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Interesting to read this just as I join a new company and am using slack "professionally" for the first time (on an all-remote team). My thoughts so far have be

• chemeril 4y ago
  I agree! Slack as a utilitarian tool is perfectly fine, in my experience. Not great, but fine enough to be a value-add as a communication platform for business purposes. However, I have found the working culture supported and implicitly enforced by Slack-centered organizations to be rather traumatizing to live with in the day-to-day. The availability of instantaneous, chat-like group communication has led to an expectation of instantaneous responses and giving _anyone_ in the org interrupt priority has completely destroyed my ability to do thoughtful, considerate work. This is not a Slack problem in origin, but the use of Slack is certainly loading and pointing a handgun at actual productivity in an org that uses it heavily for business. I'm sure that there are plenty of organizations that have found ways to use Slack effectively where it fits. I have not yet found one.
  • sjburt 4y ago
    I treat Slack DMs like email and respond when I have time dedicated to it. Very rarely found a situation where that was not acceptable. Adding do-not-disturb times and calendar integration helps a lot too--people can tell when you are not working, in a meeting, or in a focus mode. The big problem with Slack is when a multi-party discussion starts about a topic and you need to make immediate input or be left out. I haven't found a fix for this, but it's really the same problem as coworkers talking in the break room, so I'm not sure if the blame can be laid at Slack-type tools.
    • aphexddb 4y ago
      This is the way
    • computerdork 4y ago
      Yeah, agreed, using Slack's do-not-disturb to pause any notifications works really well. To be honest, not sure why the article doesn't mention this key (fairly obvious) feature to decrease distractions... Just looked, it was written in 2018, maybe Slack didn't have do not disturb back then??
      • TheCoelacanth 4y ago
        I've found it extremely limited. For example it only allows a single scheduled DND period per day. Also no way to do DND excluding a few specific people or specific channels.
• guessmyname 4y ago
  > I was previously in a FAANG where the only tool was the internal messaging platform, which in my opinion, left a lot to be desired. Were you previously at Amazon and the internal messaging platform, Amazon Chime? As far as I know: * Facebook employees use “Workplace, by Facebook” * Apple employees use different things, from iMessage to Slack * Microsoft employees use Microsoft Teams * Amazon employees use Amazon Chime and Slack * Netflix employees mostly use Slack * Google employees use Google Chat
  • messe 4y ago
    Chime has been replaced internally at Amazon with Slack as of a couple of years ago for everything but video/audio calls, at least on the AWS side.
    • scubbo 4y ago
      In the CDO business I left earlier this year, Slack was making inroads to A/V calls as well (though Chime was still dominant)
    • a_e_k 4y ago
      It was the same on the Consumer side organization I was in when I was there.
    • DiggyJohnson 4y ago
      I have to use Chime about twice a month to interact with our AWA cloud (govcloud) support. I’m not usually the type to be so opinionated about software I don’t power-use, but: it’s awful.
  • Krastan 4y ago
    Google uses Chat
• brazzledazzle 4y ago
  Slack search isn't perfect but it's surprisingly good. I use it frequently to get up to speed on something I'm being brought in on. We used to use some crappy Microsoft instant messenger and I can't imagine going back. Slack, Confluence, issue search and code search make such a huge difference that I don't think I could comfortably live without them or some equivalents.
• zelphirkalt 4y ago
  Compared to existing and free software chat solutions[1], Slack however looks like such a kindergarten tool. It has a terrible performance. Every time one switches a channel, it basically burns a CPU. The loading of messages when scrolling down a channel with many message is not working well, not pre-loading enough messages to make scrolling a smooth experience. Instead one has to wait half a second or so until the next 20 messages or so are loaded, then scroll, then wait again, then scroll ... And the "markdown" text input oh my. Rarely have I seen a worse markdown input than in Slack. Maybe on Bitbucket or Confluence it is worse. It is as if they have decided to not use any existing and perfectly well working markdown parsers, but instead get an incapable team of engineers to reimplement a bug-ridden one with missing features. One cannot even insert an image at any place in the message, but only at the bottom. That means one needs to refer to the image in the message, when otherwise one could have simply had the picture in that place where it is relevant. It is such a headache for anyone more familiar with markdown. At this point just give me a plain text input, that has any normal off the mill markdown parser to properly translate my text into a message. Oh and they still have not managed to implement voice chat according to standards properly, so that it works in all modern browsers. While other more feature full chat programs like Discord had this solved for years ago, Slack is still the same old shit. Now I have to start ungoogled-chromium every time I want to enter a "Huddle" and navigate to their website, where they will bug me with their incessant popup asking me to use their desktop app, which I have to decline every. single. time. because chromium does not remember to block such popups from websites. So basically Slack is quite crap. [1]: https://github.com/zulip/zulip https://github.com/zulip/zulip
  • hot_gril 4y ago
    I've used Discord for work chat before. It's not designed for that, but it does a better job than Slack, MS Teams, or Google Chat.
