Slack is the opposite of organizational memory (2018)(abe-winter.github.io)
abe-winter.github.io
Slack is the opposite of organizational memory (2018)
https://abe-winter.github.io/plea%27s/help/2018/02/11/slack.html
197 comments
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
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
Go use Microsoft Teams for awhile and then tell me "Slack is quite crap."
I'm stuck using Teams right now and it is an abysmal experience. There are definitely complaints to have about Slack, but it can be miles worse.
Just today I was looking for a prior conversation to document it for the future. I selected a portion of the conversation so that I could paste it into another tool I use for documenting. I selected the text once and it deselected a good chunk of it. Repeat. Okay, clearly not working well. I had to copy and paste 5 times to get ~15 lines of text because if you scrolled at all it somehow deselected some portion of the text.
I mean, honestly, what tool doesn't even let you easily copy the conversation? Teams is that tool. That's just one of the many issues I have run into today.
I'm stuck using Teams right now and it is an abysmal experience. There are definitely complaints to have about Slack, but it can be miles worse.
Just today I was looking for a prior conversation to document it for the future. I selected a portion of the conversation so that I could paste it into another tool I use for documenting. I selected the text once and it deselected a good chunk of it. Repeat. Okay, clearly not working well. I had to copy and paste 5 times to get ~15 lines of text because if you scrolled at all it somehow deselected some portion of the text.
I mean, honestly, what tool doesn't even let you easily copy the conversation? Teams is that tool. That's just one of the many issues I have run into today.
Somebody described Slack vs Teams this way:
- Slack is so easy and fun to use that we use it for things we shouldn't be (fun channels, fun integrations). It creates too much noise and hard to extract signal. It ends up being distracting past 100+ people company.
- Teams is so bad that people try not to use it. It forces you to use it minimally because everything is terrible. It actually ends up being more productive than Slack.
- Slack is so easy and fun to use that we use it for things we shouldn't be (fun channels, fun integrations). It creates too much noise and hard to extract signal. It ends up being distracting past 100+ people company.
- Teams is so bad that people try not to use it. It forces you to use it minimally because everything is terrible. It actually ends up being more productive than Slack.
Here's my problem with Teams: the search is terrible. I know I had a conversation with someone (but maybe I don't remember if it was just them, them and a few others, or a meeting chat, or a team chat), I know what it was about, I know a few words from it...and I can't reliably search for it. Useless.
And that fucking card UI absolute abomination.
And now they have just flipped the interface so you scroll up for new and not down. With no warning and no notification so for the first day no one could find any current conversations.
And the terrible "Teams documents" so we can lock away documents behind a specific chat. If anyone should be having layoffs, it is their UX folks.
And now they have just flipped the interface so you scroll up for new and not down. With no warning and no notification so for the first day no one could find any current conversations.
And the terrible "Teams documents" so we can lock away documents behind a specific chat. If anyone should be having layoffs, it is their UX folks.
I can't believe how bad the search is. Every time I need to find something we talked about days or weeks ago, it's torture.
Teams are much cheaper though - $4 vs $7.25 per user per month for a roughly equivalent plan.
It's cheaper yah, but each time I lose ten minutes it costs me more than that.
That was part of the pitch at work - "oh, over 3 years our total savings is $200k" or something. Great, but if each dev loses 10 minutes a month, or is frustrated and less efficient for an hour, that costs us 5x that.
That was part of the pitch at work - "oh, over 3 years our total savings is $200k" or something. Great, but if each dev loses 10 minutes a month, or is frustrated and less efficient for an hour, that costs us 5x that.
Honestly the (last I used) inability to go back to a conversation months ago via search is a much higher cost.
Unsure if it still is, but if you had a MS office contract it was free, which describes a lot of the defense industry.
Teams creates knowledge siloes which is worse than Slack. Every company I have used ends up with people creating various "Teams" and channels under them, then everyone just creates group chats all the time because it's easier.
I believe this is a rendering optimization leaking through to UX. It's a bit of a pattern in recent MS UI, especially their "productivity" web apps. Another example I saw a couple years ago: Ctrl-A in Outlook Web Access only selects the visible messages + a small number above and below the visible messages, because the selection logic only has access to the currently-rendered items. That's my guess, anyway. I've implemented controls with this so-called "virtualized rendering" technique and it was a nightmare to retrofit to existing controls.
Just because Teams is bad, and it's bad, make no mistake, it doesn't make Slack a good tool. Slack is just a resource hog which creates too much noise.
Neither are good tools.
Neither are good tools.
Just because MS Teams is an even worse train wreck does not automatically make Slack brilliant. The whataboutism when people criticize a program that they happen to like is wild. The complaints in the GP are exact complaints I have. I'd even add having to type a space before using a slash character when all you want to do is type a path to something.
Yes, MS Teams might actually suck worse, but don't try to diminish valid complaints about something else that also sucks
Yes, MS Teams might actually suck worse, but don't try to diminish valid complaints about something else that also sucks
I couldn't disagree more with this post. Teams offers such a better solution than Slack for virtually everything, in my opinion. Slack's voice/video chat is a toy, and it's unbelievably slow and unreliable. I am so glad I don't work for a company that uses Slack anymore.
It's very interesting how different people's experiences are. I worked for a company that used both Slack and Teams, and Teams always caused issues, was unstable, and had many video problems. Slack worked much more reliably for us. Perhaps it's a platform issue? Nobody in our workplace used Windows, everyone was either Linux or OSX.
I'm with you, man. I went Skype -> Hipchat -> Slack -> Hipchat -> Teams -> Slack and feel Slack is the superior tool.
Yeah, Hipchat and Flowdock were reasonable Slack alternatives but Teams is a complete nightmare.
I've found teams > slack for video and stability on OSX, but slack has a better UI. Both have been mostly unusable for me on linux though I think it may also be machine dependent (I had an XPS13). I've never tried them with windows
The biggest problem with Teams is everything outside of chat/video that it tries to do.
Did you know Teams had apps? Inside of it?!
90% of the problems I encounter with Teams (bad UX, crashing, freezing, corrupted sessions) would be removed if they deleted every feature outside of chat/video and more loosely coupled themselves to Office365/Exchange.
Did you know Teams had apps? Inside of it?!
90% of the problems I encounter with Teams (bad UX, crashing, freezing, corrupted sessions) would be removed if they deleted every feature outside of chat/video and more loosely coupled themselves to Office365/Exchange.
I think the Linux thing is machine dependent. I used a Dell Latitude something-or-other (7490? idk) for about 3 years, but it was the version that shipped with Ubuntu. Rock solid on Slack, and Teams mostly just had company-wide issues for us. But my colleague with the same model laptop and same Ubuntu version had no end to trouble with both Slack and Teams - turns out, the Windows version of the laptop had different internals and it struggled mightily. It was mostly GPU issues. Just thought that was interesting, mine is probably not a useful anecdote.
I liked the Teams video calls.
But did you ever try to search for a message in a conversation, and have it give you just the message you wanted, without any surrounding context? Or have you ever tried to scroll through chat history, only for it to lazy-load 10 messages at a time, making you spend 5 minutes scrolling constantly to find a conversation from a few months ago?
Teams would even lose my messages completely from time to time. It was honestly hard to believe how janky it was.
But did you ever try to search for a message in a conversation, and have it give you just the message you wanted, without any surrounding context? Or have you ever tried to scroll through chat history, only for it to lazy-load 10 messages at a time, making you spend 5 minutes scrolling constantly to find a conversation from a few months ago?
Teams would even lose my messages completely from time to time. It was honestly hard to believe how janky it was.
> But did you ever try to search for a message in a conversation, and have it give you just the message you wanted, without any surrounding context?
Yes; they seem to have fixed that now, I don’t know when but I was surprised when it took me to the conversation with context suddenly.
Yes; they seem to have fixed that now, I don’t know when but I was surprised when it took me to the conversation with context suddenly.
Teams complains that my driver is out of date, but will only do it when I go to share my screen.
Do I stop my presentation so that I update my driver, or do I wait until next time I want to share my screen and interrupt then?
Do I stop my presentation so that I update my driver, or do I wait until next time I want to share my screen and interrupt then?
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.
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.
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.
One big hurdle to this is how there's no widely-used open standard. Many corps don't want to commit to something niche that might lose support, but if there were many interchangeable services for the same kind of chat, it'd be a different story. The standard used to be XMPP, but I used to work with that closely and can rant for an hour about every reason it failed, and maybe any new standard would have similar problems.
Part of my criteria for a work IM tool is something that non-techies can actually use. I wouldn’t wish Discord on my worst enemy, with all its weird gamer marketing language. And I certainly don’t want to work in a team where I’m that far removed from reality.
I'm looking at the Discord UI now and don't see any gamer lingo except for the "welcome" messages. I can see how the UI could be overwhelming with features, and my older family members couldn't figure out how to use it the one time they tried, but Slack is even worse in that way too. And MS Teams was so bad that I couldn't figure out how to even log in.
If it weren't for the security and reliance implications, I'd run a company chat over Facebook Messenger. Simple as.
