Comment by gregkerzhner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gregkerzhner | Hacker News Reader

Someone said that Slack was the "open office" of communication software. I think this is a good analogy - but at my work it feels more like working from a huge, lively dinner table. Sure - you can put on some noise cancelling headphones and ignore the conversation, but it will still be distracting, and worse, people will judge you for being antisocial.

Every once in a while, if you are lonely or your current task is sporadic and slow, it makes sense to bring your computer to the dinner table and casually work while being part of the party. However, if this is your environment 40 hours a week, its highly taxing to productivity. My only answer is to mute all Slack notifications or turn off Slack all together. This works in the short term, but in the long term I bet it will be detrimental as I wont be seen as a "helpful" person that answers questions. Ironically, I think it's exactly those types of qualities that will help you to get promoted. Our Slack rewards the developer that just "hangs out" and answers questions all day instead of getting meaningful work done.

That being said, I think the problem isn't necessarily Slack, but large, poorly organized organization. Personally, I am part of a dozen "catch all" Slack channels that put me into direct contact with over 100 people. That might make sense for some jobs, but it's absurd for a software developer. My actual day to day work involves mainly working with a few developers and a manager or two. My Slack should reflect that - it should literally just be a chat between these 5 people.

The rest of the organization should not be able to Slack me that easily, and instead only be able to contact me through a triage process. If there is really a question from someone that I am best qualified to answer, then I am willing to answer it, but they should have to first determine that from other, more external facing people. So I think the ultimate problem with Slack is that it makes it too easy for too many loosely related people to contact each other. It's like giving every passenger in the airplane a way to send a message to the pilot.

Do you still have notifications turned on for messages? Turn those off, mute most channels, and get control of your communications. Same for email. You don’t need to be distracted every few minutes. Take a break once and hour or two and check for high priority messages. Once a day you can catch up on secondary priority messages. delete or ignore the rest. Your job title is not slack reader or email reader.

> Take a break once and hour or two and check for high priority messages.

But that requires parsing a torrent of mainly chatter messages. Slack is really poorly suited to time-shifted message review; scroll, scroll, scroll...

If your entire issue with Slack is people being able to message you out of the blue and doing it always, it sounds like something you should speak with your manager about for solutions.

But often the technology is to blame at the root. Smartphones, for example, are a management problem because you need to ask employees to put them away and get to work. But they’re now needed for things like punching in, receiving important messages, updating information, filling out checklists, etc. So you can’t just ban them anymore.

It’s not that the employees want to be stuck on their phones, they’re just that good at captivating attention.

Similarly, some sort of online conversation is useful to employees and employers, but the technology can reward unproductive behavior and make productive behavior hard.

I don't know how to respond to what you're saying because I disagree with your premise. Smartphones aren't a problem in this instance, social or personal issues, and there are several of them.

1. There's the internal discipline that the employee apparently doesn't have when they keep going to their phone.

2. There's the assumption from management that a person needs to be 100% focused on work and that lapses in focus are a loss of productivity (when in fact, stepping away and walking can be a perfect way to get an idea and move forward).

3. "punching in" and "filling out checklists" especially are management problems if they're required to use the phone for that, since by the premise of the argument phones are bad and should never be used and then they require them.

4. There's the blaming of the tool rather than the user.

5. With the vast multitude of notification management settings that Slack, in particular, provides, including just closing the app, or muting every single thing except @person's, a disciplined person can absolutely limit their Slack usage as necessary; or, speak with a manager about going dark to 'get some work done'.

When working as CTO of an eBay company I had to fight to remove all phones from developers, it didn't make any sense they had a phone, but policy was back then, everyone needs to have a phone (sure this changed).

I fought that fight at Esri. first office (we were a remote r&d center) we simply put all of the phones in a box and put the box into the locked server room.

when the second office was being built out, and Esri's CTO visited along with some IT staff, we noted that we wanted as wireless of an office as possible. IT asked, "but how will we connect all of the phones?" my answer was, "no phones." they looked at the CTO, who said, "you heard him, no phones" and the precedent was set in stone.

> we simply put all of the phones in a box

> IT asked, "but how will we connect all of the phones?" my answer was, "no phones."

We've come so far in time, that I didn't connect that as a desk-phone reference & instead was still wondering how wireless wasn't related to "phone".

Also, about a decade ago my job had a "no phones" rule, which was that our mobile phones would be shoved into a lockbox when entering the R&D area.

The "no desk-phone" policy is almost universal recently, mostly because nobody can "step away" to talk something confidential and instead end up polluting the entire open office area with ringtones & otherwise irrelevant gossip fodder.

> our mobile phones would be shoved into a lockbox when entering the R&D area

our main focus was location on mobile devices, so having a lockbox, while nice for noise, would have defeated our whole purpose. I like the idea though!

I guess you weren't doing anything relating to sensitive government work. In those situations you do want a desk phone. In those cases you're not taking your smartphone into the work area...

no. from what I understand, all of that work was done strictly on campus, in secured buildings that I never visited.

I never applied for a "red badge", and helped to steer our work into areas that would not involve security clearance.

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