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Comment by variaga | Hacker News Reader

Amazon is a big place and I can't speak for all of it, but while IT announced that slack was "available" a few months ago, I don't personally know anyone that has actually switched to using it. Everyone still uses Chime.

That may just be a peculiarity of my department, but saying "Amazon as a company switched to slack" is definitely overstating what happened.

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>I don't personally know anyone that has actually switched to using it. Everyone still uses Chime.

It must be just your org/team, because a few of my friends working there in entirely different orgs had their teams switched to Slack fully within the week of announcement. Not claiming you are wrong though, because my sample size of 3 people/teams is purely anecdata.

Slack uses Chime under-the-hood for meetings. So, people are still using Chime. This was announced at re:invent today.

The video meetings are easily the worst part of Slack. Even though Slack meetings are free and integrated, everyone at my org still uses Zoom with Slack instead.

Are the video meetings worse than chat threading?

They don't work at all in Firefox, so... for any Firefox users, yes.

Threading that didn't work at all would actually be better than the threading that exists.

It may be Firefox. The video conferencing platform we use (Dekko Lynx) requires Chrome or Edge, because Firefox does not support the tech that Dekko needs for its end-to-end encryption calls (as we have been explained).

https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/wiki/Browser-support

I work at a company that spends a lot of money at AWS, and one of the many support channels we have now is through shared Slack channels.

I can imagine that the main driver behind IT announcing Slack support was for their customer-facing staff to be able to provide support for their customers.

I would be interested to know more about these AWS Slack channels. Are the official? Do you get them with a particular support plan? Where can I find out more information on this?

They are officiall and we use our own slack instance. We have an internal dedicated slack channel with our aws team i(technical account manager, solutions architect etc) as well. It can be handy just for organising meetings etc but it is really hit and miss depending on your account team. We are on an enterprise plan.

It definitely helped to have a faster turn around time and provide more visibility for people.

This is super org-dependent -- my entire org has completely switched to Slack, I only use Chime for meetings now (except for the occasional recruiter or someone outside my org who will ping me on Chime).

So that's the thing.

Switching to slack was brought up in our org and most people were at best noncommittal, because the option wasn't really "chime vs. slack", it was "chime vs. chime AND slack".

We'd still all need chime for meetings and interacting with any groups that hadn't switched.

It's actually pretty smooth since you can do `/chime` in a Slack channel or DM and it automatically starts a Chime call. Otherwise I just keep Chime open for scheduled meetings.

Weird. From my little view of the Amazon world it seemed like everyone moved within a week of availability. I always thought Chime worked fine, but it seems the kids want to wear the cool sneakers.

I think my team switched over the day slack was allowed.

My org definitely has switched for the most part. But I'm sure it's a phased-rollout.

Know someone at Amazon in the kindle space and I say them using slack when we went to lunch today. He said his team uses it for a lot.

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