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It blows my mind that 72% of developers love Slack. I absolutely hate it with a passion. It's like someone walking up to your desk, except we made it way easi

It blows my mind that 72% of developers love Slack. I absolutely hate it with a passion. It's like someone walking up to your desk, except we made it way easier because they don't have to get up and feel the social pressure of waiting for you to stop what you're doing and take off your headphones.

mulmen 4y ago
It's IRC without the headaches.
- jedberg 4y ago
  I have the same complaint about IRC. :). I'm ok with both Slack and IRC for collaborating on an immediate problem, like an outage, but I hate having it just sit there as a way for someone to ping me any time.
  - mulmen 4y ago
    Sure but your complaint is about chat apps, not Slack specifically. For the people who "love" Slack it is just IRC but easier.
    - jedberg 4y ago
      That’s fair, but even between slack and IRC I much prefer IRC for real time collaboration and any chat app for one on on conversations. Slack threads are the worst thing to happen to IRC. Pick a modality. Is it a real time conversation or asynchronous threads? And then having one on one and group collaborations in the same place means both are done poorly. It also means the notifications for both get mixed together. I want to get notified when someone posts to a group in slack, and I also want to get notified when I have a direct message, but not at the same time.
      - mulmen 4y ago
        I love threads. They're lightweight channels. In large, busy channels it allows parallel conversations. I see no reason a thread would be strictly asynchronous or real time. That's an organizational expectation. And anyone who expects real-time responses outside of a call needs to come back down to Earth.
    - boredtofears 4y ago
      It's about the proliferation of slack being treated as the primary mode of communication at many companies now instead of email. I'd much prefer default asynchronous communication than default real time communication (or some kind of hellish mixture of the two).
      - lovich 4y ago
        Too many people preferred emails. I get several hundred a day because every tool and most coworkers are just constantly giving you updates. Emails been turned into a feed for me and not a 2 way communication channel at most places I’ve worked
        arccy 4y ago
        at least email has filters, can't do that for slack
        boredtofears 4y ago
        How is slack any different in that regard?
        lovich 4y ago
        Hasn’t been around as long for people to break it. I don’t view it as any more than a temporary reprieve and will jump ship the next time a new, less noisy but equally convenient messaging medium comes around
windows_sucks 4y ago
I think you can disable notifications, so you're not disturbed
- jedberg 4y ago
  You can, but people get annoyed if you don't respond quickly, because they expect a quick response, otherwise they would send an email.
  - loudmax 4y ago
    This is really a social problem, not a technical problem. The technology for instant communication exists and it isn't going to disappear. Your coworkers need to learn to give people space to do their job. Sorry that's scant comfort if that's what your workplace is like.
    - jedberg 4y ago
      It's a product marketing problem, specially Slack's. They market it as an instant communication product, but then they put threading and other asynchronous type modalities into it. I have no problem with instant chat apps. I can set myself as away and people know not to expect a response. But in slack it's a group conversation with the expectation of instant response, because that's how they market it.
      - arccy 4y ago
        compared to all the spam, antivirus, and other filters corporate mail goes through it is instant
    - cudgy 4y ago
      Or is it a technical problem that creates a social problem, thereby making the technology the problem?
slindsey 4y ago
Does your company culture expect immediate response? I like it because we treat it like short-form email, maybe with a slight expectation of quicker response. If I send you an email, it will have some detail and please get back to me within a few days. If I send you a slack message, I expect a sentence or two and a response today or tomorrow.
- jedberg 4y ago
  I've never worked anywhere that didn't expect an immediate response from Slack. If they wanted a delayed response, they'd send an email. Worse yet, if I try to enforce that myself by not responding, there is a whole conversation in the channel before I get there and then I have to respond to all the messages in a mess of threads or some big long response block.
  - ozim 4y ago
    You know you set the expectations. Is it firing offense if you reply in 30 mins.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    I very much have “deep work” time where I turn off everything. If there is a house on fire emergency, they can use our paging app that can bypass DND on the phone.
  - spartanatreyu 4y ago
    You need to change your company's culture. My work uses Teams with the expectation that a message is async. Most people respond whenever they finish their current task or meeting. Response times would generally looks like a bell-curve with the peak around 30 minutes. Some messages have the expectation of requiring an immediate response (e.g. reception who may be relaying information from an external phone call). Typically when something is actually urgent, we click the call/video-call button instead of sending a message.
    - jedberg 4y ago
runarberg 4y ago
My interpretation: Devs like the experience of interactive instant messaging without any hassle and simply equate Slack with that experience. Slack is really pervasive in our industry despite its subpar experience for developers. I largely agree with 72% of developers here, although I would gladly swap it out for something better. The notification scheme is good enough. I don’t like to be disturbed a lot, so I disable sound notifications, and just notice the red dot in the browser tab occasionally (which I promptly ignore if I don’t want to stop and read messages).
VirusNewbie 4y ago
My company basically uses slack as an improved email. We don't expect immediate responses unless we specifically tag someone and say ASAP or whatnot. Works out well.
- Sebguer 4y ago
  How does someone know the message says ASAP or that they've been tagged unless they're monitoring slack constantly?
  - arccy 4y ago
    turn off notifications for everything except mentions
- Philadelphia 4y ago
  What does Slack offer that’s an improvement over email for non-realtime conversations?
  - VirusNewbie 4y ago
