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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

#91

Post by curl-up »

cbozeman wrote: post #85
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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". 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…

>> The catch is that many people view Slack as e-mail but with an expectation of instant response. I don't get this, because email is instant response. It arrives more or less instantly. Almost all digital non-verbal communications can invite an instant response. Why is Slack so different than email? The excuses are the same... "Well, I didn't have Slack open..." "Well, I didn't have Outlook open..." Hell, you could…

I think there is one seemingly insignificant difference with big (behavioral) consequences: mails need to be "opened", and they're "unread" until you do that. This gives you an option, even after you learn what the email is about (reading the title, the sender, and knowing some context), whether you want to read it now or not.

On Slack, like any other instant messaging (especially the ones where the fact that you've seen a message is communicated to the other side), you don't have this option. You can, of course, snooze messages, but I doubt many people even know about that option, and a high fraction of those who do know just find it, at that moment, easier to answer immediately then to think about "scheduling" that answer.

Combining this with other characteristics that make online chat more like in-person chat (from simple functions like the ease of sending messages by pressing Enter, to more advanced ones like seeing when the other side is typing), it shifts the behavior, and people feel compelled to respond instantly - both by the expectations set by others ("everyone responds instantly to Slack so I have to as well") but maybe even more importantly by subconscious "burden" of not responding to an "already opened message".

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

#92

Post by joeax »

Nimitz14 wrote: post #88
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you make an effort to moderate it, it can be a huge asset to productivity. Sounds good in theory, rarely works well in practice. The only times I've seen Slack work well is when everyone involved starts with similar expectations about how it should be used and what's appropriate. In my experience, this is easiest to achieve when Slack channels are closely aligned with teams who are working together. The model te…

> Strongly agree, but it's not just clients. Sales people, for example, love to use Slack because it's a backdoor channel to circumvent management and go straight to the engineers. And that's bad because?

I once worked at a (open) office where sales people were constantly berating engineers, asking for a feature or pestering for a status update on a feature/bug in progress. It got so bad they installed a wall around that area.

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

#93

Post by bitdotdash »

Nimitz14 wrote: post #88
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you make an effort to moderate it, it can be a huge asset to productivity. Sounds good in theory, rarely works well in practice. The only times I've seen Slack work well is when everyone involved starts with similar expectations about how it should be used and what's appropriate. In my experience, this is easiest to achieve when Slack channels are closely aligned with teams who are working together. The model te…

> Strongly agree, but it's not just clients. Sales people, for example, love to use Slack because it's a backdoor channel to circumvent management and go straight to the engineers. And that's bad because?

Because management should be rigorously defending devs from being needlessly interrupted with whatever some sales guy thinks is important in the moment? Management can filter out the garbage, condense down the really important bits and deliver them during a time it won't knock dev out of the zone?

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

#94

Post by pseudalopex »

jordan_curve wrote: post #61
NikolaeVarius wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I feel the exact opposite. If someone emails me, I’m likely to not see it, but if someone @s me on slack there’s no chance I miss it. The whole upside of slack for me is that it makes it easier for me not to miss the things I absolutely need to see. I get a deluge of automated or templated emails every day. How am I ever supposed to reliably sift through the noise?

You can set up filters. How am I ever supposed to reliably sift through the noise on Slack?

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

#95

Post by cratermoon »

paxys wrote: post #70
cratermoon wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At my employer we have Slack channels for engineering teams but anyone in the company can (and does) come in to ask what amount to low-level support questions. I've dealt with it on my team by rotating the job of responding so that whoever is on-call for the week deals with it. It means there's a lot of interruptions, unfortunately, for whoever is on call, but at least the rest of the team is explicitly given permiss…

We deal with the same. Here's an easy solution – set up a #support- channel for the team. If anyone asks a question in the regular channel, redirect them. Have a fixed rotation and SLA for the support channel. In fact everyone now prefers this over the pre-Slack way where you had to randomly email or IM people one by one to try and get some help.

