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Comment by grillvogel | Hacker News Reader

Not an idiom, but the latest dehumanizing thing ive started noticing is referring to people by their slack tags, even in direct messages. Now when my manager has an "ask" for me, instead of a DM with "Hi Name", i get "Hi @jdklsajdls". You don't need to tag me, we're already in a DM. Then, when someone is DMing me and referring to someone else, they use the slack tag instead of their name. Its gotten to the point where people were referring to someone by name on a zoom call and I genuinely didnt remember who that person was. Finally im like ohhhh thats @jkldsajlds

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I can try and explain this one - I do this a lot when writing down meeting notes / sending emails. The problem is that when a company has 3 Steves, 5 Freds, and you need to refer to someone, you need an unambiguous way to do so. So I try to write down people's email handles when taking notes or saying "you should talk to @sdlkfj" about this issue.

On calls I will try to use their first name, unless there are multiple people with the same first name there as well. Then I just refer to people by the NATO phonetic alphabet of their last name. I do ask for their permission before I do so though, I'm not trying to be a jerk :)

This is quite weird since slack generally encourages people to use their real names for exactly this reason. In slack, tagging someone has a few added benefits, even in a private convo.

In a DM, if I tell you @fred can help you if you have any questions, you can now hover to see Fred's availability status, and click to message them.

An added benefit is that these tags track the user's displayed name. If Fred changes their name to Francine, the places where you've tagged Francine in the past will update automatically. You can also search for places where users are mentioned this same way.

This one seems to go way back. I had an cousin who started a CS program back when it was a big deal if your dorms had ethernet. I remember when visiting him it was wierd to listen to people actually refering to each other by their university-assigned email address.

Slack tags are unambiguous, and some folks have different notification settings for mentions vs simple messages.

Same thing with email rules prioritizing mail that has the recipient on the To: line.

That's very old practice in online in online communities I know people who will know my handle but not my IRL name.

Sure I get it, but these are people i worked with in person until last year. It just feels like with the remote working thing we are transforming from people into interchangeable virtual entities.

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