    that I can customize what I get notifications for. I can silence everything but mentions. So if there's an outage or someone has been waiting for a long while on something they can @ me, but if they just want to have a discussion publicly and let people review it at their leisure, they can do that as well.
    - Philadelphia 4y ago
      Any e-mail client with rules can do that and much, much, much, much more, though. Slack only offers three primitive options for notification filtering, and they can only be applied at two levels.
      - Mandatum 4y ago
        That's because you're using Slack wrong. You push notifications for a particular topic or event into a Slack channel. You then set notification settings on each of those channels. Slack isn't the filter, it's the data store and UI. If you want different types of notifications.. I'd just notify on the urgent stuff and then manually view particular topics at your leisure.
cauthon 4y ago
Note that all of these percentages are a little misleading. It's the percentage of developers who responded to the question, not the percentage of developers who participated in the survey. For the slack question, it's 72% of 34,440 responses (24,635 love vs 9,805 dread), or about 36% of the 70,000 participants (with ~50% of participants giving no response and I'm assuming therefore being neutral or having no experience.)
sexy_seedbox 4y ago
It's Microsoft Teams without 80% of the bugs.
- spartanatreyu 4y ago
  Does Teams have bugs? In my experience it either works, or the button for the feature just doesn't exist on that device.
  - wokwokwok 4y ago
    > Does teams have bugs? Yes. I mean, everything has bugs, but it's significantly worse than slack. Here's a short list of my weekly irritations: - shared images sometimes give you a placeholder empty box while loading. - shared images sometimes never load from their shared placeholder boxes. - when auto updates happen, they sometimes result in teams just being broken and has to be explicitly killed before it can restart - the `code` format tags don't work in chats, only in 'teams' (maybe this is a feature, who knows?) - sometimes the UI doesn't load and you just get a white empty page instead of a UI, despite being 'online' and receiving notifications. Not everything, all the time, but consistently noticeably buggy.
    - spartanatreyu 4y ago
      I have not experienced any of these bugs. My shared images always load, my automatic updates always work, my code format tags work in chat, the autoupdate is so invisible that I've never noticed it, and the UI always loads. One thing you listed I do have, but I don't consider it a bug: > - shared images sometimes give you a placeholder empty box while loading. That's to let you know that it's loading, and to expect an image to appear. I use teams on MacOS (intel), Windows, and Android. Are you on some weird or old beta version?
      - calmoo 4y ago
        I think your experience is unique in this regard. Teams is well known to be extremely buggy on MacOS - I've experienced everything the OP has.
imron 4y ago
> It blows my mind that 72% of developers love Slack. Just wait until you've been forced by your company to use Teams instead, then you'll find yourself advocating for Slack even if you hate it too.
- Merad 4y ago
  100%... just switched to a company that uses Teams, hate it already.
  - danielbarla 4y ago
    Ah, this brought back "fond" memories of trying to reverse engineer a 3-way chat in Teams, and trying to figure out why I didn't understand the conversation. It turned out that Teams would have a kind of eventual consistency for messages, where one or two lines would arrive a few hours later, and pop into existence in the middle of a conversation (three pages up), without notifying you that something had happened. Because, presumably, you had already read messages with a later creation date... Granted, this was pretty rare, but we noticed it happening at least 2-3 times in a 6 month period. In those cases it caused enough of a headache that I had to start worrying about whether I was seeing the entire discussion, which is a wonderful property to have in a chat tool.
- alberth 4y ago
  Ironically, because Teams is so much harder to use - I actually like it more than Slack. It creates just enough friction for people to not spam chat-messages all day with emojis.
- trydis 4y ago
  Agree, slow and a resource hog.
baka367 4y ago
Have you tried the alternatives? With the evil spawn of spaghetti code that Teams is and its cancerous spread through office offerings I'd take Slack or Discord any day.
- arvinsim 4y ago
  I would rather prefer Discord myself but it seems it's not that popular in corporate settings.
  - solatic 4y ago
    Yeah Discord is a pain to manage in corporate settings. No SSO, needing to play footsie with Alice creating an invite link so that Bob can join, and only then Alice can attach the correct roles. If people don't use usernames that correspond to their real-life names, then auditing access to ensure users and roles are cleaned up after real-life changes is a huge pain. Discord is great for small start-ups to help create a virtual office space for remote work, but it really doesn't scale well.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
irrational 4y ago
But… you don’t have to respond to slack in real time. I just check slack a few times a day. It doesn’t interrupt me because I don’t let it.
- markmark 4y ago
  As Gerald Weinberg said on consulting "It's always a people problem". People expect Slack (or whichever tool) to solve problems that are people problems. If your company expects you to be glued to Slack and respond instantly, that is a culture problem at your company, and needs to be addressed as such.
alkonaut 4y ago
Basically, I read the question as: "on a scale where 1 is the worst direct messaging app you ever used and 10 is the best you could imagine, where does this one rank", and not "Do you enjoy using this or do you think these apps should even exist or be part of people's workday"? Is slack better than Skype and MSN? Goes a good way towards a high grade for me.
bocytron 4y ago
You should turn off your notification, and look at your Slack's messages only when you choose to.
zmxz 4y ago
I agree with you 100%. Slack is the most beautiful useless application ever made. It looks great, I hate every single thing about it. The only thing that does work and lets me focus at development at hand is turning Slack off entirely. I know about notifications, but the mental pressure of having to check if $important_person wrote something or not just gets on my nerves.
nailer 4y ago
> It's like someone walking up to your desk, except we made it way easier because they don't have to get up and feel the social pressure of waiting for you to stop what you're doing and take off your headphones. Turn off notifications.

