. > hi edmundsauto (silence until you reply)
- nchi3 6y ago
  That's probably because Slack isn't the "main" communication where you are. Where I work it's the opposite, people answer slack but don't notice emails, because Slack is how we're "supposed" to communicate within the company.
2sk21 6y ago
Except that searching through email was a lot easier than searching for something in Slack. Important conversations would be scattered all throughout slack. I had a notes file in which I would store URLs for these important messages. I just retired recently and can say truthfully that simply not having to deal with Slack has improved my sense of wellbeing immensely.
- gcblkjaidfj 6y ago
  Slack super power is that you can search on other people's "email". So it kinda of make up but don't for the worse search

eightysixfour 6y ago

Slack drives me a bit nuts - everyone at my office loves it because it is very well optimized for engagement and, well, chat. That's great and all but in a work environment I want my tools optimized for communication and work, which are often at odds with chat. The SNR is completely wrong for me.

kungito 6y ago

I mean slack isn't even that good. It's a shame it got so entrenched. I wish Discord makes a business productivity push

arawde 6y ago
I've been telling my friends for months that if I were to create a startup I would use discord over slack, and my argument is always predicated around the fact that if you want to have a voice conversation with someone and share your screen the flow for it is easily 5x better than the slack calls. They laugh at me, but I think its a viable use case
- tomtheelder 6y ago
  Slack has a better ecosystem of work related add-ons, but to be honest I've never found those to be useful. I agree I'd prefer Discord.
  - arawde 6y ago
    The work add-ons for slack is something which is a strong selling point, but I've found Discord hooks to be straightforward to set up for my use cases.
- paxys 6y ago
  Look up their terms of service before considering it for work use. At the end of the day Discord is not enterprise software, and so will never be considered seriously for it.
  - arawde 6y ago
    This is a good point, one of the points that my friend made is that without a comparable revenue model you always run the risk of Discord shutting down whereas Slack wouldn't. With that said, I would happily pay for an enhanced nitro subscription to discord that allowed for enterprise use

tonymet 6y ago

Slack is a big setback for the labor movement . It undermines any distinction between work and leisure

Raphmedia 6y ago
Uninstall it from your phone? Turn off notifications? Make a work profile on your android and get off it once your shift ends? I use Slack daily and I've never brought it home with me.
- atarian 6y ago
  Pretty much this. If you don't set boundaries, your job will set yours.
  - tonymet 6y ago
    Boundaries are set by the group culture. If your peers are always available, and you are not, you are the odd one out.
- davidw 6y ago
  Yep. I'm happy to give out my phone number to people at work in case of emergencies, but I do not want work notifications at random hours of the day when I'm not working.
- mariodiana 6y ago
  Slack has a feature to turn off notifications outside of working hours (or whatever hours you choose). That's what I use.
- runarberg 6y ago
  Not saying you’re wrong, but it shouldn’t be up to the victim to prevent being abused for labor. A workplace that allows a tool to pervade into their worker’s personal life is not doing a good job protecting their workers, and are complacent in the abuse.

paxys 6y ago

Here's what this conversation always boils down to: Slack is a tool, just like one of probably dozens you use in your day-to-day work. It doesn't set or enforce any guidelines for how it should be used. If left unchecked it has a tendency to amplify the worst parts of your company's culture. If you make an effort to moderate it, it can be a huge asset to productivity. Speaking of the example in the article, there is absolutely no reason clients should have direct message channels with your company's employees and expect to get a response 24/7. This is true with email, Slack, SMS and every other form of communication. The criticism I most often hear is "Slack expects me to be online all the time". No, YOUR COMPANY expects you to be online all the time. Slack can be closed with one click.

airstrike 6y ago
> there is absolutely no reason clients should have direct message channels with your company's employees and expect to get a response 24/7. Uhh... except in Investment Banking. I suppose when your client is paying so much, they rightfully expect a 24/7 hotline.
- Swizec 6y ago
  Often baked into SaaS pricing models as well. At “call us” pricing tier $Company includes 24/7 support with guaranteed response time SLA Oh you want the 30min SLA? Add 2 zeroes The company then institutes the right on-call practices, ensures support staff is trained, triage is correct, etc
  - paxys 6y ago
    Yeah, that's my point though. You can't expect your employees to be permanently on call, watch them burn out, then blame Slack.
    - jkaplowitz 6y ago
      I hope the other commenter's idea of "right on-call practices" involve hiring enough employees to give a humane on-call schedule, and compensating appropriately for the on-call time. That's my idea of the right on-call practices, and would go very well with "add 2 zeroes" in the pricing of that SLA. But, yeah, a lot of places don't do that.

