Why a Slack Backlash Is Inevitable | Hacker News Reader

Why a Slack Backlash Is Inevitable

bigtechnology.substack.com

117 pointskantrowitz148 comments

> “They create problems, high-school-type problems,” one CEO of a midsized firm told me. “People are making fun of co-workers, they’re acting unprofessionally, and it’s technically a company system.”

The crux of this is that Slack enables long, heated arguments that normally would be defused by:

1. Being surrounded by your coworkers

2. The frown of your manager

3. The strain on the faces of those around you

It basically comes down to 80s/90s era concepts of netiquette: try to imagine that the person you're writing your response to is a thinking and feeling individual, and imagine their reaction to your words. Read out your words that you've written in the heat of the moment and think hard about how they'll be felt when read.

If you have an employee who is prone to ridiculing others and won't desist from doing so when asked...

FIRE

THEM

>If you have an employee who is prone to ridiculing others and won't desist from doing so when asked...

>FIRE

>THEM

Honestly, why does this have anything to do with slack. If it's not there, it will be in the break room or hallway or bathroom or wherever. That's a toxic person being enabled by technology. Not toxic technology magically transforming a person.

What it has to do with Slack and every other social media platform is that (vs. break-room trash-talk) it magnifies the harassment - it's instantly amplified, spread more broadly, and is more durable.

It also reduces the dampening influences of people's emotional responses in meatspace.

Slack may or may not be better/worse than FB, Twitter, etc. in this regard, but all can definitely magnify divisions in any group of people, from a clique to a nation.

It is just the dark side of reducing the communication friction that helps people work together better (kind of like a hammer is better than a rock for both setting nails and breaking skulls).

As a manager/owner, if your team/company has such toxic people, you're better off losing them.

I also wonder if tech ageism isn't at play here. The social rules of high-school and college are nothing like the social rules of the rest of society. In those places, a person can create a group of friends and only interact with them for the most part.

In a real job without high turnover, you have to learn to get along with everyone all the time. Startups (the ones complaining here) aren't known for having lots of older workers who've had time to polish their social skills and have the rough edges worn down (programmers generally aren't known for their amazing social skills in the first place).

I'd conjecture that moving 2-3 older devs onto each of those teams could drastically improve the group dynamics.

Absolutely - must lose the toxic people as as fast as possible! They will damage the team at a far faster rate than any possibly contribution they can make.

The one good thing in this, is that, although these social media platforms can amplify and spread the toxicity, they can also make it a lot easier to identify & document.

I've found putting people in the same room often helps. Especially when there has been an issue. Generally, just actual discussion and a firm reminder that we're all professional adults on the same team is often enough.

Recent pandemic events notwithstanding...

I'm also a bit gun shy about firing the "problem individual" since I've generally found that particular individual is often the one caught replying and not the instigator. YMMV.

Nuance and context and all that.

The "heads should roll" thing works but make sure its well targeted and for accurate cause.

Sorry people, this isn't about about "high school" behavior. This is about preventing workers organization. They are just building the narrative for whats comes next.

Just other day, The Economist also said that Google must "grow up": https://www.economist.com/briefing/2020/07/30/googles-proble...

It looks like, big media point of view is that it is a childish behavior to do anything against the company bottom line. Combat racial discrimination, government surveillance or any corporation misdeed are insignificant compared to the shareholders profits.

Google employees walkout was an alert for the Big Money. The backslash is coming. Big Brother is watching you.

>Sorry people, this isn't about about "high school" behavior. This is about preventing workers organization. They are just building the narrative for whats comes next.

Absolutely this. Slack was an enabler of some recent employee demands at my large employer that I believe would not have been feasible if we only had regular instant messaging without chatrooms. The chatrooms are what enable large bodies of workers to aggregate. People from this demand channel would spread their message in the other chatrooms of thousands of workers, growing their organization. I can foresee limitations coming.

> Combat racial discrimination

Interestingly, it has been shown that more diverse groups of employees are less likely to organize and form unions or demand collective bargaining.

I wonder how much of the phenomenon is historically based on past actions of unions. Regardless of class there is no intrinsic virtue to station and the incumbents would be incentivized in the short term to keep newcomers out to inflate their guild's value. Doing so without a legal monopoly however sows the seeds of their downfall as they lose the critical mass of labor needed and going with the cheaper newcomers becomes not only viable but preferrable. Long term said maltreated former newcomers would be left with negative experiences towards unions and likely think of them negatively.

That scenario has echoes in the past well before industrial organized labor and guilds into outright caste dynamics - although those may occur from lack of an educational infrastructure leaving occupation essentially heritable and it being codified.

Interesting, got any citations handy?

Yes. On the more academic front:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0019793915602253

On a more anecdotal front, Whole Foods is aware of this at the corporate level and so is (apparently) deliberately pushing for a more diverse employee base not to actually improve race relations, but to prevent unionization.

https://observer.com/2020/04/amazon-whole-foods-anti-union-t...

My experience with Slack was it is a litmus test for your company culture. If you have people prone to histrionics and complaining, it's going to encourage that. If you have cliquish attrition-game players, they're going to create their own parallel channel scheme. If you have grandstanding drama queens who work an audience, it's the weapon of choice for the sort of people who send emails with long cc' lists. If you have hustlers who pretend you owe them things and always seem to cc' your boss, they will use public channels for off hours callouts that sit for hours before you can respond.

The one anti-pattern personality that Slack does mitigate well is people who use in person meetings and phone calls to make after the fact misrepresentations, and I suppose, sales.