    • class4behavior 4y ago
      Well, if you have the opportunity to choose, it's a bad choice to surrender your communications to a commercial globally centralized black box both professionally and privately. Moving to Zulip, RocketChat, Matrix/Jitsi, etc. instead of Slack, Discord or even Signal/Whatsapp should be the long-term goal for everyone. Adobe has already started to feed its customers' data to its AI. Who says, other providers won't take advantage of broad contracts and terms in order to avoid informing their clients.
• ryukoposting 4y ago
  Give it a couple years, you'll learn to hate it. I have dozens of channels and countless group chats with 1-5 people. I was added to those channels when the channel members needed my two cents about something, but now I'm still in these channels, months later. Do I really want to be the guy purging all his Slack channels? Just wait until you're trying to look up a really, really important message, but you can't figure out what word (or synonym thereof) to search for that will give you the results you need. Better hope you didn't leave that channel in an effort to clean up your channels. It sounds like your organization already has a solution, which is a combination of GH issues and Jira. Slack is fine as a supplement to more structured methods of communication, but as the main communication method, it's a disaster. Maybe Slack is better than the "unnamed but awful FAANG tool," but by your own admission, the bar is on the floor. We can do better.
  • chrisbolt 4y ago
    > Do I really want to be the guy purging all his Slack channels? Why not?
    • slotrans 4y ago
      It screams "I'm about to quit"
      • progman32 4y ago
        This is group culture dependent. For us, people popped in and out as needed. We cheered when someone said "I need a slack break" and signed out for a day, and were glad when we saw people clean up their channels because we knew they'd be able to get more actual work done. We got there because people just decided to purge one day, despite maybe looking bad. This normalized the behavior over time. It's just like walking out of a meeting saying "y'all got this, I'm not going to be of help". It can seem rude to some, but it can also seem rude to stick around just to for looks.
        • robertlagrant 4y ago
• superfrank 4y ago
  > I join a new company and am using slack "professionally" for the first time I think this is the difference. Slack is great when you need information from other people, it's terrible when people need information from you. You, like most new hires, need a lot and have little to give. Once that balance starts to shift you'll start to feel the pain points.
  • ethbr0 4y ago
    > it's terrible when people need information from you I'd challenge this. IMHO, Slack is pretty decent if one instills 3 rules in corporate culture. #1 - No DMs. Talk about all work in an open channel. Radical transparency will also make you a better company. #2 - Keep replies on the same topic in threads. I.e. don't use it like IRC. Conversely, don't put unrelated replies in a thread. #3 - Post-back end solutions/resolutions. A thread should NEVER end with "I'll DM you" or "Let's talk about this offline" If these are followed, at some point you reach critical mass, where "question someone wants to ask you" is discoverable in your history.
    • swader999 4y ago
      Navigating the threaded replies in slack is quite tedius. I agree it makes sense to reply this way.
    • uglygoblin 4y ago
      I've been pushing my org to open channel discussions using the thread feature and periodically will hear somebody say they found what they needed in an previous discussion. This is the way.
    • superfrank 4y ago
      I agree with #2 and #3, but I absolutely despise the radical transparency mindset. In my experience, it often leads to people pulling threads off topic and creates an atmosphere where who ever is willing to argue for the longest wins. It often feels like the same problem Stack Overflow has where you go "Bob, how do I do X" and someone who is not Bob will chime in and go "Why are you doing X? You should be doing Y." and you end up spending 10 explaining that you're not an idiot, you know what you're talking about, and you just need an answer to your question. I think in smaller companies where people can set their egos aside, it's possible to make it work, but once you hit more than a few hundred people you're bound to have a few people who are constantly trying to prove how smart they are and they ruin it. I've said it before, but I also feels very micromanage-y to me. Like, we're all adults, why don't you trust me to use my best judgement on Slack? No one has issues if I book 1:1 meetings, no one makes rules about who needs to be on email thread, what makes Slack different?
• treeman79 4y ago
  Wait until they put a 30-90 day retention policy on slack messages.
• noobermin 4y ago
  You're right that culture is a big part of the gripe, but chat apps in general do enable that micromanagement, constant distractions culture.
• Dave3of5 4y ago
  > It seems like most of the article complaints are cultural, more than they are about the platform itself I've heard this argument before. If you read again they say: "slack empowers your worst people to overwhelm your best" This isn't a culture thing it's a property of the entire industry. No company can stop employees doing this, not even in office. Slack on the other hand is a tool that actually promotes these interruptions. It's like a table saw without the guard. Just because I haven't cut my fingers off doesn't make it safe, it just makes me lucky.
  • tremon 4y ago
    I'm not sure I agree entirely. Yes, Slack can be a table saw without guard. But the guard solution for Slack is company culture: each team needs to have a proper front-desk process, and the manager needs to (viciously) defend his team members that are not on front-desk duty (if at all -- a good organization has a central front-desk process for all its teams). There are organizations that get this right.
    • Dave3of5 4y ago
      None of that actually solves the distractions problem really. The fact is that using slack makes it worse. I've actually tried a lot of the solutions talked about here and none of them actually work. Software like slack is literally designed to make people interrupt you and pull you away from productive tasks.