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Can Slack-mania be cured with systemized discipline?

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Re: Can Slack-mania be cured with systemized discipline?

#21

Post by coffeefirst »

Trasmatta wrote: post #14
nicoburns wrote: post #2

We're a very small company which makes this all easier, but we've ended up with a similar Slack convention of everything being in threads and it makes Slack a lot more managable.

This works well until your team hits a certain size and suddenly you've got dozens of threads going on per day, and you're trying to somehow manage following threads, channels, and DMs. I'm sick of Slack for this reason, and I think I'm going to start participating only as much as is required not to lose my job.

Right. I'm here for norms and organizing principles, but their answer just moves the firehose around, he still has 5 notifications, it's just... now they're buried in lengthy threads instead of lengthy channels.

There's a place for async chat. But it isn't good at replacing actual processes, documents, conversations, and organizing principles.

Re: Can Slack-mania be cured with systemized discipline?

#22

Post by Cellentel »

22c wrote: post #4

I wish Slack had a feature to "threadify" comments that have already been made. I wouldn't even mind if Slack channels could designate certain users as "thread czars" that had the ability to move other users comments into a thread.

Never mind the thread czars — I wouldn't mind the ability to do this with my own comments. Often I reply to something in the channel, realize after the fact that it should have been in a thread, and then become sad when people start replying to it not in a thread.

Re: Can Slack-mania be cured with systemized discipline?

#23

Post by boopmaster »

22c wrote: post #4

I wish Slack had a feature to "threadify" comments that have already been made. I wouldn't even mind if Slack channels could designate certain users as "thread czars" that had the ability to move other users comments into a thread.

This is a brilliant idea. I work in a slack jungle most of the workday in a very large org across possible 100+ channels. Multiple instances on top of that.

Sometimes replies bucket up under the thread, sometimes they do not. Sometimes what should be threaded get fragmented into separate threads.

Love this idea.

Some of the old school IRC-channel ops functions could go a long way too (I think discord is more like that).

Re: Can Slack-mania be cured with systemized discipline?

#24

Post by PragmaticPulp »

admax88qqq wrote: post #19
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #12

> For the next five years I operated in “Slack culture”, the communication paradigm that I suspect is in use by many companies these days. Email inboxes were more or less reserved for broadcasts from exec and HR along with JIRA spam. Everything else happens on Slack. This is the real problem, IMO. Slack shouldn't be replacing e-mail or meetings or phone calls. It's great for impromptu discussions with a lot of back-a…

> but once it becomes a serious conversation with multiple parties you need to escalate to a call or meeting or e-mail. Why? Having multiple different communication buses seems like a problem as well. Possibly a worse one IMO

If you need a specific list of people engaged in a conversation, you can either:

1) Schedule something in a time slot that works for everyone. Everyone arrives prepared to focus on the conversation and reach a conclusion before returning to work.

2) Ping them in Slack or @channel and try to pry them away from whatever they're working on. Get a mix of half-attention and hurried responses and force your devs to choose whether to continue focusing on their work and risk missing out, or to drop everything and alt-tab over to Slack and try to catch up on the backlog as quick as possible.

Using synchronous comms or e-mail for everything is a mistake, but trying to force everything into asynchronous commons or Slack is just as bad. Know when to use the right tool for each job.

You can get away with a lot of Slack sins in small teams or companies, but try to scale Slack-only communication up to company scale and it's a nightmare. I worked at a company where I would accumulate upwards of 200 (not a typo) Slack notifications every single day because it became a battle ground of people competing for attention and trying to give drive-by input as they rushed on to the next Slack thread. Moving to e-mails forces people to put some minimal thought and prep into organizing their thoughts, which makes all the difference.

> Having multiple different communication buses seems like a problem as well. Possibly a worse one IMO

You have different types of communication. Why would you want to try to force them all into the lowest common denominator medium?

Trying to force everything into Slack is a disaster. Slack is great for real-time, interactive communication. Information has a very short half-life in Slack, though. Once something requires a longer half-life than Slack supports or a more careful handling, you move it to a better medium.