If it weren't for the security and reliance implications, I'd run a company chat over Facebook Messenger. Simple as.
Looking at Slack's own documentation on formatting messages, they don't even mention Markdown. I agree it's Markdown-like, but they at least aren't pretending it is.
Others that came through:
- HipChat, Campfire (Basecamp) clone
- FlowDock, which was superior to Basecamp and Slack
- Textual
- IRC
And now there's Discord, albeit for different purposes.
Workplace is an everything platform.
The problem with each tends to be distractions, discoverability, bookmarking, an app/browser performance. You really have to have a strong culture of netiquette to use any of them AND access to video conferencing to have quick meetings, because trying to do everything over chat doesn't work.
- HipChat, Campfire (Basecamp) clone
- FlowDock, which was superior to Basecamp and Slack
- Textual
- IRC
And now there's Discord, albeit for different purposes.
Workplace is an everything platform.
The problem with each tends to be distractions, discoverability, bookmarking, an app/browser performance. You really have to have a strong culture of netiquette to use any of them AND access to video conferencing to have quick meetings, because trying to do everything over chat doesn't work.
Not sure if your threads contain a lot of images/media, but I find that having images collapsed by default improves performance immensely.
one company i worked with was horrible with the amount of GIFs littered throughout the threads. it was like a light shining down from heaven with a chorus of angels when i found the disable anims feature.
I was surprised when it nearly froze because people used too many of those reaction emoji gif things on a comment. How is a tiny cartoon more important than than being able to use the app? It's ridiculous that they apparently didn't prioritize tasks.
> And the "markdown" text input oh my. Rarely have I seen a worse markdown input than in Slack
Let me introduce you to Teams.
Let me introduce you to Teams.
> Rarely have I seen a worse markdown input than in Slack
Try writing code in Microsoft Teams. Slack is very decent.
Try writing code in Microsoft Teams. Slack is very decent.
I’m pretty sure it’s a simplified pared down md.
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.
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.
why does it matter what channels you're in? i just mute all channels except for the ones that i actually care about. my channel list is probably in the low hundreds but i hide it anyway and just use stars to show the ones i often navigate to
Why aren't channels muted by default?
For many years at an old gig it was either a) almost zero docs or b) meager docs in the form of Slack archives. A terrible situation no matter the choice of A or B, but we chose B and at the end of the day we had something to show. Did it prolong our dysfunction? Hard to say. When I left the culture was shifting a bit towards expecting slack convos to be rewritten as formal documentation after the immediate question is resolved, which is much better. If nothing else it lit a fire under me to improve my technical writing. Seeing someone use your doc to breeze through a challenge is a special feeling. A good manager will notice that.
By analogy, chat tools are the coal-fired plant to more formal documentation's solar. Coal is comparatively easy and will get you bootstrapped, but it will wreck your environment. Use it to get to solar and things will be OK.
By analogy, chat tools are the coal-fired plant to more formal documentation's solar. Coal is comparatively easy and will get you bootstrapped, but it will wreck your environment. Use it to get to solar and things will be OK.
> When I left the culture was shifting a bit towards expecting slack convos to be rewritten as formal documentation after the immediate question is resolved
I am suddenly grateful that I work in an industry with heavily regulated documentation requirements.
I am suddenly grateful that I work in an industry with heavily regulated documentation requirements.
In my team when someone asks me to look at some issues, my very first question is always where they see the alert. Because there are a huge number of "alert" channels. And I am very "happy" spending most of my days doing nothing much than searching and looking up things lolz
> Do I really want to be the guy purging all his Slack channels?
Why not?
Why not?
It screams "I'm about to quit"
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.
> 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.
Rude or not, sticking around in meetings you can't add/receive value to/from is a great way to get nothing done.
Rude or not, sticking around in meetings you can't add/receive value to/from is a great way to get nothing done.
It screams "I'm organised and capable of planning"
You've never witnessed a communications existential crisis?
Yes, jumping in and out is a freedom of your choice. I do it all the time. Do it ruthlessly when channels stagnate. We have a convention of prefixing channels with wg_ to denote working group channels which are short lived projects of limited duration. They get archived once the objectives are met. By all means leave fruitless channels, wait until someone pings you with an @ or they add you back to a channel. You can also mute channels that are too noisy but require your membership.
Agreed. If anyone feels some kind of way about you leaving a Slack channel, parent's company is using it wrong.
I'd kinda guess parent's corporate culture also tends to accrete huge email CC lists? As that's the same human problem: add, but never remove.
And also, Slack search by default is global: you don't have to be in a channel to get a search hit.
I'd kinda guess parent's corporate culture also tends to accrete huge email CC lists? As that's the same human problem: add, but never remove.
And also, Slack search by default is global: you don't have to be in a channel to get a search hit.
> Do I really want to be the guy purging all his Slack channels?
Yeah I think you do, if it's an endemic issue then there are probably loads of people in the same boat, who would like to see a first mover to do something about it.
Yeah I think you do, if it's an endemic issue then there are probably loads of people in the same boat, who would like to see a first mover to do something about it.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
We follow #1 and #2 in our company.
I like #1 because it definitely helps create a more open information environment. It often takes a little while when a new employee starts to train them into this. Quite often they will come in and ask all their questions in DM, I'll always politely push them to ask the questions in the appropiate channel.
I like #2 because it keeps the channels quieter when conversations are had within threads.
Something we've done recently is cut down the number of channels. We essentially just use #general and #random now. We're only a small company (<20 employees) so it facilitates a better information flow if everything is in the one place. One thing we also do, is if a thread contains valuable information we will transcribe this into our documentation system (currently confluence)
I like #2 because it keeps the channels quieter when conversations are had within threads.
Something we've done recently is cut down the number of channels. We essentially just use #general and #random now. We're only a small company (<20 employees) so it facilitates a better information flow if everything is in the one place. One thing we also do, is if a thread contains valuable information we will transcribe this into our documentation system (currently confluence)
To me, the biggest use of channels is "One place I would ask a question about {major category}"
F.ex. at my company we have #help-{product} channels where engineers from each product team hang out and answer questions once a day or so
I guess the primary utility is roughly grouping queries and distinguishing question from general.
F.ex. at my company we have #help-{product} channels where engineers from each product team hang out and answer questions once a day or so
I guess the primary utility is roughly grouping queries and distinguishing question from general.
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?
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?
If there are people like that they will spoil any culture, including in-person meetings.
If the culture is bad then Slack doesn't hide it, if it's micromanagey already then Slack will exacerbate that, I agree.
If the culture is bad then Slack doesn't hide it, if it's micromanagey already then Slack will exacerbate that, I agree.
Yeah, that's my point though. Once a company hits a certain size, those people will exist no matter what you do. It's just a personality that a certain percent of people have. If it's just one or two people you can probably correct that but when you have hundreds or thousands of employees, it's unreasonable to think you can get everyone to see the problems they are causing.
The way to avoid letting those people interfere is to let me direct message the people I need to talk to. Why are you taking that away from me?
The way to avoid letting those people interfere is to let me direct message the people I need to talk to. Why are you taking that away from me?
I mean, you can also just pretend they don't exist. Not going to lie, I've seen that happen in Slack threads when someone random is inserting themselves in an unhelpful way.
I think it's a bit rude to just pretend the person doesn't exist and I feel like it would make the problem even worse. This person who didn't need to be in the conversation is now feeling ignored, so you've now got hurt feelings layered on top of what ever other problem you're trying to solve.
Also, I can't control everyone else in the thread. Even if I ignore the person that doesn't mean other people will. All it takes is one person engaging and it pulls the thread off topic.
It just seems weird to me... I hear people complain so often about how meetings (especially big meetings) are useless because they get off topic and it's super easy for a few loud voices to take over, but then we want radical transparency on Slack.
Also, also, I think it's funny that we're still pushing this idea of radical transparency when it turned out to be a total sham at one of the poster child companies for it ("Away"). It ended up being massively toxic and radical transparency was really just a way for management to ensure they could have an opinion on everything and leadership didn't hold themselves to the same rules. https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/5/20995453/away-luggage-ceo...
Also, I can't control everyone else in the thread. Even if I ignore the person that doesn't mean other people will. All it takes is one person engaging and it pulls the thread off topic.
It just seems weird to me... I hear people complain so often about how meetings (especially big meetings) are useless because they get off topic and it's super easy for a few loud voices to take over, but then we want radical transparency on Slack.
Also, also, I think it's funny that we're still pushing this idea of radical transparency when it turned out to be a total sham at one of the poster child companies for it ("Away"). It ended up being massively toxic and radical transparency was really just a way for management to ensure they could have an opinion on everything and leadership didn't hold themselves to the same rules. https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/5/20995453/away-luggage-ceo...
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.
Navigating the threaded replies in slack is quite tedius. I agree it makes sense to reply this way.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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??
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.
This is the way
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.
> 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
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
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.
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.
I’m not usually the type to be so opinionated about software I don’t power-use, but: it’s awful.
