27 ms·

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

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.
  - pseudalopex 6y ago
    Other people haven't been as lucky.
- cbozeman 6y ago
  >> The catch is that many people view Slack as e-mail but with an expectation of instant response. I don't get this, because email is instant response. It arrives more or less instantly. Almost all digital non-verbal communications can invite an instant response. Why is Slack so different than email? The excuses are the same... "Well, I didn't have Slack open..." "Well, I didn't have Outlook open..." Hell, you could go back in time and say, "Well, I didn't have ICQ open..." I don't see any difference.
  - curl-up 6y ago
    I think there is one seemingly insignificant difference with big (behavioral) consequences: mails need to be "opened", and they're "unread" until you do that. This gives you an option, even after you learn what the email is about (reading the title, the sender, and knowing some context), whether you want to read it now or not. On Slack, like any other instant messaging (especially the ones where the fact that you've seen a message is communicated to the other side), you don't have this option. You can, of course, snooze messages, but I doubt many people even know about that option, and a high fraction of those who do know just find it, at that moment, easier to answer immediately then to think about "scheduling" that answer. Combining this with other characteristics that make online chat more like in-person chat (from simple functions like the ease of sending messages by pressing Enter, to more advanced ones like seeing when the other side is typing), it shifts the behavior, and people feel compelled to respond instantly - both by the expectations set by others ("everyone responds instantly to Slack so I have to as well") but maybe even more importantly by subconscious "burden" of not responding to an "already opened message".
jmpeax 6y ago
> Slack is fine and works fine. As a user, you can very easily turn it off and on at will, mute it > Same goes for the open office; that can work just fine if you make sure everyone shuts their mouth while working The analogy is not even close. You can mute slack, but you can't mute everyone in your office (without noise cancelling headphones being a permenant feature of your uniform).
- oneplane 6y ago
  I think you mean that the analogy is hard to make in real-life where you can't control other people ;-) Which is true, but I was trying to shift the focus on the problem instead of where it happens to occur. Granted, for open-office plans it generally makes people feel like they can talk loudly because it's a space full of people and that's what you do in such spaces. But it's still the distraction (and noise), not the space itself. The ease of moving around is not available if you put walls everywhere. But that 'problem' isn't really seen as problematic, so the comparison becomes "loud office vs. quiet office" instead of "distracting but roamable office vs. silo'ed office". At that point we are of course trying to value one person's wish to roam as much as another person's wish to not be distracted.

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.
- pseudalopex 6y ago
  Other people haven't been as lucky.
cbozeman 6y ago
>> The catch is that many people view Slack as e-mail but with an expectation of instant response. I don't get this, because email is instant response. It arrives more or less instantly. Almost all digital non-verbal communications can invite an instant response. Why is Slack so different than email? The excuses are the same... "Well, I didn't have Slack open..." "Well, I didn't have Outlook open..." Hell, you could go back in time and say, "Well, I didn't have ICQ open..." I don't see any difference.
- curl-up 6y ago
  I think there is one seemingly insignificant difference with big (behavioral) consequences: mails need to be "opened", and they're "unread" until you do that. This gives you an option, even after you learn what the email is about (reading the title, the sender, and knowing some context), whether you want to read it now or not. On Slack, like any other instant messaging (especially the ones where the fact that you've seen a message is communicated to the other side), you don't have this option. You can, of course, snooze messages, but I doubt many people even know about that option, and a high fraction of those who do know just find it, at that moment, easier to answer immediately then to think about "scheduling" that answer. Combining this with other characteristics that make online chat more like in-person chat (from simple functions like the ease of sending messages by pressing Enter, to more advanced ones like seeing when the other side is typing), it shifts the behavior, and people feel compelled to respond instantly - both by the expectations set by others ("everyone responds instantly to Slack so I have to as well") but maybe even more importantly by subconscious "burden" of not responding to an "already opened message".

jmpeax 6y ago

> Slack is fine and works fine. As a user, you can very easily turn it off and on at will, mute it > Same goes for the open office; that can work just fine if you make sure everyone shuts their mouth while working The analogy is not even close. You can mute slack, but you can't mute everyone in your office (without noise cancelling headphones being a permenant feature of your uniform).

oneplane 6y ago
I think you mean that the analogy is hard to make in real-life where you can't control other people ;-) Which is true, but I was trying to shift the focus on the problem instead of where it happens to occur. Granted, for open-office plans it generally makes people feel like they can talk loudly because it's a space full of people and that's what you do in such spaces. But it's still the distraction (and noise), not the space itself. The ease of moving around is not available if you put walls everywhere. But that 'problem' isn't really seen as problematic, so the comparison becomes "loud office vs. quiet office" instead of "distracting but roamable office vs. silo'ed office". At that point we are of course trying to value one person's wish to roam as much as another person's wish to not be distracted.