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Ask HN: How do you ensure everyone on the team is heard on Slack?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you ensure everyone on the team is heard on Slack?

#101

Post by Vanit »

theptip wrote: post #11

One important practice to keep daily standup snappy is to decouple the high level context (“I am blocked on X” => “you should talk to codeowners Alice and Bob”) from the actual solve for the problem, even if there is a quick answer. It’s natural to answer “I am blocked” with a dive into the solution, but really you should just use the standup forum to figure out who you need to talk to, and circle back to discuss imm…

This. At my current company any blockers that need more than a minute discussion inline get moved to an optional "parking lot" session at the end of standup. The point of this isn't to deepdive but just give a people a bit more support by ensuring there's a plan in place to either solve or further discuss the issue. I've found this really useful, but you need some discipline to not deepdive the parking lot - although sometimes if your team is desperately in need of more alignment, just do it. People not process, and all that :)

Re: Ask HN: How do you ensure everyone on the team is heard on Slack?

#102

Post by bluehatbrit »

jesterson wrote: post #93
bluehatbrit wrote: post #9

In previous teams I've worked hard to make sure slack isn't the place for decisions to be made that are any greater than where to go for lunch. Same with bigger questions as well. Slack is great for small insignificant chatter but developers need long uninterrupted periods of quiet to work. That doesn't go well with an IM system that people expect to get big questions answered or key decisions made with. If the team…

This is excellent writeup I could have made, but @bluehatbrit made it much better. Slack is very distracting. I surprise some people saying I am pushing every meaningful convo out of slack and hopefully one day to completely scrap it and throw away. Emails are way better since it pushes people to think the problem first, and you'll be surprised how many problems have found solution before "Send" button is pressed. It…

I think Slack has a place in communication but it has a really poor balance. It's so easy to create and send a message to a channel and tag a few people. As a result it moves quickly and makes it hard to digest and reply slowly. It's also extremely hard to find things again later, even with the improvements to search.

Back in the days of IRC a lot of people thought lack of history was a "missing feature" but now we have it with Slack I think it was probably the best feature of IRC. When the platform has no memory you're often pushed away from it for anything that's deeper. No one can come along later and find your messages so you know you can't put anything that requires wide visibility or input there.

I'm not going to shill for IRC and say everyone should go back to it or anything, it's not really practical. But that said, I do think Slack has a huge flaw in it's design of making it so easy to send messages and pretend everyone's going to see it.

Re: Ask HN: How do you ensure everyone on the team is heard on Slack?

#103

Post by ratww »

chrsig wrote: post #47
ratww wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Were their answers wrong, or were the questions completely unnecessary? How do you know it's "not for everyone's benefit"? I don't announce to the world when I consult the documentation. Are you measuring the reach of these answers or is it just a gut feeling? I really fail to see how this is a negative thing. If anything, it's the people not doing it that caused the whole project to fail.

As I recall, largely unnecessary. I can't divine someone's intent, but I can surmise based on having worked with them for multiple years. Measuring reach? certainly not. It was just setup as a confluence plugin by the corpit team and left as a free-for-all with no direction. > I really fail to see how this is a negative thing It discouraged engagement. You can argue until you're blue in the face if it should have or…

Yeah, sorry but I’m not buying. It all seems to me like projection, a lot of speculation and a bit of pent up anger for people getting reputation for doing documentation work.

“People doing a lot discourage people who don’t do anything” isn’t a very compelling narrative.

Really can’t see a problem here. I wonder what you’ll say when you find out those people are working for money.

Re: Ask HN: How do you ensure everyone on the team is heard on Slack?

#104

Post by SkyMarshal »

Why are people still using Slack when other chat systems have solved this problem? Whether it’s Zulip’s topic streams, or the ability to tag a part of a thread as “Important”, “Need Decision”, etc. There are solutions to this problem. Does Slack not have something like this yet?

Re: Ask HN: How do you ensure everyone on the team is heard on Slack?

#105

Post by chrsig »

ratww wrote: post #103
chrsig wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I recall, largely unnecessary. I can't divine someone's intent, but I can surmise based on having worked with them for multiple years. Measuring reach? certainly not. It was just setup as a confluence plugin by the corpit team and left as a free-for-all with no direction. > I really fail to see how this is a negative thing It discouraged engagement. You can argue until you're blue in the face if it should have or…

Yeah, sorry but I’m not buying. It all seems to me like projection, a lot of speculation and a bit of pent up anger for people getting reputation for doing documentation work. “People doing a lot discourage people who don’t do anything” isn’t a very compelling narrative. Really can’t see a problem here. I wonder what you’ll say when you find out those people are working for money.

shrug what you buy or don't is your problem. I don't really stand to gain anything by arguing my lived experience with you.