pupppet 6y ago

Slack is like a bad email client. It takes the onus off the message author and instead places it on everyone else. It's not your job to make sure I'm CC'd when necessary, it's now my job to wade through dozens of channels to make sure I'm always up to date.

girzel 6y ago
This has to be the core question of how all messaging/communications channels work. How much work is it to effectively send messages? How much work is it to effectively consume messages? I feel like this dichotomy ends up deciding so much about the human effects that eventually arise from these software decisions. I do a lot of work with people in China, and my main complain with WeChat as a "do everything" medium is that it is 100% set up to prioritize the sender. In practice, this means set up to prioritize the boss. It is an absolute disaster for those on the receiving end: it's nearly impossible to keep track of and effectively act on incoming information. You must respond RIGHT NOW or that information is essentially lost. In the end, I believe a messaging channel that requires more upfront work on the part of the sender ends up providing knock-on positive effects for everyone involved. But due to the generally ego-first thought process of all human beings – and the absolutely ego-first though process of most bosses – the channel that affords the least friction in sending appeals the most. Everyone likes to think of themselves as being on the originating end of the firehose.
cwhiz 6y ago
If you manage your business through email then your email app eventually look similar to Slack. Folders with rules to route mail to the right place so you don’t miss it.

wpietri 6y ago

Yeah, I think of Slack as the virtual version of the open office. Anybody can bother you at any time. In the real world, if we ever return to it, I like having physical team rooms, the sort of thing you have naturally when it's an early-stage startup in a single space. When everybody knows each other and is focused on the same goal, it's not hard to work out good communication and space-use norms. But scaling that up into large open-plan offices can quickly turn maddening. It's the tragedy of the audio commons, and anybody can walk up and tap you on the shoulder. For me Slack is the same problem, but worse in that it removes some of they physical signals and feedback mechanisms that work in an open-plan office.

Heliosmaster 6y ago
What you are describing isn't the problem for Slack, is the problem of requiring a green status icon: https://m.signalvnoise.com/the-presence-prison/ https://m.signalvnoise.com/the-presence-prison/
telesilla 6y ago
We make liberal use of emoticon statuses in Slack: the 'away' icon (red circle with a line) is extremely visual and obvious for us to know which staff are out, sick, busy.. It's become like closed doors for us over time as we all agree to respect it. It probably helps we are over several timezones and each work irregular hours according to what's happening (kids pick up, teaching, sports..): we can't count on who is there at any time and consequently run the business asynchronously except for pre-planned meetings.
PragmaticPulp 6y ago
> Yeah, I think of Slack as the virtual version of the open office. Anybody can bother you at any time. Open office doesn't mean that anyone can bother you at any time. It's important that companies set expectations about these things and enforce them to avoid that slippery slope. Same goes for Slack. Once you expand beyond intra-team communication, it's important to set some expectations for what is and is not appropriate in Slack. At the least happy point in my career, I had to be a member of over 100 Slack channels to get my job done and I received upwards of 100-200 @here and @channel notifications every day as people competed to stand above the noise. It was miserable. At the worst point, my time tracker was counting upwards of 4 hours per day spent in the Slack app. Ironically, my efforts to push things to e-mails and scheduled calls was met with a lot of resistance from people who were afraid it would hamper flexibility and ruin asynchronous workflows. We also had absurd levels of office politics because people were treating each other as screen names instead of actual people working in other offices. I would take an open-office floorplan over that nonsense any day.

pacificat0r 6y ago

I don't super understand these articles. Before slack we had Lync, and then skype, and now it's slack. It doesn't replace email, it replaced those other communication apps. I am aware that Slack has a crusade against email but the article or that business example didn't ask why not both? There's a need for real-time communication and there's a need for email too.

kelp 6y ago
For better or for worse (I think to some degree, worse) I've found Slack has eliminated about 90% of my email use at work. My work email is almost all automated emails, communications with people external to the company, and a small percent of internal communications. Nearly everything else is done over Slack. So in my experience, it certainly is replacing email. Now, I'm not sure that it should. But it is.
2sk21 6y ago
At two companies where I have worked recently (IBM and a small startup), Slack quickly displaced email. Email was hardly used in either organization.
paxys 6y ago
Can't speak of other roles, but at least within tech/dev teams I have encountered Slack has replaced email almost 100%.
cwhiz 6y ago
For me, Slack has completely replaced internal email. Email is now almost exclusively for external communication and endless newsletters.

