Slack is the opposite of organizational memory (2018)
abe-winter.github.io
abe-winter.github.io
It seems like most of the article complaints are cultural, more than they are about the platform itself. Obviously it's still early days for my usage, but strictly evaluating the tool itself, it seems pretty solid. Definitely better than "unnamed but awful FAANG-specific tool".
I'm sure that there are plenty of organizations that have found ways to use Slack effectively where it fits. I have not yet found one.
The big problem with Slack is when a multi-party discussion starts about a topic and you need to make immediate input or be left out. I haven't found a fix for this, but it's really the same problem as coworkers talking in the break room, so I'm not sure if the blame can be laid at Slack-type tools.
Were you previously at Amazon and the internal messaging platform, Amazon Chime?
As far as I know:
* Facebook employees use “Workplace, by Facebook”
* Apple employees use different things, from iMessage to Slack
* Microsoft employees use Microsoft Teams
* Amazon employees use Amazon Chime and Slack
* Netflix employees mostly use Slack
* Google employees use Google Chat
I’m not usually the type to be so opinionated about software I don’t power-use, but: it’s awful.
And the "markdown" text input oh my. Rarely have I seen a worse markdown input than in Slack. Maybe on Bitbucket or Confluence it is worse. It is as if they have decided to not use any existing and perfectly well working markdown parsers, but instead get an incapable team of engineers to reimplement a bug-ridden one with missing features. One cannot even insert an image at any place in the message, but only at the bottom. That means one needs to refer to the image in the message, when otherwise one could have simply had the picture in that place where it is relevant. It is such a headache for anyone more familiar with markdown. At this point just give me a plain text input, that has any normal off the mill markdown parser to properly translate my text into a message.
Oh and they still have not managed to implement voice chat according to standards properly, so that it works in all modern browsers. While other more feature full chat programs like Discord had this solved for years ago, Slack is still the same old shit. Now I have to start ungoogled-chromium every time I want to enter a "Huddle" and navigate to their website, where they will bug me with their incessant popup asking me to use their desktop app, which I have to decline every. single. time. because chromium does not remember to block such popups from websites.
So basically Slack is quite crap.
Adobe has already started to feed its customers' data to its AI. Who says, other providers won't take advantage of broad contracts and terms in order to avoid informing their clients.
If it weren't for the security and reliance implications, I'd run a company chat over Facebook Messenger. Simple as.
I'm stuck using Teams right now and it is an abysmal experience. There are definitely complaints to have about Slack, but it can be miles worse.
Just today I was looking for a prior conversation to document it for the future. I selected a portion of the conversation so that I could paste it into another tool I use for documenting. I selected the text once and it deselected a good chunk of it. Repeat. Okay, clearly not working well. I had to copy and paste 5 times to get ~15 lines of text because if you scrolled at all it somehow deselected some portion of the text.
I mean, honestly, what tool doesn't even let you easily copy the conversation? Teams is that tool. That's just one of the many issues I have run into today.
Did you know Teams had apps? Inside of it?!
90% of the problems I encounter with Teams (bad UX, crashing, freezing, corrupted sessions) would be removed if they deleted every feature outside of chat/video and more loosely coupled themselves to Office365/Exchange.
But did you ever try to search for a message in a conversation, and have it give you just the message you wanted, without any surrounding context? Or have you ever tried to scroll through chat history, only for it to lazy-load 10 messages at a time, making you spend 5 minutes scrolling constantly to find a conversation from a few months ago?
Teams would even lose my messages completely from time to time. It was honestly hard to believe how janky it was.
Yes; they seem to have fixed that now, I don’t know when but I was surprised when it took me to the conversation with context suddenly.
Do I stop my presentation so that I update my driver, or do I wait until next time I want to share my screen and interrupt then?
- Slack is so easy and fun to use that we use it for things we shouldn't be (fun channels, fun integrations). It creates too much noise and hard to extract signal. It ends up being distracting past 100+ people company.
- Teams is so bad that people try not to use it. It forces you to use it minimally because everything is terrible. It actually ends up being more productive than Slack.