Yeah, I wonder what ever happened to the common-sense idea that culture flows outward from the people with the "power." Maybe it's by example, or maybe it's by unintended consequence. Maybe it's caused by some moralistic / idealistic sort of policy, or maybe it's through ignorance of the unconscious biases that people have.

To that end, Slack, being a communications enabler, merely accelerates the rate of these things happening. You can turn it off, but then you can turn off the company too. You can try to make everything out in the open open, but then you quench creativity as well as meaningful 1-1 interactions between people.

We get what we reward, and leaders who espouse one set of values but reward another in practice are necessarily going to promote a layer of jerks. It's the literal recipe for a jerk factory.

To me, if there were a backlash against Slack, it is because it makes a great scapegoat. It's different from a social media platform because social platforms have to deal with the public, where a company has every tool it needs to evolve its culture. Personally, I think Slack could be a much needed twitter-killer by letting channels and instances promote messages to being public facing, while providing much of the value twitter doesn't.

> leaders who espouse one set of values but reward another in practice are necessarily going to promote a layer of jerks

I had to read this comment a few times, because I think it's truly a wonderful insight.

This is true for many things. We should be careful as leaders to espouse and reward the same practices. We should be careful as the led to see what people actually reward and ignore what they espouse.

Yep, dead on. Slack isn't the cause, it's a symptom. I worked at a company that adopted HipChat, and then Slack, very early. There was never any of this kind of drama. People were largely professional, aside from some goofing off in team chat.

My current company is full of "histrionics and complaining". It is almost entirely (but not completely) kids who would have been too young to be in software 7 years ago. The cause of this, in my experience, is a generational culture shift that seems to have done away with the common etiquette of keeping politics and agitation away from work.

At first I was prepared to despise Slack as it being part of the baggage of that job's sudden interest in Agile Cosplay, but then it looked IRC-like and I figured I would give it a chance.

Ah, I should have known. My reasons, in no particular order:

First, it was Yet Another Communications Channel to Check. You know, email, phone, voicemail, meetings, standups, calendar appointments, and so on. It was one more place I had to scan through on an event loop. I would pay more attention to Slack only to miss something somewhere else. Where was communication happening? Anywhere. And Slack made it worse because we had a skillion channels proliferate, so it wasn't as if Slack were one email inbox, it was dozens.

Second, Agile Cosplayer #1 was busy posting random things like his Spotify playlist for the day (I don't have Spotify) and other stuff. You can't even /ignore like in IRC.

It seemed especially silly when all of us were within ten feet of each other.

Partially my fault: I was late to the smartphone game and have no idea what roughly half the emojis meant, and so I was missing whatever emotional tenor of a lot of messages.

Probably the worst part was that the expectation was that always had one eye on Slack instead of, you know, focusing on programming. There was no "getting back to" someone on it. It was expected I would have it on my smartphone (newly purchased) and have it just running all the freakin' time.

Most of this comes down to local implementation, hence I can point the finger quite a bit at Agile Cosplay, but boy oh boy, does Slack enable and encourage some lousy local implementations.

> Probably the worst part was that the expectation was that always had one eye on Slack instead of, you know, focusing on programming

Haha, yes, my job is exactly like this. If I turn off Slack for an hour to write some code, I get a lot of angry emails from management about why I'm OoO without notice.

Co-workers love to complain to management if you don't respond to them immediately as well. One guy slacked me 6 times in the morning asking for help, I gave him a clear next step of adding a certain formatted section at the bottom of his spec for legal to review privacy concerns, then he never even did that work and Slacked me 13 more times that day which I ignored to get some work done, and management went ape shit.

Now I just double all my coding estimates because I know my real job is to be on Slack 8-5 answering questions.

Sounds like your problem isn’t Slack. It’s an immature coworker and clumsy management using an unproductive expectation of response.

When I’m doing that kind of work, I tend to work in 1 hour blocks. Then I take a break, clear my head, check for significant comms, maybe rely to a couple, and then get back to my work. I have most notifications disabled so I don’t get that constant attention drain. This is all part of an effort to manage my time.

Yes. You now are hyper-connected and on an interrupt loop, timechucks sliced by the sum total of maximum neediness into mere minutes. No more blocks of time, no more focus, no more deep thought. It fits rather well into Agile Cosplay as being a series of not just incremental, but tiny tasks that accrete around extrusions, rather than being architected, it's all you really have time for in between interrupts, miniature functions which prevent you from pulling back to look at the big picture.

I even noticed that many co-workers added a third monitor just to have space for Slack being "up" all the time. I watched with interest as they would flick their heads to one side at any motion.

Where is your management?

If your manager isn't willing to back you up on "My team needs to deliver X and that's my employee's job, if you want Y, we can try to schedule that in," find a job with a better manager. And if your manager says your job is answering questions about Y and not writing code for X, then, well, that is your job.

One thing that’s problematic is that Slack has the “wrong” notification settings on by default (it notifies you of everything). You should flip the default to “mentions only” and then don’t worry about looking at a channel unless you’re mentioned. Once you’ve got that setup the channels start working to your advantage because you can use them as topic headings to just read the stuff you’re interested in keeping up with once or twice per day. Then you can press shift+esc and clear all of your unreads (or do the same in the “All Unreads” section IIRC).

As for the emoji: If you ever aren’t sure what one means, just hover over it (on desktop) or press and hold on a reaction emoji on your phone and either way will show you the its name which usually gives you a pretty good idea of its meaning.

