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Comment by ajkjk | Hacker News Reader

The funny thing is that I am sure most of the people who work at slack know it's terrible, but no one asks them. There is a small cohort of product managers who probably have a plausible-sounding reason to do it, and they need to do something to justify their jobs, so they alienate everybody else because no one stops them.

I am, to put it lightly, familiar with this in other companies.

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I would bet a lot of money I already know the pitch. It's the same one that the Confluence PM I'm sure made. "We have done very well selling to technical programmers and hip startups, but the market is so much bigger. shows Office 365 revenue numbers vs Slack revenue numbers. We have an opportunity to take this to the next level. We need to make this the goto office communication platform. cheers. Markdown may seem easy to use to us, but our user research shows that 90% of fortune 500 employees don't even know what markdown is. We need a more familiar interface to break into this lucrative new market and continue our growth."

you're exactly right, but what I want to know is - how many of those enterprise users even know how to do italics in regular email? And is this _really_ the feature that's holding them back from Slack!?

TBH, for documentation outside of docstrings and READMEs WYSIWYG editors (usually google docs) are the most popular form of documentation for engineers. I've seen this happen naturally at a bunch of corps unless someone made a coherent documentation policy and enforced it.

And they probably aren't wrong either. Even at companies made of mostly programmers, those people aren't necessarily the ones making the decision about which communication platform to use.

>I would bet a lot of money I already know the pitch. It's the same one that the Confluence PM I'm sure made. "We have done very well selling to technical programmers and hip startups, but the market is so much bigger. shows Office 365 revenue numbers vs Slack revenue numbers. We have an opportunity to take this to the next level. We need to make this the goto office communication platform. cheers.

You're probably right. However, Slack will never be _the_ goto office communication platform until it integrates with AD and that will not happen because MS has competing software (Skype for business previously known as Lync).

>MS has competing software (Skype for business previously known as Lync)

Teams, not Skype for Business, is Microsoft's Slack competitor.

Not sure why you were being voted down - Teams was explicitly positioned as a competitor for Slack.

Teams' editor is also terrible

> You're probably right. However, Slack will never be _the_ goto office communication platform until it integrates with AD and that will not happen because MS has competing software (Skype for business previously known as Lync).

Integrating with AD (or Azure AD) does not require Microsoft's blessing. Source: the product I'm working on (which is in the same market as Slack and Skype for business) is currently doing that.

Slack works with Okta which works with AD. These days it seems most IT orgs don't want software interfacing with AD directly (mainly because AD is a hot mess to deal with). Also, Teams is free with O365 :(

How would MS stop anyone from integrating with AD?

I bet a large percentage of Slack people _tried super hard_ to stop that cohort of PMs. However, you can only fight upwards so much before you just check out completely, cash the checks, and halfheartedly build whatever nonsense they're forcing through.

It's really demoralizing to be on a team on which the devs clearly have better design and UX sense than the designer(s) and/or product manager. But not the titles—they're "just" software developers who couldn't possibly understand users or design or common friggin' sense.

Maybe they have statistics that indicate that their larges user group by now isn't capable of using markdown? Most non-techies are not aware of markdown.

Maybe they have, maybe they don't. Or maybe they can pull some out of their behinds on the spot when asked (which I suspect is the most likely case).

If non-techies can be taught how threading or bunch of other Slack idiosyncrasies work, they can as easily be taught that surrounding text with characters like *, /, ~, _ and ` changes formatting. It's a trivial concept. Reddit, or countless Internet forums before, never had a problem with teaching that to non-techies.

Sometimes, the devs can sneak in a hidden fix. For example, remember back when VS 2012 made menus ALL CAPS? Officially, that was the brave new world everybody was supposed to live in (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/a-design-with-al...). Users hated it with a passion.

And then it turned out that there's an undocumented registry key to re-enable the old behavior, that was leaked without much fanfare (https://www.richard-banks.org/2012/06/how-to-prevent-visual-...). It was never mentioned in any official documentation, but word of mouth spread it far and wide, and its existence probably spared the worst in terms of angry user rants.

Ironically, the outcry over the caps was big enough that this setting eventually got an official checkbox in a major release sometime later, and then became the default behavior again.

It's common for ambitious employees in not-so-ambitious tech companies to lose their jobs over not realizing that the optimal strategy for keeping their job is to just do their work as told, collect a pay cheque, and not innovate.

In these companies, the fastest way to get canned is to believe you are there to help the company succeed by trying to innovate, and in the process of doing so, imply there are flaws with how it's currently being done.

>It's common for ambitious employees in not-so-ambitious tech companies to lose their jobs over not realizing that the optimal strategy for keeping their job is to just do their work as told, collect a pay cheque, and not innovate.

Also known as optimal strategy to get your soul crushed and die inside.

Isn’t this how all UI redesign projects happen?

The next step that also seems to happen more often than not: Despite user outcry, the company digs in, becomes defensive, and dismisses complaints with platitudes or snark like “you’ll get over it”. See also: Slashdot redesign, Fark redesign, Reddit redesign, Digg redesign, and so on.

I accidentally clicked a slashdot links yesterday. They show comments by default, sorted by New, despite having invented the best user-enforced moderation system ever seen on the web, and the #2 comment was 10 screenheights of screeenwide ASCII art swastikas. Hooray for UI redesigns to chase the next million dumber users.

Ditto... It goes to show that high quality PMs are just as important as high quality engineers. I've been in orgs where either side is imbalanced, and the same predictable results happen. When you have poor engineers, nothing is shipped, everything is buggy, the product never works and is eventually rewritten from scratch with the same predictable cycle. When you have poor PMs, you spend all your time shipping products no one will ever want to use, which demoralizes everyone and kills the productivity of your engineering organization.

I mean, it's probably not bad feature for a lot of people. But for goodness sake, why not make it optional?

This is exactly why I hate it. I think for the average person it's probably great, but it should be easy to disable for those who don't want it.

Or those who grow past it. Power users are not a different species, they do not come from the planet Vulcan. They get created through repeated use of software in order to solve problems.

my experience with Slack technical folk (on some tricky auth bugs and other issues we've hit over the years) has been excellent. They're fast, knowledgeable, never pass the buck, and communicative. If it's the PMs doing this, they're letting down an otherwise great team.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21590153

Really unsure why I was downvoted for this. I posted a link to someone else in this thread that has actually talked to Slack employees, it's directly related to the comment I replied to.

Probably for the same reason people downvote when the same comment is copy-pasted all over a thread; I don't need to be linked to somewhere else in the same conversation. I especially don't need to be linked to somewhere else in the conversation that _I have already read because it is higher ranked_. Also possibly: following an opaquish link to find yourself on the very same page is annoying, and kind of the opposite of insightful, which you might be hoping for.

Well I didn't copy and paste the same comment all over, I just posted this link once. The comment I linked was also not higher ranked when I commented, as I commented right around when the original post was made. Every comment in the thread was still getting shuffled around due to upvotes and nothing was stable.

In the future how do you suggest I handle this?

Your comment would have been better received if it had any explanation as to why it was there, like

"someone else in this thread said that they know some slack employees and it's true: <link> "

that way people scanning know what the link is and why it's there.

Yes, this would probably have been better recieved.

But it's only a few downvotes, and I think that total downvote count effect is limited to only a few points per post? So don't sweat it.

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