In the CDO business I left earlier this year, Slack was making inroads to A/V calls as well (though Chime was still dominant)
It was the same on the Consumer side organization I was in when I was there.
Google uses Chat
> 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.
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.
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.
There are organizations that get this right.
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.
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.
Wait until they put a 30-90 day retention policy on slack messages.
You're right that culture is a big part of the gripe, but chat apps in general do enable that micromanagement, constant distractions culture.
It's no substitute for proper documentation, but it is very useful to be able to find and link to the conversation that led to creating a ticket, considering how often a critical detail gets left out of a ticket description.
What I wish Slack offered is the ability to move existing messages into threads, close those threads, and give them an explicit conclusion. Webforums gave their moderators the power to do that; I think any participant in a Slack channel should be able to at least propose doing that, but alas Slack doesn't give that power to anyone!
What I wish Slack offered is the ability to move existing messages into threads, close those threads, and give them an explicit conclusion. Webforums gave their moderators the power to do that; I think any participant in a Slack channel should be able to at least propose doing that, but alas Slack doesn't give that power to anyone!
> It's no substitute for proper documentation, but it is very useful to be able to find and link to the conversation that led to creating a ticket, considering how often a critical detail gets left out of a ticket description.
It's worse than email, because emails at least almost always have subjects and the latest one usually contains most (if not all) of the thread. Email clients usually have a feature to save a message to some kind of file, and I usually attach that when creating a ticket (or working with one I didn't create).
My experience with Slack/Teams is like team using one email thread with the subject "team stuff" that they constantly reply to with fragmentary messages that are very difficult to decipher without full understanding of the context at that moment. Everything's jumbled together and impossible to piece together later.
IMHO, chat is only for things that are 100% ephemeral, and if there's any chance you will need the information later, you better immediately switch to email and summarize the previous conversation in complete sentences.
It's worse than email, because emails at least almost always have subjects and the latest one usually contains most (if not all) of the thread. Email clients usually have a feature to save a message to some kind of file, and I usually attach that when creating a ticket (or working with one I didn't create).
My experience with Slack/Teams is like team using one email thread with the subject "team stuff" that they constantly reply to with fragmentary messages that are very difficult to decipher without full understanding of the context at that moment. Everything's jumbled together and impossible to piece together later.
IMHO, chat is only for things that are 100% ephemeral, and if there's any chance you will need the information later, you better immediately switch to email and summarize the previous conversation in complete sentences.
I agree that it's worse than email but for different reasons. I've found that when writing an email, people will put more time and effort into giving a complete picture in the initial email. In Slack/Teams, people give very brief descriptions that you have to ask half a dozen questions in chat or call them to figure out what they actually mean.
> I agree that it's worse than email but for different reasons. I've found that when writing an email, people will put more time and effort into giving a complete picture in the initial email. In Slack/Teams, people give very brief descriptions that you have to ask half a dozen questions in chat or call them to figure out what they actually mean.
Yeah, that's a major component of what I was talking about, which you called out more clearly than I did. With email, people tend to compose standalone artifacts that convey a more complete idea, but chat messages are just fragments. Maybe if they were properly organized you understand the conversation later, but the fragments are interrupted by other stuff so it's too hard to even piece together the whole conversation without missing something important.
Yeah, that's a major component of what I was talking about, which you called out more clearly than I did. With email, people tend to compose standalone artifacts that convey a more complete idea, but chat messages are just fragments. Maybe if they were properly organized you understand the conversation later, but the fragments are interrupted by other stuff so it's too hard to even piece together the whole conversation without missing something important.
I find things with search in slack every single work day, and find it exactly as difficult/easy as searching my email, and vastly less painful to organize.
[deleted]
> It's no substitute for proper documentation, but it is very useful to be able to find and link to the conversation that led to creating a ticket
It is? Whenever I click on a Slack link, it opens my browser and takes me to the Slack SSO for my company. I click the "Login" button and it takes me to my list of "Workspaces" (of which I only ever click on one). I then click on the one workspace I use, and nothing. It's just like I logged in from scratch. The link is totally gone now. I can now manually paste it into the address bar again and there's a 50% chance it will take me to the conversation I wanted, but maybe not because Slack.
It is? Whenever I click on a Slack link, it opens my browser and takes me to the Slack SSO for my company. I click the "Login" button and it takes me to my list of "Workspaces" (of which I only ever click on one). I then click on the one workspace I use, and nothing. It's just like I logged in from scratch. The link is totally gone now. I can now manually paste it into the address bar again and there's a 50% chance it will take me to the conversation I wanted, but maybe not because Slack.
Sounds like your auth integration is busted.
But I was able to paste the slack link into the Slack search and it found the post (skipping the browser and auth completely).
But I was able to paste the slack link into the Slack search and it found the post (skipping the browser and auth completely).
Maybe your browser has strange cookie settings? It's just two clicks for me: I click the link, then I click “open in browser” (if I remember right) and it jumps to the message.
> how often a critical detail gets left out of a ticket description.
This is why I require all discussion of issues to start, and remain in, the tracker.
This is why I require all discussion of issues to start, and remain in, the tracker.
It drives me up the wall when we open a ticket, it remains without updates, but communications end up spread between email, Slack, some meeting we had six months ago and a letter sent by messenger pigeon to a coworker three provinces over.
Put it in the ticket. That’s why we have the ticket.
Put it in the ticket. That’s why we have the ticket.
Yeah but then the person opening the ticket would have to go to _effort_ to actually usefully describe the issue, document the decisions etc and we couldn’t have that.
Much better to write a ticket with a vague headings only, assign it to someone and ablate responsibility for everything else to some other person. /s
Much better to write a ticket with a vague headings only, assign it to someone and ablate responsibility for everything else to some other person. /s
They shouldn't need to work to do their jobs!
How do you determine whether a discussion is going to turn to an issue? Do you hold all conversations in the tracker just in case?
> a discussion is going to turn to an issue
Generally, if it's not an issue, we wouldn't be talking about it.
If they're asking a question, it becomes pretty obvious within the first few statements if it's an issue or not, even if it's one about missing documentation.
Generally, if it's not an issue, we wouldn't be talking about it.
If they're asking a question, it becomes pretty obvious within the first few statements if it's an issue or not, even if it's one about missing documentation.
Ideally yes, but in reality it’s hard to keep synchronous conversation via a tracker which is usually not a real time chat. Usually it’s important to clarify reported issues vs whether it was correctly understood right away.
> which is usually not a real time chat. Usually it’s important to clarify reported issues vs whether it was correctly understood right away.
The summary/title of issues can be edited, as needed, and clarifying summary comments can be made.
But you're right, it's not exactly the same. People with language barriers sometimes struggle with "not real time" conversations. Others feel if they're writing something in an issue tracker, it's somehow special, so they have to be incredibly formal, and are afraid to be wrong, ask questions, etc. Some people who are great at speaking are terrible at "slower" forms of communication. I think this does limit those types of people, if you completely close off chat.
The summary/title of issues can be edited, as needed, and clarifying summary comments can be made.
But you're right, it's not exactly the same. People with language barriers sometimes struggle with "not real time" conversations. Others feel if they're writing something in an issue tracker, it's somehow special, so they have to be incredibly formal, and are afraid to be wrong, ask questions, etc. Some people who are great at speaking are terrible at "slower" forms of communication. I think this does limit those types of people, if you completely close off chat.
if really enforce this then I'm curious how you maintain high quality of discussion in there. Slack for me is like an explicit outlet for all the low-quality peripheral discussion that causes problems or confusion if it ends up in the ticket itself. There's definitely a question of discipline in ensuring that info ends up back in the ticket, but it usually just comes down to finishing up the slack conversation with "Can you update the ticket with this?" and they copy the useful parts, put a link to the discussion thread if it's useful and we're done.
> maintain high quality of discussion in there.
Why is this a requirement? You have low quality discussion, in the ether, or you have somewhat constrained discussion, in the issue tracker. You can always "to summarize the above", but if you forget, it still exists where you can find it. At least it's somewhere topically relevant.
Our issue tracker lets us edit other peoples comments. This is nice for linking statements/questions to other issues.
Why is this a requirement? You have low quality discussion, in the ether, or you have somewhat constrained discussion, in the issue tracker. You can always "to summarize the above", but if you forget, it still exists where you can find it. At least it's somewhere topically relevant.
Our issue tracker lets us edit other peoples comments. This is nice for linking statements/questions to other issues.
Before 'Slack' I trained people out of asking me email questions by putting the answers in the wiki. At first I had to create the wiki pages to explain what would have been in the email, but over time people became self service. There are some negatives to this approach but mostly reducing certain classes of interruption are a good thing.
Wikis are precursors for dead tree documentation. It's both a place to store highly volatile pieces of information, and a place where you can start documentation, copy-edit it for months or years until it's just right, and then move the contents into 'real' documentation.
In the Slack age, we need a pipeline that starts in chat, moves to the wiki, and ends in capital D documentation. It wouldn't even have to be that hard. You could simply vomit out the contents, or you could try to be a little more sophisticated where you treat one participant as the author of the sections of the document and the other authors providing the copy for those sections. The goal is to rescue the contents before they disappear, either for real or just due to SNR.