I tried that hover bit, something I have picked up off of using Discord on the smartphone, but in many cases, while a label was attached, the actual meaning was unclear, as is true of a lot of slang. Normally you can decipher slang words via what that word or phrase is embedded in, looking for context, but for simple "the sentence is the emoji" bits, that was not available.

i was able to turn the graphic emoji's permanently off in the settings: they were replaced with their labels... For me it was mostly an eye saver, i hated the constantly moving bits on my screen

I've worked remotely or semi-remotely for years now. There's a definite hierarchy o communications where clearly articulating things becomes easier:

In-person > video > voice > IRC >> email >> I feel sorry if you're here.

Slack (and its competitors) provides an amazing way to escalate the level of communication from IRC all the way to video without flipping through different apps. When in-office, I'd still much rather get a slack notification I can ignore for a couple minutes to finish up. A tap on the shoulder is an immediate and unavoidable interruption.

Keeping records is also nice. I can easily search for where a question was answered a couple months ago instead of getting in someone's way yet again. Along the same lines, I find the drama complaint in the article to be rather strange. People who like conflict are going to fight with other people no matter what the medium. At least with Slack, you have a permanent record of what was said so the individual can be dealt with. If someone is that toxic, let them be another company's problem.

> have no idea what roughly half the emojis meant,

I really honestly am curious which ones confused you

The faces are easy enough, although some are a little odd. It's all of the other stuff that seemed a bit baffling. I can't remember particular instances now, I just flushed the specifics away into the "well, I guess this is somehow easier than words for some people who also simultaneously expect that I just know this, so if it is important they aren't doing a great job conveying it" memory hole.

The eggplant and all the euphemistic emojis that go with it, eye roll emojis which are so inconsistent between platforms they range from "looking at the text above" to "I'm high AF get me outta here", and most of the anger emojis which range from "gritted teeth" to "Jack Nicholson in the Shining". Just recently figured out what the Slack :tada: emoji is and it's an upside down birthday hat with confetti coming out of it which only became visible when I used a low res monitor - tada! Wouldn't have made any sense without explicit text or blown up vector graphics.

I've been using smartphones since I was a teenager and the internet since the turn of the century so I grew up without the benefit of unicode emoji. Like a sibling said, they're kanji except the cultural context that defines them is extremely fluid (and prone to flights of fancy by designers looking to get promoted).

People use the eggplant emoji on Slack at your work? It’s usually a phallic symbol.

Probably most of them. The big problem with emoji is that there are a ludicrous number of them, like kanji, but unlike kanji most of them have no agreed upon semantic meaning, so everything but the basics and things that are just graphics of some every day object have meaning determined by intuition and culture.

A lot of my CEO and founder friends talk about this"... rephrased: "My CEO and founder friends are upset that their employees use a piece of software to talk about the toxic culture my CEO and founder friends have cultivated"

This reflects my experience. The people I work with now use slack exclusively for work and the odd share of more personal items while on vacation/weekend/walk during lunch. We have similar interests so the content is always welcomed. Any important discussion happens offline or on the phone, though. I can’t imagine us using slack for anything outside of trivial, asynchronous messages and events reported by bots.

At most other companies I’ve had people message me about salary concerns, unionization, anger towards a manager or CEO, endless banter about anything but work, etc. The main difference was that these places were run by people who really didn’t care about their employees and slack ended up a reflection of that. A lot of upset, frustrated, resentful venting in private channels.

If slack didn’t exist, these conversations would have happened some other way. There’s no way everyone could keep sane in a bad work environment without some degree of venting or comradeship.

Agreed. Having been/being a person(s) managers and IC, company culture comes from the head honcho of any subgroup. If the head honcho ignores bad behavior or doesn't tend to it, it's their fault.

Having slack expose those faults in the management chain doesn't mean this is an employee/IC problem. These managers of the company should learn how to manage people better for $$$ they're (we're) getting paid for.

Oh, they are doing "unprofessional" things in a tool that facilitates informal communication now, are they?

Well. It's called chatter. That will either happen over the watercooler, or it will happen over text. The only problem is that off the cuff remarks can be part of the permanent record now. But otherwise, they should be harmless.

And also... maybe go fix the problems people are "bearish" about? (also what's this stock market lingo doing here)

> The problematic employee, the employee who would sit around at the lunchroom and tell people how bad this place is

Well, maybe the place IS bad. And if they are bitching about it, they may still care – employees who have "checked out" won't complain nearly as much (or at all), while looking elsewhere. Or maybe they are just venting and had a bad week. Or it's a cry for help. If the place weren't as bad, other employees could help the person.

> and it’s amplifying.

Oh, so other people agree with the person too? Maybe there is a problem indeed.

> The only problem is that off the cuff remarks can be part of the permanent record now.

I don't think you appreciate the scale of how many headaches this can create for a large company. Previously, A says something mean about B at the watercooler, even if somebody overhears it's all he says, she says. With Slack (or any other group chat/IM system), if A says the same thing, it's broadcast to everybody else on the channel and anybody can take out of context screenshots and run squealing to HR/EEOC/lawyers/whoever. And it's all accessible to anybody with a subpoena on a fishing expedition as well.

And you can't just fix the company or the people: beyond a certain scale, no matter how good your hiring process and training, no matter how awesome your company culture and benefits, you'll get permanently unhappy people, shit-stirring trolls, wackos with extreme views and all the other weird creatures that populate any Internet forum. So eventually you have to converge on reserving chat only for strictly work-related comms and training people to take anything with the mildest whiff of controversy to talking in person/over video.

I don’t disagree with some of your other points, but having problems and being inclined to complain about them are often separate things.

Like at startups, there are often a ton of problems, naturally. At some startups people complain a lot. At some they’re good at fixing or ignoring problem for some greater goal. Aiming for the latter (I.e not amplifying) should be a goal as well while you reduce your problems.

