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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

It blows my mind that 72% of developers love Slack. I absolutely hate it with a passion. It's like someone walking up to your desk, except we made it way easier because they don't have to get up and feel the social pressure of waiting for you to stop what you're doing and take off your headphones.

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Does your company culture expect immediate response? I like it because we treat it like short-form email, maybe with a slight expectation of quicker response. If I send you an email, it will have some detail and please get back to me within a few days. If I send you a slack message, I expect a sentence or two and a response today or tomorrow.

I've never worked anywhere that didn't expect an immediate response from Slack. If they wanted a delayed response, they'd send an email.

Worse yet, if I try to enforce that myself by not responding, there is a whole conversation in the channel before I get there and then I have to respond to all the messages in a mess of threads or some big long response block.

You know you set the expectations. Is it firing offense if you reply in 30 mins.

I very much have “deep work” time where I turn off everything. If there is a house on fire emergency, they can use our paging app that can bypass DND on the phone.

You need to change your company's culture.

My work uses Teams with the expectation that a message is async. Most people respond whenever they finish their current task or meeting. Response times would generally looks like a bell-curve with the peak around 30 minutes. Some messages have the expectation of requiring an immediate response (e.g. reception who may be relaying information from an external phone call).

Typically when something is actually urgent, we click the call/video-call button instead of sending a message.

> You need to change your company's culture.

How would one do that exactly? Like I said, I could just not respond right away, and then I either have to respond to a whole discussion later in a mess of threads, or ignore it, but either way I'll get labeled a bad communicator and hard to work with.

I don't have an answer for you, but wanted to say I sympathize with what you are saying.

People who hand wave and say "just change the company culture" must not have been in your shoes.

With that attitude you will. Honestly though you need to find a communication pattern that works for you and your teammates. In most situations if you communicate your needs clearly you won't get much pushback. For instance closing your instant message and email except for periodic checkins and letting people know why might improve the situation.

You could start small and block off a certain chunk of time during which you won’t respond. And communicate that to people ahead of time and the reasoning for it. Also set your statutes msg during that period. It could catch on and more people could similarly block off certain periods.

Start advocating for the basecamp model. [1]

[1]: https://basecamp.com/guides/how-we-communicate

> How would one do that exactly?

Don't talk to each team member one-on-one, that'll never work.

Talk to your manager, make it clear in terms they understand. That doesn't mean complain or whine to them as that will just push them away from the point that you're trying to make.

You need to REALLY make it clear to them not in your terms, but in their terms. Show them that every time they do this your productivity goes down. Show them that if it's happening to you, it's also happening to others too. Show them the research that says interruptions are bad. Show them the communication models that other companies are using that work.

Your manager isn't going to do the research for you, they're too busy managing others. The only thing that managers are trying to do is to reduce the complaining to a minimum. If that means the minimum is only you complaining, then they are going to optimise for only you complaining. If you actually show them the research, show them a list of rules, show them a plan that can be implemented, then you complaining is always going to be the minimum. You need to show them that if they follow these steps, then the complaining will essentially go down to zero, only then will they act on it.

I find that even where immediate responses are not required where I work now (and, honestly, everywhere I've ever worked), the Slack status works pretty well for when I'd like to have some "me time". I usually set it to something business or "current fad" friendly, like "in my flow state - not monitoring slack or email".

Teams is usually:

Hello

(No response for an hour)

Hello

https://nohello.net/en/

And you think they would learn not to do that, but they never do.

I think part of it is cultural. At $PREVIOUSJOB we used a lot of Indian outsourced devs and they were quite big on the "hello" thing. Could have been what the outsourced company told them to do, too, but they did stop after being asked to, mostly. QA seemed to hold on to it. They were predominantly women, so not sure if that played into it.

I’m adamant about not responding to just “hello”. So far it’s never been an issue — eventually they send the question.

I think a lot of the value in both Slack and Teams is the ability to seamlessly switch from async to real-time conversation, up to an audio/video call. Async should definitely be the default expectation though. Setting status flags can be useful for this. If they want and need an immediate response, they should call me.

> I've never worked anywhere that didn't expect an immediate response from Slack.

Interesting; I've never worked anywhere that DID. Wonder if it's a regional or company domain thing.

Could someone explain how you don’t lose track of a message irretrievably in Slack if you don’t respond to it right away? There doesn’t seem to be any way to ever find anything again without looking through every single channel and DM conversation once it’s read — no way to see every message you’ve received by date or anything like that. And DM conversations just drop off the sidebar entirely if you have too many of them.

Honestly a lot of "Remind me in X"

  > Could someone explain how you don’t lose track of a message irretrievably
  > in Slack if you don’t respond to it right away?

The idea behind "no immediate reply" isn't that you read a message and reply to it later. The idea is that when you're ready, you open Slack, then read and reply to messages. You then close Slack, go do a task, then come back to slack.

I dislike the split in Teams between chat and the Teams tab, but at least it has the Activity stream. Also you can mark messages as Unread so you can go back later.

Right click the message and choose "remind me later"

> It blows my mind that 72% of developers love Slack.