That was part of the pitch at work - "oh, over 3 years our total savings is $200k" or something. Great, but if each dev loses 10 minutes a month, or is frustrated and less efficient for an hour, that costs us 5x that.
And now they have just flipped the interface so you scroll up for new and not down. With no warning and no notification so for the first day no one could find any current conversations.
And the terrible "Teams documents" so we can lock away documents behind a specific chat. If anyone should be having layoffs, it is their UX folks.
Yes, MS Teams might actually suck worse, but don't try to diminish valid complaints about something else that also sucks
Neither are good tools.
- HipChat, Campfire (Basecamp) clone
- FlowDock, which was superior to Basecamp and Slack
- Textual
- IRC
And now there's Discord, albeit for different purposes.
Workplace is an everything platform.
The problem with each tends to be distractions, discoverability, bookmarking, an app/browser performance. You really have to have a strong culture of netiquette to use any of them AND access to video conferencing to have quick meetings, because trying to do everything over chat doesn't work.
Let me introduce you to Teams.
Try writing code in Microsoft Teams. Slack is very decent.
Just wait until you're trying to look up a really, really important message, but you can't figure out what word (or synonym thereof) to search for that will give you the results you need. Better hope you didn't leave that channel in an effort to clean up your channels.
It sounds like your organization already has a solution, which is a combination of GH issues and Jira. Slack is fine as a supplement to more structured methods of communication, but as the main communication method, it's a disaster.
Maybe Slack is better than the "unnamed but awful FAANG tool," but by your own admission, the bar is on the floor. We can do better.
Why not?
Rude or not, sticking around in meetings you can't add/receive value to/from is a great way to get nothing done.
I'd kinda guess parent's corporate culture also tends to accrete huge email CC lists? As that's the same human problem: add, but never remove.
And also, Slack search by default is global: you don't have to be in a channel to get a search hit.
Yeah I think you do, if it's an endemic issue then there are probably loads of people in the same boat, who would like to see a first mover to do something about it.
By analogy, chat tools are the coal-fired plant to more formal documentation's solar. Coal is comparatively easy and will get you bootstrapped, but it will wreck your environment. Use it to get to solar and things will be OK.
I am suddenly grateful that I work in an industry with heavily regulated documentation requirements.
I think this is the difference. Slack is great when you need information from other people, it's terrible when people need information from you. You, like most new hires, need a lot and have little to give. Once that balance starts to shift you'll start to feel the pain points.
I'd challenge this.
IMHO, Slack is pretty decent if one instills 3 rules in corporate culture.
#1 - No DMs. Talk about all work in an open channel. Radical transparency will also make you a better company.
#2 - Keep replies on the same topic in threads. I.e. don't use it like IRC. Conversely, don't put unrelated replies in a thread.
#3 - Post-back end solutions/resolutions. A thread should NEVER end with "I'll DM you" or "Let's talk about this offline"
If these are followed, at some point you reach critical mass, where "question someone wants to ask you" is discoverable in your history.
I think in smaller companies where people can set their egos aside, it's possible to make it work, but once you hit more than a few hundred people you're bound to have a few people who are constantly trying to prove how smart they are and they ruin it.
I've said it before, but I also feels very micromanage-y to me. Like, we're all adults, why don't you trust me to use my best judgement on Slack? No one has issues if I book 1:1 meetings, no one makes rules about who needs to be on email thread, what makes Slack different?
If the culture is bad then Slack doesn't hide it, if it's micromanagey already then Slack will exacerbate that, I agree.
The way to avoid letting those people interfere is to let me direct message the people I need to talk to. Why are you taking that away from me?
Also, I can't control everyone else in the thread. Even if I ignore the person that doesn't mean other people will. All it takes is one person engaging and it pulls the thread off topic.
It just seems weird to me... I hear people complain so often about how meetings (especially big meetings) are useless because they get off topic and it's super easy for a few loud voices to take over, but then we want radical transparency on Slack.
Also, also, I think it's funny that we're still pushing this idea of radical transparency when it turned out to be a total sham at one of the poster child companies for it ("Away"). It ended up being massively toxic and radical transparency was really just a way for management to ensure they could have an opinion on everything and leadership didn't hold themselves to the same rules. https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/5/20995453/away-luggage-ceo...