This article would've been better with some concrete examples, or a study, or really anything to back it out. "Slack can be used for bad things". Well, so can email, mailing lists, support forums, internal chat systems (jabber), etc.

Not even one example, just "A lot of my CEO and founder friends talk about this".

As with any tool, it's how you use it. Best implementations I have seen of Slack is when the rules are clear for the beginning. Maybe channels are meant to be public and private is an exception, or the opposite (everything private to avoid noise). And clear guidelines. And to be fair, the discussion is usually a reflection of the company culture that is already present: formal, informal, direct. The tool just facilitates it.

Exactly. “High-school type problems” are created by immature people, not the tool. That kind of behavior would never be tolerated at any of the companies I’ve worked at, no matter what the medium.

Tech companies, and startups in particular, tend to have these problems because their culture and leadership is sophomoric and immature, and those people hire and promote (or fail to fire) similar people.

If a CEO thinks this is a problem in their company, then they need to, well, be a CEO and do something about it. Leadership sets the tone. Lack of leadership creates a void.

Exactly I've worked at places like this and the cadence is usually set by the people in leadership. If the boss up top is a drunk and boning every 20 year old ( been at one such place ), it sets the tone for everyone else. Also does not help if everyone in the team is young and DTF.

I hate Slack, but for unrelated reasons.

Slack has no priority levels. Slack pings you: is it an alert, a question, an outage, or someone sending you a funny gif? You can’t adjust the relative priority of these alerts, so good luck!

I’ve also seen that it regularly replaces documentation for teams. This is an issue, since slack just scrolls forever. You might have memorized the precise sentence to search for (I’ve done this), but good luck to everyone else.

All in all I think more companies would be better off with just IRC for ephemeral chats. IRC sets no expectation that you’ll catch up with everything that happened when you were offline, which in this case is good.

Yes! The Noise Machine aspects, the sprawling dumpster that is threads, and the fact that there's no way for all 7 people DMing me at once to see that there are 7 of them DMing me at once make the platform an indispensable nightmare.

I'm starting to notice that organizations with long term remote experience like Basecamp and Automatic rely a lot more on longer, async communication over instant messaging. There might be something to that.

> the sprawling dumpster that is threads

Doesn't the Threads view (Ctrl T, Mac: Cmd T) list all threads you're involved with in chronological order, navigable by mouse or keyboard, and searchable? What's your pain point with threads?

> the fact that there's no way for all 7 people DMing me at once to see that there are 7 of them DMing me at once

This same objection applies to every other text-based communication medium out there that I'm aware of.

MS Teams has the ability to mark something as important and it isn't such a great feature IMO.

Instead, create groups for whatever purpose and use it (eg, an @<team>_devs to avoid blowing up everyone else in the channel). @mentions stand out when you're scrolling through a feed.

Everybody in a Slack channel can pin important messages, when somebody writes something noteworthy I pin it until it is moved to the documentation.

As someone who moderates a several hundred person mailing list, the arguments they listed are neither new nor unique to Slack.

If anything, Slack is much easier to moderate than e-mail or other mediums of communication.

Bingo. Having a user tied to an actual person, and not just a dog with an internet connection and email address must make it orders of magnitude simpler to address offenders.

Isn't this kind of orthogonal to the software you choose to use? Those issues are a factor of public vs. private Slacks or email lists. Internal email isn't just dogs with internet connections, and big public Slack servers may just be 3 people with hundreds of alts and bots for all you know. (Hyperbolizing, but you get the idea.)

Turn off Slack and you'll have your employees in WhatsApp groups. What do you prefer? Nobody is going back to email.

If people behave unprofessionally on Slack then that is because they are unprofessional. I've been working with different corporate chat tools for years and haven't seen any major drama. And if the former lunchroom conversation moved to Slack, you can now hold the bad actors accountable.

Heck the WhatsApp groups probably already exist. At my last company, the malicious shit (e.g. "marry, fuck, kill" lists of coworkers, racist / casteist memes, etc.) happened on WhatsApp, not the company chat platform. If you don't discourage a "frat boy" culture, one can develop outside your control. People who do that crap aren't stupid, so they'll keep it off company systems but they'll still do it.

Did you say anything in any of these problematic WhatsApp groups to "discourage a 'frat boy' culture"? Or did you stay in the groups to quietly lurk, or did you laugh along to fit in?

I did quietly lurk until I came out as trans, when I stopped being invited to join them. No great loss to me, but you can understand why I was hesitant to speak up in them.

This sounds a lot more like your company culture is the issue than the tool. If you think this sort of thing didn't happen via emails, or even in the office kitchen, you're naive. If you're more interested in broad strokes like banning a tool than addressing acute bad behaviour, you shouldn't be managing people.

If decreasing the friction to communicate is causing problems in your company, then maybe you don’t have a tooling problem or a communication problem, but a culture problem.

There is really no strong argument made in this article. It seems like most, if not all, of the problems they talk about are _employee_ problems not slack problems. Slack is simply a medium to chat with your company and team, one which is pretty easy to use desipite its flaws. Employees being toxic is just that, it's not because of slack.

As others have mentioned, this is a professional communication tool there is no need for fully private conversations. Chats should always be accesible by HR/admins.

> _employee_ problems

Employee problems as perceived from some random "CEO"'s perspective.

Yes. It's only a matter of time before there is a backlash to Slack.

I won't understand the backlash when it comes, just as I didn't understand the excitement. Slack is just a chat client. Chat has been around forever. Corporate chat clients have been around forever. What am I missing?

Honestly it's just the little details... which are huge. For better or worse emoji reactions and gifs really change the tenor of conversations. You can say its just chat, and that's true, but people are complicated and the smallest of chat features changes interactions so much.