mulmen 4y ago

It's IRC without the headaches.

jedberg 4y ago
I have the same complaint about IRC. :). I'm ok with both Slack and IRC for collaborating on an immediate problem, like an outage, but I hate having it just sit there as a way for someone to ping me any time.
- mulmen 4y ago
  Sure but your complaint is about chat apps, not Slack specifically. For the people who "love" Slack it is just IRC but easier.
  - jedberg 4y ago
    That’s fair, but even between slack and IRC I much prefer IRC for real time collaboration and any chat app for one on on conversations. Slack threads are the worst thing to happen to IRC. Pick a modality. Is it a real time conversation or asynchronous threads? And then having one on one and group collaborations in the same place means both are done poorly. It also means the notifications for both get mixed together. I want to get notified when someone posts to a group in slack, and I also want to get notified when I have a direct message, but not at the same time.
    - mulmen 4y ago
      I love threads. They're lightweight channels. In large, busy channels it allows parallel conversations. I see no reason a thread would be strictly asynchronous or real time. That's an organizational expectation. And anyone who expects real-time responses outside of a call needs to come back down to Earth.
  - boredtofears 4y ago
    It's about the proliferation of slack being treated as the primary mode of communication at many companies now instead of email. I'd much prefer default asynchronous communication than default real time communication (or some kind of hellish mixture of the two).
    - lovich 4y ago
      Too many people preferred emails. I get several hundred a day because every tool and most coworkers are just constantly giving you updates. Emails been turned into a feed for me and not a 2 way communication channel at most places I’ve worked
      - arccy 4y ago
        at least email has filters, can't do that for slack
      - boredtofears 4y ago
        How is slack any different in that regard?
        lovich 4y ago
        Hasn’t been around as long for people to break it. I don’t view it as any more than a temporary reprieve and will jump ship the next time a new, less noisy but equally convenient messaging medium comes around