> “People doing a lot discourage people who don’t do anything” isn’t a very compelling narrative.

Who said the people being discouraged didn't do anything? It seems like you may be reading things that aren't there.

> Really can’t see a problem here.

ok? why are you posting then?

> I wonder what you’ll say when you find out those people are working for money.

pent up anger and projection of your own, perhaps?

Re: Ask HN: How do you ensure everyone on the team is heard on Slack?

#106

Post by kazinator »

heretogetout wrote: post #36
kazinator wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you do standups on Zoom if you have Slack? Is it because you're running into the 15 person limit and need video (so cannot use huddles)?

Slack huddles have poor ergonomics what with their use of global keyboard shortcuts. I avoid them whenever possible.

The lack of a detached floating window for huddles compared to Slack calls is a big regression in functionality for me.

Re: Ask HN: How do you ensure everyone on the team is heard on Slack?

#107

Post by ratww »

chrsig wrote: post #105
ratww wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, sorry but I’m not buying. It all seems to me like projection, a lot of speculation and a bit of pent up anger for people getting reputation for doing documentation work. “People doing a lot discourage people who don’t do anything” isn’t a very compelling narrative. Really can’t see a problem here. I wonder what you’ll say when you find out those people are working for money.

shrug what you buy or don't is your problem. I don't really stand to gain anything by arguing my lived experience with you. > “People doing a lot discourage people who don’t do anything” isn’t a very compelling narrative. Who said the people being discouraged didn't do anything ? It seems like you may be reading things that aren't there. > Really can’t see a problem here. ok? why are you posting then? > I wonder what…

I never met your co-workers so I have no axe to grind, nor am I accusing them of anything. But yeah neither of us has anything to gain here so let’s stop?

Re: Ask HN: How do you ensure everyone on the team is heard on Slack?

#108

Post by e9 »

yesiamyourdad wrote: post #82
e9 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if question seems unnecessary at the time, more often than not some junior dev will find it helpful once your company grows. It’s about preserving knowledge and no question is dumb at that point.

I don't question their premise, I believe that it happens. So remove clout, it's a feature to create network incentives for people who need an incentive.

That's right. Most people need incentive. That's how humans operate unfortunately and you have work around that to get anything done. That's why being good manager is hard. For example, if you make a competition to give some prize for most fixed bugs, they will get fixed. Yes some won't be fixed completely and you have to redo them but I guarantee you there will be more bugs fixed than if you don't have the incentive.

Re: Ask HN: How do you ensure everyone on the team is heard on Slack?

#109

Post by pseudalopex »

nlnn wrote: post #92
bluehatbrit wrote: post #9

In previous teams I've worked hard to make sure slack isn't the place for decisions to be made that are any greater than where to go for lunch. Same with bigger questions as well. Slack is great for small insignificant chatter but developers need long uninterrupted periods of quiet to work. That doesn't go well with an IM system that people expect to get big questions answered or key decisions made with. If the team…

Any tips on making sure that Slack isn't the place for important decisions? We're facing this problem at the moment, with Slack being heavily used for almost everything. Main difficulty is changing culture around its use - there are plenty alternatives that we push people towards, but they tend to get ignored in favour of Slack since asking is easier there.

Limit message retention.

Re: Ask HN: How do you ensure everyone on the team is heard on Slack?

#110

Post by dicknuckle »

whiskyagogo wrote: post #94
dicknuckle wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't read too far into those, but if one has an integration or feature to automatically send a message to the team's Slack channel with a link to every new Local SO post, it could really light the fire on that new system. Then all the replies would be easier to capture on the SO post, AND eyes would be on the new posts, AND it wouldn't be cluttering inboxes.

I’m in the process of identifying communication gaps in my org and possible tooling and process solutions. Stack Overflow for Teams is high on my list of tools to evaluate and it feels like a Slack integration would be important so your comment finally prompted me to look into it. It turns out there’s an official integration that looks pretty comprehensive: https://stackoverflow.co/teams/integrations/slack/

Beautiful! I'll have to bring this up with my team. We just had a management expansion and I'm part of the process for changing the way we operate.
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