The channel name is not the problem. The problem is that people will go to whatever channel they want and ignore any "official" support system. It's the same as the guy in sales who comes to your desk to bug you about something he promised a customer. He knows he's supposed to go through channels, but he's going to do what he wants, regardless of mechanism.

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

#96

Post by HexagonalKitten »

dasil003 wrote: post #86
spoonjim wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 128oz tub of pork rinds with an easy-open cap is just a tool to alleviate hunger when you're looking for a salty snack. Placed next to an incredibly disciplined person like an Olympic athlete, the tub will probably last six months and not damage their health. But placed next to an ordinary person it will definitely encourage overeating. Tools placed in the hands of imperfect people will be used imperfectly, and in…

Bad analogy though because persistent channel-based chat is a good way to handle ephemeral and interactive collaboration, especially in a Covid world where few lightweight options exist. Do we have to open a Zoom, send an email or start a doc for every single thing? I get that some environments might be fine without group chat, but for others it's indispensable.

I've had jobs where every little thing required a bunch of back and forth. Integration, and spinning up a new product. Slack (or IRC if you aren't hooked on giant emojis) work well for this.

But for the rest of my work there are questions but you can batch them if you think ahead, and write a good email. Or, just put the questions in the ticket and use the right collaboration tool.

I find that all chat-derived information needs to be rewritten (ideally) or being cut&paste into a document because chat is either ultimately ephemeral, or lives in an entirely different system from the rest.

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

#97

Post by oneplane »

jmpeax wrote: post #52
oneplane wrote: post #35

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…

> Slack is fine and works fine. As a user, you can very easily turn it off and on at will, mute it > Same goes for the open office; that can work just fine if you make sure everyone shuts their mouth while working The analogy is not even close. You can mute slack, but you can't mute everyone in your office (without noise cancelling headphones being a permenant feature of your uniform).

I think you mean that the analogy is hard to make in real-life where you can't control other people ;-) Which is true, but I was trying to shift the focus on the problem instead of where it happens to occur. Granted, for open-office plans it generally makes people feel like they can talk loudly because it's a space full of people and that's what you do in such spaces. But it's still the distraction (and noise), not the space itself. The ease of moving around is not available if you put walls everywhere. But that 'problem' isn't really seen as problematic, so the comparison becomes "loud office vs. quiet office" instead of "distracting but roamable office vs. silo'ed office". At that point we are of course trying to value one person's wish to roam as much as another person's wish to not be distracted.

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

#98

Post by edmundsauto »

pseudalopex wrote: post #94
jordan_curve wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel the exact opposite. If someone emails me, I’m likely to not see it, but if someone @s me on slack there’s no chance I miss it. The whole upside of slack for me is that it makes it easier for me not to miss the things I absolutely need to see. I get a deluge of automated or templated emails every day. How am I ever supposed to reliably sift through the noise?

You can set up filters. How am I ever supposed to reliably sift through the noise on Slack?

Culturally, you make the onus on the sender to make sure the receiver got the message.

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

#99

Post by pseudalopex »

btown wrote: post #82

At my company, we use WhatsApp alongside Slack. It's primarily for legacy reasons, but we're seeing actually a really interesting phenomenon: because WhatsApp exists as a way to ping someone with an emergency request that should disrupt their flow, we can have a culture where direct messages and mentions in Slack should be answered reasonably promptly but not immediately, and should not disrupt bandwidth. So Slack, e…

Email has priority levels. Sorting tasks into quadrants is a popular technique. People understand who should see a message, if it's important, and if it's urgent are 3 different questions. Slack just doesn't have a way to tell them apart.

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

#100

Post by sumedh »

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…

> Slack or not, online communication lacks etiquette.

Its probably you not them. If you dont like people message you about non work topics, just ignore their message or directly tell them that you are busy. They will get the message and stop being friendly with you.

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