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Everyone praises Slack here but I find e-mail + IM completely sufficient and I work in a very large company.. Something urgent? Use IM. Something can wait? Use

Everyone praises Slack here but I find e-mail + IM completely sufficient and I work in a very large company.. Something urgent? Use IM. Something can wait? Use e-mail. It's that simple.

Synergyse 12y ago
The integrations, history and ambient awareness it creates are what makes it unique.
- pkorzeniewski 12y ago
  Actually you get all of that with an e-mail as well - services send you e-mails when something happens (which you can filter to different folders, you get desktop notifications and so on); you have a full history as well and at least at my company we have an "off-topic" group, which can be easily filtered out if you don't want to be bothered. To be honest a live chat seems to me like a bad idea at a company, because it just encourages people to spam. I don't know, maybe I just prefer an efficient use of simple tools.
  - stevebot 12y ago
    You get that, but not in the same user friendly way. Plus email is passive, while chat is active. I think this is the main selling point of chat. With email you do not get the same feeling as a chat room, and maybe that feeling is what drives people to use Slack, Hipchat etc.
  - coldtea 12y ago
    >Actually you get all of that with an e-mail as well Things that "you get with technology X" by having to do 10 extra steps and have everybody else on the team do the same to get the same benefits do not count.
- AndrewKemendo 12y ago
  ambient awareness This was a new term for me so I looked it up and quite frankly that sounds like a terrible overload of info.
joshmlewis 12y ago
I typically have Gmail open with Chat and Slack. My team also has Gmail Chat but we find it easier to organize conversations, files, etc with Slack. It let's us have a channel for each project, a scrum channel for what everyone's working on, direct messaging when you need it, etc. Uploading files from Dropbox and other integrations like Github are also useful.
hvs 12y ago
I work at a small company (<10 employees) and we use HipChat all day. Since we are geographically dispersed, it helps to maintain the inter-team communication that is hard to do remotely. We probably only use it for 40% "work." The rest is random news items and discussions about sports.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- bryanlarsen 12y ago
  > We probably only use it for 40% "work." The rest is random news items and discussions about sports. Which probably means that you have a coworker or two that's passively annoyed at you and/or actively ignores the channel.
  - coldtea 12y ago
    Yeah, there are always squares and killjoys.
  - hvs 12y ago
    We're a sports company and everyone is usually involved with most of the discussions. I catch your point, but it's pretty easy to ignore if you are heads down coding. You can get someone's attention (for important stuff) but addressing them directly (@username).
  - ceejayoz 12y ago
    > Which probably means that you have a coworker or two that's passively annoyed at you and/or actively ignores the channel. I don't see how that's all that different from people having a discussion in a physical office. Someone might be annoyed people are chatting about sports, some might put headphones in so they don't hear.
- smikhanov 12y ago
  > The rest is random news items and discussions about sports Out of curiosity: how do you manage to get any work done with IM on? I get like 40-50 _emails_ a day (very low number by the industry standards) and if I don't close my Gmail tab it's a huge distractor during periods when I do long stretches of coding.
stevebot 12y ago
The web hook integrations add a lot of value. Plus consider that most communication is archived and searchable but multiple users. Not the case with email + IM.
rabino 12y ago
Searchability is a huge + from me for using Slack. That's hard on email + IM. Specially if you were not in the original loop.
trustfundbaby 12y ago
I used to think the same but with IM, you have to find out the right account and add it (someone might prefer their personal gmail over corporate or whatever) ... but with this, everything is right there. completely replaced any need for im for me.
- dkrich 12y ago
  I don't understand- that only seems to hold if everyone agrees to use Slack. If everyone agrees to use a single chat service, like OC (like most large enterprises), then you don't have to search anything but the company directory, so the comparison doesn't seem to make sense. What you're saying is that IM is sub-optimal because everyone uses different services, but Slack is better because everyone is forced to use it?
enraged_camel 12y ago
Slack's value comes from integrations. The way it compiles all the information from a variety of services in one place and presents it in one format (chat messages) removes a ton of overhead and inefficiency.