I like #2 because it keeps the channels quieter when conversations are had within threads.
Something we've done recently is cut down the number of channels. We essentially just use #general and #random now. We're only a small company (<20 employees) so it facilitates a better information flow if everything is in the one place. One thing we also do, is if a thread contains valuable information we will transcribe this into our documentation system (currently confluence)
F.ex. at my company we have #help-{product} channels where engineers from each product team hang out and answer questions once a day or so
I guess the primary utility is roughly grouping queries and distinguishing question from general.
I've heard this argument before. If you read again they say:
"slack empowers your worst people to overwhelm your best"
This isn't a culture thing it's a property of the entire industry. No company can stop employees doing this, not even in office. Slack on the other hand is a tool that actually promotes these interruptions.
It's like a table saw without the guard. Just because I haven't cut my fingers off doesn't make it safe, it just makes me lucky.
There are organizations that get this right.
I've actually tried a lot of the solutions talked about here and none of them actually work.
Software like slack is literally designed to make people interrupt you and pull you away from productive tasks.
What I wish Slack offered is the ability to move existing messages into threads, close those threads, and give them an explicit conclusion. Webforums gave their moderators the power to do that; I think any participant in a Slack channel should be able to at least propose doing that, but alas Slack doesn't give that power to anyone!
This is why I require all discussion of issues to start, and remain in, the tracker.
Put it in the ticket. That’s why we have the ticket.
Much better to write a ticket with a vague headings only, assign it to someone and ablate responsibility for everything else to some other person. /s
The summary/title of issues can be edited, as needed, and clarifying summary comments can be made.
But you're right, it's not exactly the same. People with language barriers sometimes struggle with "not real time" conversations. Others feel if they're writing something in an issue tracker, it's somehow special, so they have to be incredibly formal, and are afraid to be wrong, ask questions, etc. Some people who are great at speaking are terrible at "slower" forms of communication. I think this does limit those types of people, if you completely close off chat.
Generally, if it's not an issue, we wouldn't be talking about it.
If they're asking a question, it becomes pretty obvious within the first few statements if it's an issue or not, even if it's one about missing documentation.
Why is this a requirement? You have low quality discussion, in the ether, or you have somewhat constrained discussion, in the issue tracker. You can always "to summarize the above", but if you forget, it still exists where you can find it. At least it's somewhere topically relevant.
Our issue tracker lets us edit other peoples comments. This is nice for linking statements/questions to other issues.
It is? Whenever I click on a Slack link, it opens my browser and takes me to the Slack SSO for my company. I click the "Login" button and it takes me to my list of "Workspaces" (of which I only ever click on one). I then click on the one workspace I use, and nothing. It's just like I logged in from scratch. The link is totally gone now. I can now manually paste it into the address bar again and there's a 50% chance it will take me to the conversation I wanted, but maybe not because Slack.
But I was able to paste the slack link into the Slack search and it found the post (skipping the browser and auth completely).
I would love unification in the tracker to every mention of a ticket, from Slack comment to Branch/commit/github mention, and every build system as well.
Jira with DVCS gets pretty close, and is much more useful after using a bot which can do a post back to a reference in the slack message.
It's worse than email, because emails at least almost always have subjects and the latest one usually contains most (if not all) of the thread. Email clients usually have a feature to save a message to some kind of file, and I usually attach that when creating a ticket (or working with one I didn't create).
My experience with Slack/Teams is like team using one email thread with the subject "team stuff" that they constantly reply to with fragmentary messages that are very difficult to decipher without full understanding of the context at that moment. Everything's jumbled together and impossible to piece together later.
IMHO, chat is only for things that are 100% ephemeral, and if there's any chance you will need the information later, you better immediately switch to email and summarize the previous conversation in complete sentences.
Yeah, that's a major component of what I was talking about, which you called out more clearly than I did. With email, people tend to compose standalone artifacts that convey a more complete idea, but chat messages are just fragments. Maybe if they were properly organized you understand the conversation later, but the fragments are interrupted by other stuff so it's too hard to even piece together the whole conversation without missing something important.