Just wait until you've been forced by your company to use Teams instead, then you'll find yourself advocating for Slack even if you hate it too.

100%... just switched to a company that uses Teams, hate it already.

Ah, this brought back "fond" memories of trying to reverse engineer a 3-way chat in Teams, and trying to figure out why I didn't understand the conversation. It turned out that Teams would have a kind of eventual consistency for messages, where one or two lines would arrive a few hours later, and pop into existence in the middle of a conversation (three pages up), without notifying you that something had happened. Because, presumably, you had already read messages with a later creation date...

Granted, this was pretty rare, but we noticed it happening at least 2-3 times in a 6 month period. In those cases it caused enough of a headache that I had to start worrying about whether I was seeing the entire discussion, which is a wonderful property to have in a chat tool.

Ironically, because Teams is so much harder to use - I actually like it more than Slack.

It creates just enough friction for people to not spam chat-messages all day with emojis.

Agree, slow and a resource hog.

My company basically uses slack as an improved email. We don't expect immediate responses unless we specifically tag someone and say ASAP or whatnot. Works out well.

How does someone know the message says ASAP or that they've been tagged unless they're monitoring slack constantly?

turn off notifications for everything except mentions

What does Slack offer that’s an improvement over email for non-realtime conversations?

that I can customize what I get notifications for. I can silence everything but mentions. So if there's an outage or someone has been waiting for a long while on something they can @ me, but if they just want to have a discussion publicly and let people review it at their leisure, they can do that as well.

Any e-mail client with rules can do that and much, much, much, much more, though. Slack only offers three primitive options for notification filtering, and they can only be applied at two levels.

That's because you're using Slack wrong. You push notifications for a particular topic or event into a Slack channel. You then set notification settings on each of those channels.

Slack isn't the filter, it's the data store and UI.

If you want different types of notifications.. I'd just notify on the urgent stuff and then manually view particular topics at your leisure.

Have you tried the alternatives?

With the evil spawn of spaghetti code that Teams is and its cancerous spread through office offerings I'd take Slack or Discord any day.

I would rather prefer Discord myself but it seems it's not that popular in corporate settings.

Yeah Discord is a pain to manage in corporate settings. No SSO, needing to play footsie with Alice creating an invite link so that Bob can join, and only then Alice can attach the correct roles. If people don't use usernames that correspond to their real-life names, then auditing access to ensure users and roles are cleaned up after real-life changes is a huge pain.

Discord is great for small start-ups to help create a virtual office space for remote work, but it really doesn't scale well.

My interpretation: Devs like the experience of interactive instant messaging without any hassle and simply equate Slack with that experience. Slack is really pervasive in our industry despite its subpar experience for developers.

I largely agree with 72% of developers here, although I would gladly swap it out for something better. The notification scheme is good enough. I don’t like to be disturbed a lot, so I disable sound notifications, and just notice the red dot in the browser tab occasionally (which I promptly ignore if I don’t want to stop and read messages).

Note that all of these percentages are a little misleading. It's the percentage of developers who responded to the question, not the percentage of developers who participated in the survey.

For the slack question, it's 72% of 34,440 responses (24,635 love vs 9,805 dread), or about 36% of the 70,000 participants (with ~50% of participants giving no response and I'm assuming therefore being neutral or having no experience.)

I think you can disable notifications, so you're not disturbed

You can, but people get annoyed if you don't respond quickly, because they expect a quick response, otherwise they would send an email.

This is really a social problem, not a technical problem. The technology for instant communication exists and it isn't going to disappear. Your coworkers need to learn to give people space to do their job. Sorry that's scant comfort if that's what your workplace is like.

It's a product marketing problem, specially Slack's. They market it as an instant communication product, but then they put threading and other asynchronous type modalities into it.

I have no problem with instant chat apps. I can set myself as away and people know not to expect a response.

But in slack it's a group conversation with the expectation of instant response, because that's how they market it.

compared to all the spam, antivirus, and other filters corporate mail goes through it is instant

Or is it a technical problem that creates a social problem, thereby making the technology the problem?

But… you don’t have to respond to slack in real time. I just check slack a few times a day. It doesn’t interrupt me because I don’t let it.

As Gerald Weinberg said on consulting "It's always a people problem". People expect Slack (or whichever tool) to solve problems that are people problems. If your company expects you to be glued to Slack and respond instantly, that is a culture problem at your company, and needs to be addressed as such.

It's Microsoft Teams without 80% of the bugs.

Does Teams have bugs?

In my experience it either works, or the button for the feature just doesn't exist on that device.

> Does teams have bugs?

Yes.

I mean, everything has bugs, but it's significantly worse than slack. Here's a short list of my weekly irritations:

- shared images sometimes give you a placeholder empty box while loading.

- shared images sometimes never load from their shared placeholder boxes.

- when auto updates happen, they sometimes result in teams just being broken and has to be explicitly killed before it can restart

- the `code` format tags don't work in chats, only in 'teams' (maybe this is a feature, who knows?)

