Slack is not for me
medium.com
medium.com
I turn off all notifications & just check from time to time. I have a project manager who tends to pester me with DMs a little too much, but if I'm trying to concentrate I just turn it off.
I'm 50 years old & still "pre-internet" in much of my thinking, but I don't have a smartphone, turn off ALL notifications and then turn them on one-by-one on a need only basis, and still can't figure out why people have so much trouble managing their internet lives.
It's not the tool that's causing your problems.
That even Google violates its own Android notification guidelines is annoying.
I know it sounds really crochety, but I 100% agree. It's getting pretty tiresome to see people continue to put most of their blame onto their tools instead of their habits. It doesn't take that much maturity and self-awareness to realize that certain tools can be double-edged, and that their value sometimes requires a little bit of conscious thought about their usage.
I'd say the main difference with chat tools like Slack (vs examples like Facebook) is that I can't get certain people to wrap their heads around how not to abuse them, but it's been pretty easy to ask those people politely once or twice to adhere to basic etiquette around messaging and then simply mute them after that.
Getting off Slack was an experiment to surface its benefits and drawbacks. Although I am content with being offline that does not preclude a scenario where I check Slack once or twice a day, as I do with email. The onus is on the user to manage their tools.
I very much disagree. Tools generate different expectations. For example, an email can be responded in a few days, an instant message not. If you company expects you to be reachable by instant message versus email, you have to react faster, and possibly have more trouble managing what you call their internet lives.
Slack is synchronous, it's built around notifications and always on-ness (though their default do not disturb settings were a great improvement). It's also become a bit mandatory.
Many email dominated businesses moved to slack. That's an actual qualitative increase in synchronous communications. At least email could be paced.
Things totally get rediscovered all the time, but if everyone is saying the same thing at the same time, it does feel like something's off...
I guess having occasional spontaneous watercooler conversations may be good for getting to know your peers better, but in a lot of cases watercooler conversations result in clique behaviors.
Slack takes this to whole new level. People hang around on slack channels posting animated Gifs and chatting all day, on topics that have nothing to do with work.
The problem with this is you have to keep up all day with the chatter or otherwise you get left out as an "outsider" (the clique effect).
Sometimes I would see these people talk behind backs of people who they know are not part of the group. This creates office politics. I know because I saw it first hand.
Lastly, there's nothing worse than penalizing people for working hard and not participating in meaningless gossip and chatter all day.
If people are "SLACKing" off so much work doesn't get done then that gets escalated just like any other performance concern. If not, it feels a lot more like sour grapes than anything else.
But I'm not talking about me. I'm talking about how the system is messed up. I didn't enjoy being unproductive. I didn't enjoy having to keep Slack open all day to make sure I don't miss out on what people are up to. I do believe the company lost a lot of talented developers because of the office politics.
And you know what? Everyone did just fine before they started using Slack. Everybody was friendly to one another, we regularly had globally inclusive face-to-face social gatherings, many of the team members ate lunch together, the team was pretty social.
But with slack, everything became political. It didn't bring people closer together in any way because people were already friendly enough before. What it did do was create more politics and make everyone waste more time than they used to.
Before slack, wasting time was a single player thing, you would maybe slack off for a bit reading hacker news but quickly get back to work, but after Slack, slacking off became a multiplayer thing, and just like any other multiplayer architecture, Metcalfe's law applies here too, which means the amount of wasted time grows exponentially.
Why did you feel you had to keep it open all the day?
Just skim the channels for anything interesting and/or relevant and check for new private messages occasionally when you're not in the zone. That could be once a day or few times a day, depending on your rhythm.
For example, I tend to directly continue the work in the morning where I left off the previous day for maximal productivity and it's not until my energy begins to wear out after a few hours when I go check back email, Slack, and other communications. Same for afternoon. I don't let email or instant messages interrupt my flow because the flow is a precious thing that doesn't simply come back when summoned. I always try to give the flow the priority and email/slack/IM are not urgent enough to break that. I can always reply back to messages in detail once the flow breaks down.
In my experience it works nicely for distributed organizations where people can't physically get together.
My point is Slack does introduce more politics into workplace. This is something you as a single user can't control.
Maybe you're doing fine there because your org doesn't have this problem, good for you. But I've seen this happen with a lot of different teams, in a lot of different ways, and that was what I was pointing out.
If you work at a company where there's office politics, you WILL miss out and lose a lot of opportunities if you don't participate actively.
Imagine parent poster is one of the latter. Now imagine that people like yourself judged that he was "determined not to make friends" because he didn't opt to participate much or at all in group chats. Then all you need is people talking about other people at work something people do everywhere and shockingly we have exactly the situation parent poster described.