I worked with a Slack bot that would create a ticket and include link to the Slack thread and copy of the entire thread right in the ticket description. Very useful.
You can check it out our community https://linen.dev/s/linen
I find the organization and layout of Teams quite useful. I'm normally working on multiple projects at a given time so having a different "group" in teams for each of the projects makes a lot of sense for me. Previously I made heavy use of folders in outlook I'd make a new folder in my inbox for each project I was working on. I have email folders (and before folders existed PST files) going back 15 years now.
In order for this to work I'd have to curate my inbox by manually filing each email into the appropriate folder as it arrived, Teams kind of does the equivalent of this by default.
Managing and sharing files between people involved in projects has greatly simplified things previous depending on project we'd use a combination of email (has file size limits for attachments, no built in versioning when people are emailing around multiple revisions of the same powerpoint pres for example), Sharepoint document libraries (really hard to add people to sharepoint groups (maybe it was just way my work was setup but sharepoint security was really draconian, access control basically needed a full time admin to make it workable) and Network shared folders (needs VPN, active directory permissions etc). The way it works now (at least with how my work has it set up) once you are added to a group all the files that have been shared are accessible - having to file tickets to get access to shared folders or get added to groups in sharepoint is a thing of the past.
For long term management of documentation my workplace used to have a physical library with dedicated librarians(I think this dated back to 1960's and 70's). Keep in mind for a lot of technical engineering work etc there are legal requirements to keep information archived (for 50+ years sometimes).
The physical library disappeared in the early 1990's I think (long before my time) all of the physical docs were scanned and digitized we had some ancient MS Dos era software (looked like old early 90's software with a text user interface) I think it was called Q and A or something like that. It functioned as digital index for our at one point physical library. We used this for many years basically everything was archived as a PDF and the index in this DOS software was kept up to date. At some point someone used OCR on all the ancient pdfs which kind of worked and greatly improved searchability of our library.
When I first started we were in process of using some java based web interface to replace this ancient MS Dos software, I can't remember what it was called but I think it was mostly used by Lawyers and people in legal profession, kind of worked for storing technical engineering reports and technical drawings but wasn't really built for that purpose. It's still around people really hate using it. I believe there is a desktop client which might be ok to use but I've only ever accessed it through the web interface which is horrible.
In more recent time we trialed using some software called Confluence but it kind of fizzled out and there has been limited use of Open Source Media Wiki software.
Wikis are precursors for dead tree documentation. It's both a place to store highly volatile pieces of information, and a place where you can start documentation, copy-edit it for months or years until it's just right, and then move the contents into 'real' documentation.
In the Slack age, we need a pipeline that starts in chat, moves to the wiki, and ends in capital D documentation. It wouldn't even have to be that hard. You could simply vomit out the contents, or you could try to be a little more sophisticated where you treat one participant as the author of the sections of the document and the other authors providing the copy for those sections. The goal is to rescue the contents before they disappear, either for real or just due to SNR.
The secret is this: Turn off desktop/phone notifications completely. Turn off icon badging. Use Slack as an async messaging tool. Come back to it every so often and batch process messages in your own time. It's great for that. If you let it interrupt you on its own terms, you're going to have a bad time.
Also, turn off @channel and @here notifications on most channels.
I work for several different organisations that use Slack. Every time I start working at one, I turn off notifications and mark myself as busy or away, then jump onto Slack at logical intervals during the day to respond. Within a day or so, I have people asking if I'm OK, then when I explain, I get told that there's an expectation that "people should be always accessible via Slack" (generally a mealy-mouthed version of that, but the message is clear).
To me, Slack is like sitting in the desk next to the only coffee machine in a large office - constant interruptions and zero chance to get into a flow state.
This is probably a holding it wrong issue. And a bit of “well the handle is shaped weird too so how do I hold it?”
Ephemeral conversions, like you have in the office might be a good solution. Maybe default Ephemeral (end of day loss unless you vote to keep) would force people to document meetings and decisions and stuff in the right place .
It's terrible for being off the record. All Slack should be considered durable for the employer.
