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Comment by zippergz | Hacker News Reader

I can't help but feel sorry for the Slack engineers who are used to working at a nimble and innovative company, and now will be beaten down by bureaucracy only rivaled by large governments.

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Speaking from experience, getting absorbed as a small nimble company into a behemoth is akin to slowly boiling a frog alive. Things usually start out as business as usual for quite a while, at least for engineering; other departments are heavily impacted immediately. Then... the beuracracy creeps and grows and soon you have some corporate IT nonsense on your machine that blocks DNS lookups to github.com so you don't "leak intellectual property" and now you can't build your software any more and your manager is a plant.

Based on my experience, Salesforce does leave acquisitions to do their own thing for a long period of time - Heroku, Tableau and Quip are examples of that. But yes, its a big bureaucracy and things can move at a glacial pace.

It sounds like they kinda ran morale for Tableau folk into the ground; and a bunch have/are jumping ship

This happened at Heroku too.

MuleSoft too.

> nimble and innovative company

Given slack has barely changed at all in the past... 6 years, I would hardly call it "nimble and innovative" any more.

What’s innovative in Slack? From my - purely user - point of view it’s just IRC, only worse in terms of functionality.

The idea that Slack is strictly worse than IRC in functionality is laughable. Maybe IRC does some things better, but Slack certainly offers improvements as well.

Slack and Teams have always been laggy for me, meaning there's a perceptible delay between the time you press the keys on the keyboard and when the text appears on the screen. This isn't an issue with GUI IRC clients or many of the older chat platforms that were in use in the early 2000s.

The UI issues, at least for me, are the problem.

They are laggy, their logging and search support is a joke, they are non-interoperable, lack scripting support, and the UI is less responsive than MIRC on a 90 MHz Pentium.

I’m certain they do have some advantage though, apart from marketing. I’d love to find out what.

Maybe lack of signing-in everywhere, but Jabber solved that and with Bitlbee or any CLI tool you could IM from that 90MHZ Pentium.

Easier account creation and file sharing, I believe.

AOL instant messenger, MSN messenger, Yahoo instant messenger, and Google talk didn't have issues with account creation or file sharing. You didn't really need an account for IRC and file sharing via DCC wasn't an issue in the dial-up days before firewalls were common.

Kopete. We could do everything Slack did (even with inline Youtube videos, LaTex and video chat) under an AMD Athlon XP and 256 MB of RAM. And with KDE3 in the background.

cc /u/spiderice

So can you give some examples?

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