Wikis are precursors for dead tree documentation. It's both a place to store highly volatile pieces of information, and a place where you can start documentation, copy-edit it for months or years until it's just right, and then move the contents into 'real' documentation.
In the Slack age, we need a pipeline that starts in chat, moves to the wiki, and ends in capital D documentation. It wouldn't even have to be that hard. You could simply vomit out the contents, or you could try to be a little more sophisticated where you treat one participant as the author of the sections of the document and the other authors providing the copy for those sections. The goal is to rescue the contents before they disappear, either for real or just due to SNR.
Post-back of jira ticket mentions (or $tracker of choice) are highly useful. Making a channel with issue name is another (crappy) way to do it.
I would love unification in the tracker to every mention of a ticket, from Slack comment to Branch/commit/github mention, and every build system as well.
Jira with DVCS gets pretty close, and is much more useful after using a bot which can do a post back to a reference in the slack message.
I would love unification in the tracker to every mention of a ticket, from Slack comment to Branch/commit/github mention, and every build system as well.
Jira with DVCS gets pretty close, and is much more useful after using a bot which can do a post back to a reference in the slack message.
We actually have that functionality for teams/private communities. I'm working on a tool called Linen.dev and we can move messages and have an open close state with threads.
You can check it out our community https://linen.dev/s/linen
You can check it out our community https://linen.dev/s/linen
> find and link to the conversation that led to creating a ticket, considering how often a critical detail gets left out of a ticket description
I worked with a Slack bot that would create a ticket and include link to the Slack thread and copy of the entire thread right in the ticket description. Very useful.
I worked with a Slack bot that would create a ticket and include link to the Slack thread and copy of the entire thread right in the ticket description. Very useful.
I work as non software type of engineer my work started using Microsoft Teams when the pandemic kicked in (from what I understand Teams and Slack are roughly equivalent to each other).
I find the organization and layout of Teams quite useful. I'm normally working on multiple projects at a given time so having a different "group" in teams for each of the projects makes a lot of sense for me. Previously I made heavy use of folders in outlook I'd make a new folder in my inbox for each project I was working on. I have email folders (and before folders existed PST files) going back 15 years now.
In order for this to work I'd have to curate my inbox by manually filing each email into the appropriate folder as it arrived, Teams kind of does the equivalent of this by default.
Managing and sharing files between people involved in projects has greatly simplified things previous depending on project we'd use a combination of email (has file size limits for attachments, no built in versioning when people are emailing around multiple revisions of the same powerpoint pres for example), Sharepoint document libraries (really hard to add people to sharepoint groups (maybe it was just way my work was setup but sharepoint security was really draconian, access control basically needed a full time admin to make it workable) and Network shared folders (needs VPN, active directory permissions etc). The way it works now (at least with how my work has it set up) once you are added to a group all the files that have been shared are accessible - having to file tickets to get access to shared folders or get added to groups in sharepoint is a thing of the past.
For long term management of documentation my workplace used to have a physical library with dedicated librarians(I think this dated back to 1960's and 70's). Keep in mind for a lot of technical engineering work etc there are legal requirements to keep information archived (for 50+ years sometimes).
The physical library disappeared in the early 1990's I think (long before my time) all of the physical docs were scanned and digitized we had some ancient MS Dos era software (looked like old early 90's software with a text user interface) I think it was called Q and A or something like that. It functioned as digital index for our at one point physical library. We used this for many years basically everything was archived as a PDF and the index in this DOS software was kept up to date. At some point someone used OCR on all the ancient pdfs which kind of worked and greatly improved searchability of our library.
When I first started we were in process of using some java based web interface to replace this ancient MS Dos software, I can't remember what it was called but I think it was mostly used by Lawyers and people in legal profession, kind of worked for storing technical engineering reports and technical drawings but wasn't really built for that purpose. It's still around people really hate using it. I believe there is a desktop client which might be ok to use but I've only ever accessed it through the web interface which is horrible.
In more recent time we trialed using some software called Confluence but it kind of fizzled out and there has been limited use of Open Source Media Wiki software.
I find the organization and layout of Teams quite useful. I'm normally working on multiple projects at a given time so having a different "group" in teams for each of the projects makes a lot of sense for me. Previously I made heavy use of folders in outlook I'd make a new folder in my inbox for each project I was working on. I have email folders (and before folders existed PST files) going back 15 years now.
In order for this to work I'd have to curate my inbox by manually filing each email into the appropriate folder as it arrived, Teams kind of does the equivalent of this by default.
Managing and sharing files between people involved in projects has greatly simplified things previous depending on project we'd use a combination of email (has file size limits for attachments, no built in versioning when people are emailing around multiple revisions of the same powerpoint pres for example), Sharepoint document libraries (really hard to add people to sharepoint groups (maybe it was just way my work was setup but sharepoint security was really draconian, access control basically needed a full time admin to make it workable) and Network shared folders (needs VPN, active directory permissions etc). The way it works now (at least with how my work has it set up) once you are added to a group all the files that have been shared are accessible - having to file tickets to get access to shared folders or get added to groups in sharepoint is a thing of the past.
For long term management of documentation my workplace used to have a physical library with dedicated librarians(I think this dated back to 1960's and 70's). Keep in mind for a lot of technical engineering work etc there are legal requirements to keep information archived (for 50+ years sometimes).
The physical library disappeared in the early 1990's I think (long before my time) all of the physical docs were scanned and digitized we had some ancient MS Dos era software (looked like old early 90's software with a text user interface) I think it was called Q and A or something like that. It functioned as digital index for our at one point physical library. We used this for many years basically everything was archived as a PDF and the index in this DOS software was kept up to date. At some point someone used OCR on all the ancient pdfs which kind of worked and greatly improved searchability of our library.
When I first started we were in process of using some java based web interface to replace this ancient MS Dos software, I can't remember what it was called but I think it was mostly used by Lawyers and people in legal profession, kind of worked for storing technical engineering reports and technical drawings but wasn't really built for that purpose. It's still around people really hate using it. I believe there is a desktop client which might be ok to use but I've only ever accessed it through the web interface which is horrible.
In more recent time we trialed using some software called Confluence but it kind of fizzled out and there has been limited use of Open Source Media Wiki software.
it needs __named threads__
I continue to think people are holding Slack wrong.
The secret is this: Turn off desktop/phone notifications completely. Turn off icon badging. Use Slack as an async messaging tool. Come back to it every so often and batch process messages in your own time. It's great for that. If you let it interrupt you on its own terms, you're going to have a bad time.
Also, turn off @channel and @here notifications on most channels.
The secret is this: Turn off desktop/phone notifications completely. Turn off icon badging. Use Slack as an async messaging tool. Come back to it every so often and batch process messages in your own time. It's great for that. If you let it interrupt you on its own terms, you're going to have a bad time.
Also, turn off @channel and @here notifications on most channels.
As you scale up the volume of messages gets out of control. You can’t read them all. My solution is I only guarantee to read messages in my team channels, or where I have been @‘d. Otherwise there is too much to catch up on. The boundaryless combo of watercooler, idea box, official docs and meetings notes means I am going to miss something important.
This is probably a holding it wrong issue. And a bit of “well the handle is shaped weird too so how do I hold it?”
Ephemeral conversions, like you have in the office might be a good solution. Maybe default Ephemeral (end of day loss unless you vote to keep) would force people to document meetings and decisions and stuff in the right place .
This is probably a holding it wrong issue. And a bit of “well the handle is shaped weird too so how do I hold it?”
Ephemeral conversions, like you have in the office might be a good solution. Maybe default Ephemeral (end of day loss unless you vote to keep) would force people to document meetings and decisions and stuff in the right place .
In my company every team has a private channel where most of the high velocity conversations happen. In most othersl channels the number of daily messages is in the single digits (excluding things like monitoring and alerts that we send to slack). Company size 200, mostly remote word wide.
Yes, this is also what I'd say to the author's points about it being distracting. But Slack search and scroll UIs are both really slow and clumsy. I don't think I'm using those wrong.
Agreed. I turn off all notifications and route mentions/replies to email, creating a chronological inbox I can work through.
I agree that would work, but culturally that's not how most organisations seem to be using it. Instead Slack seems to be viewed as a synchronous messaging tool - "if I send you a Slack msg, and I don't get a response within 2-3 minutes, something is wrong"
I work for several different organisations that use Slack. Every time I start working at one, I turn off notifications and mark myself as busy or away, then jump onto Slack at logical intervals during the day to respond. Within a day or so, I have people asking if I'm OK, then when I explain, I get told that there's an expectation that "people should be always accessible via Slack" (generally a mealy-mouthed version of that, but the message is clear).
To me, Slack is like sitting in the desk next to the only coffee machine in a large office - constant interruptions and zero chance to get into a flow state.