Privacy846 6y ago

I have used Slack for two years now and don’t see any problems with it. 35 people at my company.

rubixdude 6y ago
You wouldn’t with only 35 people. Wait until you hit 350.
- FalconSensei 6y ago
  Probably those 350 people will be divided in teams, and those teams will have separate channels, right?

runjake 6y ago

I guess we are in the minority. Slack has been awesome for boosting communication and collaboration in our department. It's effectively killed awful e-mail communication on issues. Instead, we carry on live, highly-interactive communications. Everyone pretty much understands if you are busy, however, and don't respond immediately. Work without Slack would be awful.

paxys 6y ago
You are definitely the non-vocal majority.
- denimnerd42 6y ago
  or the one still in the honeymoon period.
  - DangitBobby 6y ago
    I have been using chat tools for in-office work for 2 years and more recently at home work for another 2 years. I am well past the honeymoon period for these chat tools, and I quite like them.
ssharp 6y ago
When I started at a fully-remote company, where most communications happened on Slack, I was prepared to live with it as a necessity that I simply had to deal with, based on my negative perception of it from places like HN. I actually found it to be a very nice way to keep casual communications open to a remote workforce, while also allowing for actual work communications and collaboration. Now that I'm in another position at a company that is remote due to COVID, I find not having a well-managed Slack workspace a minus and I do feel less connected to the team.

mumblemumble 6y ago

There seem to be two kinds of Slack user: People who despise Slack, and people who use Slack at work, but not for work. In other words: The name tells you what it's for.

oneplane 6y ago

Slack is fine and works fine. As a user, you can very easily turn it off and on at will, mute it, even set status messages like "I will check my messages twice a day". There are plenty of 'product X is bad' write-ups, but all of them try to blame something while the blame is for something intangible which is much harder to write a clever title for. Same goes for the open office; that can work just fine if you make sure everyone shuts their mouth while working; having your 'own' office space with lots of distractions isn't any better than having a 'shared' space with the same distractions. The problem is the distraction, not the space. At best you would state that a certain type of space makes a certain type of distraction easier to occur. But that's a lot more words when you catch more eyeballs with 'office bad, isolation good'. Before we complained about the office, home, or Slack, we complained about Email. And before that about the phone and the pager. This isn't new. What's new is the scale and the amount of people not taking steps to do what works for them.

PragmaticPulp 6y ago
> Slack is fine and works fine. As a user, you can very easily turn it off and on at will, mute it, even set status messages like "I will check my messages twice a day". From a workflow standpoint, this is optimal. The catch is that many people view Slack as e-mail but with an expectation of instant response. The farther your Slack communications stray from engineers, the more likely you are to encounter this mindset. Years ago I would have argued that Slack is merely a tool and these are personal problems, but after setting Slack up at a few workplaces I've realized that they structure the defaults and notification settings to encourage this "always connected, always on" mode by default.
- zaphar 6y ago
  I maintain "API documentation" for my coworkers to refer to when they interface with me. In them I specifically call out that I do not view Slack as an instant response channel. I have a cell phone they can use if they need that type of SLA. Slack and Email are asynchronous. I have stuck with that since I started here and everyone seems to understand that those are the SLAs I commit to. So far no one is upset with me about it.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

dev12341 6y ago

armchair expert opinions

Solvitieg 6y ago

This morning I had three members of my team private message me to tell me about their weekend. On one hand, maybe I'm an asshole because I don't care to have three separate conversations about my weekend. But there's something about Internet Messaging which makes it highly inefficient and basic small talk that should last 30 seconds in the office, last 30 minutes. I tend to use phrases like "ttyl" or "cya" to try to escape the conversation. But it doesn't always work. So I end up just not responding after awhile. Either way I look like an asshole. Slack or not, online communication lacks etiquette.