Everyone praises Slack here but I find e-mail + IM completely sufficient and I work in a very large company.. Something urgent? Use IM. Something can wait? Use e-mail. It's that simple.

Synergyse 12y ago

The integrations, history and ambient awareness it creates are what makes it unique.

pkorzeniewski 12y ago
Actually you get all of that with an e-mail as well - services send you e-mails when something happens (which you can filter to different folders, you get desktop notifications and so on); you have a full history as well and at least at my company we have an "off-topic" group, which can be easily filtered out if you don't want to be bothered. To be honest a live chat seems to me like a bad idea at a company, because it just encourages people to spam. I don't know, maybe I just prefer an efficient use of simple tools.
- stevebot 12y ago
  You get that, but not in the same user friendly way. Plus email is passive, while chat is active. I think this is the main selling point of chat. With email you do not get the same feeling as a chat room, and maybe that feeling is what drives people to use Slack, Hipchat etc.
- coldtea 12y ago
  >Actually you get all of that with an e-mail as well Things that "you get with technology X" by having to do 10 extra steps and have everybody else on the team do the same to get the same benefits do not count.
AndrewKemendo 12y ago
ambient awareness This was a new term for me so I looked it up and quite frankly that sounds like a terrible overload of info.

joshmlewis 12y ago

I typically have Gmail open with Chat and Slack. My team also has Gmail Chat but we find it easier to organize conversations, files, etc with Slack. It let's us have a channel for each project, a scrum channel for what everyone's working on, direct messaging when you need it, etc. Uploading files from Dropbox and other integrations like Github are also useful.

hvs 12y ago

I work at a small company (<10 employees) and we use HipChat all day. Since we are geographically dispersed, it helps to maintain the inter-team communication that is hard to do remotely. We probably only use it for 40% "work." The rest is random news items and discussions about sports.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
bryanlarsen 12y ago
> We probably only use it for 40% "work." The rest is random news items and discussions about sports. Which probably means that you have a coworker or two that's passively annoyed at you and/or actively ignores the channel.
- coldtea 12y ago
  Yeah, there are always squares and killjoys.
- hvs 12y ago
  We're a sports company and everyone is usually involved with most of the discussions. I catch your point, but it's pretty easy to ignore if you are heads down coding. You can get someone's attention (for important stuff) but addressing them directly (@username).
- ceejayoz 12y ago
  > Which probably means that you have a coworker or two that's passively annoyed at you and/or actively ignores the channel. I don't see how that's all that different from people having a discussion in a physical office. Someone might be annoyed people are chatting about sports, some might put headphones in so they don't hear.
smikhanov 12y ago
> The rest is random news items and discussions about sports Out of curiosity: how do you manage to get any work done with IM on? I get like 40-50 _emails_ a day (very low number by the industry standards) and if I don't close my Gmail tab it's a huge distractor during periods when I do long stretches of coding.

stevebot 12y ago

The web hook integrations add a lot of value. Plus consider that most communication is archived and searchable but multiple users. Not the case with email + IM.

rabino 12y ago

Searchability is a huge + from me for using Slack. That's hard on email + IM. Specially if you were not in the original loop.

trustfundbaby 12y ago

I used to think the same but with IM, you have to find out the right account and add it (someone might prefer their personal gmail over corporate or whatever) ... but with this, everything is right there. completely replaced any need for im for me.

dkrich 12y ago
I don't understand- that only seems to hold if everyone agrees to use Slack. If everyone agrees to use a single chat service, like OC (like most large enterprises), then you don't have to search anything but the company directory, so the comparison doesn't seem to make sense. What you're saying is that IM is sub-optimal because everyone uses different services, but Slack is better because everyone is forced to use it?

enraged_camel 12y ago

Slack's value comes from integrations. The way it compiles all the information from a variety of services in one place and presents it in one format (chat messages) removes a ton of overhead and inefficiency.