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Comment by playeren | Hacker News Reader

All these complaints about Slack, are strangely reminiscent of all the complaints about email pre-Slack; "re:re:re:re:re:", cc all the people, 200+ non-relevant emails per day etc etc.

I worry that people are trying fix org culture problems with communication software, which is unlikely to succeed.

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>I worry that people are trying fix org culture problems with communication software, which is unlikely to succeed.

Agreed. If your work culture demands that you answer every single slack message within 30 seconds, or forces you to be "online" constantly, you have bad work culture. This is not a issue that slack, or email, or texting, or phone calls can fix.

You could argue that slack makes fostering these work cultures easier, and to that I would say it's still just bad management.

Also - and this argument gets brought up a lot by slack haters - if that @here, or other notifications, are so impeding to your daily productivity, you might just have trouble focusing. Which isn't bad, but learn to deal with it instead of blaming Big Bad Slack.

Hint: you can exit Slack and check it once per hour, every few hours, or even once a day. I've yet to see one real life example where people are forced to be online and respond within seconds of receiving a message.

That's exactly why we need to fix email - not replace it with another app with more notifications. I agree with Dvir - email's asynchronous nature is what makes the exact solution for business comms. It's instant, but not invasive, and doesn't expect an instant reply. Culturally, we need to also respect people's time. I'm sticking with email.

Most of the Slack channels I use are used async, and I only have notifications on for 2 out of ~15 channels. Good comms culture was much easier to develop with Slack + [Something for docs] for the teams I have worked with. But I very much understand that teams are different, and different cultures work optimally for different teams.

But then what's the point of using Slack? Your scenario describes you could just use email without downsides.

> without downsides

Hmm. Might be true for you.

Slack enabled "De-silo'ing". It became more efficient and convenient to ask a team, or knowledge group of something, instead of depending on specific persons. Easier to be flexible about which topics to follow or not. I.e. normally I don't interact much with the #ops channel, but Bill is on holiday, so I'm giving it attention this week.

On the other hand, there is a case to be made that if everyone makes "mistakes" it's because it's the first option they have, so we (as an industry) should make softwares do the correct thing by default. Users don't have time to fiddle with options, the software should serve them.

I generally agree with that opinion, but in this case I believe communication tool feature sets are not the right setting to enforce organisational culture. You would end up with a highly opinionated piece of software, which would imply that one size fits all, when it comes to org culture.

Slack et al. (and email for that matter), can be used in a myriad of different ways to suit different types of organisations, which I strongly believe is a good thing.

We probably do need software to help us all with org culture, but I don't think comms is the right place to implement that.

Or "Re: Aw: Re: Aw:" when you deal with germans.

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