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Why a Slack Backlash Is Inevitable

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Re: Why a Slack Backlash Is Inevitable

#141

Post by Nasrudith »

core-questions wrote: post #108
neves wrote: post #103

Sorry people, this isn't about about "high school" behavior. This is about preventing workers organization. They are just building the narrative for whats comes next. Just other day, The Economist also said that Google must "grow up": https://www.economist.com/briefing/2020/07/30/googles-proble... It looks like, big media point of view is that it is a childish behavior to do anything against the company bottom line.…

> 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.

I wonder how much of the phenomenon is historically based on past actions of unions. Regardless of class there is no intrinsic virtue to station and the incumbents would be incentivized in the short term to keep newcomers out to inflate their guild's value. Doing so without a legal monopoly however sows the seeds of their downfall as they lose the critical mass of labor needed and going with the cheaper newcomers becomes not only viable but preferrable. Long term said maltreated former newcomers would be left with negative experiences towards unions and likely think of them negatively.

That scenario has echoes in the past well before industrial organized labor and guilds into outright caste dynamics - although those may occur from lack of an educational infrastructure leaving occupation essentially heritable and it being codified.

Re: Why a Slack Backlash Is Inevitable

#142

Post by staticassertion »

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #69
oceanswave wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We’ve found the same behavior in normal person to person speech, so we’ve implemented a gag policy that nobody talks to one another during business hours. Ultimately, it’s person to person communication that we’ve found is the broken tool for, granted, a minority of users so we’ve implemented this policy company wide.

Your satire rings very flat because it doesn’t happen much in person to person communication. The whole reason it’s noteworthy to talk about it in regards to Slack is that it does happen to a much greater extent in Slack and other chat programs than in almost any other corporate communication system, enough to make it clear that instant messaging , not people, is the core of the issue.

> Your satire rings very flat because it doesn’t happen much in person to person communication.

Of course it does. It is just harder to audit and record. That's why they call it "high school like" behavior - you put a bunch of people in a room together every day and you get gossip.

Re: Why a Slack Backlash Is Inevitable

#143

Post by staticassertion »

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #34
staticassertion wrote: post #5

A 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 me…

I didn't tell you to fire anyone.

Re: Why a Slack Backlash Is Inevitable

#144

Post by geofft »

lnanek2 wrote: post #123
at_a_remove wrote: post #104

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…

> Probably the worst part was that the expectation was that always had one eye on Slack instead of, you know, focusing on programming Haha, yes, my job is exactly like this. If I turn off Slack for an hour to write some code, I get a lot of angry emails from management about why I'm OoO without notice. Co-workers love to complain to management if you don't respond to them immediately as well. One guy slacked me 6 tim…

Where is your management?

If your manager isn't willing to back you up on "My team needs to deliver X and that's my employee's job, if you want Y, we can try to schedule that in," find a job with a better manager. And if your manager says your job is answering questions about Y and not writing code for X, then, well, that is your job.

Re: Why a Slack Backlash Is Inevitable

#145

Post by EForEndeavour »

coffeefirst wrote: post #81
ashtonkem wrote: post #40

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…

Yes! The Noise Machine aspects, the sprawling dumpster that is threads, and the fact that there's no way for all 7 people DMing me at once to see that there are 7 of them DMing me at once make the platform an indispensable nightmare. I'm starting to notice that organizations with long term remote experience like Basecamp and Automatic rely a lot more on longer, async communication over instant messaging. There might…

> the sprawling dumpster that is threads

Doesn't the Threads view (Ctrl T, Mac: Cmd T) list all threads you're involved with in chronological order, navigable by mouse or keyboard, and searchable? What's your pain point with threads?

> the fact that there's no way for all 7 people DMing me at once to see that there are 7 of them DMing me at once

This same objection applies to every other text-based communication medium out there that I'm aware of.

Re: Why a Slack Backlash Is Inevitable

#146

Post by EForEndeavour »

wayoutthere wrote: post #118
aeyes wrote: post #58

Turn off Slack and you'll have your employees in WhatsApp groups. What do you prefer? Nobody is going back to email. If people behave unprofessionally on Slack then that is because they are unprofessional. I've been working with different corporate chat tools for years and haven't seen any major drama. And if the former lunchroom conversation moved to Slack, you can now hold the bad actors accountable.

