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Comment by vinceguidry | Hacker News Reader

> They destroy focus

I see this sentiment a lot and it strikes me that deep focus work simply isn't something that is needed or even wanted in most orgs. Just about every single org I've ever worked at prioritized a more extraverted work environment. In this regard, Slack is promoting the interests of the org and not harming them.

I personally have been focused on making positive changes with 15 solid minutes of effort. Because that's all I'm going to have before I'm interrupted. It's annoying and I would much prefer a quieter work environment, but that's clearly not what the org wants.

On the flip side I never have to feel bad about not being productive. I suspect most of the actual work on my team gets done at home after work hours, work is being increasingly treated like social hour.

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> I personally have been focused on making positive changes with 15 solid minutes of effort. Because that's all I'm going to have before I'm interrupted. It's annoying and I would much prefer a quieter work environment, but that's clearly not what the org wants.

Doesn't that just feel terrible? I bought noise cancelling headphones because of the open office concept. When that wasn't sufficient, I moved and am now remote. When Slack came in, I used the IRC bridge and setup ignore rules for all the botspam. Now that's gone and I found a web plugin that would do it. Slack changed their code and that no longer works. Every effort seems to be going toward a more disruptive world. 15 minute chunks are no sufficient to do quality work, in my opinion.

We shouldn't spend our days screwing around and our nights on work. If I have to work nights to be productive, I shouldn't have to show up during the day. Even if I didn't have a kid, I'd have a personal life.

> Doesn't that just feel terrible?

The depth of the work I've been doing at work has been steadily decreasing. I feel less like a software engineer and more like a manager of SaaS. It's still much more technical than work your average office worker can do but the pendulum of power seems to be swinging back towards employers at the moment.

I don't know if it will ever swing back. I worry that the days of software engineers being able to build up expertise and have that expertise be a vehicle to social advancement are already over. Coders now need to be businessmen to get ahead just like everyone else.

You probably can, but it's like finding a needle in a haystack because the growth of software engineering jobs has been driven by direct business lines instead of the government and R&D focus that drove things early on. Also, salaries are higher, and you have glut of engineers coming in purely for the money and career which breeds a different culture as well.

> deep focus work simply isn't something that is needed or even wanted in most orgs.

I agree.

To the company it's better if all work is done in small groups.

Even though, research suggests that results are worse when working in groups, compared to a single expert, they don't care, because when done in groups, the knowledge gets spread across a few people.

This is better for knowledge retention if the 'expert' leaves.

Of course companies have to say that they want everyone's best work, but what they actually promote is everyone's average work, done in groups as a hedge against losing people.

In typical corporate doublespeak, this is rebranded as 'best work.' anyway.

What research are you referring to?

Most orgs would be happy to have smart people never do any work but only go to meetings and explain stuff. Have the slower people do the actual work.

>Slack is promoting the interests of the org and not harming them.

Even with a lot of creativity I can't imagine how the workforce being unproductive and doing their work at home instead of the workplace where they're actually being paid to work is in the interests of your organisation.

What appears to me more likely is that someone in upper management has been roped into using slack because it's the next hip thing being pitched by some sales team and that nobody is actually aware how much productivity it costs.

I think upper management cares much much more about perceptions than about actual individual productivity. So long as the "mission is accomplished" then they'll spend as much money as they need to ensure the optics goal is met doing it. And teams that look happy and engaged are preferable to a workforce that's 5x more productive but doesn't look happy and engaged, probably because they're busy doing work.

My org just burned wheelbarrows full of cash bringing on like a hundred interns and then holding an immense company-wide conference, all for optics. It was well understood that very little work was going to get done.

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