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Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

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Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#431

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What about it is horrible? My team loves it.

I have a few reasons to list: 1) It constantly minimizes for seemingly no reason (at least once a week). 2) The "Teams" and "Chat" menus are separate. They're in the same window in Slack, and that just makes sense. 2.1) The "Teams" menu won't list more than 4 channels per Team by default. If you want to open a channel there you have to open the menu or favorite everything. I know this can be fixed by good sanitation…

re toast/pop ups, it’s SO frustrating that they don’t use the OS built in notifications framework! doesn’t respect DND and plenty of other integrations because of this ridiculous decision

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two camps: the we-should-just-use-irc camp, and the we-need-every-feature camp. You fall in to the former, and I would bet that a lot of people here fall in to the former. However, many people fall in to the latter, and Slack handily beats the competition there. There is also an element of having nice and polished features baked in that appeals to many people. Want it on your phone? There's an app. Want to…

> There are two camps: the we-should-just-use-irc camp, and the we-need-every-feature camp. I'm firmly in the "email should be used for substantive discussions" camp, but ever since we got the bandwidth and CPU necessary for the internet to not be a primarily text-based medium, the illiterates took over and that was the end of that.

> I'm firmly in the "email should be used for substantive discussions" camp

I wish there were more people who were in the "newsgroups should be used for substantive discussions" camp. They're better than email in that context.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#433
post #53

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HipChat had some major uptime issues. I have friends who experienced whole day outages at their companies. I hear a lot of people on HN say it was "Just IRC" and I'm always surprised by that. If IRC was so compelling then why didn't it take off? Why did Slack have a meteoric rise? It can't be for no good reason. I think the answer is that the interface fluff they added is actually extremely important and valuable. Th…

My Linux user group used to hangout in IRC until 3 or 4 years ago when little by little we stopped joining the channel. Some of us tried IRC clients for smartphone and it was a lousy experience. Until one day someone created a Telegram group. Now we are all there, the conversation might not be as fluid as IRC, each is in their own timezone, but it is there.

Scrappy founder here. Telegram crushes it for low latency, instantly synched desktop/mobile flexibility, easy topic channels and groups, and trivial bot API. I've not seen anything do what it does as perfomantly.

For code, wiki, and issues, it's self hosted Gitea. It's a dream to fire up thanks to Go and SQLite, and users forget you're not at GitHub.

Nothing more than those two plus email needed here, yet anyway.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#434

When is this overhype for Slack going to stop? It is a chat application with a slightly improved UI like it existed 30 years ago. This is a step in corporate IT that I really cannot fully understand. It seems that every company//startup has to use slack nowadays to pretend to be cool again. Everytime I have a serious conversation about the productivity gains or losses of Slack though, it is pretty clear to me that it…

>> Everytime I have a serious conversation about the productivity gains or losses of Slack though, it is pretty clear to me that it is more disruptive than helpful. It fosters a "Always on" culture, where irrelevant chats are exchanged publicly to advertise how much work is being done. If you shut down Slack and appear as Offline people assume you are not working.

This is once again entirely up to the business that deploys it. We use Slack and punish people who use Slack as a project management tool; we have Basecamp for that.

It comes to setting boundaries and consent, which is something en vogue in the 21st century and something I guess a lot of humans didn't get trained on when they were young.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#435

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I run the Atlassian stack for my company, so here's some thoughts on this: - Jira is pretty bog-standard these days, huge installed base. It's a bit weird to administer, and not as powerful in many ways as I'd like (especially compared to a more flexible system like ServiceNow). However, it's entrenched and a lot of people like it. - Confluence is a top tier wiki. I actually find it very nice to work with, both from…

Every engineer I met dislikes Confluence. Engineers who write most of the documentation don't like using Confluence which lead to out dated, subpar and incomplete documentation. In my org, I noticed this and created a github repo to push documentation in Markdown. I created initial version of docs and now every engineer in our team uses it because they know markdown, appreciate version controlled docs and can use wha…

> Confluence which lead to out dated, subpar and incomplete documentation.

How exactly is it Confluence's fault if your team does not update the docs?

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#436
post #26

I've never really gotten into any of Atlasssian's products. It seems like they make tools for managers with bolt on functionality for engineers (which may be why I never caught onto their products). I hope this is good news for Slack, but as a software engineer today, Atlasssian's products are not the first ones I would recommend in any category.

Jira was great, ~15 years ago. It was a tool that actually helped development, especially with the GreenHopper plugin Now almost the entirety of its functionality is to help various middle managers track things that are important to them, while continuously making development slower. Manager 1 wants to track Metric A? Add a drop down. Manager 2 wants to track Metric B? Add a new form to fill out. And tie them all tog…

> Those that haven't experienced this probably just haven't worked in a medium or large corporation.

It’s really an organizational problem, not the tool.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two camps: the we-should-just-use-irc camp, and the we-need-every-feature camp. You fall in to the former, and I would bet that a lot of people here fall in to the former. However, many people fall in to the latter, and Slack handily beats the competition there. There is also an element of having nice and polished features baked in that appeals to many people. Want it on your phone? There's an app. Want to…

> There are two camps: the we-should-just-use-irc camp, and the we-need-every-feature camp. I'm firmly in the "email should be used for substantive discussions" camp, but ever since we got the bandwidth and CPU necessary for the internet to not be a primarily text-based medium, the illiterates took over and that was the end of that.

> the illiterates took over and that was the end of that.

That's a very harsh attack and I'm sure you're aware of all the nuances you're conveniently skipping over. I'm not sure how you think this adds to the discussion at all.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you and I feel your points are well articulated. I especially like how you summarized the internet as 'the illiterates took over.' Very poignant, indeed. So much of the average person's internet usage boils down to memes and videos, it's quite unfortunate.

One thing to think about with respect to memes and videos is they may evolve to be more dense in their ability to symbolize and convey a much larger amount of information. There are so many examples of teams successfully communicating state, sentiment and other information among each other with memes and videos an what not. Also, to help people blow off steam. We don't need to be absolute productive units operating a…

I don't disagree with not being productive 100% of the time. My gripe is that for many non-tech people, their computer time is majority memes and videos. The ratio is all wrong, IMO. This incorrect ratio has created the click-bait internet and other scorns of the modern internet IMO as corporations are catering to the masses.

The internet is such a large collection of knowledge, I just wish more people used it to improve themselves, or at least their understanding of the many different things we have in the world.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#439

Huge problem for on-prem Hipchat customers. Plenty of customers out there not willing to put all their internal communications on the other side of their firewall, and now have to migrate. Slack doesn't have an on-prem option. Microsoft Teams doesn't have an on-prem option. What are enterprises supposed to use, RocketChat? Matrix? With no clear migration path? Really poor move on Atlassian's part. It would be one thi…

At this point I don’t think any company should be relying on on-prem solutions remaining on-prem which aren’t open source. There’s too much to be gained from a cloud + SaaS business model. If you want to be either on prem or just avoid cloud lock in, open source is the way to go. The user just has much more power in the context of OSS than they do proprietary software.

That being said, it’s unfortunate that OSS in many areas lags behind proprietary software in so many different areas, and it’s clear that for many different business use cases properietary cloud services are going to be more cost effective than OSS. As the deployment and ops aspects of software becomes more automated and simplified, I think this might begin to start shifting back in favor of OSS though.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Featured specifications work better in email, live debugging/forensics work better in Slack.

Featured specifications work better in source control...

You can have both with git format-patch/git send-email and git am :)
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