Just as an example, "heres a new feature" vs "heres a new feature (+100 thumbs up emoji)", for better or worse that changes people.

>For better or worse emoji reactions and gifs really change the tenor of conversations.

As did emoticons. I miss emoticons.

Yeah, from 2005-2009 I had a boss who insisted all staff be on AOL IM, with groups etc. There was an option to automatically save all chats. Slack has more features, but I don't see it as fundamentally different.

Totally agree!

We recently migrated from HipChat to Slack - everyone was very excited because Atlassian is not as hip as Slack.

Well, turns out emoticons are so small you can't see them, karma works better on HipChat, the client is RAM heavy for no reason.

Overall it is pretty much the same but a small downgrade in experience and increase in cost. Oh, well.

An iPhone is just a phone. The Beatles are just a band. Michael Jordan is just a basketball player. I don’t get the excitement.

I get what you're trying to say, but ... I still don't see it. I introduced slack at work a few years ago. It's fine, it's modern and has nice UI (UX on the other hand ... is just OK). I also used chat clients and IRC since the 90s. I don't see slack being the Michael Jordan of Chat clients. I don't see how it is a fundamental change the way the iPhone was.

It has charm. Emoji reactions, animated GIFs, pleasant notification sounds, etc. Makes a big difference.

We use Zulip, which is designed to avoid some of these issues. https://zulipchat.com/why-zulip/

I'm happy with it.

I think there's something there but I don't think I'd describe it as high school culture. It's more that things are way more permanent/visible. A one off watercooler comment from someone having a bad day is suddenly A THING. Sometimes people need to vent and commune without it going on their permanent record.

I personally find myself doing the opposite and censoring myself on slack, because I know a comment that's funny in context might read terribly a year removed.

My coworker wrote a bot for Slack that spams most of our channels with random gifs throughout the day. Most of my other coworkers find it amusing, but to me, it's quite distracting. I opened an issue with Slack to ask them to add an "ignore" feature, but they responded that ignoring anyone is counterproductive so they won't be adding it. Thanks, Slack.

wrote a bot for Slack that spams most of our channels with random gifs throughout the day

I am surprised that sort of behaviour is even allowed. The places I've worked would've probably given such an employee a very strong reprimand. Then again, they've also had clear policies about not... slacking off with the company's resources.

That said, there are a few thirdparty clients; you might like the text-only ones: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20500880

Write a bot to raise random requests for an "ignore" feature with them throughout the day until they get the message. ;)

Support ticket systems (Zendesk, Freshdesk, Intercom...) definitely have an “ignore” feature.

I've got a good eye for UX and have sent several improvements / feature adds via the /feedback mechanism. (I was one of the earliest complainers about the WYSIWYG fiasco, for ex.) For everything I've suggested they have some inane response tantamount to "that would allow users to do something that we decided no one should need to do." Their Product Engineers are shamefully obtuse is the vibe I get.

I also looked into blocking people on Slack but it's 'antithetical' to their whole mission or whatever, so I went this route: https://github.com/ketanbhatt/block-slack-users

Slack fails to meet the bar of functionality set by Outlook 97. This isn’t a compliment to Outlook.

Luckily my company does not have this problem but I’ve felt it before. I will leave channels that turn into distractions like that.

Frustrating, but I agree with Slack here. It isn't their job to police the behavior of your coworkers. Maybe try talking to the person directly? Or their boss? Or HR?

If they give me the option to mute someone (or in this case, something), that's not Slack policing anything. It's simply them enabling me to mute distractions. As I mentioned too, most of the others see no problem with the bot. They actually enjoy it. So muting it for myself would be preferable.

If Slack allowed me to ignore others, then I would be accountable for missing any important messages. I am okay with having that responsibility.

They don't need to police anyone. It would be you deciding who/what you choose to mute. They give you the ability to mute channels, but not to mute bots. It should be something they could add.

My company's approach is just that bot posts go in their own dedicated channels that anyone can mute or watch as they see fit. That works ok for us. But it doesn't give someone that option in a company that allows bot posts in any channel.

I'm pretty sure you can mute bots, since they are just like any other user (right click on bot DM -> mute conversation). Or you can mute/leave the channel itself. You can also hide images/GIFs posted in channels by default.

Neither of the options you describe mutes the bot when posting in a channel, which was the feature asked about.

This is a basic feature of every other communication platform.

Blocking people within your own company is just adding dysfunction to the company. If it gets to that point where someone is justifiably blocked by someone else (harassment, etc) HR should get involved and someone should be fired.

Have you talked to the person who made the not? They might not realize how distracting it is. Maybe they'll move it to another channel as a compromise.

"Hey, could you get rid of that annoying bot that's distracting people with its spam?"

Hmm, you may be talking about me. Oops.

Really though, having the ability to ignore _bots_ would be quite useful, a lot of noise comes from bots that might be useful to some of my coworkers, but not others, even in the same channel.

And also ignoring highlights from particular people too

Just close the app then, right? Does your job obligate you to be on Slack all the time, probably not. You get more time back, and deliver more value to your company's business.

Many jobs do require Slack open all the time. At my job that's the entire point, if it can wait send an email, if it needs attention now, slack. People get upset if you don't respond within 5 minutes, even if it's just to say I'll get back to you.

Not in my experience. I never bothered enabling notifications from Slack. I can only tell if I received a message if I actually see the red mark on the pinned tab's favicon. Sometimes I don't get back to people for 10 to 15 minutes and they've never complained about it.

Okay, back to the people who need Slack open for their jobs.

