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Comment by nixgeek | Hacker News Reader

Slack has been doing similar things via their Analytics for several years now and their Customer Success teams regularly meet to discuss “Deployment Maturity” with larger customers on Enterprise Grid. In these PowerPoints you get their take on where your organization is at in employees engaging with Slack, compared to some of their other bigger customers, and they drill into how many applications you’ve got deployed, how many custom ones you’ve created, whether you use features like Workflows, etc.

There are statistics for what % of employees are using Slack, how many days in the month, % of messages being shared in public channels, private channels, direct messages, % of messages sent vs. % which actually get read, ...

What Microsoft is doing here seems like they’re trying to copy what Slack has done, to try and drive ROI and renewal conversations with their customers.

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My company puts the Slack message count on the website. Scroll down to the bottom.

https://www.altaml.com/team/

It isn't used as part of management or anything so it is just a fun little fact, but I was surprised to learn that such a number was readily available. It shouldn't have been surprising, but it was when it clicked in my head that Slack tracks you as much as any other app.

I do not understand why any company would put that on their website. It's absolutely meaningless in a vacuum.

To me, it tells me "do not apply, we care about meaningless metrics"

It's put next to "# of AltaMLers who think strawberry is the best Bubly flavour" and "% of AltaMLers who think pineapple is an acceptable pizza topping", I don't think it's supposed to be taken super seriously

Yea, but those are clearly fun and playful stats.

Yeah that's what I'm saying. All of them (except the one about # of countries) are just "jokes"

I don't think anyone cares about the statistic. It is probably just an easily available datapoint.

It's just a little "creative" thing at the bottom of the site. I think its cool.

In the context of the other "fun" stats, it makes sense.

If they said something like "We take slack VERY seriously, here's the numbers to prove it" I would agree.

I honestly don't know if more messages would be considered better or worse. Which is it?

I don't think it is considered either way. My surprise was in them knowing it so trivially.

Pineapple is definitely an acceptable pizza flavoring. I cannot see how this company consists of 33% heretics.

Those measures are not that useful at all without a denominator. Do you have 10,000 employees or 2? 2880 slack messages means nothing without knowing the denominator. Same for countries of origin.

I wonder who sees these and thinks anything other than “what kind of dipshits think this matters?” Although, I must think that a lot of the people I know of who are buying ML consultants would likely think that counting and displaying random metrics without context is data science. So maybe it works well.

Slack also allows bosses to read your private messages on premium plans! On the free tier they can as well but need SlackCo input.

I seem to remember this was justified for "auditing compliance" reasons.

https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/recode/2020/1/24/21079275/s...

Sure, but at least Slack talked about adoption of Slack, rather than general "employee productivity". There is a difference.

This is SaaS 101. Salesforce has been writing the book on all this stuff since before Slack existed.

"Oh someone else does it, then it must be fine". I wish people stood up against such invasive practices and maybe we should have a legislation regulating this if company greed clouds being decent.

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