Comment by at_a_remove | Hacker News Reader

Comment by at_a_remove | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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