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

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

#1

Post by _rzt9 »

The premise of this is that I feel people are pinched for time and need space to work – yet when they come back from their coding mode the answers team members provide seldom respect the depth, severity, or nature of the queries which are posted while people are focusing on dev work and, in some cases, simply delay the discussion of it until the next weekly/in-depth check in.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and while daily meetings are nice, once you start to go beyond the bounds of "yesterday I was working on ... and today I'm working toward ... could you provide a bit more help and/or context on ..." the discussion balloons beyond a reasonable check-in limit with regard to time.

The properties of communication in remote work seem very hard to crack and I'd like to know if this problem is something your team has succeeded at – and, If so, how?

Edit: To be sure, I'm not talking about alerts/system critical stuff. Additionally, I work in a small company, so maybe there are safeguards for this kind of predicament in larger orgs.

Thanks

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

#4

Post by metadat »

binarymax wrote: post #2

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.

Agree 100%, slack is the wrong tool for the job in this case.

Your proposal is a cool idea, and there are even self-hostable FOSS clones available.

See: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2267/are-there-any-...

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

#6

Post by chrsig »

binarymax wrote: post #2

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.

Unfortunately, I've seen an internal stackoverflow fail right out the gate because of clout chasing. For example, people asking questions only to answer it themselves immediately.

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

#7

Post by josephcsible »

chrsig wrote: post #6
binarymax wrote: post #2

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.

Unfortunately, I've seen an internal stackoverflow fail right out the gate because of clout chasing. For example, people asking questions only to answer it themselves immediately.

What's wrong with that? On the real StackOverflow, that's not only allowed but encouraged, and it doesn't seem to cause problems like that.

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

#8

Post by junon »

chrsig wrote: post #6
binarymax wrote: post #2

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.

Unfortunately, I've seen an internal stackoverflow fail right out the gate because of clout chasing. For example, people asking questions only to answer it themselves immediately.

Which is exactly what SO encourages one to do.

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

#9

Post by bluehatbrit »

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 needs to discuss a key decision everyone should be given time to digest the information at hand and respond. That might be in a synchronous meeting or over an asynchronous email but either way people need to have time to think and contribute. 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.

If someone external to my team wants to ask a question thats of any significance I'll try to jump in and set their expectations. If it requires input from multiple people on my team then it's best done over something slower like email / collaborative docs, or as a last resort a meeting. If it's internal to the team I'll try and push it out to a mechanism that allows people to set time aside to consider the topic and respond.

Most questions in and around the team are small and less opinion based. How does X work? How do I do Y? When did Z change? Anything like that is usually fine to be answered by anyone when they get a moment and doesn't require much input from the whole team, Slack is totally fine. To help out I like using the slack action thing for when someone joins a teams channel to let them know that it could take a bit to get an answer because the team may be focused on something else.

As you say, emergencies are different. Those are raised via alerting of some sort and interrupt people in a different method.

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

#10

Post by karaterobot »

In my view the question asker can help themselves by asking better questions, if they aren't already. Sometimes people ask vague questions, and it's hard to respond to them, even if you want to. This is something we're working on in my team: ask specifically for what you want, tell the other person that it's important, and also, crucially, tell them when you need the response by.

But, assuming they are already asking good questions and just not getting good responses, they should instead be asking for a synchronous meeting with the other developer. They should be pairing, or screen sharing, or at the very least looking at each other when they talk. An ad hoc 15-minute meeting is a slight pain in the ass, but better than a Slack conversation spanning 2 days, followed by a 25 minute retrospective discussion on what went wrong.

Try to make it part of your team culture that, when somebody is blocked, anybody who can help them needs to put down what they're doing and unblock them as fast as possible. This was a firm rule on the most successful team I ever worked on, and I have carried it forward ever since then. It's better for everybody if they can expect to get help and are expected to give it.

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