It's also terrible for being "on the record". All slack conversations should be considered ephemeral from a documentation and records keeping perspective.
Which leaves it in a pretty ugly spot. It's good for exactly two things in my opinion:
1. Quickly scheduling a real meeting (occasionally it can replace the meeting if it's just two participants, but I've not seen this be consistently successful past two).
2. Work appropriate chit chat and water cooler discussions - which are beneficial from a "social cohesion" standpoint for remote teams, but are generally wasted time.
Basically - it's the worst of both worlds: you're always on the record and the record is mostly useless from a historical/documentation perspective.
But yes, using it for either secret or formal purposes is going to disappoint.
I don't agree it's "wasted time"; some amount of social interaction is pretty useful for a team to work well together. Essential? Probably not. But it does tend to lubricate the process a bit.
There's also idle work-related conversation that doesn't really neatly fit in a "ticket" but is nonetheless pretty useful.
All of that being said, I think Slack is horrible for all of this as its UI forces stuff into "threads" hard which serious reduces visibility and ability to "join in" on conversations hours or days later.
For some reason I never saw this magic replicated with Slack.
We use chat exactly that way. Commonly people respond to questions with a link to either the issue in our issue tracking system, or to the relevant page in the wiki. Certain individuals have learned that saying "but what I want isn't in there" gets them an edit link to the same page.
Once tech support started using the wiki it became more broadly useful. Knowledge that used to live only in the minds of the more experienced tech support people somehow ended up in the wiki thanks to juniors asking questions and the answers being pasted into the wiki. Wiki has also become something of a back channel for things that should be written down but don't really fit the issue tracking system. Common user errors and their symptoms, for example.
I'm also not sure why you consider the record useless from a historical perspective. It's not structured documentation, to be sure, but it's at least a useful as email in that respect. (More-so because it's generally much easier to search.)
Unfortunately, from a SOX, HIPAA, or sunshine/FOIA perspective it's not. As you say, you're always on the record, even if you don't know what the record is.
It's funny to read people on HN bagging on Slack. My first experience of it was as a middle manager moving to Silicon Valley where everyone expected you to use it, along with JIRA. I used to like to use kanban boards and -- I know this sounds ridiculous -- waterfall charts. It's like these things become fads and then everyone decides they are terrible.
A couple of disadvantages of Slack vs real-time conversations: there can be multiple Slack threads happening at the same time. On particularly busy days, I find myself having to context switch between threads a lot. Threads can also keep going versus an in-person conversation which has an explicit end (further discussions are done in a follow-up conversation). Some threads play out over the course of multiple days, which requires that you keep the context of it in "working memory" for a while.
I like Slack, but at its worst it encourages multitasking, which can be a real productivity killer.
Agreed. Reading this, a lot seems to come down to culture problems that would exist whether that given office uses Slack or not, especially regarding interruptions.
I personally have felt way less interrupted from Slack/Teams in my 8+ years of remote work than I did in an office. All of my employers have understood that if I have Slack notifications disabled, I'm either "out of office" or focusing on something, and have also understood that Slack should be treated as a "something that could go a few hours without a response."
In-person, I'd just have people walk into my office and start talking without seeing if I was busy. I had multiple times where I had the door shut and lights off, and had someone pound on the door because "they could hear my keyboard and thought I just didn't hear them knocking."
Slack just lets the people who are going to interrupt you regardless do so with way less effort.
If you are constantly interrupted and expected to drop everything and reply immediately, moving from Slack to email or anything else won't magically fix it.
If you don't have proper data repositories (organized docs folders, wikis, issue trackers), switching off Slack won't fix that.
If middle managers are interfering in your work, signing out of Slack isn't going to fix it.
If people aren't documenting code, they will continue to not do it regardless of the existence of Slack.
Slack is a tool. It is not a fix for human problems at any company.
additionally, if the volume of messages is too high to be able to catch up with after working for a while (like you would catch up on emails), this is probably an issue of not splitting things up adequately into granular channels. or, again, some weird culture of just spamming Slack for everything.
If your workplace requires instant responses over Slack, that's a problem with your employer and/or their culture, not the application.