Not being able to mute or suppress doesn't necessarily need HR if everybody thinks it's quirky and harmless fun. You're then the odd man out and ostracized for trying to do your job efficiently - it's pretty bogus, but until some HN user decides to create a new messaging channel. It's gotten to the point where people will avoid seeing you in person but just as quickly ask if you "got that slack" the second they do. It's like e-mail but now you're expected to have it on your phone, home computer, work computer - never a chance to say "no" because you didn't feel like reading it at the time even as it's 9 pm on a Monday night. It's invasive and turns work banter into privatized logs of discussion - from an entry level POV this is terrible.

> Okay, back to the people who need Slack open for their jobs.

It's a requirement at my job, but no one is required to respond right away. Just in a reasonable time frame. Sometimes I have to wait 15 to 30 minutes before I get a response to a message and it's similar to how long people may wait for me to respond to them.

> It's gotten to the point where people will avoid seeing you in person but just as quickly ask if you "got that slack"

Before we had to start working from home, people would typically come to my desk to talk if they wanted me to look at something. If it was someone from another office, the same time frame as I described earlier for replying to a message was perfectly fine and no one complained about it. We've been using Slack for 2 years at my workplace.

> It's like e-mail but now you're expected to have it on your phone, home computer, work computer

I actually use an older smartphone that won't work with Slack (Nokia N9). It used to work when Slack had an IRC gateway, but not now. I also tell my employer that I refuse to install any work related software on my personal devices and they're fine with that. If it was that important, then they can provide me with company issued devices. So far, they haven't bothered.

As for notifications, it's up to you if you want to enable them and it applies to any type of chat client, not just Slack. I prefer just checking it periodically during work hours and any messages that I receive, I'll reply when I check for them. What you describe is a problem at the business level as opposed to a specific chat client.

For me, I would rather use a less resource intensive IM framework like IRC over Slack, mainly because it's a resource hog and frequently has significant UI lag when running it in a Firefox tab (to the point where I have to wait 3 to 5 seconds for text I type to show up on the screen).

I wish it was that simple. Questions and alerts come up frequently, and people expect as close to a real-time response as they can get.

If you are having trouble with distracting conversation or bots, but are expected to work in the channel, I would consider it the same as any in-person distraction. Loud music, nerf guns, shouting or laughing in an open office. You could politely ask them to turn it off.

Or you could mute notifications except for @mentions and @all and tell them to use that if they need you.

Maybe raise an issue with your companies Slack admins to kick the bot.

In many smaller companies the person who added this bot is the slack admin.

"Hey, could you get rid of that annoying bot that's distracting people with its spam?"

This is an advantage of Microsoft Teams... the product is so utterly without charm that I doubt anyone is recreationally loitering in it.

Yeah, Teams tends to murder conversation. It's not even broken, its just not quite worth engaging with.

This is why it will win.

Can confirm, use Teams daily and theres almost no side chatting in it compared to Slack which seems like a near constant watercooler experience.

Agreed. Curious to hear if you think it's side effect of a more corporate-looking UI? Or is it the association with Microsoft and other "office products"?

A lot of these issues seem to come down to:

1. Just fire the shitty people. I don't know why companies don't do this more in the US - it's at-will, just fire them.

2. Why are you trying to stop your employees from organizing????

> “The onus is on the CEO,” Flory said. “Our focus has been on the values,”

Agreed on this last statement. Ultimately if Slack is becoming a toxic environment there are obviously other issues - employees being able to quickly communicate and organize is not one of them.

This post matches up with every other "We're ditching Slack" post I've seen. It comes down to:

1. Our employees can't behave themselves 2. Our managers can't or won't do anything about it 3. Executives aren't willing to draw a line in the sand 4. I guess Slack is terrible?

If a tool is so easily subverted and misused so widely, eventually it’s the tool’s fault. Arguing that it’s just the users’ fault is like trying to boil the ocean. It doesn’t matter if you’re right or not, the component that can actually be addressed is the tool, so the tool is capable of bearing blame.

We’ve found the same behavior in normal person to person speech, so we’ve implemented a gag policy that nobody talks to one another during business hours. Ultimately, it’s person to person communication that we’ve found is the broken tool for, granted, a minority of users so we’ve implemented this policy company wide.

Your satire rings very flat because it doesn’t happen much in person to person communication. The whole reason it’s noteworthy to talk about it in regards to Slack is that it does happen to a much greater extent in Slack and other chat programs than in almost any other corporate communication system, enough to make it clear that instant messaging, not people, is the core of the issue.

My experience is the exact opposite. All personnel problems have occurred in-person, often at company events. I find that employees are generally much more considerate and careful about what they say over slack as everything basically becomes permanent record.

> Your satire rings very flat because it doesn’t happen much in person to person communication.

Of course it does. It is just harder to audit and record. That's why they call it "high school like" behavior - you put a bunch of people in a room together every day and you get gossip.

I think this is wrong. The property of high school that led to this being named that way is that high school facilitates immature, consequence-free social contexts where asserting individuality is key to your social status among peers.

In-person workplaces do not foster this usually, with some exceptions in immature start-ups or bro-y Wall Street.

By contrast, it’s exactly the kind of atmosphere that instant messaging environments foster.

I manage a team where we have had one member frequently get into issues with Slack. Mostly in the form of drawing into political discussions or lengthy drama, usually not inappropriate by tone or comment, but mostly by relentlessness and distraction.

His quality of work output is very high, his teammates rate him highly in reviews, he is kind & respectful in all other forms of communication like code reviews, team meetings, etc. It’s just 100% the instant gratification of a real time chat response in a debate thread that draws him to the problem zone.

