The ticking time bomb of old Slack posts | Hacker News Reader

The ticking time bomb of old Slack posts

nymag.com

25 pointsimartin2k26 comments

>“We’re colleagues, but we can also laugh as friends!”

It doesn't even take time. Statements like the above are invariably lies. Seeing friends and acquantances or their friends and acquantances harassed or fired for innocuous or misunderstood comments has reinforced to me that the least amount of contact with your coworkers is desireable. I was told this long ago but did not initially believe.

It has also changed how I see other cultures. Most are intolerant in their own way. In particular the adage that Europeans are more open about politics is not really true -- they're more willing to discuss policy not found elsewhere, but react similarly poorly to other cultures to foreign ideas.

You gotta ask yourself what are you actually doing if you invest such a large portion of your daily life amongst people with whom you can't be intimately vulnerable?

That is a good question. I guess it's kind of like making friends at school -- you socialize because you're in the same place, not because of some deep inherent connection. Coupled with a lack of work it may be hard to move jobs.

I am surprised at how easily people in HN take on new jobs and negotiate for better pay.

Yes, but the difference is we choose our work families -- ostensibly we're working together towards a common vision of some sort whereas we are simply thrust into our school lives by our parents

Corporatism has a rich history and it used to be 'for life' whereas nowadays the stark and frankly short sighted careerism plaguing industry is having a detriment on true long term prospects

In other words, true corporatism relies on deep long term connection and vulnerable intimacy, whereas false corporatism rests on shallow guarded careerism and we're investing our entire livelihoods on a confidence scam

What I mean is, writing software with other people is about as intimate as you can get, you are literally combining your thoughts on paper and creating a shared paradigm

If you believe that can be done while simulateously avoiding all intimacy on a personal level, the irony will defeat you every time and your software will fail

Being a true software dev means warts and all or not at all

Hmm, this does explain what I had experienced. Most of my friends are not in IT. There are people I eventually get to know (and that others I know get to know) it's just going into a job trying to make friends can be an extremely bad idea, at least from what I have seen.

Thanks for the comments

Hey you seem relatively new to HN -- welcome to Hotel California

It's like a git repo.. you can check out, but you can never leave

Work people ought to be closer than family and friends if you really think about it --

Hear me out: assuming we have some kind of freedom and actually choose to work at a company and we're not slaves --

We are investing the vast majority of our efforts on work, even 8 hours per day, not to mention most of our productive moments and brain cycles. Our immediate family comes a distant second in many cases

If the people we work with mean nothing to us, how can we justify investing so much of our best selves with them? What does that mean for our so called loved ones whom we sacrifice continuously? Are we sacrificing them for people we hardly care about? That means we hardly care about them even less!

The only way this works is if we actually care about the people we work with and the mission of the company, otherwise stay home

The reason I invest my time and energy in my job is because working and maintaining a career is generally necessary for someone in my position. Within limits the people (I don’t want extraordinarily unpleasant coworkers) and the mission (I probably won’t do anything I find immoral) aren’t extraordinarily important to me.

I generally like the word “professional”.

bigred100, you've expressed the general consensus and I can't disagree with you, most of us are mildly detached and don't care about the 'soft' stuff but.. like.. hmmm.. all things considered, if you were to be paid the exact same amount for the exact same of effort, would you rather work for a company that makes things somewhat better for the world at large or somewhat worse

I too like the word professional very much, to me it means that I'm staking more than my reputation on something, I'm staking my clients' reputation as well

I've made many sacrifices along the way to call myself a professional and the more I think about it, I want the people around me to care about professionalism as much as I do..

I agree with you on this point. I believe that’s part of doing a reasonably good job as an employee.

Let me give a little anecdote -- Apparently according to a previous post, there are three tribes of programmers[1] The hackers, the makers and the poets

In my view there are actually other tribes, for example `the fixers` which I personally feel I naturally belong to --

Well I used to work with a fellow from Spain, he was a great coder and all, but he called himself a Punk, a Programming Punk and any time he'd show up it would be in some oversized T-shirt of some esoteric punk band

Not that I didn't like the guy, but I simply didn't relate to his sense of professionalism which I found rather brash and arrogant -- I felt like he would harm my relationships with certain kinds of clients by what amounted to egotism

Well, we were thrust together due to managerial allocations and I was forced to work with him, but I wasn't very glad about it. I kept thinking like "I'm sacrificing time with my kids to be with this Lone Ranger and he's not really giving me the emotional surface area I need to get my job done expediently'

A lot of rookies would internalize this and tell themselves whatever they need but as an adult I found his behaviour simply moronic and that is one albeit small example of why I actually care about the behaviour and attitude of the people around me

edit:

[1] https://josephg.com/blog/3-tribes/

Some may disagree but I’d view someone displaying so many personal eccentricities as generally unprofessional. And (probably no one will disagree) failing to work as a team. And I do agree with you that contributing to and improving the culture of your team is very important. That’s something I’d care about as well. I guess I view it largely as part of the job rather than a personal thing if that makes sense.

I completely disagree. I can work closely with someone without being friends with them, or sharing anything personal about myself. That's one reason I like open source development. You can treat everyone, including yourself, as formless brains in a vat, and just focus on the tasks at hand.

If it's something like co-founding a startup, that's different. But I don't work a day job to form "intimate relationships". I've found the less intimate and personal, the more productive and smooth things go. But maybe I'm abnormal.

I'm of the opinion that sharing code is the most intimate act that people can engage in, it's like writing a story and you both have to agree on the plot, the characters, the layout.. now you might say you can spend 8 - 10 hours a day in isolation writing code but I'm telling you that's impossible -- even if I allude to the old adage 'to go quickly go alone, to go far travel with company' eventually you're going to need to know the person you're travelling with because holding back is actually much harder than simply putting down your defences

Admittedly, remote work is something different but being colocated for extended periods of time even if you are an island, most people are not and you ought to give a care to your fellow human beings because any one could be going through some shit, as we are all wont to do -- look at TechLead for example.. his wife left him!! did he even mention it to his cubicle mates or did he just maintain a stiff upper lip?

As well, even if you yourself disagree, can you imagine that some percentage of human beings might disagree with your disagreement?

I view humans in a systems-based perspective, you can't possibly assume everyone thinks the same way you do?

Interesting, I didn't know this:

> "A lesser known fact about Slack is that its name is, according to the company’s founder Stewart Butterfield, an acronym. It stands for “Searchable Log of All Communication and Knowledge.” Not menacing at all."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_the_SubGenius#Conspi...

I don't know if I should be reassured or concerned that the insularity and provincial-but-seemingly-worldly spirit of journalism professionals is apparently equal to that of technology professionals.

Yes, they are people too. :-)

Is there a popular open Slack alternative? I suppose it's just a IRC client that inlines images? (havent tried slack so idk)

Matrix.org / Riot.im, Rocket.chat, and Mattersmost are all popular alternatives.

Matrix is what I'm hoping will become more popular since it's more of a decentralized system.

Other than inline images, having voice/video calls and screensharing are becoming important as well.

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