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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

I just had a sudden moment of clarity where I think I grokked massive tech companies slightly more, when I tried to picture 70k employees on a single Slack server.

How does that work? I imagine they don’t all pile into one server. Do you just have zero organic connection to 99% of your colleagues?

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> Do you just have zero organic connection to 99% of your colleagues?

They aren't really your colleagues in the sense you're thinking.

Companies that big get broken up into departments or business units that function pretty close to separate businesses (until you get to the top of them, then it merges back a bit). Those are your colleagues, and most of the people you interact with.

Those 70k wouldn't all be on the same channel. Even at a small company you might want to have distinct channels with different purposes - maybe #sales, #sw-engineering, #announcements. A 70k-person company might have a few large channels but most of the activity would take place in much more focused channels, of which there would be thousands or tens of thousands. A software team of a dozen people might have their own channel, for example. (Actually, in my experience we had several for distinct purposes.)

(and of course yes, there can also be big general-purpose channels with a lower signal-to-noise ratio)

The 70,000 are all forced into #general. However it's a moderated channel of dubious utility.

sounds like you're talking about a specific company, or is this just a general Slack thing I've forgotten? by 'forced' do you mean they aren't able to create channels at-will?

Slack also has Enterprise Grid, which super-huge companies use to divide into not just separate channels, but separate Slack "servers" entirely.

When I was at IBM, they had...uh...a lot of them.

I experienced 2-3k employees on a slack server. it was terrible. 99% of the traffic is noise, 1% was critically important information for me to do my job.

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