Re: Can Slack-mania be cured with systemized discipline?

#25

Post by tptacek »

I think the answer here is pretty straightforward: run a Discourse board alongside your Slack, and nudge conversations out of the Slack and onto the board. The board works for long-form stuff, and for stuff you need to reference in the future; Slack works for interactivity when you want the interactivity.

We've been doing this for over a year at Fly.io and it's worked out great; I wish every other place I've worked that did a Slack or Slack-like thing did a dual chat/board strat, instead of pretending that chat/email is a serious alternative.

Re: Can Slack-mania be cured with systemized discipline?

#26

Post by thebean11 »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #24
admax88qqq wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but once it becomes a serious conversation with multiple parties you need to escalate to a call or meeting or e-mail. Why? Having multiple different communication buses seems like a problem as well. Possibly a worse one IMO

If you need a specific list of people engaged in a conversation, you can either: 1) Schedule something in a time slot that works for everyone. Everyone arrives prepared to focus on the conversation and reach a conclusion before returning to work. 2) Ping them in Slack or @channel and try to pry them away from whatever they're working on. Get a mix of half-attention and hurried responses and force your devs to choose…

How does email not have the exact same issues? I agree that a meeting might be better though.

Re: Can Slack-mania be cured with systemized discipline?

#27

Post by mandelbrotwurst »

hackandtrip wrote: post #20

To me, it is incredible that Slack is used WITHOUT threads. There is no way that information and discussions can be effective without a threaded conversation - it would just be pure cause otherwise. Also, I find feature-specific channels to be such a pleasure. It's easy to have everyone focused on the same topic in a given channel, without any confusion or missing information between different channels or private mes…

What are "no-focus times"?

Re: Can Slack-mania be cured with systemized discipline?

#28

Post by xeromal »

thebean11 wrote: post #26
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you need a specific list of people engaged in a conversation, you can either: 1) Schedule something in a time slot that works for everyone. Everyone arrives prepared to focus on the conversation and reach a conclusion before returning to work. 2) Ping them in Slack or @channel and try to pry them away from whatever they're working on. Get a mix of half-attention and hurried responses and force your devs to choose…

How does email not have the exact same issues? I agree that a meeting might be better though.

Because email is a snapshot in time. Slack on the other hand can get overwhelmed by noise and most people, myself included, don't go back very far when opening a channel. Emails, on the other, I make sure to read each thread.

Re: Can Slack-mania be cured with systemized discipline?

#29

Post by PragmaticPulp »

thebean11 wrote: post #26
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you need a specific list of people engaged in a conversation, you can either: 1) Schedule something in a time slot that works for everyone. Everyone arrives prepared to focus on the conversation and reach a conclusion before returning to work. 2) Ping them in Slack or @channel and try to pry them away from whatever they're working on. Get a mix of half-attention and hurried responses and force your devs to choose…

How does email not have the exact same issues? I agree that a meeting might be better though.

> How does email not have the exact same issues?

Chat and e-mail have entirely different dynamics. Most people use chat as rapid-fire communication. Most people write e-mail with at least some thought and structure before hitting send. Think sentences versus paragraphs.

You also pick the audience from the start when you fill out the "To" field. With Slack, it can be hard to narrow the audience of a conversation unless you go to private messages (which will be lost to search) or go to threads and only ping the people who need to see it (which is what this article is proposing as their solution)

Re: Can Slack-mania be cured with systemized discipline?

#30

Post by sneak »

tptacek wrote: post #25

I think the answer here is pretty straightforward: run a Discourse board alongside your Slack, and nudge conversations out of the Slack and onto the board. The board works for long-form stuff, and for stuff you need to reference in the future; Slack works for interactivity when you want the interactivity . We've been doing this for over a year at Fly.io and it's worked out great; I wish every other place I've worked…

I think an issue tracker can also be repurposed for this sort of thing if a team doesn't want to run Yet Another Thing. This is what I do.

Practically there is little difference between an issue tracker that supports comments and Discourse, and most teams already have the former.

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