I work for several different organisations that use Slack. Every time I start working at one, I turn off notifications and mark myself as busy or away, then jump onto Slack at logical intervals during the day to respond. Within a day or so, I have people asking if I'm OK, then when I explain, I get told that there's an expectation that "people should be always accessible via Slack" (generally a mealy-mouthed version of that, but the message is clear).
To me, Slack is like sitting in the desk next to the only coffee machine in a large office - constant interruptions and zero chance to get into a flow state.
This, 100x.
Slack replaces in-person conversations, which have the same deficits, and many of the same benefits. It works best for remote and hybrid teams, where the in-person discussions aren't possible. It can even work well for in-office teams by allowing some collaboration to be more async. It's way better than email for this.
It's terrible for being off the record. All Slack should be considered durable for the employer.
It's terrible for being off the record. All Slack should be considered durable for the employer.
> It's terrible for being off the record. All Slack should be considered durable for the employer.
It's also terrible for being "on the record". All slack conversations should be considered ephemeral from a documentation and records keeping perspective.
Which leaves it in a pretty ugly spot. It's good for exactly two things in my opinion:
1. Quickly scheduling a real meeting (occasionally it can replace the meeting if it's just two participants, but I've not seen this be consistently successful past two).
2. Work appropriate chit chat and water cooler discussions - which are beneficial from a "social cohesion" standpoint for remote teams, but are generally wasted time.
Basically - it's the worst of both worlds: you're always on the record and the record is mostly useless from a historical/documentation perspective.
It's also terrible for being "on the record". All slack conversations should be considered ephemeral from a documentation and records keeping perspective.
Which leaves it in a pretty ugly spot. It's good for exactly two things in my opinion:
1. Quickly scheduling a real meeting (occasionally it can replace the meeting if it's just two participants, but I've not seen this be consistently successful past two).
2. Work appropriate chit chat and water cooler discussions - which are beneficial from a "social cohesion" standpoint for remote teams, but are generally wasted time.
Basically - it's the worst of both worlds: you're always on the record and the record is mostly useless from a historical/documentation perspective.
It’s like hallway and ad hoc conversations: a great to get a quick answer, less great as a part of formal business process.
But yes, using it for either secret or formal purposes is going to disappoint.
But yes, using it for either secret or formal purposes is going to disappoint.
> Work appropriate chit chat and water cooler discussions - which are beneficial from a "social cohesion" standpoint for remote teams, but are generally wasted time.
I don't agree it's "wasted time"; some amount of social interaction is pretty useful for a team to work well together. Essential? Probably not. But it does tend to lubricate the process a bit.
There's also idle work-related conversation that doesn't really neatly fit in a "ticket" but is nonetheless pretty useful.
All of that being said, I think Slack is horrible for all of this as its UI forces stuff into "threads" hard which serious reduces visibility and ability to "join in" on conversations hours or days later.
I don't agree it's "wasted time"; some amount of social interaction is pretty useful for a team to work well together. Essential? Probably not. But it does tend to lubricate the process a bit.
There's also idle work-related conversation that doesn't really neatly fit in a "ticket" but is nonetheless pretty useful.
All of that being said, I think Slack is horrible for all of this as its UI forces stuff into "threads" hard which serious reduces visibility and ability to "join in" on conversations hours or days later.
I agree with both points. One of the things I miss from my previous job is a thriving mattermost instance with channels full of jokes mixed with technical (but not necessarily work-related) info. It really brought the team together and I believe it had many indirect positive productivity effects.
For some reason I never saw this magic replicated with Slack.
For some reason I never saw this magic replicated with Slack.
> All slack conversations should be considered ephemeral from a documentation and records keeping perspective.
We use chat exactly that way. Commonly people respond to questions with a link to either the issue in our issue tracking system, or to the relevant page in the wiki. Certain individuals have learned that saying "but what I want isn't in there" gets them an edit link to the same page.
Once tech support started using the wiki it became more broadly useful. Knowledge that used to live only in the minds of the more experienced tech support people somehow ended up in the wiki thanks to juniors asking questions and the answers being pasted into the wiki. Wiki has also become something of a back channel for things that should be written down but don't really fit the issue tracking system. Common user errors and their symptoms, for example.
We use chat exactly that way. Commonly people respond to questions with a link to either the issue in our issue tracking system, or to the relevant page in the wiki. Certain individuals have learned that saying "but what I want isn't in there" gets them an edit link to the same page.
Once tech support started using the wiki it became more broadly useful. Knowledge that used to live only in the minds of the more experienced tech support people somehow ended up in the wiki thanks to juniors asking questions and the answers being pasted into the wiki. Wiki has also become something of a back channel for things that should be written down but don't really fit the issue tracking system. Common user errors and their symptoms, for example.
We've been doing almost all of our team meetings (ranging from 5-8 people) over Slack for the past number of years. They're both faster and more productive than the video chat meetings we used to have, and leave a written record. A huge benefit over a spoken meeting is that multiple people can be 'talking' at once (often in threads) without interrupting each other.
I'm also not sure why you consider the record useless from a historical perspective. It's not structured documentation, to be sure, but it's at least a useful as email in that respect. (More-so because it's generally much easier to search.)
I'm also not sure why you consider the record useless from a historical perspective. It's not structured documentation, to be sure, but it's at least a useful as email in that respect. (More-so because it's generally much easier to search.)
>All slack conversations should be considered ephemeral from a documentation and records keeping perspective.
Unfortunately, from a SOX, HIPAA, or sunshine/FOIA perspective it's not. As you say, you're always on the record, even if you don't know what the record is.
Unfortunately, from a SOX, HIPAA, or sunshine/FOIA perspective it's not. As you say, you're always on the record, even if you don't know what the record is.
> Slack replaces in-person conversations, which have the same deficits, and many of the same benefits
A couple of disadvantages of Slack vs real-time conversations: there can be multiple Slack threads happening at the same time. On particularly busy days, I find myself having to context switch between threads a lot. Threads can also keep going versus an in-person conversation which has an explicit end (further discussions are done in a follow-up conversation). Some threads play out over the course of multiple days, which requires that you keep the context of it in "working memory" for a while.
I like Slack, but at its worst it encourages multitasking, which can be a real productivity killer.
A couple of disadvantages of Slack vs real-time conversations: there can be multiple Slack threads happening at the same time. On particularly busy days, I find myself having to context switch between threads a lot. Threads can also keep going versus an in-person conversation which has an explicit end (further discussions are done in a follow-up conversation). Some threads play out over the course of multiple days, which requires that you keep the context of it in "working memory" for a while.
I like Slack, but at its worst it encourages multitasking, which can be a real productivity killer.
That's the point. There have always been lots of ways for employees to communicate, Slack is one with a permanent record owned by the licensing company.
It's funny to read people on HN bagging on Slack. My first experience of it was as a middle manager moving to Silicon Valley where everyone expected you to use it, along with JIRA. I used to like to use kanban boards and -- I know this sounds ridiculous -- waterfall charts. It's like these things become fads and then everyone decides they are terrible.
It's funny to read people on HN bagging on Slack. My first experience of it was as a middle manager moving to Silicon Valley where everyone expected you to use it, along with JIRA. I used to like to use kanban boards and -- I know this sounds ridiculous -- waterfall charts. It's like these things become fads and then everyone decides they are terrible.
> Slack replaces in-person conversations, which have the same deficits, and many of the same benefits.
Agreed. Reading this, a lot seems to come down to culture problems that would exist whether that given office uses Slack or not, especially regarding interruptions.
I personally have felt way less interrupted from Slack/Teams in my 8+ years of remote work than I did in an office. All of my employers have understood that if I have Slack notifications disabled, I'm either "out of office" or focusing on something, and have also understood that Slack should be treated as a "something that could go a few hours without a response."
In-person, I'd just have people walk into my office and start talking without seeing if I was busy. I had multiple times where I had the door shut and lights off, and had someone pound on the door because "they could hear my keyboard and thought I just didn't hear them knocking."
Slack just lets the people who are going to interrupt you regardless do so with way less effort.
Agreed. Reading this, a lot seems to come down to culture problems that would exist whether that given office uses Slack or not, especially regarding interruptions.
I personally have felt way less interrupted from Slack/Teams in my 8+ years of remote work than I did in an office. All of my employers have understood that if I have Slack notifications disabled, I'm either "out of office" or focusing on something, and have also understood that Slack should be treated as a "something that could go a few hours without a response."
In-person, I'd just have people walk into my office and start talking without seeing if I was busy. I had multiple times where I had the door shut and lights off, and had someone pound on the door because "they could hear my keyboard and thought I just didn't hear them knocking."
Slack just lets the people who are going to interrupt you regardless do so with way less effort.
Most complaints about Slack are really complaints about company culture and employee expectations.
If you are constantly interrupted and expected to drop everything and reply immediately, moving from Slack to email or anything else won't magically fix it.
If you don't have proper data repositories (organized docs folders, wikis, issue trackers), switching off Slack won't fix that.
If middle managers are interfering in your work, signing out of Slack isn't going to fix it.
If people aren't documenting code, they will continue to not do it regardless of the existence of Slack.
Slack is a tool. It is not a fix for human problems at any company.
