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Unslacking Tideways Company

beberlei.de

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Re: Unslacking Tideways Company

#71

Post by beberlei »

jahaja wrote: post #67

I find it hard to follow these kind of no-chat articles since they usually come off as a bit contrarian rather than something that makes sense: * Why does a chat blackout naturally follow a fear of missing out? * What's different from the good ol' IRC days? Mute the channels, see them as transient, and focus on 1on1 conversations. * Important conversations should not be solely communicated through a short-lived chann…

Author here.

I have never used IRC in a company, so I can't compare. Slack is the topic, because we used Slack. If we have had used IRC or HipChat or Microsoft Teams, then maybe we have come to the same conclusion.

Yes, summarization is important. However switching to E-Mail causes all its problems. New colleagues don't have the mails for example. Basecamp has chat and a forum/message board or todolists. We can easily link between these.

Re: Unslacking Tideways Company

#72

Post by jt2190 »

quixoticaxolotl wrote: post #62

I feel that many of these objections already have solutions within Slack. If you don't want to be disturbed by notifications, there is the Do Not Disturb option to snooze notifications. If you don't want to lose context, use Slack threads, which localize discussion around an issue to a single place. If you have a fear of missing out because you're piping everything to Slack - have you considered segregating your aler…

> One thing that's really helped us is that, by consensus...

This is why the things that work for you don't work for others: Communication requires that all (or at least a significant majority) of parties agree to a protocol. It's not enough for a lone employee to start putting up Do Not Disturb when the culture insists on real-time responses.

I read somewhere that the crazy hours on Wall Street (purportedly 7 AM - 11 PM for new employees) are not because it takes 80 hours a week to get work done, but that there's a kind of social proof that one must demonstrate in order to be part of the "club". (Nobody's saying that you can't work 9 AM - 5 PM, they're just saying that everyone who was ever successful with the company put in the long hours, and you want to be successful, don't you?)

Similarly, it seems that Slack and other real-time communication removes some of the defenses that employees once had against these implicit demands. Note I'm not just talking about demands made by management of employees, I'm also talking about demands that employees put on themselves. (All it takes is one or two employees answering messages in the middle of the night to change people's expectations of when they'll get a response.)

As we enter an era of knowledge work, we're going to have to get better at recognizing and avoiding the social dynamics that can cause distraction and wasted time.

Re: Unslacking Tideways Company

#74

Post by lima »

Our solution to this has been to keep Slack, but only for conversations that need to happen in real time.

Anything else goes into our Discourse-based internal forum.

Re: Unslacking Tideways Company

#75

Post by amirathi »

There's a great opportunity for someone to build a team communication tool that's more forum-centric than channel-centric. Let me explain the core problem with slack (or any channel-centric chat).

When I join a wide slack channel (e.g. #Design), I'm not interested in half a dozen different threads of communication happening on it everyday. But there might be couple of discussions per week that are pertinent and important for me to do my job well. There's NO way to ignore 90% of non-pertinent conversations without actually reading all the messages on the channel (yikes!).

Re: Unslacking Tideways Company

#76

Post by TheAceOfHearts »

sdan wrote: post #7

Definitely agree with your decision. After leaving slack entirely from a robotics team and a science club, our productively increased. No longer were we going off topic wasting precious time and making everyone in the channel read every 500+ messages some people engaged in. We instead chose to make more plans during meetings and through direct chat (Messenger). However, Slack is usefull for forums such as donkeycar.s…

I'd also suggest giving Discord [0] a try. There's a few tech communities that have migrated from Slack to Discord, with one of the main benefits being that you can access and search the full history for free. It also uses fewer resources and it's overall snappier in my experience. The top example that comes to mind is Reactiflux [1], which at the time of migration I believe was one of the largest free Slack servers.

IMO, Slack can be pretty great for remote teams, although I agree you can definitely abuse it too hard and end up wasting time. One benefit of using text chat to have a discussion is that it you can easily scan through it and reference any section. There's also certain kinds of discussions which I think are easier to have through text, especially when you want to provide references and examples. It also makes it easier for introverts and non-fluent speakers to participate. On the other hand, physical discussions are hard to beat when you're whiteboarding or drawing diagrams, especially if you're still exploring the problem domain. You don't have to limit yourself to any single discussion format.

[0] https://discordapp.com/

[1] https://www.reactiflux.com/

Re: Unslacking Tideways Company

#77

Post by ForrestN »

quixoticaxolotl wrote: post #62

I feel that many of these objections already have solutions within Slack. If you don't want to be disturbed by notifications, there is the Do Not Disturb option to snooze notifications. If you don't want to lose context, use Slack threads, which localize discussion around an issue to a single place. If you have a fear of missing out because you're piping everything to Slack - have you considered segregating your aler…

Rather than take a product that wants to be a chat room and adapting it in a million ways to make it not a chat room, there could be wisdom in using a product that attempts to address these issues from the ground up? We use Basecamp instead of Slack and find it infinitely better than when we used Slack, even with a ton of plug-ins and settings and hacks.

Re: Unslacking Tideways Company

#78

Post by jonahx »

dvtrn wrote: post #63
jonahx wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This feels like the "guns don't kill people, people kill people" argument. Of course you can assign moral blame however you please, but the relevant "policy" question (in both the gun case and the slack case) is empirical. You could measure the productivity of a single team with and without slack and see how things compare. My guess is Slack would not fare well in that experiment, but I've never done it.

Of course you can assign moral blame however you please, but the relevant "policy" question (in both the gun case and the slack case) is empirical. You absolutely can but if there's something about my post that insinuates any sort of 'moral' blame that a comparison to the "Guns don't kill people" trope (there's probably a better word for this) is warranted, then I've massively failed to express my intent clearly. All…

> but let me raise my hand right now and admit that I am absolutely guilty of checking every notification I see come in and breaking my own flow, it's why I even hold this position

Right, so you are blaming yourself morally here (guilty of...). I'm not saying you're wrong to do so. I'm just saying that to solve the problem you can either:

1. blame yourself, and try to improve your own discipline when using slack.

2. stop using the tool that you know "tempts" you too much.

I'd rather bet on strategy 2. It's entirely analogous to throwing out all the junk food in your house when dieting. Sure, if you had the discipline you wouldn't need to do that, but so what?

Re: Unslacking Tideways Company

#80

Post by duskwuff »

beberlei wrote: post #69
quixoticaxolotl wrote: post #62

I feel that many of these objections already have solutions within Slack. If you don't want to be disturbed by notifications, there is the Do Not Disturb option to snooze notifications. If you don't want to lose context, use Slack threads, which localize discussion around an issue to a single place. If you have a fear of missing out because you're piping everything to Slack - have you considered segregating your aler…

Hey, these all sound like very good hints on how to use Slack, especially the consensus on decision making. Maybe we have used Slack wrong, but especially the context was important for me and Slack threads are hard to enforce, you can "break out of the jail" easily, often by mistake.

> Slack threads are hard to enforce, you can "break out of the jail" easily, often by mistake.

In particular, image uploads (and possibly other attachments?) are always posted to the main channel, even if the message they were attached to was in a thread. Trying to conduct an image-heavy discussion -- like a discussion about a graphical design -- in a thread will just mean the main chat gets interrupted by a bunch of out-of-context images.

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