41–50 of 131 posts
I guess we are in the minority. Slack has been awesome for boosting communication and collaboration in our department. It's effectively killed awful e-mail communication on issues. Instead, we carry on live, highly-interactive communications. Everyone pretty much understands if you are busy, however, and don't respond immediately. Work without Slack would be awful.
Slack is like a bad email client. It takes the onus off the message author and instead places it on everyone else. It's not your job to make sure I'm CC'd when necessary, it's now my job to wade through dozens of channels to make sure I'm always up to date.
I do a lot of work with people in China, and my main complain with WeChat as a "do everything" medium is that it is 100% set up to prioritize the sender. In practice, this means set up to prioritize the boss. It is an absolute disaster for those on the receiving end: it's nearly impossible to keep track of and effectively act on incoming information. You must respond RIGHT NOW or that information is essentially lost.
In the end, I believe a messaging channel that requires more upfront work on the part of the sender ends up providing knock-on positive effects for everyone involved. But due to the generally ego-first thought process of all human beings – and the absolutely ego-first though process of most bosses – the channel that affords the least friction in sending appeals the most.
Everyone likes to think of themselves as being on the originating end of the firehose.
I mean slack isn't even that good. It's a shame it got so entrenched. I wish Discord makes a business productivity push
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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.
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 su…
From a workflow standpoint, this is optimal.
The catch is that many people view Slack as e-mail but with an expectation of instant response. The farther your Slack communications stray from engineers, the more likely you are to encounter this mindset.
Years ago I would have argued that Slack is merely a tool and these are personal problems, but after setting Slack up at a few workplaces I've realized that they structure the defaults and notification settings to encourage this "always connected, always on" mode by default.
On one hand, maybe I'm an asshole because I don't care to have three separate conversations about my weekend.
But there's something about Internet Messaging which makes it highly inefficient and basic small talk that should last 30 seconds in the office, last 30 minutes.
I tend to use phrases like "ttyl" or "cya" to try to escape the conversation. But it doesn't always work. So I end up just not responding after awhile. Either way I look like an asshole.
Slack or not, online communication lacks etiquette.
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…
The goal is to allow all of our team members to control what their own day/communication rules are, and make those shoulder taps opt-in, not out.
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Often baked into SaaS pricing models as well. At “call us” pricing tier $Company includes 24/7 support with guaranteed response time SLA Oh you want the 30min SLA? Add 2 zeroes The company then institutes the right on-call practices, ensures support staff is trained, triage is correct, etc
Yeah, that's my point though. You can't expect your employees to be permanently on call, watch them burn out, then blame Slack.
But, yeah, a lot of places don't do that.
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.
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).
Look, I feel ya, but it is important to stay professional even in the face of annoying coworkers.