If you are constantly interrupted and expected to drop everything and reply immediately, moving from Slack to email or anything else won't magically fix it.
If you don't have proper data repositories (organized docs folders, wikis, issue trackers), switching off Slack won't fix that.
If middle managers are interfering in your work, signing out of Slack isn't going to fix it.
If people aren't documenting code, they will continue to not do it regardless of the existence of Slack.
Slack is a tool. It is not a fix for human problems at any company.
This is my experience too. Slack is what you make of it. Annoyed at interruptions? Be honest and communicate how you like to work, adjust expectations about responsiveness, and then stick to it. I've never had issues.
agreed. I love Slack. where I work, it is used for helping coworkers/other teams with issues - but there is no expectation of fast replies. the author implies this expectation is implicit to Slack, but it's not. for me, it's perfectly normal to not expect a reply to something even on the same day, especially if it's complex and people are busy.
additionally, if the volume of messages is too high to be able to catch up with after working for a while (like you would catch up on emails), this is probably an issue of not splitting things up adequately into granular channels. or, again, some weird culture of just spamming Slack for everything.
additionally, if the volume of messages is too high to be able to catch up with after working for a while (like you would catch up on emails), this is probably an issue of not splitting things up adequately into granular channels. or, again, some weird culture of just spamming Slack for everything.
It is a shame that by default, Slack is set up to be high-interruption. But this is true of any IM app and I wouldn't necessarily call it a problem of the app itself, I mean they are building an "instant" messenger. I agree with the author that it's normally counter to my own goals (like deep work). But this is a ridiculously easy fix -- you just turn off notifications, whether visual or auditory.
If your workplace requires instant responses over Slack, that's a problem with your employer and/or their culture, not the application.
I personally find Slack to be fine. I have all notifications turned off (including the red badge), and set myself as permanently away. I use it as a lower-latency email, and for that it works quite well.
If your workplace requires instant responses over Slack, that's a problem with your employer and/or their culture, not the application.
I personally find Slack to be fine. I have all notifications turned off (including the red badge), and set myself as permanently away. I use it as a lower-latency email, and for that it works quite well.
Slack is horrible. Here are my issues with these modern chat tools:
* People saying 'Hey!' and then nothing. First 3 times I'll ask them to immediately post their question. After that I don't respond to greetings without questions.
* The sheer amount of data that I need to parse. People throw things out there at random and expect you to keep up to date. At least with email the barrier is higher so that people send a condensed email. Not with Slack. It's just type and hit Enter.
* The disarray of finding out what's relevant when being mentioned. A private channel? An ad-hoc group chat? An established channel? A thread in a channel? How far do you need to scroll back? @WirelessGigabit ^ really doesn't help.
* People not realizing it's async. If you need me, call. Otherwise I'll treat it like an email. Context switching is heavy, and the cost of reading 'Hey!' is more than 2 seconds, it's more like 5 minutes, with a chance I go do something completely different.
* People saying 'Hey!' and then nothing. First 3 times I'll ask them to immediately post their question. After that I don't respond to greetings without questions.
* The sheer amount of data that I need to parse. People throw things out there at random and expect you to keep up to date. At least with email the barrier is higher so that people send a condensed email. Not with Slack. It's just type and hit Enter.
* The disarray of finding out what's relevant when being mentioned. A private channel? An ad-hoc group chat? An established channel? A thread in a channel? How far do you need to scroll back? @WirelessGigabit ^ really doesn't help.
* People not realizing it's async. If you need me, call. Otherwise I'll treat it like an email. Context switching is heavy, and the cost of reading 'Hey!' is more than 2 seconds, it's more like 5 minutes, with a chance I go do something completely different.
[deleted]
So nothing to do with the tool, just the way people you work with use it?
Sometimes the tool shapes behaviours. Things that are easier to do, will be done more often.
The folks at Doist (makers of todoist app) created Twist.com because of their discontent with slack, it's very interesting to read their blog posts regarding the tool (and others regarding async work), as they state the default settings of an app shapes a lot of the common behaviour. So, for example, their tool does not send a post on the press of the ENTER key (it creates a new line). Sure slack can also do that, but it's not the default and it has impact.
Anyway, it's interesting to read on their UX decisions they seem very thoughtful on UX (even if you might not agree with the toughts), and async/remote work stuff.
edit: went to look for the post, it is older than I recall, and with the old look:
https://blog.doist.com/designing-twist-the-challenge-of-maki...
The folks at Doist (makers of todoist app) created Twist.com because of their discontent with slack, it's very interesting to read their blog posts regarding the tool (and others regarding async work), as they state the default settings of an app shapes a lot of the common behaviour. So, for example, their tool does not send a post on the press of the ENTER key (it creates a new line). Sure slack can also do that, but it's not the default and it has impact.
Anyway, it's interesting to read on their UX decisions they seem very thoughtful on UX (even if you might not agree with the toughts), and async/remote work stuff.
edit: went to look for the post, it is older than I recall, and with the old look:
https://blog.doist.com/designing-twist-the-challenge-of-maki...
"slack empowers your worst people to overwhelm your best."
Damn straight
Damn straight
"Where work happens" was the funniest tagline for Slack, because it's really more of a social network that distracts people and promotes unstructured back-and-forth.
If you're interested in learning about how decreasing barriers to communication in workplaces have resulted in over-communication and poor processes, check out the book A World without Email by Cal Newport. I highly recommend it.
Chat engages the small percent of active participants, but neglects people who are too busy (e.g., doing work) to follow along with the streams. This is a problem at work, but also in online communities like Discord. That's why I'm working on a threaded, forum-like communication tool. I'm focused on online communities as the first use case (e.g., investor networks or professional groups), but I hope companies start to adopt it for internal communications, too. https://www.booklet.community
Related, I found the article's discussions of Jira and Trello interesting. Modern project management hates ambiguity. So, all projects need to be broken down into tasks and acceptance criteria ASAP. But, this means that you have bloated backlogs reflecting yesteryear's priorities. We conflate "not forgetting things" with "obligations", and that is where a lot of this bloat comes from.
If you're interested in learning about how decreasing barriers to communication in workplaces have resulted in over-communication and poor processes, check out the book A World without Email by Cal Newport. I highly recommend it.
Chat engages the small percent of active participants, but neglects people who are too busy (e.g., doing work) to follow along with the streams. This is a problem at work, but also in online communities like Discord. That's why I'm working on a threaded, forum-like communication tool. I'm focused on online communities as the first use case (e.g., investor networks or professional groups), but I hope companies start to adopt it for internal communications, too. https://www.booklet.community
Related, I found the article's discussions of Jira and Trello interesting. Modern project management hates ambiguity. So, all projects need to be broken down into tasks and acceptance criteria ASAP. But, this means that you have bloated backlogs reflecting yesteryear's priorities. We conflate "not forgetting things" with "obligations", and that is where a lot of this bloat comes from.
Uhm. I don't know. At my company, we're living on Slack (it's remote). There are only few tactical meetings. Coordination happen async on Slack. Worked out pretty well so far, we ship tons of stuff continuously. I agree with some other comments here: how much signal to noise ratio you get out of Slack mostly boils down to the people
I feel like the very concept of real-time text chat is fundamentally broken.
Discord is another example here. I play a lot of video games, and mod a lot of video games. Lately the trend is for mod teams to move all discussion of their mods - including bug reports - to Discord. This is a nightmare for anyone actually hoping to troubleshoot some issue, since not only does one need to deal with Discord's shitty search (thankfully less shitty than Slack or Teams, but only marginally), but also have to go through the ceremony of adding yet another Discord "server", yet again combing through the notification settings to not get bombarded by the @everyone pings every 13 fucking seconds, yet again jumping through whatever hoops to be deemed a sufficiently-normal user to even have access to the bug reporting channels (rather than being stuck in the "explicitly agree to our rules and await approval" circle of Hell), etc. for every single mod.
Slack, Discord, Teams, IRC... hell, even email: they suck as support channels, they suck as stores of organizational knowledge, and they suck as collaboration tools. The only thing they're good at is being as distracting as possible. A traditional forum is vastly superior in every way.
Discord is another example here. I play a lot of video games, and mod a lot of video games. Lately the trend is for mod teams to move all discussion of their mods - including bug reports - to Discord. This is a nightmare for anyone actually hoping to troubleshoot some issue, since not only does one need to deal with Discord's shitty search (thankfully less shitty than Slack or Teams, but only marginally), but also have to go through the ceremony of adding yet another Discord "server", yet again combing through the notification settings to not get bombarded by the @everyone pings every 13 fucking seconds, yet again jumping through whatever hoops to be deemed a sufficiently-normal user to even have access to the bug reporting channels (rather than being stuck in the "explicitly agree to our rules and await approval" circle of Hell), etc. for every single mod.
Slack, Discord, Teams, IRC... hell, even email: they suck as support channels, they suck as stores of organizational knowledge, and they suck as collaboration tools. The only thing they're good at is being as distracting as possible. A traditional forum is vastly superior in every way.