Firing someone like this would be ridiculous. It would hurt team morale, lower productivity, sink costs into finding and training a backfill, and establish that we, as managers, would prefer to kick people and bark orders under the threat of dismissal than to be accepting of flaws and actually do the job of managing and help the person grow past this.

I didn't tell you to fire anyone.

Nah, I think you’re wrong. It would require a very revisionist / mental gymnastics interpretations of your original post and it just doesn’t seem reasonable given all your other follow up comments.

You said “just fire the shitty people” in response to a very low stakes topic like misbehavior on a chat program, and then vigorously added response comments all over defending the claim that any type of community gathering of coworkers begets this shitty behavior.

The most reasonable take possible on your initial comment is that you are suggesting a very extreme low bar for firing people rather than helping them improve.

> 1. Just fire the shitty people. I don't know why companies don't do this more in the US - it's at-will, just fire them.

I've asked this question of managers many times. The answer is usually some variation on "The shitty ones are the ones who know how to work the system to their advantage the best. They're the most likely to sue for wrongful termination and otherwise make my life hell if I fire them."

The best thing to do is to closely and carefully document their inappropriate behavior.

Anybody can do this, not just HR. If you have overwhelming evidence of job misconduct and provide it to your company, it gives them ammunition to defend themselves against those sorts of legal recourses.

I would have a serious performance conversation with the manager and explain to them that their job as a manager is to take important but sometimes difficult decisions. If they can't bring themselves to do this, they shouldn't be a manager.

The outcome you want is the shittiness to stop and you have an objective transcript of everything that happened in slack, so assuming the shittiness is real this isn't even remotely hard.

Option 1: If the behaviour isn't that bad or is in some sense borderline or open to interpretation, you speak to them in person, say the thing that happened that needs to stop, state clearly why it isn't in line with your values, is damaging to the team/whatever the problem is, and state your expectation that it will stop and if it doesn't immediately stop it will affect their future with the firm. You follow up with an email recapping all of the conversation (in particular the statement that if it happens again they're out) and copy HR. You need to do option 1 if you have been allowing this behaviour to slide in the past. It's important to do this with all parties who have been indulging in this behaviour and don't show any kind of favouritism.

Option 2: If it's not the first time (ie you've already done some version of option 1 and it hasn't stopped) or the behaviour is really egregious you book a 1:1 with the person and when they show up HR is there with you. You show them the thing on slack that is happening that isn't ok and any previous "option 1" recap emails. You ask them to explain any extenuating circumstances. You terminate them there and then unless they have a really compelling story. You send an email to the HR person thanking them for handling the situation (especially since the reason you got here is that you have made mistakes as a manager), summarising the conversation and your thought process that meant option 1 was not appropriate. If they've done this before you have the email track from when you did option 1 before to add to their evidence trail.

For at-will employees there's no way any kind of wrongful termination will stick if you follow this kind of fair and rigorous process, you document conversations you have had and your rationale for dismissal is reasonable. For employees in a European or UK employment context, you need to be more aware of the surrounding context and make sure they have actually breached your policies and then follow your disciplinary process appropriately. If you work with your HR colleagues this isn't hard.

[edit] There is also an "Option 0" above which is less heavy-handed. Part of being a good manager is knowing when to take the person out for a coffee, put a hand on their shoulder and just give them the "Come on you know this isn't ok" conversation. Then you follow up with an email (but don't copy HR) and make sure you save it in case you need to escalate further. Just make sure you don't option 0 your buddies and escalate everyone else because that is seriously bad.

A communication environment is just a reflection of culture.

Point 1 can sound harsh at times, but when you consider the consequences of a toxic team member being left to interact with the rest of the organization every day, it becomes clear that there is a bigger problem at play.

You do not want your good employees to suffer at the hands of a bad employee. It might be difficult to do the right thing in these cases. I would try to focus on the people/products/customers you are helping and less on the negativity you are removing.

I have personally witnessed the consequences of toxicity spreading throughout a team. It is incredible how much productivity you lose and how much more stress you have in your life when everyone is salty all the time.

This seems like a case of shooting the messaging app. It's just human behavior, and it'll happen anywhere.

This has cause and effect wrong. Slack may make bad culture worse, but it won't be the cause.

Chat is a technology.

Blaming chat for having had a catalytic effect on a toxic corporate culture may underscore the toxicity of the culture.

Maybe a cultural detox would be in order?

At first, I thought it was a repost of an article from 2017 or 2018. But yeah, Slack sucks in many situations, especially in large companies. But it's a great tool for a small group high intensity collaboration (small=8-9 people max).

Right now, Slack and Zoom are probably the only things holding my small org's collective culture together. Email just doesn't cut it when we're not in the same physical space anymore.

I don't understand the argument against Slack. Obviously this is not about people making fun of co-workers. That's just a bad culture and toxic environment and can happen even at the office. It's also not about Slack creating distraction. That's just how they're utilizing it if they have that issue, which is easy to fix.

Employees organizing union and protest is the big problem for some companies. And I don't think they can live without a communication tool either. Perhaps those companies wouldn't be happy about any tool for this matter unless it can provide some surveillance features.

The "high school problems" are the employees organizing, apparently.

The biggest problem with Slack is not even the "politics" or inappropriate use. It's the fact that chat is a super-horrible way to farm out tasks.

Go ahead. Ask someone to do something over chat.

Very soon, that request is buried in succeeding messages and no one remember the original task. To me that's why we will stop using Slack, even if it causes some friction in casual communications.

The problem is that managers (i'm guilty) use Slack as a way to farm out tasks to subordinates and then we're not thrilled when those tasks don't get done.

Ssshhhhoooocking....

> The biggest problem with Slack is not even the "politics" or inappropriate use. It's the fact that chat is a super-horrible way to farm out tasks.

