Comment by throwaway66666 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway66666 | Hacker News Reader

My only complaint for Slack (and any instant messaging app), is the sense of urgency it creates. It has been discussed on HN a lot, but I 've never seen someone complaint about the fact that you can invite to your organization people from other orgs. This feature is beloved by product managers. And hated by everyone else.

See. Before 'Slack', we had 3 channels of communication. 1. Email (usually expectation of getting a reply within hours) 2. Phonecall (reserved for urgent situations, expecting a reply within... seconds) 3. Ticket system that had a little drop-down where you could select urgency. And you would expect a reply based on the urgency.

If you abused the urgency, we had a way to track that, and let you know.

Today however, Slack's "multiple organizations" feature pretty much shadowed the above. Now product manager from client org X, will require that you make a channel called "X-feature Commandos/dream team" then invite everyone involved on the project. Then they will ALWAYS end up wasting everyone's time for no reason. "Hey @here, X page is slow can you check it out?". "Sorry guys my bad. I was under the bay sea riding the Bart! Forgot LTE connections can be finnicky 100m under water. heh (ultra fast parrot emoji)"

> Then they will ALWAYS end up wasting everyone's time for no reason. "Hey @here, X page is slow can you check it out?"

I don't understand why your company doesn't charge, say, $500 per request like this. Let the client have direct Slack access to you, if that's what you want. Just don't give them your time for free when you make a living selling your time.

I imagine OP was referring to internal partners. I still like the idea, but actually recording how much team time a partner team wastes opens up more problems than it's likely to solve.

Or, it brings to light the asks from those partners, and you can then set the correct cost/resourcing from management.

Ain't no free lunch, and don't be suckered into doing free work.

I kind of want to turn it off for half the work day to get my time back. As an engineer, it kills getting into a state of flow, which is essential for maximal productivity.

Disable notifications?

Either-or would achieve the same goal of not being bothered once every 15 minutes.

Yea I don't understand their viewpoint. No one is forcing you to look at every single slack message as soon as it arrives.

I've gotten the impression that some places force you to be online on Slack all day and therefore receive notifications. Maybe the Slack admin can see if you disabled notifications even, which could mean you get reprimanded. But I'm not sure.

Some places (my company included), invite people from client organizations on slack. You can have cross-org accounts and limited access to another org's slack.

We are sadly utilizing this heavily. Disabling notifications in those channels is not permitted as essentially you are required to reply as soon as possible. They exist for the sole reason of instant communication, which I find counter productive but product-xxx people LOVE.

Those guests will not play by your rules. Those guests will play by their bosses rules, who might err on the side of yelling at you at first chance. Things like "QA didn't catch bug X" people pinging on a friday afternoon, rather than going in the process of opening a ticket.

Again you cannot ignore them, and you cannot change this, because these people are paying you. Usually it's team leads that are present in those rooms, so they get all the shit thrown at them at random times, and can only tell themselves "hey I 'm paid better than average so it's part of the job right?". No, no it's not part of the job. Whoever made this decision is dumb, and Slack unfortunately catered to the wrong feature requests and made this too easy to happen too.

Since I am seeing how trigger happy our product managers are to invite the client org's PMs to our Slack, I can only dream that in an ironic twist of fate when Slack's product people reviewed this feature request they immediately loved it too and on a friday evening pinged the slack team leads to hop on it :p

Culturally, people expect you to reply on Slack in the workplace during normal business hours.

eh. I disagree. I find that with Slack there's this expectation to reply right away. And if your boss Slacks you, sees you're online, and you don't reply, it's perceived as not doing your job. And even if it's not perceived that way, we've developed our own fears that we'll be judged as being unavailable/ un-responsive or simply not doing our jobs well enough. It may be cultural and not just app-based, but when millions of people are using a specific app, its hard not to draw conclusions...

IM is really useful lots of times, but I definitely think it's one of the main contributors to our 'workism' problem and what so many of u have issues disconnecting and eventually burning out. </rant>

This is why I can't imagine using slack (or any kind of chat service) for work, except in very specific circumstances like a team tracking an outage or one-on-one customer support.

Why would you want to be interrupted by inane chatter when you're working?

I don't see how this is different?

> If you abused the urgency, we had a way to track that, and let you know.

So how is Slack different? You can still track the urgency and let the person know -- it is right there in the message.

And if they really don't understand that @here is bad, then you can always disable @here on per-channel basis (I have this on a few channels, in fact)

Spamming multiple messages a on slack seems more innocent than spamming multiple emails a day.

I had to fight our HR manager over access to @here and it's equivalent.

Global company, people working all sorts of schedules and they want to use @here in the primary channel (which you can't mute) to send inane bullshit about unimportant stuff. (In theory @here only sends notifications when you are 'here', but I found it to be less than reliable)

The first few times people did it, I asked them not to, and then turned it off for non-admins. Thus the fight with HR.

If your job is to program, and people are sending you email and slack messages, you're a chump if you are replying in anything under 24 hours.

I reply to say "I will get to this request in x amount of time," and that amount of time simply increases as the requests go up and I factor in time spent focusing and context switching.

And if you don't reply within 24 hour: fired. By me at least. (don't be silly, I don't have the power to fire anyone anymore).

Yes, expecting a reply by email sooner than e.g. 4 working hours is futile.

But if you work in a team and only communicate once a day then you are not a team member, you are an ar#eh#le.

If you constantly check your emails and slack and write replies immediately then yes, we should probably have a chat about your time focus and productivity. But checking your emails quickly once an hour is common sense. And where appropriate with a quick receipt response, not a full answer.

And e.g. slack every 15 minutes or half an hour. Perhaps in a Pomodoro break or similar. (channel dependent)

It would perhaps be a good idea to have a well-known team/department convention on response times. More asynchronous for email especially if not internal (hours not days). Quite asynchronous in company-wide public slack chats, and more responsive but not instant in team irc-like chats.

Whether you program, write content, make sandwiches etc is no excuse to be an ar#eh#ole.

I check slack every hour or so. Not because I have to but as a break from coding. However it doesn’t mean I’ll answer every question or switch context.

Maybe this is true if you're a bottom-level grunt programmer with nothing of value to give to other people in the company.

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