- sometimes the UI doesn't load and you just get a white empty page instead of a UI, despite being 'online' and receiving notifications.

Not everything, all the time, but consistently noticeably buggy.

I have not experienced any of these bugs. My shared images always load, my automatic updates always work, my code format tags work in chat, the autoupdate is so invisible that I've never noticed it, and the UI always loads.

One thing you listed I do have, but I don't consider it a bug:

> - shared images sometimes give you a placeholder empty box while loading.

That's to let you know that it's loading, and to expect an image to appear.

I use teams on MacOS (intel), Windows, and Android.

Are you on some weird or old beta version?

I think your experience is unique in this regard. Teams is well known to be extremely buggy on MacOS - I've experienced everything the OP has.

Are you currently experiencing those issues?

What's your version of MacOS and Teams?

I discover new bug every week, and my colleagues are also treating it as "working as expected" when they find only a few bugs. You are extremely lucky to completely avoid bugs in Teams.

I've experienced so many Teams bugs over the past few years that it became a running joke. Didn't keep a list though, but by far the buggiest piece of software I had to use on a daily basis.

Also just... a horrible piece of software? Dealing with multiple organisations was such a pain. When I was using it I never got notifications from the other organisations except by email sometimes many hours later. I'm not sure if it's a missing feature or a bug. Whatever - same effect.

It also liked sometimes randomly and continously consuming bandwidth - I'm not sure if that bug ever got resolved or what it was actually doing.

I've never had to use teams over multiple organisations, but I do remember that it did not support multi-account until much further down the road.

I think if I had to use teams on multiple accounts simultaneously, I would have loaded the web app in separate firefox multi-account containers. (I do that at home to keep all of my work and home accounts separate and it works like a dream. It's probably the one feature you can show to get people to switch away from chrome when you show it to them.)

I'm unaware of the bandwidth usage on MacOS & Windows since I've always just used the building's connection. Teams on my Android phone hasn't seemed to cause any bandwidth issues though.

messages just don't send and you only find out hours later, even though later messages are sent

you just stop getting new messages, think you have a quiet day, until you restart teams and see a flood of missed things

does audio work? let everyone try to disconnect/reconnect to give out whose problem it is

Those message issues sound more like intermittent network issues to me.

The only audio issues I've ever seen with teams are actually user issues where they install teams on a new computer, get into a call, then don't read the big popup box that says "teams needs permission to access your mic, follow these steps".

Granted, both MacOS' System Preferences app and Window's Settings app make this more clunky then it needs to be, but that's an OS issue, not a teams issue. (Hopefully it's easier with the upcoming MacOS Ventura's redesigned System Settings app, but based on the screencaps I am not holding my breath.)

Basically, I read the question as: "on a scale where 1 is the worst direct messaging app you ever used and 10 is the best you could imagine, where does this one rank", and not "Do you enjoy using this or do you think these apps should even exist or be part of people's workday"?

Is slack better than Skype and MSN? Goes a good way towards a high grade for me.

I agree with you 100%.

Slack is the most beautiful useless application ever made. It looks great, I hate every single thing about it.

The only thing that does work and lets me focus at development at hand is turning Slack off entirely. I know about notifications, but the mental pressure of having to check if $important_person wrote something or not just gets on my nerves.

It's IRC without the headaches.

I have the same complaint about IRC. :). I'm ok with both Slack and IRC for collaborating on an immediate problem, like an outage, but I hate having it just sit there as a way for someone to ping me any time.

Sure but your complaint is about chat apps, not Slack specifically. For the people who "love" Slack it is just IRC but easier.

That’s fair, but even between slack and IRC I much prefer IRC for real time collaboration and any chat app for one on on conversations.

Slack threads are the worst thing to happen to IRC. Pick a modality. Is it a real time conversation or asynchronous threads? And then having one on one and group collaborations in the same place means both are done poorly.

It also means the notifications for both get mixed together. I want to get notified when someone posts to a group in slack, and I also want to get notified when I have a direct message, but not at the same time.

I love threads. They're lightweight channels. In large, busy channels it allows parallel conversations. I see no reason a thread would be strictly asynchronous or real time. That's an organizational expectation. And anyone who expects real-time responses outside of a call needs to come back down to Earth.

It's about the proliferation of slack being treated as the primary mode of communication at many companies now instead of email.

I'd much prefer default asynchronous communication than default real time communication (or some kind of hellish mixture of the two).

Too many people preferred emails. I get several hundred a day because every tool and most coworkers are just constantly giving you updates.

Emails been turned into a feed for me and not a 2 way communication channel at most places I’ve worked

at least email has filters, can't do that for slack

How is slack any different in that regard?

Hasn’t been around as long for people to break it.

I don’t view it as any more than a temporary reprieve and will jump ship the next time a new, less noisy but equally convenient messaging medium comes around

> It's like someone walking up to your desk, except we made it way easier because they don't have to get up and feel the social pressure of waiting for you to stop what you're doing and take off your headphones.

Turn off notifications.

You should turn off your notification, and look at your Slack's messages only when you choose to.

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