windows_sucks 4y ago

I think you can disable notifications, so you're not disturbed

jedberg 4y ago
You can, but people get annoyed if you don't respond quickly, because they expect a quick response, otherwise they would send an email.
- loudmax 4y ago
  This is really a social problem, not a technical problem. The technology for instant communication exists and it isn't going to disappear. Your coworkers need to learn to give people space to do their job. Sorry that's scant comfort if that's what your workplace is like.
  - jedberg 4y ago
    It's a product marketing problem, specially Slack's. They market it as an instant communication product, but then they put threading and other asynchronous type modalities into it. I have no problem with instant chat apps. I can set myself as away and people know not to expect a response. But in slack it's a group conversation with the expectation of instant response, because that's how they market it.
    - arccy 4y ago
      compared to all the spam, antivirus, and other filters corporate mail goes through it is instant
  - cudgy 4y ago
    Or is it a technical problem that creates a social problem, thereby making the technology the problem?

slindsey 4y ago

Does your company culture expect immediate response? I like it because we treat it like short-form email, maybe with a slight expectation of quicker response. If I send you an email, it will have some detail and please get back to me within a few days. If I send you a slack message, I expect a sentence or two and a response today or tomorrow.

jedberg 4y ago
I've never worked anywhere that didn't expect an immediate response from Slack. If they wanted a delayed response, they'd send an email. Worse yet, if I try to enforce that myself by not responding, there is a whole conversation in the channel before I get there and then I have to respond to all the messages in a mess of threads or some big long response block.
- ozim 4y ago
  You know you set the expectations. Is it firing offense if you reply in 30 mins.
- scarface74 4y ago
  I very much have “deep work” time where I turn off everything. If there is a house on fire emergency, they can use our paging app that can bypass DND on the phone.
- spartanatreyu 4y ago
  You need to change your company's culture. My work uses Teams with the expectation that a message is async. Most people respond whenever they finish their current task or meeting. Response times would generally looks like a bell-curve with the peak around 30 minutes. Some messages have the expectation of requiring an immediate response (e.g. reception who may be relaying information from an external phone call). Typically when something is actually urgent, we click the call/video-call button instead of sending a message.
  - jedberg 4y ago

runarberg 4y ago

My interpretation: Devs like the experience of interactive instant messaging without any hassle and simply equate Slack with that experience. Slack is really pervasive in our industry despite its subpar experience for developers. I largely agree with 72% of developers here, although I would gladly swap it out for something better. The notification scheme is good enough. I don’t like to be disturbed a lot, so I disable sound notifications, and just notice the red dot in the browser tab occasionally (which I promptly ignore if I don’t want to stop and read messages).

VirusNewbie 4y ago

My company basically uses slack as an improved email. We don't expect immediate responses unless we specifically tag someone and say ASAP or whatnot. Works out well.

Sebguer 4y ago
How does someone know the message says ASAP or that they've been tagged unless they're monitoring slack constantly?
- arccy 4y ago
  turn off notifications for everything except mentions
Philadelphia 4y ago
What does Slack offer that’s an improvement over email for non-realtime conversations?
- VirusNewbie 4y ago
  that I can customize what I get notifications for. I can silence everything but mentions. So if there's an outage or someone has been waiting for a long while on something they can @ me, but if they just want to have a discussion publicly and let people review it at their leisure, they can do that as well.
  - Philadelphia 4y ago
    Any e-mail client with rules can do that and much, much, much, much more, though. Slack only offers three primitive options for notification filtering, and they can only be applied at two levels.
    - Mandatum 4y ago
      That's because you're using Slack wrong. You push notifications for a particular topic or event into a Slack channel. You then set notification settings on each of those channels. Slack isn't the filter, it's the data store and UI. If you want different types of notifications.. I'd just notify on the urgent stuff and then manually view particular topics at your leisure.

cauthon 4y ago

Note that all of these percentages are a little misleading. It's the percentage of developers who responded to the question, not the percentage of developers who participated in the survey. For the slack question, it's 72% of 34,440 responses (24,635 love vs 9,805 dread), or about 36% of the 70,000 participants (with ~50% of participants giving no response and I'm assuming therefore being neutral or having no experience.)

sexy_seedbox 4y ago

It's Microsoft Teams without 80% of the bugs.