I would file that under "inappropriate use". Slack is not a task or issue tracker, use more appropriate tools for that. While it's certainly flexible and can be adapted to many workflows, there are still limits with features it arguably shouldn't have.

I'd also add that it might be better to PM someone if you want to be sure they got a specific message.

I don't disagree that a Slack 'backlash' is coming because anything that grows eventually has to stop growing as teams find whatever, NoSQL, NoCode, Slack, Kubernetes, Docker, AWS, was not the panacea they thought it was. That's okay.

I thoroughly dislike the basis for the argument. The author does clear it up in the end that Slack isn't the problem, the culture is, but why wrap the story that way just to sound good.

It reminds me of anti-maskers who blame restaurants for forcing them to wear masks. Wrong attribution.

I see articles like this periodically here, and I never understand them.

I've used Slack for 6 years with an organization, it's been indispensable, and since I'm remote it's been my window into the company culture, which I'd characterize as healthy.

But then again, my job before that one tried to start a corporate intranet blog and then mothballed it while HR dragged their feet on a proper company policy for the comments section.

So...maybe it's not about the tools of communication, but the people behind them.

It has been fine at my work as well. I understand that people get mad that is uses more resources than is necessary, I have that same aversion but that is a pretty ubiquitous software problem today, and is why I asked for the 6 core xeon laptop =)

Is slack really causing these things, or were they just happening in secret before?

I could see it increasing the instances, but it could also just be making the instances more visible.

This article is basically complaining "employees are using Slack to organize and try to push for a union", and then claiming that's a bad thing. Fun!

I was thinking the article would be about the deteriorating quality of Slack and the lack of improvement in their facilitation of perusing channels.

The article was instead that CEOs don’t want to get talked about behind their back and so are going to shut it down. While Slack might increase the ease of that, it’s not like employees couldn’t do it via email or at the water cooler instead. This speaks to leadership problems more than anything else.

Your organizations are doing a bad job at mitigating high-school type problems because they are not clearly defining what bad behavior is nor the common stereotypes of problematic Slack users.

If these were clearly defined, people could reference this information when they identify it, and people's behavior would become more policed. Without a strong definition, people can inflict harm from safe gray areas.

A favorite quote: "culture eats strategy for breakfast".

Slack and Teams just feed this instinct to spew thoughts without thinking about your communication first. Everything about modern society reinforces this. And it's not remotely generational; or, I haven't noticed much of a difference between generations in regards to depth of conversation. It's just different tools of choice.

So, I'm sure everyone will hate these tools, but really, they just haven't figured out how to communicate deeply and meaningfully together. And no tool is gonna make that happen for you. It's a culture problem.

I'm 100% sure if they ban Slack and Teams, and go back to email, everyone is just gonna hack email to say all the same stupid crap they're saying right now. Maybe it'll slow things down a bit, but I can't see it transforming much of anything.

So slack is amplifying a problem... one that happens to be quite common in more paralyzed mediums such as the water cooler ... And before CEOs would ignore it or sweep it under the rug but now it is getting in their way.

Awesome! STOP ignoring your employees! Stop dismissing their complaints. And start LEADING! Yes, when employees complain, leaders are put in the hot seat. Yes, when employees organize, they are being ridiculous. Yes, when babies cry, they need to be consoled. Yet, the solution is not to keep the baby sleeping or be threatening or just dump the baby. These CEOs need to lead. And the employees need to speak louder.

This article is is all about Slack. And designed to make slack look bad. Other communication platforms have the same problem. But the author only focuses on slack. This looks like the opposite of a PR article.

Twist. We’ve been using it as a slack alternative and it truly works as a better email replacement. It’s great for announcements, and isn’t super overwhelming with every channel organized like an inbox. The UX is super simple. Haven’t played with it too much just yet, but like it so far

which one?

Feel like they missed an obvious opportunity to coin the term slacklash...

"Ultimately, many CEOs and analysts I spoke with said it’s up to company leaders to create a healthy culture and make sure it’s lived out."

That's the key takeaway from that article. It has nothing to do with Slack or any other specific form of communication. The headline is just clickbait. Even the CEOs complaining about it admit that the problem isn't the media, it's the culture that they create and control that's the problem.

It easier to blame the tool then the culture and human nature.

Those tools just exposed many people subjective/inner feelings/views to the surface. It is up to leader to learn how to deal with the exposure.

I agree that these need to better managed and leaders need to step up, but the older culture of repressing and hiding info is gone in this age, and leader need to learn how to lead in today's world effectively.

I don't get it, so if you use a hammer to wreck a car or whatever now hammers are bad? and we should ban hammers?

I remember when HipChat was in the position that Slack is in now. At the time it seemed unassailable.

> The problematic employee, the employee who would sit around at the lunchroom and tell people how bad this place is — that’s just happening on Slack, and it’s amplifying

Great, on Slack it’s documented, so you can fire them.

If something as toxic as described in the post is feared, it says nothing about Slack/Teams. It means the company is dysfunctional and the culture is bad. It will happen with or without slack.

Bring back the IRC, half the high school problems will go away automatically, fire the immature employees and the remaining half will go away too.

I miss hipchat, I truly don't understand why slack exists

is the problem slack or people? same argument is said for facebook and facebook serves people since they use it a lot. This only validates the existence of slack for me.

Isn't everyone on teams now?

No. It's not wonderful.

edit, I'll be more helpful with criticism. I feel like Teams is well integrated into their cloud stuff on the good side. The cons are it very much feels like it is aimed at checking some CIO and HR requirements around control and auditability. Spontaneity and usefulness suffer.

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