There may even be people like that at your work who feel the same way he does.
And I can confidently say most of them absolutely do not appreciate anything wasting their time, and most of them prefer to be acknowledged through skills instead of politics, and they do manage to pull it off. If they can't because of the toxic office politics, they simply move to another company that will treat them much better because they never run out of offers.
You may think these people are super anti-social and everybody will hate them, but a lot of them are nice people and helpful to coworkers. Unless they act like assholes, most co-workers like them and they get along just fine even though they don't get to interact very often.
If you haven't met one of these people in your career, it means you haven't worked with extremely talented people. That is just the reality.
Plus, my argument was not even about this type of extreme case. You're the one who's dramatized it into this.
For the vast majority of everyone else, not participating is exactly as described - statistically speaking those tend to be the lowest performers in my experience even if they might be the hardest working. For the rest of us communication and teamwork is the primary name of the game and how most "normies" will be the most productive. I have zero clue how you'd expect to operate a remote devops team (for example) without a constant flow of communication over what's happening, and I've found those that try to silo information off (typically with the "productivity" excuse) are about the worst in the world to work with.
Have there been exceptions? Of course. One of the best developers I've ever worked with refused to participate in chat and required everything done over e-mail to the point of absurdity. This was worth doing because he was exceptional. It also severely limited his usefulness to the organization to a very specific type of work. Very few folks I've worked with have been so exceptional as to warrant that type of kid glove handling.
You gave an example of a management type (who operates a team remotely). Do you really think that holds true for the people actually doing the work?
That goes well beyond not "socializing" - that's simply not communicating in real time.
> Do you really think that holds true for the people actually doing the work?
Really depends on the work. An ops team? Absolutely holds true. You can't do your job effectively without constant communication with other team members, as those projects tend to be short lived, rapid paced, and involve half a dozen disciplines working together at a time. There is a strong correlation between how much someone participates with their co-workers in such an environment and in job performance as seen by the customer.
A programmer working on deep algorithms that are implemented as third party modules into a larger application? I wouldn't expect them to ever participate in chat.
A programmer who is working with 4 other programmers on a rapid development project of a bunch of microservices that must interact together cohesively? Yeah, unless they are a rockstar I would rather a mid-range dev who is great at teamwork vs. a stellar dev who refuses to participate and help the team on demand. A good team won't randomly bother everyone for no reason - there has to be a balance though.
All in all it really depends. There is certainly room for all types, it's simply the jobs where you can afford to not be available and communicative with a team in real time have been rather rare in my career. Statistically speaking I pretty much stand behind my statement - unless you are exceptional (and most people by definition are not) doing the "head down working" thing is likely bad for your career and I'd even go further and say it's likely bad for your actual productivity in general.
If you simply mean hanging out in the random non-work-related channels and chatting about off topic stuff, then I agree. My experience is also with 100% remote teams, and I assume if you added up the chat+office socializing in a "regular" organization you might get a different sum.
I find a lot of my coworkers have an attitude like yours, and I find it incredibly frustrating. We spend huge amounts of time talking about doing work, and not enough time actually doing work. I spend upwards of three hours a day just talking to people and not making any actual headway on mission-critical projects.
I agree with your reply to me that it may really come down to the different types of jobs. In your initial post it seemed like your position was that only rock stars rated "head down working" time. I think my position is more analogous to the "deep algorithm" module developer.
This isn't to say that being good at communication isn't a valuable thing in any profession. Life is a team sport. But by and large this means communicating in the context of your job regarding things that pertain to their work.
Plenty of people can do an effective job at that while spending 95% of their time actually you know doing useful work.
Your instincts are hyper specialized to your type of individual and I predict you will continue to move up well but I cannot imagine how difficult it must be for you to manage people you don't even slightly understand.
All this fake friendliness and clique behaviour is just more stress and distraction.
I used to believe that ML were the best ratio of work+content / noise. Because the medium is limiting, so it doesn't invite for smalltalk(sic).
# rule:[spam]
if allof (header :contains "X-Spam-Flag" "YES")
{
fileinto "Shared/SPAM-it";
}
# rule:[list]
elsif anyof (exists "X-List",
exists "List-Id",
exists "X-MailingList",
exists "X-List-Name",
exists "X-ML-Name",
exists "X-Mailing-List",
exists "MailingList",
exists "Mailing-List")
{
fileinto "INBOX/Lists";
}
...
