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Comment by PLenz | Hacker News Reader

I've done email heavy companies and slack heavy ones and I infinitely prefer Email heavy any day of the week. Slack is just so needy and in your face - people can 'see' you typing(!). Email gives you a little distance. So now that I'm at a slack heavy operation I regularly log out of slack for a few hours at a time. I'll get to your question when _I'm_ ready for it.

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Seems like it depends on work culture. If the expectation is you should answer ASAP, that's detrimental to coders. But if it's expected that you can respond sometime within a few hours, all is well.

I strongly prefer Slack to email: the ability to search through past conversations, start multi-person conversations, and discuss things on a channel (with searchable history and sub-threads).

> If the expectation is you should answer ASAP, that's detrimental to coders.

This reminds me of a Donald Knuth quote. I forget how it went exactly, but was something like this, "Some people have jobs that require them to be on top of things. My job requires me to be on the bottom of things. So I can't be interrupted by email."

IMO semi ephemeral nature of free Slack is a feature for me. I used to keep zero inbox too, only archiving obviously important messages.

If it’s not in ticket, git or wiki - it’s your fault.

We are tiny, globally distributed team focused on documenting well so maybe thats why it works.

> I strongly prefer Slack to email: the ability to search through past conversations, start multi-person conversations, and discuss things on a channel (with searchable history and sub-threads).

It's a real shame I can't search my emails or CC people in. Oh...

I won't pretend that they're the same thing, but those reasons to prefer ~Slack are things people readily do with email.

> the ability to search through past conversations, start multi-person conversations, and discuss things on a channel (with searchable history and sub-threads).

With a good email client you can do those things. E.g. you can make rules to move emails into folders, etc.

Sure Slack is probably quicker at doing those things, but I prefer not having to rely on a 3rd party to run my business.

The overall issue with Slack is that a channel that gets busy, you lose all context, and the decision becomes do I want to scroll back to figure it out, or just ignore it. I'd much rather prefer email. As people tend be more succinct and focus more on writing and summarizing, than just be a trail of thoughts.

Slack is one of the new breed of applications that really tries its best to get you to pay attention to it all the time. Nevertheless, it's pretty manageable if you spend a little time going around and muting channels and turning off OS-integrated notifications.

IMO, both Slack and Email have their places. Slack is better for long-running conversations with a lot of rapid back and forth of mostly short messages involving a dozen-ish people. Email is better for making requests expected to be responded to in hours or days and sending longer and more detailed descriptions.

The worst thing is you cannot mute @everyone.

The worst things are the often-non-repeatable or content-sensitive key mappings.

Press up once to edit the last message. Press enter. Press up again nothing happens.

Enter means enter except within a code block when it means shift-enter.

It feels as awful as using Matlab and missing the += from Octave. Like no one tried to use their own product. It makes me sad.

I imagine not as many people get in car accidents responding to email as they do responding to text messages, but, I could be wrong.

Why not use Do Not Disturb mode?

Because nobody actually pays attention to it and every messenger has a slightly different method of setting it, not to mention the ambiguously “cute” status messages that require interpretation to decipher.

But mostly because Do Not Disturb means Immediate Interrupt.

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