I personally find Slack to be fine. I have all notifications turned off (including the red badge), and set myself as permanently away. I use it as a lower-latency email, and for that it works quite well.
* People saying 'Hey!' and then nothing. First 3 times I'll ask them to immediately post their question. After that I don't respond to greetings without questions.
* The sheer amount of data that I need to parse. People throw things out there at random and expect you to keep up to date. At least with email the barrier is higher so that people send a condensed email. Not with Slack. It's just type and hit Enter.
* The disarray of finding out what's relevant when being mentioned. A private channel? An ad-hoc group chat? An established channel? A thread in a channel? How far do you need to scroll back? @WirelessGigabit ^ really doesn't help.
* People not realizing it's async. If you need me, call. Otherwise I'll treat it like an email. Context switching is heavy, and the cost of reading 'Hey!' is more than 2 seconds, it's more like 5 minutes, with a chance I go do something completely different.
The folks at Doist (makers of todoist app) created Twist.com because of their discontent with slack, it's very interesting to read their blog posts regarding the tool (and others regarding async work), as they state the default settings of an app shapes a lot of the common behaviour. So, for example, their tool does not send a post on the press of the ENTER key (it creates a new line). Sure slack can also do that, but it's not the default and it has impact.
Anyway, it's interesting to read on their UX decisions they seem very thoughtful on UX (even if you might not agree with the toughts), and async/remote work stuff.
edit: went to look for the post, it is older than I recall, and with the old look:
https://blog.doist.com/designing-twist-the-challenge-of-maki...
Damn straight
If you're interested in learning about how decreasing barriers to communication in workplaces have resulted in over-communication and poor processes, check out the book A World without Email by Cal Newport. I highly recommend it.
Chat engages the small percent of active participants, but neglects people who are too busy (e.g., doing work) to follow along with the streams. This is a problem at work, but also in online communities like Discord. That's why I'm working on a threaded, forum-like communication tool. I'm focused on online communities as the first use case (e.g., investor networks or professional groups), but I hope companies start to adopt it for internal communications, too. https://www.booklet.community
Related, I found the article's discussions of Jira and Trello interesting. Modern project management hates ambiguity. So, all projects need to be broken down into tasks and acceptance criteria ASAP. But, this means that you have bloated backlogs reflecting yesteryear's priorities. We conflate "not forgetting things" with "obligations", and that is where a lot of this bloat comes from.
Discord is another example here. I play a lot of video games, and mod a lot of video games. Lately the trend is for mod teams to move all discussion of their mods - including bug reports - to Discord. This is a nightmare for anyone actually hoping to troubleshoot some issue, since not only does one need to deal with Discord's shitty search (thankfully less shitty than Slack or Teams, but only marginally), but also have to go through the ceremony of adding yet another Discord "server", yet again combing through the notification settings to not get bombarded by the @everyone pings every 13 fucking seconds, yet again jumping through whatever hoops to be deemed a sufficiently-normal user to even have access to the bug reporting channels (rather than being stuck in the "explicitly agree to our rules and await approval" circle of Hell), etc. for every single mod.
Slack, Discord, Teams, IRC... hell, even email: they suck as support channels, they suck as stores of organizational knowledge, and they suck as collaboration tools. The only thing they're good at is being as distracting as possible. A traditional forum is vastly superior in every way.
Slack is decidedly not a project management tool. It would be insane to replace a dedicated project tracker with random Slack conversations. Nor should it replace proper documentation, though in a pinch it can be helpful to be able to search a past conversation. Admittedly because it can bail you out that way, you need to remain diligent in properly documenting things that should be documented.
If it had a way to come back and tack on organization after the fact, it'd be the perfect tool for this. As it is, you get Threads, which kinda work ok.
The thing that really kills it though is search. I can write up the most incredible documentation about something as I'm building it, then come back 6 months later and not be able to find it using any combination of keywords. Or, better still, have the entire history be purged by company policy after a couple months.
Managing notifications for monitors/alarms is much more painful in Teams. You can’t organize channels how you wish, they always have to be part of a parent team. The performance of Microsoft Teams seems much more laggy when opening or searching for conversations. Built-in Slack features like Slackbot reminders are nonexistent in Teams. I am interested to see how our development organization adapts to this transition.