spartanatreyu 4y ago
Does Teams have bugs? In my experience it either works, or the button for the feature just doesn't exist on that device.
- wokwokwok 4y ago
  > Does teams have bugs? Yes. I mean, everything has bugs, but it's significantly worse than slack. Here's a short list of my weekly irritations: - shared images sometimes give you a placeholder empty box while loading. - shared images sometimes never load from their shared placeholder boxes. - when auto updates happen, they sometimes result in teams just being broken and has to be explicitly killed before it can restart - the `code` format tags don't work in chats, only in 'teams' (maybe this is a feature, who knows?) - sometimes the UI doesn't load and you just get a white empty page instead of a UI, despite being 'online' and receiving notifications. Not everything, all the time, but consistently noticeably buggy.
  - spartanatreyu 4y ago
    I have not experienced any of these bugs. My shared images always load, my automatic updates always work, my code format tags work in chat, the autoupdate is so invisible that I've never noticed it, and the UI always loads. One thing you listed I do have, but I don't consider it a bug: > - shared images sometimes give you a placeholder empty box while loading. That's to let you know that it's loading, and to expect an image to appear. I use teams on MacOS (intel), Windows, and Android. Are you on some weird or old beta version?
    - calmoo 4y ago
      I think your experience is unique in this regard. Teams is well known to be extremely buggy on MacOS - I've experienced everything the OP has.

imron 4y ago

> It blows my mind that 72% of developers love Slack. Just wait until you've been forced by your company to use Teams instead, then you'll find yourself advocating for Slack even if you hate it too.

Merad 4y ago
100%... just switched to a company that uses Teams, hate it already.
- danielbarla 4y ago
  Ah, this brought back "fond" memories of trying to reverse engineer a 3-way chat in Teams, and trying to figure out why I didn't understand the conversation. It turned out that Teams would have a kind of eventual consistency for messages, where one or two lines would arrive a few hours later, and pop into existence in the middle of a conversation (three pages up), without notifying you that something had happened. Because, presumably, you had already read messages with a later creation date... Granted, this was pretty rare, but we noticed it happening at least 2-3 times in a 6 month period. In those cases it caused enough of a headache that I had to start worrying about whether I was seeing the entire discussion, which is a wonderful property to have in a chat tool.
alberth 4y ago
Ironically, because Teams is so much harder to use - I actually like it more than Slack. It creates just enough friction for people to not spam chat-messages all day with emojis.
trydis 4y ago
Agree, slow and a resource hog.

baka367 4y ago

Have you tried the alternatives? With the evil spawn of spaghetti code that Teams is and its cancerous spread through office offerings I'd take Slack or Discord any day.

arvinsim 4y ago
I would rather prefer Discord myself but it seems it's not that popular in corporate settings.
- solatic 4y ago
  Yeah Discord is a pain to manage in corporate settings. No SSO, needing to play footsie with Alice creating an invite link so that Bob can join, and only then Alice can attach the correct roles. If people don't use usernames that correspond to their real-life names, then auditing access to ensure users and roles are cleaned up after real-life changes is a huge pain. Discord is great for small start-ups to help create a virtual office space for remote work, but it really doesn't scale well.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

irrational 4y ago

But… you don’t have to respond to slack in real time. I just check slack a few times a day. It doesn’t interrupt me because I don’t let it.

markmark 4y ago
As Gerald Weinberg said on consulting "It's always a people problem". People expect Slack (or whichever tool) to solve problems that are people problems. If your company expects you to be glued to Slack and respond instantly, that is a culture problem at your company, and needs to be addressed as such.

alkonaut 4y ago

Basically, I read the question as: "on a scale where 1 is the worst direct messaging app you ever used and 10 is the best you could imagine, where does this one rank", and not "Do you enjoy using this or do you think these apps should even exist or be part of people's workday"? Is slack better than Skype and MSN? Goes a good way towards a high grade for me.

bocytron 4y ago

You should turn off your notification, and look at your Slack's messages only when you choose to.

zmxz 4y ago

I agree with you 100%. Slack is the most beautiful useless application ever made. It looks great, I hate every single thing about it. The only thing that does work and lets me focus at development at hand is turning Slack off entirely. I know about notifications, but the mental pressure of having to check if $important_person wrote something or not just gets on my nerves.

nailer 4y ago

> It's like someone walking up to your desk, except we made it way easier because they don't have to get up and feel the social pressure of waiting for you to stop what you're doing and take off your headphones. Turn off notifications.