Hacker News Reader

Comment by fronterablog | Hacker News Reader

A small step in the right direction.

When will we see a company forbidding Slack and Teams?

They introduced Facebook Workplace today, as well, for “async things”. Public slack channels now have a membership cap. All the “social channels” have limited posting permissions and people were mass-removed from other work channels. Slack is supposed to be just for DMs, I guess.

I guess I’m not entirely mad, Slack has a lot of downsides. But feels like they only half-assed solving for that set of problems.

How would you prefer people talk to each other?

I used to work at Apple and for a very long time we used email for most things, and iMessage for anything urgent.

IMO it worked great, and I prefer that to slack.

Email is much more linear and more permanent so it’s much harder to lose things. It’s also much easier to search for things in email IMO. The extra friction invoked with e-mail can also be good for cutting down on unnecessary communication.

Apple also uses Radar which is more effective than other bug trackers.

You can file a bug with some product and someone from the other side of the campus will typically reply within days.

I think part of it is a user interface issue, interacting with Jira is such an unpleasant affair that often only PMs in a company will interact with it in any depth.

Often PMs are the only people with adequate permissions to actually achieve anything with Jira.

Email is good for one-offs and "general shout-outs", for everything that involves a discussion it is pretty bad

Slack conversations and threads are a good sweet spot for team discussions

> can also be good for cutting down on unnecessary communication

Or you're discouraging conversations that didn't need to, but it would be better in the end if they happened.

You can always enter DnD on Slack and attend to DMs as needed

Doesn't that end up with an email inbox full of 1 line back and forths as people relentless grind the little details down to nubs?

Nope. If a thread was getting long we would just schedule a meeting to make a decision.

I can’t remember ever seeing a thread of just 1 line back and forths (although I have seen this on slack). The 1 line emails I remember were usually from some higher up person who was signing off on some decision and that ended a thread usually.

Not the worst thing in the world. I'm not saying it's necessarily better than a meeting, but at least you have a paper trail and automatic log of decisions made.

(A collaborative doc would probably be a better venue for that, of course.)

With slack, you have two inboxes: your email, and also your slack notifications.

I was at a company that used IRC and had a very clear policy: responsiveness isn’t a measure of performance

Using your own client allowed you to squash notifications and other silly engagement tactics that plague slack today

It was wonderful

You can stop notifications in Slack now, and I don't know what the other engagement tactics are.

> other engagement tactics

Bots that can't be completely muted, for example. The best you can do is disable notifications for messages created by bots (except slackbot) but as far as I can tell you can't stop the dreaded "red dot" from appearing.

I use the browser version and override favicon, notifications are also disabled and I have some greasemonkey scripts to modify behavior. It’s a moving target though

I agree - many people said "email sucks!" and then pushed communication ideally suited for an email into slack. We'd do so much better if we taught people how to pick the right channel for the intent vs. big, dumb generalized rules.

>>a very long time we used email for most things

The only thing worse than email for communication is talking on the phone....

I would love to kill email completely

Phone calls are ok. Voicemail is the real waste of time

100% disagree, I absolute hate when people call me and do not leave a VM.

Unless I have prescheduled a call with you, and I am expecting our call you are going to VM, i do not answer unsolicited calls even from people I know

The reality is that many people don’t want to talk to anyone else, and ultimately want to be paid to do little or no work at all.

So many folks are completely disconnected from the performance of their group (whatever structure that group takes), that stuff like this starts to sound appealing.

Nobody who wants to get things done (that actually benefit the group) would advocate for not collaborating with other members of the group, but folks who want to maximize extraction with minimal effort would.

Thoughtful people who want to get things done recognize that other people's time is a scarce resource that should be allocated deliberately, not routinely.

No, that's not it; you can both understand how scarce time is as a resource and still accurately believe spending it with others is more productive than spending it alone, depending on the work (and software engineering falls into the "time more productively spent together" set).

Periodicity is an arbitrary line upon which to draw acceptability, so when one draws it there's usually a reason other than, "I want to maximize effectiveness."

Email is much better. Instant messaging is constant interruptions.

https://heeris.id.au/trinkets/ProgrammerInterrupted.pdf

Right until you're involved in a long email thread that has nothing to do with you, and no way to opt out.

Turn off the damned notifications.

I don’t know many great alternatives, but usually people will point to email in this case. And great documentation (wiki/FAQ/Readme) to preempt a lot of potential questions. I find those work well for me and it’s what a lot of people like because it reduces the amount of urgent but non-important interruptions in their work.

Call me crazy but I would like to occasionally talk to and see the faces of my teammates in real time. We're not robots in factories. We're humans. I love remote work but a workplace is different from, say, an Internet forum.

One thing I've noticed is that people are less prone to personal discussions over a conference call compared to in person meetings. We only rarely do in person meetings now because of how quickly we can get through a meeting. One thing that contributes to this is the fact that you are sitting at your computer with plenty of other things to work on other than the meeting. When you're sitting in a conference room, there's no work distractions so people find other things to talk about, whether it's what they did that weekend or other work discussions that are unrelated to the meeting. One other thing is that since a Teams meeting feels less "official", we can have multiple status meetings a week where it's not mandatory to call in for every one of them. Our in person status meetings were once a week and would go for at least two hours since it was easier to get people together for a long time once a week than a short time multiple times a week. A status meetings once a week was simply not enough because of how quickly things changed throughout the week so by Wednesday, the plans for the week could have changed or someone's progress may have been halted due to a problem. Very inefficient!

IRC + email + VCS system works fine for FLOSS projects.

tmux can also be used for screen sharing, if anyone needs support or wants to pair on something.

One nice thing about using this comms stack is it doesn't exclude people who are on slow internet connections. Video/audio is grossly inefficient for transfer of some bytes of raw information versus text.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com