IMO slack is a poor medium for in depth questions and answers. It’s a chat application made for short text. A better tool would be something like an internal stackoverflow…which would have more durability and findability.
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Ask HN: How do you ensure everyone on the team is heard on Slack?
21–30 of 112 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you ensure everyone on the team is heard on Slack?
#22just suggest that the person who exceeds their reasonable amount of time meets offline with whoever they're discussing with
"stay on after the meeting and we'll talk about that"
or
"why don't you and x meet up later to discuss y"
Re: Ask HN: How do you ensure everyone on the team is heard on Slack?
#23In 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…
> Slack prioritises whoever is first to reply and no one wants to read a 50+ message thread to figure out if they have relevant input.
My personal belief is that Slack provides a perverse incentive to reply quickly, rather than thoughtfully. There's a time and place for quick communications, but the majority of discussions I have over Slack feel that they'd be better served by thoughtful requests with equally (if not more) thoughtful responses.
E-mail was great at this: the extra overhead (if it could be called that, but I digress) of writing an e-mail encouraged information density in that e-mail - I want to convey my point in the least number of round trips possible, and likewise, have my question answered in the least number of round trips possible. Slack does away with this; round trips so easy as to be common, and in fact we have sites like nohello.com showing that the trend towards round-trips isn't helpful.
Re: Ask HN: How do you ensure everyone on the team is heard on Slack?
#24I've found Notion (or Google Docs, etc) to be a clearer source-of-truth and place-of-collaboration than Slack, which I've found to be better to debug ongoing issues or as a place to point people to the right notion doc.
Making sure someone gets heard in Slack isn't a top priority for me. It's surfacing information and solutions as fast as possible when they come up. Solidifying them in Notion is something a subject matter expert can do outside of the time constraints of a real-time conversation then the rest of the team can surface those answers as needed and mark where they fall short with comments in or additions to the Notion doc.
Re: Ask HN: How do you ensure everyone on the team is heard on Slack?
#25Well I personally prepend @everyone to all my messages.
>Well I personally prepend @everyone to all my messages.
^ Arrest this man or woman!
Re: Ask HN: How do you ensure everyone on the team is heard on Slack?
#26Well I personally prepend @everyone to all my messages.
my thinking, better to think twice before using @everyone, if it really needed to notify everyone (with the sound/popup) for this specific message. teammates still see it without @everyone, do they really need to be disturbed for this message?
I suspect it was ironic ? Unclear
Re: Ask HN: How do you ensure everyone on the team is heard on Slack?
#27At my place of work, our internal chat rooms (not Slack, but a similar product) are automatically wiped of messages older than two weeks, to actively discourage anyone from using it as a knowledge store. Instead, we have a company-wide BookStack instance that's the primary store of documentation, split into different sections for project information (per project) and rough notes (per employee). Everyone is expected t…
> automatically wiped of messages older than two weeks
How do you determine historical truth in a potential conflict scenario, where a manager says "why didn't anybody tell me we'd be running a test at the customer site?" and the engineer says "but I announced it two weeks ago and you even thumbs-upped the post!"?
Re: Ask HN: How do you ensure everyone on the team is heard on Slack?
#28@everyone
jk don't :)
Re: Ask HN: How do you ensure everyone on the team is heard on Slack?
#29I am a fan of having twice or thrice-weekly in-person checkins, led by a tech lead
In my team we do these on Monday/Thursday. If something conflicts, we just bump that checkin forward a day to Tuesday or Friday.
Re: Ask HN: How do you ensure everyone on the team is heard on Slack?
#30At my place of work, our internal chat rooms (not Slack, but a similar product) are automatically wiped of messages older than two weeks, to actively discourage anyone from using it as a knowledge store. Instead, we have a company-wide BookStack instance that's the primary store of documentation, split into different sections for project information (per project) and rough notes (per employee). Everyone is expected t…
> automatically wiped of messages older than two weeks How do you determine historical truth in a potential conflict scenario, where a manager says "why didn't anybody tell me we'd be running a test at the customer site?" and the engineer says "but I announced it two weeks ago and you even thumbs-upped the post!"?
The commenter just said slack is not the source of truth in the org. If the post was important, the result should have been documented in the source of truth.