> There’s one way in which slack edges out trello & jira for project management.
Slack is decidedly not a project management tool. It would be insane to replace a dedicated project tracker with random Slack conversations. Nor should it replace proper documentation, though in a pinch it can be helpful to be able to search a past conversation. Admittedly because it can bail you out that way, you need to remain diligent in properly documenting things that should be documented.
Slack is decidedly not a project management tool. It would be insane to replace a dedicated project tracker with random Slack conversations. Nor should it replace proper documentation, though in a pinch it can be helpful to be able to search a past conversation. Admittedly because it can bail you out that way, you need to remain diligent in properly documenting things that should be documented.
Slack actually has a pretty good writing experience, and it's great for dumping out stream-of-consciousness notes. It's better than any other note-taking app for this because you don't need to think about titles or organization before you start. Just pick a channel that you're working in and start typing.
If it had a way to come back and tack on organization after the fact, it'd be the perfect tool for this. As it is, you get Threads, which kinda work ok.
The thing that really kills it though is search. I can write up the most incredible documentation about something as I'm building it, then come back 6 months later and not be able to find it using any combination of keywords. Or, better still, have the entire history be purged by company policy after a couple months.
If it had a way to come back and tack on organization after the fact, it'd be the perfect tool for this. As it is, you get Threads, which kinda work ok.
The thing that really kills it though is search. I can write up the most incredible documentation about something as I'm building it, then come back 6 months later and not be able to find it using any combination of keywords. Or, better still, have the entire history be purged by company policy after a couple months.
As a cost savings measure my employer recently moved our entire organization from Slack to Microsoft Teams. I used to assume both products were similar, but I have much more appreciation for Slack as a product now.
Managing notifications for monitors/alarms is much more painful in Teams. You can’t organize channels how you wish, they always have to be part of a parent team. The performance of Microsoft Teams seems much more laggy when opening or searching for conversations. Built-in Slack features like Slackbot reminders are nonexistent in Teams. I am interested to see how our development organization adapts to this transition.
Managing notifications for monitors/alarms is much more painful in Teams. You can’t organize channels how you wish, they always have to be part of a parent team. The performance of Microsoft Teams seems much more laggy when opening or searching for conversations. Built-in Slack features like Slackbot reminders are nonexistent in Teams. I am interested to see how our development organization adapts to this transition.
> As a cost savings measure my employer recently moved our entire organization from Slack to Microsoft Teams. I used to assume both products were similar, but I have much more appreciation for Slack as a product now.
Same, and OMG is this true. Slack may be less than ideal but it is so much better than Teams.
But its not organizational memory, its really for basically ephemeral comms. Yes, you can dig back for stuff but its not great for that, and finding things is horrible.
Same, and OMG is this true. Slack may be less than ideal but it is so much better than Teams.
But its not organizational memory, its really for basically ephemeral comms. Yes, you can dig back for stuff but its not great for that, and finding things is horrible.
> Microsoft Teams seems much more laggy when opening or searching for conversations
It's incredible watching a _chat app_ made by one of the biggest tech companies redraw itself.
It's incredible watching a _chat app_ made by one of the biggest tech companies redraw itself.
Teams is laggy even when typing! The input lag for me was noticeable.
Yes, Slack is bad for all the reasons listed here.
Slack is also bad because it's crap for software devs: it's the year 20-freakin'-23 and I still can't get syntax highlighting in fenced code blocks. Discord does it fine. So does Element on desktop. Why not Slack?! Yes, yes, I know all about uploading a file, but if I want to send a quick snippet to a coworker, I don't want to save a file somewhere just so I can upload it to Slack and then delete it right away. Sheesh.
(It's still better than MS Teams, which is the worst possible of all worlds.)
</rant>
Slack is also bad because it's crap for software devs: it's the year 20-freakin'-23 and I still can't get syntax highlighting in fenced code blocks. Discord does it fine. So does Element on desktop. Why not Slack?! Yes, yes, I know all about uploading a file, but if I want to send a quick snippet to a coworker, I don't want to save a file somewhere just so I can upload it to Slack and then delete it right away. Sheesh.
(It's still better than MS Teams, which is the worst possible of all worlds.)
</rant>
You can use the snippets feature. Is this what you're looking for?
https://slack.com/help/articles/204145658-Create-or-paste-co...
https://slack.com/help/articles/204145658-Create-or-paste-co...
Companies are gonna have terrible documentation whether or not they use Slack, at least Slack makes this slightly better by making every conversation decently searchable. IME every attempt to centralize information in some "better" repository has just resulted in fragmentation.
In a perfect world there'd be some metacrawler that could search Github, Google Docs, internal wikis, JIRA, etc. all at once; in practice, Slack is the search index
In a perfect world there'd be some metacrawler that could search Github, Google Docs, internal wikis, JIRA, etc. all at once; in practice, Slack is the search index
> Somewhere along the way we forgot that interruptions are toxic to real work. It wasn’t always this way. On day 1 of my first trading job the only instruction I received was ‘when the market is open, mute your phone.’ The subtext was ‘or else’. If someone said this to me today I’d give them a hug, and I’m not a hugger.
Muting my phone and its endless alerts: it’s what i do from Monday to Friday; 8am to 6pm.
Muting my phone and its endless alerts: it’s what i do from Monday to Friday; 8am to 6pm.
Not to be mean but this a lot of misplaced whining. Slack and jira are not the problem in any organization. It's always people. You work on stories written 6 months ago as if they're still fresh? Jira didn't do that. And slack search is really good. I literally dug up a 2 year old thread yesterday and showed it to new colleagues who used the info to save us thousands in redundant work.
Agreed, the rant about Jira really made it seem like a management issue. At our company tickets are only created for the upcoming three sprints, anything that hasn't been done in three months is deleted as it's obviously not important
As a good consultant and contractor, Slack great at holding people - particularly decision makers, to account.
Oh you forgot you told me to do this? Here's the message from 6 months ago.
I'm excited to work with organisations who have executive staff that use Slack, but from talking with employees - even Stewart Butterfield stopped using Slack over the past few years except for company announcements.
Companies that embrace open decision making, blameless (to a degree) culture and transparency who embrace Slack, and good work-life balance, are far and few.
People who get mad about having too many channels simply are putting too much pressure on themselves. As long as you look at your DM's, when people tag you directly - or your close team's channel - you're using Slack correctly. If people expect you to view or have seen something elsewhere, you should have known about it through your manager, through direct tags/DM's or whatever your #very-important-announcement channel is. That's it.
Oh you forgot you told me to do this? Here's the message from 6 months ago.
I'm excited to work with organisations who have executive staff that use Slack, but from talking with employees - even Stewart Butterfield stopped using Slack over the past few years except for company announcements.
Companies that embrace open decision making, blameless (to a degree) culture and transparency who embrace Slack, and good work-life balance, are far and few.
People who get mad about having too many channels simply are putting too much pressure on themselves. As long as you look at your DM's, when people tag you directly - or your close team's channel - you're using Slack correctly. If people expect you to view or have seen something elsewhere, you should have known about it through your manager, through direct tags/DM's or whatever your #very-important-announcement channel is. That's it.
I wonder if you could use an AI like Chat GPT to write documentation or maybe just FAQs from following the Slack History. It seems like you could find common patterns in repeated questions and things people need to know.
Maybe that is a dumb idea but every time someone points out a problem with Slack, Teams or Zoom I wonder if it is an opportunity for a better platform.
Maybe that is a dumb idea but every time someone points out a problem with Slack, Teams or Zoom I wonder if it is an opportunity for a better platform.
Here is a Python library that basically does that: https://gpt-index.readthedocs.io/en/latest/reference/readers...
I had a similar idea. Continuously feed new messages into a GPT like model and have a slack bot that you can just ask questions to.
Most people don't want to read documentation. They'd rather just message someone their exact question and get an answer. Instead of bugging a person have an AI fill in.
Most people don't want to read documentation. They'd rather just message someone their exact question and get an answer. Instead of bugging a person have an AI fill in.
I see Slack in a similar light as I see dating apps — good first stabs at the tool but really needs evolution to develop into an actually great tool for its purpose. Unfortunately due to the dynamics of the market that needed evolution is unlikely to take place: incumbents are not incentivized to experiment and network effects mean that new entries to the market have an incredibly hard time gaining enough traction to even validate their new models.
There is one competitor (can't remember which rn) that has an inbox model that I really dig. Mentions go into the inbox, not into your notifications. Small things like that I think could make a big difference; I hope Slack is taking notes.
There is one competitor (can't remember which rn) that has an inbox model that I really dig. Mentions go into the inbox, not into your notifications. Small things like that I think could make a big difference; I hope Slack is taking notes.
My team uses Slack and I can't imagine working with others without it. Sharing ideas, code snippets, images, video, zip files, ... what would one use without this? There is no replacement for Slack. Heck I even slack myself all of the time.
