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Comment by cdent | Hacker News Reader

Aligns with my experience.

Which, of course, is only one person's experience amongst many, and different people will have different experiences.

For people like me, however, the problems listed in this article are painfully obvious, especially with regard to false sense of urgency. When everything is urgent, nothing is urgent, except my heart rate.

Slack isn't really the issue here: it's any form of synchronous communication (IRC, someone coming to your desk, getting a phone call). Slack just happens to be the latest flagship for the interruption armada, swooping in with their false urgency and lack of sufficient information.

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Agreed. We used to think similar things about email, Slack has just amplified the problem. One place that I do think Slack is to blame is not providing a way to filter noise. Because they seem to think that Slack communications are business oriented, they've done little to allow an individual to add ignore rules, like one could do with an IRC client. The reality is that even most professional Slack services I've used collect significant noise (I just joined a Slack and was added to more than a dozen channel, each seeming to have their own bots) after just a short amount of time. (Try and find one without a gif bot.)

Synchronous chat is spam and we need to be better about understanding the productivity hit that cokes with always-on comms where we expect instant response.

The best way to use Slack (or e-mail) is probably to only turn it on once or twice a day. After you complete a task, before taking a coffee break, turn on the messaging software and read the internal news.

Until one day a manager sends something urgent, and then explodes in anger because 30 minutes later no one has reacted yet.

I'm pretty explicit with the people that I manage that I do not expect them to respond to me with any kind of timeliness.

It sounds like you don't really manage them then?

To completely convey that there's no timeliness requirement for even a basic acknowledgement means you aren't actually managing anyone and/or your team is so gifted in efficiency your position isn't really needed in that organization.

I wonder if you're more of a mentor they go to when something isn't working or you're just wasting some company's time and money posting useless crap on their chat.

Are you just talking about Slack or are you talking about other methods of communication? If it's the former then wtf point does it serve other than as a morale booster to goof off with.

I'm specifically talking about slack.

I rarely need something done with any degree of urgency. That generally implies a lack of planning on my part. If my team is functioning correctly, everyone knows why they should be focused on, what's next, and how that fits into the roadmap for the near term, generally quarterly.

But... slack isn't synchronous. At least not any more than email is.

In my team people look at it when they have the time or could use a context switch, and if you need them immediately adding @username send them a notification during business hours.

Chat is synchronous. Always has been.

With threaded conversations you can keep topics of discussions from getting interlaced. You have to keep reminding people to reply in a thread and have to remind people that slacks value is it is asynchronous. And you have to go back and read the new messages when you do check in. It is swimming against the stream but not impossible.

No, a meeting or a phone call is synchronous. You can't put a meeting down for 10 minutes, do something, and pick it up later. There is no requirement to answer chat messages immediately unless your organization has ridiculous expectations. Chat is asynchronous like email, but facilitates faster exchange than email.

There are a lot of product design reasons that I could argue encourage more synchronous communication in Slack than in email, but the real proof is in the outcomes. Have you actually been in organizations where the latency expectations for reading and responding to email are equal to or shorter than for Slack? In my experience email correspondence is _much_ slower and long-winded, because people are almost never exchanging them minute by minute and waiting in real time on the thread for the next update.

This article also directly aligns with my experiences. Once a team has sunk its teeth into Slack (or a similar real-time tool), it’s extremely painful to remove it.

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