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

Unslacking Tideways Company

beberlei.de

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 162 posts

Re: Unslacking Tideways Company

#131

Post by nine_k »

jasode wrote: post #52
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 believe that slack in general is a waste of time in a TEAM. Why not have meetings or meet up in real life rather than hiding behind a screen without any physical interaction? In the book "Facebook Effect" by David Kirkpatrick[1], one programmer described how Mark Zuckerberg and the other programmers extensively chatted on AOL AIM even though they all sat at the same table elbow-to-elbow . When one of the new pro…

Personalities aside, chats are a track record (and searchable). Imagine remembering what your colleague asked you last Friday, and you promised to answer. Compare it with scrolling up and finding the exact question.

Re: Unslacking Tideways Company

#132

Post by SnootyMonkey »

gregmac wrote: post #13
Waterluvian wrote: post #5

When I was at a fully local company, slack was good for conversations where a few people might be actively discussing an issue and then I could come in hours later and skim the history, if it was a channel I felt relevant to be aware of. But slack was also super easy to use wrongly and drain so much time into. It really helped to declare slack a lossy source of comms. You shall not expect people to read it and you sh…

Almost agree, but email should also be treated as lossy. It drives me crazy when people send mass company emails with, for example, new policy or forms attached, and don't post them elsewhere. New hires only see them if someone remembers they exist and forwards them, plus it's impossible to figure out current state without spending a bunch of time playing email archeologist.

Shameless plug here, but this is exactly why we built Carrot ( OSS / SaaS https://carrot.io/ )

We've been remote founders and employees in numerous distributed startups, and have always found the same issue, the noisy nature of chat/Slack and lossy nature of email necessitates a 3rd place to keep the important decisions, announcements and history of the company.

Lots of companies use wikis and forum software for this, and those can work, but we're betting that a dedicated solution can work better.

Re: Unslacking Tideways Company

#133

Post by u801e »

tomp wrote: post #122
dsr_ wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forums rarely get things right -- that had been solved by Usenet. Proper threading. Read/Unread tracking. Keyboard UI. (And the mouse UI tends to be bad as well.) Responsiveness. (Especially: page loads which are not instantaneous.) Killfiles. They generally have mediocre search functions unless they are entirely visible to Google. These are off the top of my head.

Does usenet have points? That's what I find missing in most forums, except Reddit and HN, where best comments flow towards the top, instead of being present arbitrarily deep in the timeline.

I actually prefer having the thread with the most recent post at the top (or bottom depending on how one sorts it) of the list. That, I find is helpful in terms of keep up to date with the most recent comments. The equivalent in HN would be that the next time you load HN's front page, this particular article would appear at the top of the list and this comment (along with other new comments) would be highlighted when you load the comments section.

Thunderbird does this by default. Reddit breaks threading when sorting by "new". On HN, you have to search the comments page "minutes ago" or "hours ago" to find new comments in an existing thread.

Re: Unslacking Tideways Company

#134

Post by SnootyMonkey »

saalweachter wrote: post #130
bonestamp2 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am not sure where term "ping you" came from I assume it's like using sports euphemisms in the office to convey a concept... this is likely a military euphemism (from radar/sonar). On one hand I don't mind it because it removes the specifics about how the person will contact you, it just simply states that they will contact you (and the method may vary depending on the time of day/week). Sure, there are other ways…

I assumed it was from the networking 'ping'.

As did I. Actually, it never occurred to me that it could have come from anywhere else.

Re: Unslacking Tideways Company

#135

Post by u801e »

rabidrat wrote: post #92
personjerry wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Email is generally regarded as the most reliable in my experience.

To the parent's point, how do you get a future employee to receive the information in an email that was sent before they started?

An internal NNTP server would work better in that aspect when compared to email.

Re: Unslacking Tideways Company

#136

Post by paulie_a »

saalweachter wrote: post #130
bonestamp2 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am not sure where term "ping you" came from I assume it's like using sports euphemisms in the office to convey a concept... this is likely a military euphemism (from radar/sonar). On one hand I don't mind it because it removes the specifics about how the person will contact you, it just simply states that they will contact you (and the method may vary depending on the time of day/week). Sure, there are other ways…

I assumed it was from the networking 'ping'.

I kind of figured, but that terminology and specific phrasing in the tech world is obnoxious and pretentious. Just say "hey can we talk later?" No need to use to buzzword terms to ask for a simple conversation.

Honestly, I hardly acknowledge those ping requests anymore. I'm sure there is a packet loss pun, but it's late and I'm tired.

Re: Unslacking Tideways Company

#137

Post by bonestamp2 »

saalweachter wrote: post #130
bonestamp2 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am not sure where term "ping you" came from I assume it's like using sports euphemisms in the office to convey a concept... this is likely a military euphemism (from radar/sonar). On one hand I don't mind it because it removes the specifics about how the person will contact you, it just simply states that they will contact you (and the method may vary depending on the time of day/week). Sure, there are other ways…

I assumed it was from the networking 'ping'.

Right, but don't you think that was named after radar/sonar pings too?

Re: Unslacking Tideways Company

#138

Post by markdoubleyou »

john_oshea wrote: post #105
stupidbird wrote: post #102

Doing everything in chat is pure insanity. It's great for the day-to-day collaborating on projects... but it's all short-term memory. Are you going to be referencing a chat from 3 years ago? We use an internal forum in addition to chat. Anything substantive goes in the forum. We'll regularly reference 5 year old posts.

Any recommendations for sensible forum software? (self-hosted would be ideal)

My company just started using XenForo, and we've been pretty happy with it. We're self-hosting on a cheap AWS Lightsail instance.

We really wanted to to like Dicourse, but everyone on my team found some little thing that really annoyed them ("why does it hijack ctrl-f?", etc.). It was death by a thousand cuts. XenForo is the most modern of the traditional forum platforms that I reviewed. Everyone just gets it.

Re: Unslacking Tideways Company

#139

Post by Cogito »

john_oshea wrote: post #105
stupidbird wrote: post #102

Doing everything in chat is pure insanity. It's great for the day-to-day collaborating on projects... but it's all short-term memory. Are you going to be referencing a chat from 3 years ago? We use an internal forum in addition to chat. Anything substantive goes in the forum. We'll regularly reference 5 year old posts.

Any recommendations for sensible forum software? (self-hosted would be ideal)

Depending on what exactly you are trying to do, I've found wikis like Confluence pretty good for quite a few things.

It used to have a halfway decent forum addon, and the ability to have the wiki features/content embedded was enough to convince us not to try and use a separate forum.

Re: Unslacking Tideways Company

#140

Post by kureikain »

I think a good way to use Slack is to eliminate channel idea. No one has to constantly monitor a channel and that's expected.

Otherwise we know we can muted a channel but we cannot just do that to some certain channel because that's where the team annouencement happens.

Email isn't good either. Email can be easily get lost and not easy to search.

To me, Slack is super useful in 2 cases:

1. 1-1 or group chat between members on same topic 2. Archive log: I pipe all the information such as AWS activity(login, spin up server, AWS cloudtrait, Audit Log: ssh in out, K8S event...)

1. is useful to discuss on specific topics on a specificed thing.

2. is useful for on-call people to correlate with something, such as when AWS personal dashboard has issue we will know, when a server is added to autoscaling pool trigger Nginx reload, we may have trigger websocket reload and create a spike...those kind of things are very useful and easier to see compare to email to me.

Post reply on HN