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Slack is the right tool for the wrong way to work

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Re: Slack is the right tool for the wrong way to work

#31

Post by StavrosK »

paxys wrote: post #6

Here's what this conversation always boils down to: Slack is a tool, just like one of probably dozens you use in your day-to-day work. It doesn't set or enforce any guidelines for how it should be used. If left unchecked it has a tendency to amplify the worst parts of your company's culture. If you make an effort to moderate it, it can be a huge asset to productivity. Speaking of the example in the article, there is…

This ignores the fact that defaults matter, and defaults shape the usage of the tool. I want to reply in threats, but often don't, because it requires me to let go of my keyboard and fumble around with the mouse to do it. That's why I vastly prefer Zulip (which additionally isn't slow as molasses).

Re: Slack is the right tool for the wrong way to work

#33

Post by runarberg »

Raphmedia wrote: post #7
tonymet wrote: post #4

Slack is a big setback for the labor movement . It undermines any distinction between work and leisure

Uninstall it from your phone? Turn off notifications? Make a work profile on your android and get off it once your shift ends? I use Slack daily and I've never brought it home with me.

Not saying you’re wrong, but it shouldn’t be up to the victim to prevent being abused for labor. A workplace that allows a tool to pervade into their worker’s personal life is not doing a good job protecting their workers, and are complacent in the abuse.

Re: Slack is the right tool for the wrong way to work

#34

Post by 2sk21 »

pacificat0r wrote: post #16

I don't super understand these articles. Before slack we had Lync, and then skype, and now it's slack. It doesn't replace email, it replaced those other communication apps. I am aware that Slack has a crusade against email but the article or that business example didn't ask why not both? There's a need for real-time communication and there's a need for email too.

At two companies where I have worked recently (IBM and a small startup), Slack quickly displaced email. Email was hardly used in either organization.

Re: Slack is the right tool for the wrong way to work

#35

Post by oneplane »

Slack is fine and works fine. As a user, you can very easily turn it off and on at will, mute it, even set status messages like "I will check my messages twice a day".

There are plenty of 'product X is bad' write-ups, but all of them try to blame something while the blame is for something intangible which is much harder to write a clever title for.

Same goes for the open office; that can work just fine if you make sure everyone shuts their mouth while working; having your 'own' office space with lots of distractions isn't any better than having a 'shared' space with the same distractions. The problem is the distraction, not the space. At best you would state that a certain type of space makes a certain type of distraction easier to occur. But that's a lot more words when you catch more eyeballs with 'office bad, isolation good'.

Before we complained about the office, home, or Slack, we complained about Email. And before that about the phone and the pager. This isn't new. What's new is the scale and the amount of people not taking steps to do what works for them.

Re: Slack is the right tool for the wrong way to work

#38

Post by paxys »

pacificat0r wrote: post #16

I don't super understand these articles. Before slack we had Lync, and then skype, and now it's slack. It doesn't replace email, it replaced those other communication apps. I am aware that Slack has a crusade against email but the article or that business example didn't ask why not both? There's a need for real-time communication and there's a need for email too.

Can't speak of other roles, but at least within tech/dev teams I have encountered Slack has replaced email almost 100%.

Re: Slack is the right tool for the wrong way to work

#39

Post by 2sk21 »

gcblkjaidfj wrote: post #2

slack IS email. corporate communication changed medium but remained the same. paper/reports/memos > email clients > rich email clients > webmail+blackberry > webmail+email apps > slack (desktop email app) it is just the first, crappy, desktop email app client. The incumbents will eat them soon, just like microsoft and oracle ate all other email clients in the 90s. I mean, slack is already in someone’s plate.

Except that searching through email was a lot easier than searching for something in Slack. Important conversations would be scattered all throughout slack. I had a notes file in which I would store URLs for these important messages.

I just retired recently and can say truthfully that simply not having to deal with Slack has improved my sense of wellbeing immensely.

Re: Slack is the right tool for the wrong way to work

#40

Post by PragmaticPulp »

wpietri wrote: post #14

Yeah, I think of Slack as the virtual version of the open office. Anybody can bother you at any time. In the real world, if we ever return to it, I like having physical team rooms, the sort of thing you have naturally when it's an early-stage startup in a single space. When everybody knows each other and is focused on the same goal, it's not hard to work out good communication and space-use norms. But scaling that up…

> Yeah, I think of Slack as the virtual version of the open office. Anybody can bother you at any time.

Open office doesn't mean that anyone can bother you at any time. It's important that companies set expectations about these things and enforce them to avoid that slippery slope.

Same goes for Slack. Once you expand beyond intra-team communication, it's important to set some expectations for what is and is not appropriate in Slack.

At the least happy point in my career, I had to be a member of over 100 Slack channels to get my job done and I received upwards of 100-200 @here and @channel notifications every day as people competed to stand above the noise. It was miserable. At the worst point, my time tracker was counting upwards of 4 hours per day spent in the Slack app.

Ironically, my efforts to push things to e-mails and scheduled calls was met with a lot of resistance from people who were afraid it would hamper flexibility and ruin asynchronous workflows. We also had absurd levels of office politics because people were treating each other as screen names instead of actual people working in other offices. I would take an open-office floorplan over that nonsense any day.

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