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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

#71

Post by johnc1231 »

StavrosK wrote: post #31
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).

Another plus one for Zulip, huge improvement over Slack for me.

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

#72

Post by runarberg »

corytheboyd wrote: post #44
runarberg wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is this actually happening though? You are claiming that companies are using Slack to creep into the personal lives of employees? Where is that even coming from? I’ve never had an employer force me to be always online, Slack or otherwise. Not counting on-call duty of course, but that’s completely different.

> You are claiming that companies are using Slack to creep into the personal lives of employees

No I’m not. The workplace might be completely in the blue about this, but if a workplace uses a tool that offers convince in installing this tool to your personal devises (or off hour workstation usage):

a) Make it absolutely clear that this is not expected

b) Provide instructions for workers on how turn the tool off during non-work hours

c) Reprimand users that bother workers with this tool during non-work hours

Anything short of that is complacency in labor abuse.

The problem slack (and tools like it) offers is that there will be a point where installing and enabling it on personal devises or out side of work hours will be convenient, be it off site on a convention or when finishing up a tight deadline. After that time workers will probably not remove it from the devise (the power of defaults), and that opens up avenues for complacency in abuse. At no point does the workplace need to make a conscious choice of malice, however harm will happen if the tool is used without disclaimers.

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

#73

Post by Solvitieg »

munro wrote: post #53
Solvitieg wrote: post #46

This morning I had three members of my team private message me to tell me about their weekend. 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…

I don't know you or your coworkers, but dang, trash talking them on HN? Sounds like a great place to work . Definitely sounds like some communication issues going on. I've worked for the past 8 years on remote teams, and from my experience, having a shared mind is very important to a highly productive team. My suggestion to you would be to communicate with your coworkers that you've already talked about your weekend…

You're right I might be insensitive and ideally I would have the time (and patience) to have a useful, thoughtful conversation with each person I talk to.

I don't have 8 years experience working from home, so it's possible this is something I can improve. I like the idea of having an open-channel for weekend discussion.

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

#74

Post by ssharp »

runjake wrote: post #20

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.

When I started at a fully-remote company, where most communications happened on Slack, I was prepared to live with it as a necessity that I simply had to deal with, based on my negative perception of it from places like HN.

I actually found it to be a very nice way to keep casual communications open to a remote workforce, while also allowing for actual work communications and collaboration.

Now that I'm in another position at a company that is remote due to COVID, I find not having a well-managed Slack workspace a minus and I do feel less connected to the team.

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

#75

Post by arawde »

paxys wrote: post #63
arawde wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been telling my friends for months that if I were to create a startup I would use discord over slack, and my argument is always predicated around the fact that if you want to have a voice conversation with someone and share your screen the flow for it is easily 5x better than the slack calls. They laugh at me, but I think its a viable use case

Look up their terms of service before considering it for work use. At the end of the day Discord is not enterprise software, and so will never be considered seriously for it.

This is a good point, one of the points that my friend made is that without a comparable revenue model you always run the risk of Discord shutting down whereas Slack wouldn't. With that said, I would happily pay for an enhanced nitro subscription to discord that allowed for enterprise use

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

#76

Post by tayo42 »

jkaplowitz wrote: post #48
paxys wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that's my point though. You can't expect your employees to be permanently on call, watch them burn out, then blame Slack.

I hope the other commenter's idea of "right on-call practices" involve hiring enough employees to give a humane on-call schedule, and compensating appropriately for the on-call time. That's my idea of the right on-call practices, and would go very well with "add 2 zeroes" in the pricing of that SLA. But, yeah, a lot of places don't do that.

I had a manager tell me we can't hire people to be low productivity people just because we need people in the rotation. Idk if I agree with that, though I guess I get the point.

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

#78

Post by cratermoon »

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…

> Anybody can bother you at any time

I can't recall where exactly but at one seminar I took, well before chat programs were ubiquitous, the presenter called out in-person interruptions. Just a co-worker dropping by randomly and starting a conversation. There are ways to deal with that, but those tricks don't work so well in a virtual world when you can have dozens of people simultaneously demanding your attention. (and TBH they stopped working very well with the move to open offices)

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

#79

Post by arawde »

tomtheelder wrote: post #23
arawde wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been telling my friends for months that if I were to create a startup I would use discord over slack, and my argument is always predicated around the fact that if you want to have a voice conversation with someone and share your screen the flow for it is easily 5x better than the slack calls. They laugh at me, but I think its a viable use case

Slack has a better ecosystem of work related add-ons, but to be honest I've never found those to be useful. I agree I'd prefer Discord.

The work add-ons for slack is something which is a strong selling point, but I've found Discord hooks to be straightforward to set up for my use cases.

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

#80

Post by nchi3 »

NikolaeVarius wrote: post #5
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.

No its not. What I find frustrating about Slack is that it gives certain people the ability to say "i didn't see that" regarding important work information. I regard properly reading your email part of your job, and if you're missing important emails, you're failing at it. I find that unless you send an email alongside whatever Slack notification, many people will just ignore it.

That's probably because Slack isn't the "main" communication where you are. Where I work it's the opposite, people answer slack but don't notice emails, because Slack is how we're "supposed" to communicate within the company.
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