Twitter shut off its internal Slack, and now ‘everyone is barely working’
theverge.com
theverge.com
I'd bet that it's not the insignificant cost of Slack for Twitter licenses that's the issue (even if it might be used as an excuse), but control. Musk doesn't want internal communications sent to some outside third party. And he's have them develop some internal chat or get a self-hosted option.
Even if I am wrong, and it could be the cost, this alternative should have been considered in the article (as well as others).
In general, the article is a total case of "uncharitable interpreation".
>Another worker called the disappearance of Slack the “proverbial final straw.”
So, that guy survived mass layoffs, accepted lots of changes to the company and mission, and didn't quit, but Slack being removed is what really got him?
Or did The Verge specifically looked around for clowns to quote?
Perhaps you should apply your own advice about uncharitable interpretations, which seems to apply much better to this employee than to Twitter (there is no obvious charitable interpretation to killing a major productivity tool with no warning, and the reason's largely irrelevant).
Literally everything musk does has 100 news articles published with the most uncharitable interpretation possible. Hating on him has become a sport.
Maybe that's why it's called the last straw, not the first one?
And this "final straw" is more like that one scene from Airplane 2:
That part would be funny even if it was shown as regular outrage and some loud complaints.
Because, even though a "straw that broke the camel's back" response is by definition about having an outburst at a smaller slight as opposed to one of the biggers ones that preceded it, when the final slight is extremely out of proportion compared to the previous ones, having that be "the final straw" becomes farcical.
In other words, there's illogical and there's really really illogical - to the point of being comical.
Shutting off Slack before you have a new 'internal chat system' as you've said is insanity. How can you not recognize that and immediately jump to some 4d chess defense?
No need for any "4d chess defense". There was a lot of cheap checkers cheating in the article though.
For god's sake, he didn't cut the electricity in the data center (which would actually fit the "sky is falling" narrative), he just cut access to a glorified enterprise chat app.
They can always use email, bug trackers, task management, their enterprise intranet collaboration and discussion tools, and several other things besides, or, god forbid, have teleconferences, pick up the phone, or discuss it face to face in the office.
If they can't work with those, then lack of Slack isn't the problem...
Do you actually do software development? Have you worked with Slack before? Because at almost every place I've worked at it serves as a large store of easily indexable information around a variety of issues. If an issue occurred 10 months ago and is occurring again but the engineer that solved the issue is gone because of Musk firing a bunch of people you can't just email someone that doesn't exist anymore.
Those places have a big documentation, organization, and knowledge retention problem then...
Now it's shut down, where do you get that info? It's gone, just gone.
Please explain to us how it's a good idea to shut down Slack before an alternative has come up.
That same day, Jira — a tool Twitter uses to track everything from progress on feature updates to regulatory compliance — also stopped working.
And a glorified enterprise issue tracker.
I can only imagine how much information was unavailable because they couldn't access Jira or Slack.
>pick up the phone, or discuss it face to face in the office
Except you can't if that person was fired. But you can still search their Slack messages to find information on systems that they've helped to build.
>For Twitter employees, Slack is more than a way to message colleagues: it’s also a store of institutional memory, preserved in documents that workers have had to rely on more and more since Musk purged thousands of employees since taking over.
Losing vital documentation makes work unnecessary hard.
Kind of feel like it's probably not the best defense against the "biased" thing through...
If this was the case, the employees would know about it, rather than be shocked and unable to work.
I think your problem is that you think what Elon is doing makes sense. I did this countless times since November. I kept thinking "this guy surely knows what he's doing" and building plausible excuses about what I'm reading.
But nope. It's just panicky arrogant nonsense. Always has been. And it never ends.
What proof did the disgruntled employee give you that made you believe this?
If this is all you've got, you're putting more trust in The Verge than they've earned.
They have what, one direct quote from an anonymous venting app that proves that no one is working?
But you do you.
1) Setup self hosted solution
2) Migrate data from Slack to self hosted solution
3) Switch off Slack
And I am not surprised that Elon did 3) first, because that's the easiest step.
Not that it’s helpful to employees looking for past messages, but a complete data dump of all of Slack prior to Musk’s arrival must exist — isn’t that what they needed to do all those Twitter Files screeds?