munro 6y ago
I don't know you or your coworkers, but dang, trash talking them on HN? Sounds like a great place to work </sarcasm>. Definitely sounds like some communication issues going on. I've worked for the past 8 years on remote teams, and from my experience, having a shared mind is very important to a highly productive team. My suggestion to you would be to communicate with your coworkers that you've already talked about your weekend with so-and-so, building resentment with your coworkers is never good. Maybe even create a channel specifically to talk about your weekends! Who knows, you may like it. :)
- Solvitieg 6y ago
  You're right I might be insensitive and ideally I would have the time (and patience) to have a useful, thoughtful conversation with each person I talk to. I don't have 8 years experience working from home, so it's possible this is something I can improve. I like the idea of having an open-channel for weekend discussion.
sumedh 6y ago
> Slack or not, online communication lacks etiquette. Its probably you not them. If you dont like people message you about non work topics, just ignore their message or directly tell them that you are busy. They will get the message and stop being friendly with you.

da39a3ee 6y ago

> I do not dislike Slack as much as people assume given that I wrote a book titled “Deep Work,” which advocates for the importance of long, undistracted stretches of work. This marks the author out as a fantasist. Once a company gets above a couple of hundred employees, the majority of the new employees simply are not the sort of people who do "long, undistracted stretches of work". You can't carry on for ever hiring people who both have that sort of mentality and intellectual fortitude, and also want their job to completely dominate their day rather than just 9-5.

chmaynard 6y ago

"... e-mail was struggling to keep up with the world of hyper-messaging that it helped create." What tripe. Author Calvin Newport is a professor of computer science at Georgetown University. He seems to have a nice side gig as a tech pundit: https://www.calnewport.com https://www.calnewport.com

tengbretson 6y ago

Do other people not just wait to respond if you're busy?

neonate 6y ago

https://archive.is/ny3Q4 https://archive.is/ny3Q4

btown 6y ago

At my company, we use WhatsApp alongside Slack. It's primarily for legacy reasons, but we're seeing actually a really interesting phenomenon: because WhatsApp exists as a way to ping someone with an emergency request that should disrupt their flow, we can have a culture where direct messages and mentions in Slack should be answered reasonably promptly but not immediately, and should not disrupt bandwidth. So Slack, even with little red icons appearing, becomes a safe haven for creative thought, and operational craziness can be isolated elsewhere. I wonder how many more productivity and sanity points society would have gained in the past few years if Slack had built in an @@ or @! symbol for a "SuperPing" that's differentiated from a normal ping (five knocks after the brush, perhaps?). Or even provide a structured way to set a priority on a mention, letting you reference that someone was involved in a thing you're writing about or that they should see it as an FYI, but make it clear that they don't need to worry about it immediately. You can make the UI have sane defaults so it's not overwhelming, then you either let culture sort itself out if people are misusing the system, or otherwise ensure there are speed-bumps to misuse. It's ironic that even YouTube streamers benefit from being able to triage Superchats, with color coding based on the monetary value the sender ascribes to getting the streamer's immediate attention. Why is donation-based entertainment more sane than the business environment? At the end of the day, humans don't work well when they're "always on." There's a balance between UI simplicity and the fundamental UX principal that not everything can be important. I do wonder if there's research on how many classes of things people can handle on a screen - rather than a binary classification between mentions and non-mentions, is there anything preventing us from handling a third priority level?

pseudalopex 6y ago
Email has priority levels. Sorting tasks into quadrants is a popular technique. People understand who should see a message, if it's important, and if it's urgent are 3 different questions. Slack just doesn't have a way to tell them apart.

cranekam 6y ago

IMO Facebook Workplace is vastly superior to Slack when you have a decent number of people around because: a) posts and comments logically group discussion better than multiple interleaved discussions in a channel b) the newsfeed does a decent job of surfacing interesting content (posts from groups/people you interact most with) c) notifications in one place (with per-group options like “notify for every post” or “only when tagged” or whatever) beats clicking through each channel to scan everything that happened since you last looked. It puts the power to choose what to consume back in the hands of the recipient. Sure, it’s not a real-time discussion platform but, IMO, most things at work don’t need this anyway. For the times this is useful (incident response, etc) small messenger groups work well. YMMV, opinions mine, contents may settle in transit, etc

denton-scratch 6y ago

No mention of IRC? It's still widely used for developer collaboration. It has most of the features of Slack, apart from the ability to share pictures of cats with coworkers.