Same, and OMG is this true. Slack may be less than ideal but it is so much better than Teams.
But its not organizational memory, its really for basically ephemeral comms. Yes, you can dig back for stuff but its not great for that, and finding things is horrible.
It's incredible watching a _chat app_ made by one of the biggest tech companies redraw itself.
Slack is also bad because it's crap for software devs: it's the year 20-freakin'-23 and I still can't get syntax highlighting in fenced code blocks. Discord does it fine. So does Element on desktop. Why not Slack?! Yes, yes, I know all about uploading a file, but if I want to send a quick snippet to a coworker, I don't want to save a file somewhere just so I can upload it to Slack and then delete it right away. Sheesh.
(It's still better than MS Teams, which is the worst possible of all worlds.)
</rant>
https://slack.com/help/articles/204145658-Create-or-paste-co...
In a perfect world there'd be some metacrawler that could search Github, Google Docs, internal wikis, JIRA, etc. all at once; in practice, Slack is the search index
Muting my phone and its endless alerts: it’s what i do from Monday to Friday; 8am to 6pm.
Oh you forgot you told me to do this? Here's the message from 6 months ago.
I'm excited to work with organisations who have executive staff that use Slack, but from talking with employees - even Stewart Butterfield stopped using Slack over the past few years except for company announcements.
Companies that embrace open decision making, blameless (to a degree) culture and transparency who embrace Slack, and good work-life balance, are far and few.
People who get mad about having too many channels simply are putting too much pressure on themselves. As long as you look at your DM's, when people tag you directly - or your close team's channel - you're using Slack correctly. If people expect you to view or have seen something elsewhere, you should have known about it through your manager, through direct tags/DM's or whatever your #very-important-announcement channel is. That's it.
Maybe that is a dumb idea but every time someone points out a problem with Slack, Teams or Zoom I wonder if it is an opportunity for a better platform.
Most people don't want to read documentation. They'd rather just message someone their exact question and get an answer. Instead of bugging a person have an AI fill in.
There is one competitor (can't remember which rn) that has an inbox model that I really dig. Mentions go into the inbox, not into your notifications. Small things like that I think could make a big difference; I hope Slack is taking notes.
Slack is perfect for agreeing on simple, reversible decisions that don’t require much context or structured debate. I doubt you’ll ever be able to remove that just-in-time feeling from Slack’s user experience. Its UI is just not made for deep thinking.
But any long term thinking should happen in tools like Notion, which is better set up for long thinking, discussion and structured documentation of decisions.
- it's great for casual chats
- it means we have the institutional memory of a goldfish
This is largely a product of how we use it and it's a less than organized company generally.
It's one of the most baffling things to me about modern corporate IT practices.
Also, credit to their engineers that they haven’t had a breach yet. I cannot tell you the number of times i’ve received passwords in a slack channel.
On IRC, I have a bouncer mostly to receive the message while I'm offline. But I write down the important information immediately, because I consider it ephemeral.
On Slack, I consider that the history is there to stay, so I don't save it anywhere else. Even if I often lose information because I can't find it anymore.
If I had a conversation with several people where information shared turned out to be valuable, I have to remember exactly who was there to be able to recall that chat thread. Miss or forget one person and it might not ever appear again in your recollection or history, if you can't specify exactly what you're trying to remember.
What happens in a company that has normalized this kind of always-availability when an employee decides to regularly not respond within 5 minutes?
Call it Tribal ™
Slack is the opposite of organizational memory - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16355454 - Feb 2018 (250 comments)
Most stuff in slack should be ephemeral enough to not need that process, but I know that in reality that process never actually happens because the one that needs to move it doesn't have any incentive to do so, and it being deleted doesn't really harm them either.
In one particularly unfortunate case I can recall, the same engineer, having been thoroughly tired out by the lengthy and stressful (production-critical) rotation procedure, then pasted the new password again when announcing the rotation's completion. But it never happened after that. :-)
Everybody gets to lose Slack memory so "it won't happen again."