131–140 of 155 posts
This is an advantage of Microsoft Teams... the product is so utterly without charm that I doubt anyone is recreationally loitering in it.
Can confirm, use Teams daily and theres almost no side chatting in it compared to Slack which seems like a near constant watercooler experience.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Combat racial discrimination Interestingly, it has been shown that more diverse groups of employees are less likely to organize and form unions or demand collective bargaining.
Interesting, got any citations handy?
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0019793915602253
On a more anecdotal front, Whole Foods is aware of this at the corporate level and so is (apparently) deliberately pushing for a more diverse employee base not to actually improve race relations, but to prevent unionization.
https://observer.com/2020/04/amazon-whole-foods-anti-union-t...
The biggest problem with Slack is not even the "politics" or inappropriate use. It's the fact that chat is a super-horrible way to farm out tasks. Go ahead. Ask someone to do something over chat. Very soon, that request is buried in succeeding messages and no one remember the original task. To me that's why we will stop using Slack, even if it causes some friction in casual communications. The problem is that manager…
I would file that under "inappropriate use". Slack is not a task or issue tracker, use more appropriate tools for that. While it's certainly flexible and can be adapted to many workflows, there are still limits with features it arguably shouldn't have.
At first I was prepared to despise Slack as it being part of the baggage of that job's sudden interest in Agile Cosplay, but then it looked IRC-like and I figured I would give it a chance. Ah, I should have known. My reasons, in no particular order: First, it was Yet Another Communications Channel to Check. You know, email, phone, voicemail, meetings, standups, calendar appointments, and so on. It was one more place…
In-person > video > voice > IRC >> email >> I feel sorry if you're here.
Slack (and its competitors) provides an amazing way to escalate the level of communication from IRC all the way to video without flipping through different apps. When in-office, I'd still much rather get a slack notification I can ignore for a couple minutes to finish up. A tap on the shoulder is an immediate and unavoidable interruption.
Keeping records is also nice. I can easily search for where a question was answered a couple months ago instead of getting in someone's way yet again. Along the same lines, I find the drama complaint in the article to be rather strange. People who like conflict are going to fight with other people no matter what the medium. At least with Slack, you have a permanent record of what was said so the individual can be dealt with. If someone is that toxic, let them be another company's problem.
At first I was prepared to despise Slack as it being part of the baggage of that job's sudden interest in Agile Cosplay, but then it looked IRC-like and I figured I would give it a chance. Ah, I should have known. My reasons, in no particular order: First, it was Yet Another Communications Channel to Check. You know, email, phone, voicemail, meetings, standups, calendar appointments, and so on. It was one more place…
One thing that’s problematic is that Slack has the “wrong” notification settings on by default (it notifies you of everything). You should flip the default to “mentions only” and then don’t worry about looking at a channel unless you’re mentioned. Once you’ve got that setup the channels start working to your advantage because you can use them as topic headings to just read the stuff you’re interested in keeping up wi…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>If you have an employee who is prone to ridiculing others and won't desist from doing so when asked... >FIRE >THEM Honestly, why does this have anything to do with slack. If it's not there, it will be in the break room or hallway or bathroom or wherever. That's a toxic person being enabled by technology. Not toxic technology magically transforming a person.
What it has to do with Slack and every other social media platform is that (vs. break-room trash-talk) it magnifies the harassment - it's instantly amplified, spread more broadly, and is more durable. It also reduces the dampening influences of people's emotional responses in meatspace. Slack may or may not be better/worse than FB, Twitter, etc. in this regard, but all can definitely magnify divisions in any group of…
I also wonder if tech ageism isn't at play here. The social rules of high-school and college are nothing like the social rules of the rest of society. In those places, a person can create a group of friends and only interact with them for the most part.
In a real job without high turnover, you have to learn to get along with everyone all the time. Startups (the ones complaining here) aren't known for having lots of older workers who've had time to polish their social skills and have the rough edges worn down (programmers generally aren't known for their amazing social skills in the first place).
I'd conjecture that moving 2-3 older devs onto each of those teams could drastically improve the group dynamics.
The biggest problem with Slack is not even the "politics" or inappropriate use. It's the fact that chat is a super-horrible way to farm out tasks. Go ahead. Ask someone to do something over chat. Very soon, that request is buried in succeeding messages and no one remember the original task. To me that's why we will stop using Slack, even if it causes some friction in casual communications. The problem is that manager…
> The biggest problem with Slack is not even the "politics" or inappropriate use. It's the fact that chat is a super-horrible way to farm out tasks. I would file that under "inappropriate use". Slack is not a task or issue tracker, use more appropriate tools for that. While it's certainly flexible and can be adapted to many workflows, there are still limits with features it arguably shouldn't have.
I 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 do…
Instead, create groups for whatever purpose and use it (eg, an @_devs to avoid blowing up everyone else in the channel). @mentions stand out when you're scrolling through a feed.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> have no idea what roughly half the emojis meant, I really honestly am curious which ones confused you
The eggplant and all the euphemistic emojis that go with it, eye roll emojis which are so inconsistent between platforms they range from "looking at the text above" to "I'm high AF get me outta here", and most of the anger emojis which range from "gritted teeth" to "Jack Nicholson in the Shining". Just recently figured out what the Slack :tada: emoji is and it's an upside down birthday hat with confetti coming out of…