Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 112 posts

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

#41

Post by dahart »

> The properties of communication in remote work seem very hard to crack

Many good replies here about what Slack is good for and what it’s not good for, but I wanted to take a moment to reflect on this part of the premise. The properties of in-person communication have always been hard to crack, and having everyone remote makes it that much harder. This is not an easy problem, regardless of the tools. But if people aren’t getting what they need out of Slack, it’s up to the team and the leads especially and the whole org to identify, discuss, and solve communication problems. This might be educating ICs about what to do when they don’t get responses, it might be about providing a system to escalate questions as needed, it might be about picking and choosing different communication tools.

In addition to some of the Slack problems others have listed, in the last two years, I’ve experienced a lot of: 1- new hires being very afraid to speak up in larger groups, they prefer to DM someone who’s friendly and receptive to interruptions, and especially prefer to steer away from asking questions in channels that their boss/manager is in. 2- Slack is pretty terrible for retention and searchability of info after a couple of weeks, it’s just kind of a void when it comes to keeping or tracking important information.

It’s great that you’re thinking about it a lot, because most people have reflexive opinions without a lot of careful thought. Communication is a hard problem, and it’s worth internalizing this and realizing that there aren’t easy answers to this nor single tools that will magically solve it.

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

#42

Post by oneplane »

Slack is for real-time stuff, not for plans and decisions. Make that distinction clear to everyone and complex questions can simply be put into complex meetings instead.

The real replacement that slack is, is for crappy emails and crappy phone calls and crappy meetings about nothing. Not a replacement for communication as a whole.

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

#43

Post by oneplane »

SnowHill9902 wrote: post #33
spyspy wrote: post #32

Just spitballing... I wonder if anyone has tried using a private subreddit for team collaboration? I feel like it has the opportunity to be a great asset. It's free, persistent, searchable (ish), supports threads, images/links/markdown, and even nice mobile app support.

Too easy to get distracted.

Also just a slower version of Slack so it doesn't really solve much.

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

#45

Post by beAbU »

jbay808 wrote: post #38
xboxnolifes wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, but the context is that the message wasn't something that the org permanently documents to refer back to, like... an API or a list of deliverables or something. It's just run-of-the-mill workplace interpersonal communications and announcements, like announcing that there's going to be an earthquake drill, or that you're going to be working from home the first week of August. Not documentation. Until a miscommun…

What would be used in the total absence of an IM tool?

How was this managed 10 years ago? Email?

How was this managed 50 years ago? Physical bulletin board?

What the GP is trying to drive at is that slack should be treated like a passing conversation, and nothing more. It cannot be relied upon as a persistent source of truth or a knowledge base.

We try to apply the same philosphy within my team.

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

#46

Post by samora »

You need to establish some rules to make Slack work for most teams without overload.

1) People should avoid DMing each other when talking about work, use threads instead (see 3) to discuss topics in team channels (see 2).

2) Keep channels to a minimum. Every person shouldn't have more than 2/3 channels they need to pay attention to. A private team communication channel (eg #dream-team) and a private work channel (eg #dream-team-engineering) is enough for most teams. All team members are in the private team communication channel. A work channel is specific to a domain, such as engineering. Example you don't want engineering work banter to distract those working on other stuff.

3) Use threads religiously! This is super important as it helps declutter the Slack experience and keep conversations heavily organized.

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

#47

Post by chrsig »

ratww wrote: post #40
chrsig wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps it's a solution that does better at a large scale than at a smaller scale. At a smaller company, it becomes much more evident that the contributions are being made more for self-promotion than for anyone's benefit. Either because you know the person making them and their personality, because the volume:quality is out of alignment, or because the person posting the question/answer wasn't actually having the pr…

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 not.

If there's something to take away here, I imagine that it's not "internal stackoverflows are doomed to fail", and more "unstructured adoption of internal stackoverflows don't go as smoothly as one fantasizes"

Had we made some set of individuals as having been responsible for the adoption and moderation of it, it may have gone better.

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

#48

Post by CharlesW »

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.

Have you tried async standups via something like Geekbot? https://geekbot.com/

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

#49

Post by bennathanson »

kazinator wrote: post #20
bennathanson wrote: post #18

What has worked for my (mostly) remote team is a mix of different tools for different communication needs: - Daily standups on Zoom. Each person's standup should be short and to the point. Don't be afraid to tell people they're getting into the weeds. If more open-ended discussion needs to happen, interested parties should either 1) stick around after standup or 2) schedule a new meeting to discuss in greater depth 3…

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)?

Great question! We do use huddles sometimes, especially when a Slack thread starts to get too deep. They're wonderful for pairing on problems. I'm sure we could migrate to huddles for standups if we really wanted to, there's just more momentum in Zoom meetings.

But I will say that Zoom integrates nicely with Google Calendar, offers video, and like you said has a higher limit.

We're also experimenting with doing standup three days a week so we can have less time spent in meetings each week.

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

#50

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

Email is the best method of communication for anything complex. It's asynchronous, long-form, has a historical record, allows threading, you can seamlessly include anyone in the world in the conversation, have shared mailboxes and mailing lists, attach files.

But people are afraid of e-mail. Will anyone ever read my e-mail? When will I get a response? What if I mess up my message? It is unknown, immutable, does not provide instant gratification. I want everything NOW. So Slack was created to poorly reinvent e-mail, but with instant gratification and emoji buttons.

I really love open source mailing lists. Every once in a while I'll go skim over some I'm subscribed to and see what's been going on. If I ask a question I usually get an answer within a day or two. The archives provide searchable record/context for everything. I can even review patches and comments on patches, and see the history of all the e-mails before/after it, whereas GitHub PRs are little islands unto themselves. Best of all, it's all stored offline, and I can use any client I want.

It's sad that technological progress means 'things got more advanced', and not 'things got better'.

Post reply on HN