...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sieve_(mail_filtering_language)I use Thunderbird filters to sort incoming emails, but it's still out of control. In 1995 there wasn't this kind of email overload.
The only real gotcha is how strict to tune the spam filter, get that wrong and you can actually lose mail. Assuming you'd use SpamAssassin the risk of getting false positives at the default setting is low, as far as I know it has not happened to me yet. If you regularly exchange important messages with people who speak Marketeese that might be different though...
That's a good point that I didn't think of.
Maybe I'll tinker with it when I have a little free time. I would also like to learn how to use Mutt.
* Mute all channels.
* Take long periods of time to respond to people. Trust me, this isn't ever going to lead to any sense of shame.
* Set yourself to away most of the time.
* Disable gifs.
* Set notifications for keywords like "lunch" and "meeting".
* Disable the icon badge. (the red dot if you're using macOS)
Now you can be productive with Slack.
I know all these things are designed to grab our attention but, seriously, have some agency in your life. Deciding to go "offline" is perfectly legitimate, but I do think Slack can be easily used in a way that doesn't waste time.
And I think this is the core of the problem. Office politics is BAD. And wasting time chatting and sharing GIFS all day instead of working is BAD.
An ideal tool for the workplace should minimize office politics, not create more. Also it shouldn't distract people into "Slack"ing off. An organization that incentivizes developers who play politics instead of doing good work is not a great workplace.
Even within a family or group of friends there are politics in people promoting their own interests or vying for affection/time of others.
This is not an inherent flaw in the system. This is how the system was designed to work.
Precisely - it is management's responsibility to foster an environment in which work gets done. If "fun" channels are really that busy then management needs to wonder whether people either aren't getting their work done or whether they're not being assigned enough work in the first place.
> Basically you MUST play politics.
Well... That's not necessarily a bad thing. Every organization has politics. Having people pay attention to their coworkers and their interests is a requirement of empathetic and successfully cooperative organizations. But it's management's responsibility to ensure that politics has its dedicated place, where all voices are encouraged and heard equally, and remains healthy (no back-stabbing), without politics becoming all-consuming and preventing real work from getting done.
God, no. Politics is a necessary evil, sometimes.
You might think that blocking out pointless meetings and other useless distractions will help you to focus on actual engineering
This is entirely true.
What you'll find is that within mere weeks, others are taking credit for your work
What kind of organization are you working for, that allows this? In any case, using slack won't prevent anyone who truly, inappropriately wants to take credit from doing so.
Soon enough, you will be sidelined and marginalized, and no meaningful work will be assigned to you
This is only if your skillset is not relevant enough.
Never turn your back to your coworkers.
How do you go from not wanting to use slack to that? There are other means of communicating with your coworkers. Email is still superior for anything relevant.
For at least a couple of decades there has generally been some internal instant messaging system at whichever company I've worked for. Nerds used to like plain local IRC server. In some places the expected tool was Windows Messenger despite it sucked bad and kept disconnecting. Slack is just another communication system: if you have problems with Slack you're likely to have problems with any messaging system if you configure them to allow interrupting your work.
The very reason I've personally always preferred online communications for anything non-urgent at work is because nobody gets to interrupt me and I get to check messages when I have an idle moment. The alternative is face-to-face communication which means someone is interrupting you at your desk several times a day which I ten times worse.
I currently use Slack over their irc gateway which works just fine. I have an Slack-connected irc client running in one tmux window and when I have time I can easily see if someone called for me or if the team channel has new activity.
I've been in an org where there were stragglers who didn't want to use Slack for whatever reason -- "I'm too old" for it was one I found particularly retarded.
Communication is key -- get your whole team on one tool - silence notifications if you have to, but you should aim to participate.
I struggle to see how substantive decisions can be made legitimately through group chat. How do you facilitate decision making such that it allows people to prepare and participate?
>> Although Slack is positioned as a productivity tool, it becomes counterproductive when misused.
The conclusion doesn’t follow the premise here. The author concludes that the root cause of counterproducitivty is misuse of the tool, not the tool itself. This doesn’t do anything to discredit the premise, as it’s easy to argue that any tool can be counterproductive/dangerous/etc. when misused.
>> Organizations that find enough value in using Slack should introduce rules of engagement.
So the OP admits organizations can find value in using Slack, but should address the potential for misuse by introducing rules of engagement. Or rather, that rules of engagement should be put in place to prevent other root cause issues from being worsened by misuse of the tool. Again, the author is arguing that Slack isn’t the problem here.