I used FB Workplace while at FB and strongly prefer it to Slack. In Workspace there's a clear delineation making a new post and replying to one; this means it's easy to skim through new posts in a group to catch up, and only dig through a long reply thread if its relevant. In theory Slack has a "replies" feature, but everything in the product encourages you to just dump discussion into the main channel. Making a new post shouldn't necessarily be heavyweight, but it should at least cause you to pause and ask "does everyone in this group need to know this?"
How companies structure organisational memory is down to culture. People need to understand the benefits and limitations of a tool like Slack and behave accordingly (most users even struggle to use threads appropriately).
Slack is perfect for agreeing on simple, reversible decisions that don’t require much context or structured debate. I doubt you’ll ever be able to remove that just-in-time feeling from Slack’s user experience. Its UI is just not made for deep thinking.
But any long term thinking should happen in tools like Notion, which is better set up for long thinking, discussion and structured documentation of decisions.
Slack is perfect for agreeing on simple, reversible decisions that don’t require much context or structured debate. I doubt you’ll ever be able to remove that just-in-time feeling from Slack’s user experience. Its UI is just not made for deep thinking.
But any long term thinking should happen in tools like Notion, which is better set up for long thinking, discussion and structured documentation of decisions.
In my experience at a company where Slack is the primary communication too:
- it's great for casual chats
- it means we have the institutional memory of a goldfish
This is largely a product of how we use it and it's a less than organized company generally.
- it's great for casual chats
- it means we have the institutional memory of a goldfish
This is largely a product of how we use it and it's a less than organized company generally.
[deleted]
I just don't understand why a company would take all its most important information and just punch it all up into a third party web site. Somebody could buy Slack, change the user agreement, and sell everybody's treasured secrets. It could be hacked. Subtle changes could be introduced ahead of a law suit. When (not IF) this happens I hope we don't have to hear a bunch of whining from users on this site who never saw it coming.
It's one of the most baffling things to me about modern corporate IT practices.
It's one of the most baffling things to me about modern corporate IT practices.
I used to work for a company that handled a lot of classified data. In that space, there’s a notion of something being “classified by amalgamation”. In other words, I can tell you something that is not classified, and someone else can tell you something that is not classified, but you knowing both those things collectively may make it classified. I always wondered how much classified intelligence was leaked to or through Teams in this way. That nobody ever considered it blew my mind.
The consumer-facing user agreement rarely applies in corporate settings. Customers negotiate master agreements with the vendor (in this case Slack, or maybe Salesforce) which limit ways the vendor can use their data, and often have significant financial penalties for sharing data without customer permission.
I really like slack (the Searchable Log of All Communication and Knowledge). Of course it’s not a substitute for everything, especially writing and whiteboarding, but it’s a good way to exchange information and it’s automatically stored and searchable. Actually the worst thing about slack is that so many convos, like direct messages and private groups, are not publicly searchable.
Also, credit to their engineers that they haven’t had a breach yet. I cannot tell you the number of times i’ve received passwords in a slack channel.
Also, credit to their engineers that they haven’t had a breach yet. I cannot tell you the number of times i’ve received passwords in a slack channel.
I still believe the no history approach of IRC is the better default.
In practice you end up using a bouncer, or the org uses a bot to preserve history
That's your decision and your fear of missing out. That's why I've written defaults.
But do you expect it as a user? I find that I do behave differently on IRC and Slack just because of my perception of the history.
On IRC, I have a bouncer mostly to receive the message while I'm offline. But I write down the important information immediately, because I consider it ephemeral.
On Slack, I consider that the history is there to stay, so I don't save it anywhere else. Even if I often lose information because I can't find it anymore.
On IRC, I have a bouncer mostly to receive the message while I'm offline. But I write down the important information immediately, because I consider it ephemeral.
On Slack, I consider that the history is there to stay, so I don't save it anywhere else. Even if I often lose information because I can't find it anymore.
[deleted]
For organizations yes, and even more so for open-source software or other community-based projects. Mailing lists are there for all time, for people to search and find solutions in past discussions. Slack is instant, but essentially ephemeral. You might get an answer for your stacktrace or crash if someone is online who knows, but nobody in the future benefits from that conversation. Really sad...
I have a pretty mundane / kindergarten problem with it:
If I had a conversation with several people where information shared turned out to be valuable, I have to remember exactly who was there to be able to recall that chat thread. Miss or forget one person and it might not ever appear again in your recollection or history, if you can't specify exactly what you're trying to remember.
If I had a conversation with several people where information shared turned out to be valuable, I have to remember exactly who was there to be able to recall that chat thread. Miss or forget one person and it might not ever appear again in your recollection or history, if you can't specify exactly what you're trying to remember.
Couldn't agree more. My team recently adopted http://threads.com and it's been an absolute game changer. It's sexy, but it also works incredibly well and I feel like I can hear myself think at work for the first time in a decade.
(2018), but reads like it was written yesterday
Not entirely. I'd argue one of the bigger gripes in this article is Slack's inadequate search feature. That being said, I've had good experiences with Slack's search in my use after 2020. MSFT Team's search on the other hand is abominable.
Search is meaningless when the storage is so expensive. We can't afford to maintain logs more than a year. I'd give anything to be able to walk back through conversations 2-3 years ago, but it's simply too expensive for the org.
You know what I really want for collaborating on projects and such right now? Google Wave (but obviously executed better than it was back in 2009). I want the integration of synchronous and asynchronous in one application - because I do actually need both Slack-style and email-style communication for different things.
wave was so exciting, bummer it fizzled
When I get enough sway to do so (new team, new company, somewhere to try a new process without killing productivity) I’d like to give Discourse a try for discussion. It’s got both forum-like and chat-like features.
https://www.discourse.org/index
https://www.discourse.org/index
Ironically enough slack is organizational memory where I work. We have an insane retention policy where emails are auto deleted after 60 days. It’s nuts - just when you need that sent email, you realize it’s gone. Yet slack is not subject to that policy… so I always know I can just search there for what I need.
A lot of the complaints in the article have to do with the near-synchronous nature of the communication. It undermines focus and prevents deep thought.
What happens in a company that has normalized this kind of always-availability when an employee decides to regularly not respond within 5 minutes?
What happens in a company that has normalized this kind of always-availability when an employee decides to regularly not respond within 5 minutes?
Seems to me a lot of these problems are more down to company policy. For instance, depending on Slack for documentation is not the fault of the tool, this could easily be remedied by insisting that people document the results of discussions in a reliable place.
If it were open source and self hostable, could you convince people to make emails, internal documentation, slack etc. be the training data for an LLM to make an omnipotent organizational guru who can participate in planning sessions, help onboard people, etc?
Call it Tribal ™
Call it Tribal ™
Back at my last position we used slack almost like a notes application. I still like it a bit better than confluence. Documentation, sure, think. Slow down. But notes need to be immediate or they won't get captured at all. There slack excelled.
Discussed at the time:
Slack is the opposite of organizational memory - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16355454 - Feb 2018 (250 comments)
Slack is the opposite of organizational memory - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16355454 - Feb 2018 (250 comments)
Problem at my work is that we have data retention policies on Slack. So we treat it as a great source of info, but then messages simply expire after long enough.. still need documentation as well
I haven't seen it happen well, but I'd like to think retention policies, especially somewhat tight ones, could encourage folks to move durable information elsewhere. If you know this explanation is going to be removed in a month or a few months, you know to polish it up somewhere else.
Most stuff in slack should be ephemeral enough to not need that process, but I know that in reality that process never actually happens because the one that needs to move it doesn't have any incentive to do so, and it being deleted doesn't really harm them either.
Most stuff in slack should be ephemeral enough to not need that process, but I know that in reality that process never actually happens because the one that needs to move it doesn't have any incentive to do so, and it being deleted doesn't really harm them either.
Its all fun and games until some doofus posts a password in Slack and now your security team demands 30 days retention and you can't use Slack to search for anything any more.
If a doofus posts a password, the doofus gets to run the password rotation runbook for that service, done. If the runbook is too long, a PR to automate it is a great alternative.
In one particularly unfortunate case I can recall, the same engineer, having been thoroughly tired out by the lengthy and stressful (production-critical) rotation procedure, then pasted the new password again when announcing the rotation's completion. But it never happened after that. :-)
In one particularly unfortunate case I can recall, the same engineer, having been thoroughly tired out by the lengthy and stressful (production-critical) rotation procedure, then pasted the new password again when announcing the rotation's completion. But it never happened after that. :-)
Doofus is an HR person who posted a login to a yoga signup website. So, no, they're not rotating anything but that password.
Everybody gets to lose Slack memory so "it won't happen again."
Everybody gets to lose Slack memory so "it won't happen again."
Maybe Wave (with a desktop app this time) could be tried again.
There is Mattermost if you want to own your data. It’s quite good and free for the basic use case.
The same can be said for Teams.
How? Teams search is ok and posts and replies are threaded. Haven't used slack professionally but it just seems to be a massive chat.
good question !
good question!
[deleted]
It seems like most of the article complaints are cultural, more than they are about the platform itself. Obviously it's still early days for my usage, but strictly evaluating the tool itself, it seems pretty solid. Definitely better than "unnamed but awful FAANG-specific tool".