Ask HN: How does your company use Slack? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How does your company use Slack?

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I'm writing a report for a class on how companies use Slack, how it affects their productivity, etc. It would be incredibly helpful in anyone who works for a company that uses Slack could provide answers to the following questions:

1. How has Slack affected your team's productivity?

2. What are your top 3 features on Slack?

3. Why did you choose Slack instead of some other form of interoffice communication system (Office communicator, Skype, etc.)?

4. Are there any disadvantages to using Slack?

Thanks for the help!

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1. Makes communication (especially when employees work remotely) very simple. Great to integrate things like GitHub and Twitter to keep track of updates.

2. Channels, integrations, also integrating with other teams (I'm part of a Slack channel with a company we're collaborating with and it makes it a lot easier to work on things rather than Skype or email).

3. Word-of-mouth, free

4. Too many channels, can turn into a "Facebook" vibe after a while (once you get "fun" channels that aren't work related). I had to "leave" a bunch of channels today and it's quite controversial to "leave" small channels on a small team... But the noise!

We traded up from ad hoc IM so are more productive in some ways, but the main purpose was to increase cohesion so we post a lot of gifs and run funny bots.

However, we also use bots to track certain pushes and deployments, and we use it to make some news channels that also get compiled into newsletters (adding an article to the newsletter also pushes it into a Slack channel.)

We also use it for quick file-sharing.

We chose Slack because it is the only one remotely pleasant to use. Adoption was unlikely otherwise.

1. Communication with remote people is very easy. If I'm debugging one of our robots at a client's home, I can share output and code snippets easily. We also have a channel for news that might be particularly interesting for our company, so less e-mails to be sent and read. Slack is handier for that because of page previews etc.

2. Channels, triggers from ifttt, GitHub etc. And integration with giphy is much used :-)

3. Free, we tried this and it works like we wanted

4. None experienced yet

Decent search is the only thing that makes it better than all the others (Hipchat, Flowdock et al). I actually liked Flowdock bit more, but it got hard to find stuff from a few months back, so switched to Slack. The weird situation where you're satisfied and disappointed at the same time...

1- May have increased a little since it makes easier to comunicate.

2- Channels, integrations (we integrated with jenkins and bitbucket so far), pretty much just those 2

3- Free

4- None so far.

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