Heck the WhatsApp groups probably already exist. At my last company, the malicious shit (e.g. "marry, fuck, kill" lists of coworkers, racist / casteist memes, etc.) happened on WhatsApp, not the company chat platform. If you don't discourage a "frat boy" culture, one can develop outside your control. People who do that crap aren't stupid, so they'll keep it off company systems but they'll still do it.

Did you say anything in any of these problematic WhatsApp groups to "discourage a 'frat boy' culture"? Or did you stay in the groups to quietly lurk, or did you laugh along to fit in?

Re: Why a Slack Backlash Is Inevitable

#147

Post by hideo »

motohagiography wrote: post #97
lambdasquirrel wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I wonder what ever happened to the common-sense idea that culture flows outward from the people with the "power." Maybe it's by example, or maybe it's by unintended consequence. Maybe it's caused by some moralistic / idealistic sort of policy, or maybe it's through ignorance of the unconscious biases that people have. To that end, Slack, being a communications enabler, merely accelerates the rate of these thing…

We get what we reward, and leaders who espouse one set of values but reward another in practice are necessarily going to promote a layer of jerks. It's the literal recipe for a jerk factory. To me, if there were a backlash against Slack, it is because it makes a great scapegoat. It's different from a social media platform because social platforms have to deal with the public, where a company has every tool it needs t…

> leaders who espouse one set of values but reward another in practice are necessarily going to promote a layer of jerks

I had to read this comment a few times, because I think it's truly a wonderful insight.

This is true for many things. We should be careful as leaders to espouse and reward the same practices. We should be careful as the led to see what people actually reward and ignore what they espouse.

Re: Why a Slack Backlash Is Inevitable

#148

Post by CincinnatiMan »

neves wrote: post #103

Sorry people, this isn't about about "high school" behavior. This is about preventing workers organization. They are just building the narrative for whats comes next. Just other day, The Economist also said that Google must "grow up": https://www.economist.com/briefing/2020/07/30/googles-proble... It looks like, big media point of view is that it is a childish behavior to do anything against the company bottom line.…

>Sorry people, this isn't about about "high school" behavior. This is about preventing workers organization. They are just building the narrative for whats comes next.

Absolutely this. Slack was an enabler of some recent employee demands at my large employer that I believe would not have been feasible if we only had regular instant messaging without chatrooms. The chatrooms are what enable large bodies of workers to aggregate. People from this demand channel would spread their message in the other chatrooms of thousands of workers, growing their organization. I can foresee limitations coming.

Re: Why a Slack Backlash Is Inevitable

#149

Post by wayoutthere »

EForEndeavour wrote: post #146
wayoutthere wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heck the WhatsApp groups probably already exist. At my last company, the malicious shit (e.g. "marry, fuck, kill" lists of coworkers, racist / casteist memes, etc.) happened on WhatsApp, not the company chat platform. If you don't discourage a "frat boy" culture, one can develop outside your control. People who do that crap aren't stupid, so they'll keep it off company systems but they'll still do it.

Did you say anything in any of these problematic WhatsApp groups to "discourage a 'frat boy' culture"? Or did you stay in the groups to quietly lurk, or did you laugh along to fit in?

I did quietly lurk until I came out as trans, when I stopped being invited to join them. No great loss to me, but you can understand why I was hesitant to speak up in them.

Re: Why a Slack Backlash Is Inevitable

#150

Post by mlthoughts2018 »

staticassertion wrote: post #142
mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your satire rings very flat because it doesn’t happen much in person to person communication. The whole reason it’s noteworthy to talk about it in regards to Slack is that it does happen to a much greater extent in Slack and other chat programs than in almost any other corporate communication system, enough to make it clear that instant messaging , not people, is the core of the issue.

> Your satire rings very flat because it doesn’t happen much in person to person communication. Of course it does. It is just harder to audit and record. That's why they call it "high school like" behavior - you put a bunch of people in a room together every day and you get gossip.

I think this is wrong. The property of high school that led to this being named that way is that high school facilitates immature, consequence-free social contexts where asserting individuality is key to your social status among peers.

In-person workplaces do not foster this usually, with some exceptions in immature start-ups or bro-y Wall Street.

By contrast, it’s exactly the kind of atmosphere that instant messaging environments foster.

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