The article may strike a chord with those who don’t like Slack, but the arguments presented are very sloppy. To me, this reads as a plug for a particular work style the OP finds themselves more productive under. The Slack attack is misplaced. The expectation of constant availability and immediate responses sound like cultural issues, exacerbated by the communication channels that Slack provides.
The idea that “I don’t use this communication channel that all my coworkers do and everything is fine” seems risky at best.
Communication is tough. There are so many different, competing styles and needs that you'll never build the perfect tool. It's more about building the right habits and processes around your tools.
My personal problem with most of this conversation is that in bigger teams (e.g. 500 people spread through 5-10 countries) it is really the truth that you are left behind if you are not constantly up to date on emails and chat. And it's not just that you are required to read incredible amounts of both, it's also that if you don't interact you are left out of many discussions that are important to your work, while not having a way to opt out of the discussions that are just spam from your tasks' perspective.
Therefore I'd say the problem is not so much the communication medium, but the ability to interact with it en masse. I'm still interacting with each message one-on-one. But usually it would be enough if I could search all emails from my company that are not marked private or confidential for keywords, and get a sorted result back that prioritises based on what topics I'm working on. Basically google search for my company emails/chats, including these that are not addressed to me, preferably with a powerful query language like SQL.
That is not a team: that is a department.
You cannot meaningfully follow more than a couple of dozen people at a time, and you cannot deeply interact with maybe at most ten people at time. You also cannot follow more than a handful of subjects with reasonable comprehension: assumedly you work on one or two things full time and that knowledge fills most of your brain anyway. The 500 other people are those from whom you hear summaries from company or department wide meetings once a month or so.
The communication overhead grows exponentially with the number of people. That's why departments form teams of maybe a dozen people and let the managers communicate and filter information back to the team so that the team members can focus on doing what they know best instead of trying to track everything that is happening. You can always talk with specific people when you need to know more about something specific: you don't have to know everything by default.
Like many of the people in the comments of your article, I am struggling to see how this is any different from traditional emails. The only difference is that these conversation threads are public/discoverable, and not only sent to certain people... but most companies already have this (via groups/team mailing lists/confluence/...).
https://blog.codinghorror.com/discussions-flat-or-threaded/
Flat discussions make much more sense, especially for emails. Gmail and most email clients are focusing on flat discussion threads, which are much easier to follow.
I'll send an email when appropriate, but in most other cases I'll look for you on Slack. If you're not there then that means I'll just have to walk over to your desk to find you instead.
In many corporate communications platforms, it is quite effortless to ask an idle question, use an emoticon, paste a giphy image, write a bot to push notifications into your team channel, express a witticism, or vent complaints. It was my experience that Slack made it easier to do all of these things more than any platform I'd previously used. I've been off of it for 3 months and hope I never have to return. The worst problem seemed to be the number of ad-hoc channels I could be automatically invited to, and it was not often clear whether the information exchanged there was something I needed to pay attention to (although in retrospect it is more so).
Different organizations will utilize it differently, and feature-wise Slack seems to have gotten pretty far ahead of the competition. But if there's any truth to the medium being the message, then I think that it can be inferred from much of what transpires on Slack is that as a platform it is a big time sink. There don't seem to be a lot of important degrees of urgency between an email, a phone call, or a drop-by. For me about 90% of the value in corporate messaging is pasting web links to resources, which doesn't require the other bells and whistles.
We used Slack at my last job but we were encouraged to stop by the person's desk for any matter that requires immediate attention. I sat near our CTO and sometimes I saw many engineers standing around his desk trying to debug a production issue. This resulted in knowing other people's name/face (which I realized after I joined my current company).
At my new company we use Slack for pretty much everything. If there's a production bug you're encouraged to @here on the dedicated channel and someone would take a look at it. There's no one-to-one interaction to debug it. We had our holiday party last month where I introduced myself to some of my coworkers and once we started talking we realized that we have chatted on Slack but never saw each other even though we were all working in the same office. I never associated the engineer's face to the name.
I do think Slack is a powerful tool in modern work environment but people shouldn't be too dependent on it.
That's also why it's hard for me to imagine that it's true what you say. The need for quick results will always create smaller meetings at this or that guy's desk.
As a habit, I don't use any chat group (be it Telegram or any other app or platform) if there are more than five people. The explosion in the number of messages and the frustration in not being able to catch up is too big a cost on one's health and productivity. These tools don't enhance collaboration. On the contrary, they provide a facade of "being busy".
We seem to keep trying to reinvent email and forum discussions (that have more context and confine discussions by topic) again and again, but not achieving better results.
