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Comment by canadaduane | Hacker News Reader

I worked at a medium-sized company during the transition from IRC to Slack. The problem the company had was a split in comms networks. There was a lack of will on the part of engineers to move to GChat, and non-engineers were unwilling to respond/engage on IRC. Marketing, Sales, and Admin were using GChat, while engineering used IRC. Getting everyone on the same comms platform was a major improvement. I'm not saying it's ideal, but it wasn't dumb.

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I worked at Cisco, who had their own awful IM client. Our team used Hangouts instead with great success.

Company-wide conferences were a ball-ache. The corporate solution didn't mute by default, so with 40000 people in a conf it devolved into a "TURN YOUR MIC OFF" shouting match for the first 10 minutes.

The more frightening thing is that Cisco (presumably as developer of the client?) couldn't change the defaults to solve one of their own problems.

Can't remember, it was a while ago. I will say that anybody who knows what Blizzard is will know how bad their IM was.

> I worked at Cisco, who had their own awful IM client.

Which one? Webex, Jabber or whatever they use for their 50k€+ videoconferencing systems? I have only had the honor with the first two and, jeez, it's a nightmare...

No, it was dumb, and I didn't stutter. It's an extraordinarily short-sighted move to switch to Slack. IRC may not be for everyone, but clients like The Lounge and alternatives like Matrix are quite friendly to non-engineers.

I've been contemplating putting The Lounge in front of my IRC servers. How well does it scale? i.e. how many web users can you support with {n} amount of memory/cpu?

I've used cgiirc, but it isn't pretty and some people want pretty and client-less.

I'm not sure, to be honest. I would be interested in hearing what you discover if you investigate this yourself.

Certainly! I will keep notes on my setup and performance.

I confess that, overall, that's been my experience with a few customers and that getting everyone on the same platform was ace.

But as somebody who's got gchat gatewayed to IRC, replacing two things I can use from irssi with one thing I can't has always annoyed me.

Agreed

>The problem the company had was a split in comms networks.

My new team is going through this. For comms, my machine came equipped with Skype for Business, Slack, Stride and Bria. It's a fun game rolling the dice when you need to ask someone a question figuring out which comms tool that person uses.

A game I've avoided playing altogether by just sending an email.

I thought chat was going to eliminate the need for email. ;-)

So say we all, so say we all.

This is largely the same rational that was used at the company I work at to transition to Slack. From an engineer and developer point of view, I rarely, if ever, directly communicate with non-engineers over instant messaging.

For people who deal with different groups of people in the company, shouldn't it be up to them to handle communicating with different groups using different methods rather than compelling everyone to use the same communication platform for instant messaging?

lol... it rings a bell

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