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Comment by Ensorceled | Hacker News Reader

Good point, I guess they could stop using slack and eventually get fired.

Funnily enough I was hired on a 12 month contract as a software developer.

Four months into that contract I was moved over to a struggling 'Slack' enabled project, to help them work through their ever growing backlog.

I knew someone working on that project and discussed with them the project's use of Slack only to realise it was nothing more than a talk fest and not for me.

So when the project manager approached me, asking if I would like to join in on the Slack discussions, I declined.

Needless to say that did no go down so well.

However, I stuck to my guns and 12 months on my contract was renewed.

To this day Slack is still not part of my daily development life.

99% of the time, Slack is nothing more but a glorified, shitty messaging client. And most people I know don't even know why they're using slack, it's just that it's the tool they think everybody uses, and they don't really see why they should look elsewhere.

Why so snarky? The parent poster asked a valid question, and "my organization relies on it and de-facto mandates its use" would have been a good answer.

I'm confused, do you honestly believe the person I was replying to doesn't know that Slack is critical comms infrastructure at a LOT of companies?

> I'm confused, do you honestly believe the person I was replying to doesn't know that Slack is critical comms infrastructure at a LOT of companies?

As the person asking that question, no. I've heard it's used by some people ... for things.

Just like I've heard some companies use IRC for chat, and some open source projects use Discord where you can join if you feel like it.

I have no idea what its primary use-case is, who its primary audience is, and to what degree it's more critical than IRC or email or intranets to anyone.

Does that answer your question?

Yes. Now, no snark, just advice.

Your comment started off about you and was dismissive of Slack. Saying "How so?", in general, is not handled by people as a genuine and sincere question, it's usually laden with an "I don't believe you" vibe, especially with the dismissive nature of the lead-in.

If you had asked instead:

> "I've haven't really used slack, didn't really see the use case. Why can't you stop using it?"

You would have received a better response.

> Saying "How so?", in general, is not handled by people as a genuine and sincere question, it's usually laden with an "I don't believe you" vibe, especially with the dismissive nature of the lead-in.

I don't believe that. I think it is a perfectly fine question, and don't find anything wrong with the way the post was worded. Based on my personal experience, I think my interpretation is the general one.

From my 30 years management experience, your personal experience is not what I've seen. Maybe works in small teams but not with strangers; too short, too abrupt and provides little to no context about the desired answer.

For example, in the case above, was the "How so?" directed at the "immediately stop using it" part or the "have no choice" part? Both?

> Saying "How so?", in general, is not handled by people as a genuine and sincere question, it's usually laden with an "I don't believe you" vibe

That sounds like an extremely regional interpretation, and does not consider that the question was asked in good faith, something the HN guidelines specifically ask you to assume[1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Why would this person know that? Speaking from personal experience, I myself did not know how critical it is for some as I do not use it day to day (I heard some anecdotes sometimes, but that's it), rarely ever used it, and only recently experienced it in a setting were it was Slacks all the down.

They previously looked at Slack and never found it appealing, they are replying pretty deep into a massively popular HN thread and their question was a pretty snarky "How so?". Maybe my snark was unjustified but I'm comfortable with it.

"How so?" isn't snarky at all to me. It's a rather legitimate question one may pose to somebody who just said they'd stop using a product but can't. The answers could be one of a wide variety, like vendor lock-in, network effect, contractual obligations, or company policy, no viable alternatives (because...), or something entirely unexpected.

I'd actually be interested in the answer from grand-poster as well, if only because I am a curious asshole.

I've never worked at a company that uses Slack. I don't particularly understand what people use it for or how what as far as I can tell is a glorified IRC channel is allegedly so important to some teams. Get a whiteboard.

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