If you need long periods of quiet time to work, locking yourself in a closet is extremely effective, but that doesn't mean it also positively affects your organization. Slack is an organizational productivity tool. Nearly every post I read about people quitting Slack focuses on how much better they are able to work without it, not how much better their team or organization is without them on Slack...
You're right, Slack isn't for you. It's for your team.
I run a fully remote startup. My goal is to make as much communication asynchronous as possible, to facilitate people being in multiple time zones and having different optimal work times and places.
We have slack right now, but for the most part people understand that it's an async tool -- i.e. don't expect an instant response. Usually the only "instant" convo is if we're having a video meeting and need to share links (which of course we try to avoid since video meetings aren't async but are sadly unavoidable).
My question is, as we grow, how to I keep Slack that way, and make sure it doesn't turn into a huge distraction and just a bunch of gifs and watercooler talk, without imposing rules about "the proper use of Slack"?
Im also of the opinion that having a dedicated space for more "real time" communications can be really helpful as well. Team branded support room, for example. Having a space that everyone at least casually keeps an eye on can really save everyone a lot of time (especially when operating remotely) if a team member comes across an issue.
So, we have off-topic channels, a channel to plan social events (I Live in Austin Texas and we have more than one musician who will post events, and we've made company outings out of going to see a coworker perform), there's one for movie chats, and even a "LFG" (Looking for games) channel for the folks who like to play and discuss video games.
They're all as active and vibrant as our #devops and #product-discussions channels.
My team has "General" for company wide announcements and "random" for dumping gifs and whatnot.
There's also stuff like #sysadmin if something goes down or you spot a security bulletin and want to make sure the admin team sees it. Keep those rooms going as necessary. Low traffic, but the right people want an unread marker on them.
What drove us was a cultural shift away from immediate responses to task based responses. If you do stay with slack it seems like shifting that culture is the most thing to focus on.
I think the bit about "my team is starting to notice I'm offline" is very telling. Oh you're so fancy, you special person who doesn't tell your team when you're not available and you aren't checking your messages. You sure showed them. I bet you're just the best facilitator of communication.
Personally, I tell my team how they can and can't expect to contact me when I'm changing methods of communication. Call me crazy.
I also push people to ask questions in a channel instead of directly to me, as usually someone else will help them before I even see the question.
No. It's totally wrong. One needs to learn how to configure his chat tool that it doesn't disturb one in productive times, but is easily available when free. It's possible. I do it since ICQ. Unread chat messages will also still be unread if you continue to work 4 hours on your current task.
> Without [instant messaging], days are calm, purpose-driven and productive.
How can days be purpose driven if you don't sync your own work with your colleague's work any more? I'd argue that people who act like that are the least productive because they only work on things that are not valuable for the team at large.
Work does get synced. It gets discussed at our desks, usually in the mornings. If the work presents blockers requiring a lengthy discussion then we hop into a meeting room. I find we get better participation and arrive at a solution with less friction.
But it's never about the tool. It's just the author learning how to operate themselves. What they did has minimal relevance to others in general, except perhaps for some validating "me too!"-s.
It's much more valuable to step back and think critically about how you approach tasks and decisions, how you feel and what it tells you, and how much you can actually control all of it.
Kinda eye opening.
It's better than email because they can see the chat from other devs around the issue.
The only thing I'd like to do is be able to stop auto-playing gifs and block @here from certain people who abuse it.
I enjoyed HipChat [https://www.atlassian.com/software/hipchat]
Is that just due to client fit and polish or for a more fundamental reason?
You can't chat with more than 1 person without creating a private room. Slack makes this effortless. It's been on Atlassian's radar for almost 1.5 years with no movement: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Hipchat-questions/chat-wi...
https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/HCPUB-431
And when you're in a private chat with someone, the jumping text you see when the person you're chatting with is typing. Over 1.5 years and they can't fix that? It's horribly distracting and just kinda sucks.
https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/HCPUB-950
Anyways, the whole thing feels dead and is very clearly a low priority for Atlassian.
Does Stride really need to be $36/user/year, and double that if we need SAML?
Like you can't distract yourself with 40 other apps if not slack. Slack isn't the problem, they're ALL the problem. Anyway, Slack is mandatory if you're remote.
I'd rather receive a DM than a phone call in most cases.
Of course, it may be different for sales and support people, etc.
One could say finding out which components are critical should be someone elses job, e.g. the manager's. All true, but still I wouldn't want to end up spending the prime time of my day for multiple years on a piece of software that nobody uses and nobody makes money with. So I'd argue that I as a dev cannot interact with just the bug db. I need to see what sales is doing, product management, join meetings, etc.