Comment by quixoticaxolotl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by quixoticaxolotl | Hacker News Reader

quixoticaxolotl

I feel that many of these objections already have solutions within Slack.

If you don't want to be disturbed by notifications, there is the Do Not Disturb option to snooze notifications.

If you don't want to lose context, use Slack threads, which localize discussion around an issue to a single place.

If you have a fear of missing out because you're piping everything to Slack - have you considered segregating your alerts into specific channels and muting those you don't care about? (Alerts are a bad example, though - really, you should use Slack for a visibility record during an incident, but the only alerts you should care about should bother you with PagerDuty or OpsGenie - if they're important, they should bother you).

I do work for a larger company (some 400 employees) and we use Slack quite effectively. One thing that's really helped us is that, by consensus, we don't make decisions in Slack - everything of actual import should have a ticket to condense everything in. Slack becomes useful for us if we need immediate assistance, have questions or need to communicate in real time during an incident. It's also invaluable when you have remote employees (!).

> One thing that's really helped us is that, by consensus...

This is why the things that work for you don't work for others: Communication requires that all (or at least a significant majority) of parties agree to a protocol. It's not enough for a lone employee to start putting up Do Not Disturb when the culture insists on real-time responses.

I read somewhere that the crazy hours on Wall Street (purportedly 7 AM - 11 PM for new employees) are not because it takes 80 hours a week to get work done, but that there's a kind of social proof that one must demonstrate in order to be part of the "club". (Nobody's saying that you can't work 9 AM - 5 PM, they're just saying that everyone who was ever successful with the company put in the long hours, and you want to be successful, don't you?)

Similarly, it seems that Slack and other real-time communication removes some of the defenses that employees once had against these implicit demands. Note I'm not just talking about demands made by management of employees, I'm also talking about demands that employees put on themselves. (All it takes is one or two employees answering messages in the middle of the night to change people's expectations of when they'll get a response.)

As we enter an era of knowledge work, we're going to have to get better at recognizing and avoiding the social dynamics that can cause distraction and wasted time.

Rather than take a product that wants to be a chat room and adapting it in a million ways to make it not a chat room, there could be wisdom in using a product that attempts to address these issues from the ground up? We use Basecamp instead of Slack and find it infinitely better than when we used Slack, even with a ton of plug-ins and settings and hacks.

Hey, these all sound like very good hints on how to use Slack, especially the consensus on decision making. Maybe we have used Slack wrong, but especially the context was important for me and Slack threads are hard to enforce, you can "break out of the jail" easily, often by mistake.

> Slack threads are hard to enforce, you can "break out of the jail" easily, often by mistake.

In particular, image uploads (and possibly other attachments?) are always posted to the main channel, even if the message they were attached to was in a thread. Trying to conduct an image-heavy discussion -- like a discussion about a graphical design -- in a thread will just mean the main chat gets interrupted by a bunch of out-of-context images.

This was improved over recent months by Slack.

This resonates with me more easily than the tone of the OP. Slack is a very good tool. For some reason, bashing it is all the rage now, but most of the criticism is misplaced and unsubstantial. FWIW, I use Slack even though I work alone, just because the integration with various 3rd parties makes it a fantastic notifications hub (which I can silence/relay/amplify at will).

Hah, but I am the op :-) I didn't want it to come out negative. I don't think my critique is unsubstantial though. Essentially we switched Slack with Basecamp, which also offers a chat part, so you can replicate the same behavior, but it also offers other means to communicate. Slack in this case was just the chat tool we used, I think the problem is with chat as primary company communication, independent of vendor.

Yeah, I wish you could migrate messages to a thread retroactively.

People enjoy vilifying Slack but like any tool what matters is how you apply it and build structure around it Replace 'Slack' with 'email', 'Skype', anything in these gripes and it all reads the same.

I agree that slack can have a place as long as there are expectations around what to use it for.

How do people coordinate around incidents without something like slack? It used to be that everyone had to hop on a conference bridge, which I personally never liked.

For important discussions and decisions, we often paste a log of a chat and a link into tickets or change requests. This helps capture the conversation and people can review and/or challenge what happened.

A ticket for tracking the incident (with posts to graphs, alerts, other tickets and so on - what you use slack for) + conference bridge for live discussion focused on restoring availability is what I personally like.

As long as you keep it technical and kick the salespeople out of it, the conference call is very useful tool to keep people focused on mitigating the problem ASAP instead of spending time looking for the root cause (ex: restarting the application/reverting the bad commit instead of fixing a bug, creating a new build and pushing it through).

If the issue is not killing the company you can chat about it, sure, feel free to use the tool you feel most comfortable with. If we are in a "the site is down" situation though chatting is too slow (and I always promise the SWEs I will insta-revert their last deployment when that happens until I find a good one, though I rarely do so), and talking keeps your hands free.

We use everything. We work with a lot of other companies on a very large project and every company uses something different. But, I would say most of my messages come in by Slack or Skype.

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