The "high school problems" are the employees organizing, apparently.
Why a Slack Backlash Is Inevitable
31–40 of 155 posts
Re: Why a Slack Backlash Is Inevitable
#32Oh, they are doing "unprofessional" things in a tool that facilitates informal communication now, are they?
Well. It's called chatter. That will either happen over the watercooler, or it will happen over text. The only problem is that off the cuff remarks can be part of the permanent record now. But otherwise, they should be harmless.
And also... maybe go fix the problems people are "bearish" about? (also what's this stock market lingo doing here)
> The problematic employee, the employee who would sit around at the lunchroom and tell people how bad this place is
Well, maybe the place IS bad. And if they are bitching about it, they may still care – employees who have "checked out" won't complain nearly as much (or at all), while looking elsewhere. Or maybe they are just venting and had a bad week. Or it's a cry for help. If the place weren't as bad, other employees could help the person.
> and it’s amplifying.
Oh, so other people agree with the person too? Maybe there is a problem indeed.
Re: Why a Slack Backlash Is Inevitable
#33Yes. It's only a matter of time before there is a backlash to Slack. I won't understand the backlash when it comes, just as I didn't understand the excitement. Slack is just a chat client. Chat has been around forever. Corporate chat clients have been around forever. What am I missing?
Honestly it's just the little details... which are huge. For better or worse emoji reactions and gifs really change the tenor of conversations. You can say its just chat, and that's true, but people are complicated and the smallest of chat features changes interactions so much.
Just as an example, "heres a new feature" vs "heres a new feature (+100 thumbs up emoji)", for better or worse that changes people.
Re: Why a Slack Backlash Is Inevitable
#34A lot of these issues seem to come down to: 1. Just fire the shitty people. I don't know why companies don't do this more in the US - it's at-will, just fire them. 2. Why are you trying to stop your employees from organizing???? > “The onus is on the CEO,” Flory said. “Our focus has been on the values,” Agreed on this last statement. Ultimately if Slack is becoming a toxic environment there are obviously other issues…
I manage a team where we have had one member frequently get into issues with Slack. Mostly in the form of drawing into political discussions or lengthy drama, usually not inappropriate by tone or comment, but mostly by relentlessness and distraction.
His quality of work output is very high, his teammates rate him highly in reviews, he is kind & respectful in all other forms of communication like code reviews, team meetings, etc. It’s just 100% the instant gratification of a real time chat response in a debate thread that draws him to the problem zone.
Firing someone like this would be ridiculous. It would hurt team morale, lower productivity, sink costs into finding and training a backfill, and establish that we, as managers, would prefer to kick people and bark orders under the threat of dismissal than to be accepting of flaws and actually do the job of managing and help the person grow past this.
Re: Why a Slack Backlash Is Inevitable
#35My coworker wrote a bot for Slack that spams most of our channels with random gifs throughout the day. Most of my other coworkers find it amusing, but to me, it's quite distracting. I opened an issue with Slack to ask them to add an "ignore" feature, but they responded that ignoring anyone is counterproductive so they won't be adding it. Thanks, Slack.
Just close the app then, right? Does your job obligate you to be on Slack all the time, probably not. You get more time back, and deliver more value to your company's business.
Re: Why a Slack Backlash Is Inevitable
#36My coworker wrote a bot for Slack that spams most of our channels with random gifs throughout the day. Most of my other coworkers find it amusing, but to me, it's quite distracting. I opened an issue with Slack to ask them to add an "ignore" feature, but they responded that ignoring anyone is counterproductive so they won't be adding it. Thanks, Slack.
Write a bot to raise random requests for an "ignore" feature with them throughout the day until they get the message. ;)
Support ticket systems (Zendesk, Freshdesk, Intercom...) definitely have an “ignore” feature.
Re: Why a Slack Backlash Is Inevitable
#37There is really no strong argument made in this article. It seems like most, if not all, of the problems they talk about are _employee_ problems not slack problems. Slack is simply a medium to chat with your company and team, one which is pretty easy to use desipite its flaws. Employees being toxic is just that, it's not because of slack. As others have mentioned, this is a professional communication tool there is no…
> _employee_ problems
Employee problems as perceived from some random "CEO"'s perspective.
Re: Why a Slack Backlash Is Inevitable
#38Yes. It's only a matter of time before there is a backlash to Slack. I won't understand the backlash when it comes, just as I didn't understand the excitement. Slack is just a chat client. Chat has been around forever. Corporate chat clients have been around forever. What am I missing?
An iPhone is just a phone. The Beatles are just a band. Michael Jordan is just a basketball player. I don’t get the excitement.
Re: Why a Slack Backlash Is Inevitable
#39This seems like a case of shooting the messaging app. It's just human behavior, and it'll happen anywhere.
Re: Why a Slack Backlash Is Inevitable
#40I hate Slack, but for unrelated reasons.
Slack has no priority levels. Slack pings you: is it an alert, a question, an outage, or someone sending you a funny gif? You can’t adjust the relative priority of these alerts, so good luck!
I’ve also seen that it regularly replaces documentation for teams. This is an issue, since slack just scrolls forever. You might have memorized the precise sentence to search for (I’ve done this), but good luck to everyone else.
All in all I think more companies would be better off with just IRC for ephemeral chats. IRC sets no expectation that you’ll catch up with everything that happened when you were offline, which in this case is good.