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I find it hard to believe that Slack etc would increase my productivity.

by _hcuq 5y ago

dasil003 5y ago
Why? A good Slack culture means as an engineer you can find tons of historical context on discussions / decisions without someone needing to forward you a bunch of emails or historical docs. It also means you can get relatively quick answers to tribal knowledge questions while also have an async option for everyone on the answering side to shut down Slack for focus time. Of course if you're only optimizing for your single productivity measured in lines of code written then I can see your point, but software engineering at scale is a team sport, and Slack has traits that make it better than email/in-person discussion/phone/zoom/in-doc comment thread.
- waynesonfire 5y ago
  > A good Slack culture means as an engineer you can find tons of historical context on discussions / decisions You'd think, until your org. decides to deploy a 2-3 month retention window on all slack content because of legal concerns.
- stepbeek 5y ago
  I've found slack to be a pretty poor tool for knowledge sharing like this in comparison to a more document-driven form of communication. We previously used a wiki-tool for this (I don't think it really matters which one), but in recent years we've used Basecamp for this. I'm completely sold on decisions being driven by a doc of a few paragraphs with the conversation around it co-located in the comments. It's easy to scroll through a list of such conversations in the message board and read through the context with discussion. In comparison, finding a previous conversation is slack is much more difficult. Even if I can find the conversation, I think that the chat-focused nature of slack encourages short, loosely worded messages. This is great in the moment but the lack of context a few months on is pretty tough to deal with.
  - dasil003 5y ago
    All fair points, and I agree there are theoretically better solutions. It's just that in practice I've specifically seen Confluence and Basecamp fail due to lack of buy-in, and comment threads are good in Google docs/Quip but proliferation of docs is a problem. In my experience Slack has just been the least-bad in many cases, not that I think it's optimal. YMMV.
    - stepbeek 5y ago
      That’s very fair - I’ve seen the same thing with confluence. Maybe having slack as a suboptimal knowledge store in these situations beats the alternative?
- _hcuq 5y ago
  Is this your experience?

I find it hard to believe that Slack etc would increase my productivity.

by _hcuq 5y ago

I find it hard to believe that Slack etc would increase my productivity.

Why? A good Slack culture means as an engineer you can find tons of historical context on discussions / decisions without someone needing to forward you a bunch of emails or historical docs. It also means you can get relatively quick answers to tribal knowledge questions while also have an async option for everyone on the answering side to shut down Slack for focus time. Of course if you're only optimizing for your single productivity measured in lines of code written then I can see your point, but software engineering at scale is a team sport, and Slack has traits that make it better than email/in-person discussion/phone/zoom/in-doc comment thread.

waynesonfire 5y ago
> A good Slack culture means as an engineer you can find tons of historical context on discussions / decisions You'd think, until your org. decides to deploy a 2-3 month retention window on all slack content because of legal concerns.
stepbeek 5y ago
I've found slack to be a pretty poor tool for knowledge sharing like this in comparison to a more document-driven form of communication. We previously used a wiki-tool for this (I don't think it really matters which one), but in recent years we've used Basecamp for this. I'm completely sold on decisions being driven by a doc of a few paragraphs with the conversation around it co-located in the comments. It's easy to scroll through a list of such conversations in the message board and read through the context with discussion. In comparison, finding a previous conversation is slack is much more difficult. Even if I can find the conversation, I think that the chat-focused nature of slack encourages short, loosely worded messages. This is great in the moment but the lack of context a few months on is pretty tough to deal with.
- dasil003 5y ago
  All fair points, and I agree there are theoretically better solutions. It's just that in practice I've specifically seen Confluence and Basecamp fail due to lack of buy-in, and comment threads are good in Google docs/Quip but proliferation of docs is a problem. In my experience Slack has just been the least-bad in many cases, not that I think it's optimal. YMMV.
  - stepbeek 5y ago
    That’s very fair - I’ve seen the same thing with confluence. Maybe having slack as a suboptimal knowledge store in these situations beats the alternative?
_hcuq 5y ago
Is this your experience?