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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?

#61

Post by philip1209 »

stavros wrote: post #60
philip1209 wrote: post #47

I'm tired of constant chatting. Slack encourages quick, stream-of-consciousness, short responses. Plus, it's hard to find past discussion, and it's hard to jump in after being gone for a few days (or, even a few hours). Threads are absolutely the answer. But, the defaults matter - Slack isn't encouraging threaded, long-form messages. Instead, it makes all messages feel urgent - and it makes the cost of sending a mess…

Zulip solves the problem you mention extremely well.

I hadn't seen this - I'll check it out. Thanks!

Self-hosted software has its benefits. But, it's inaccessible to a lot of groups. So, I'm intentionally building more of a managed product. Controlling the deployment end-to-end will allow setting up new features more easily such as inbound email parsing.

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

#62

Post by stavros »

philip1209 wrote: post #61
stavros wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zulip solves the problem you mention extremely well.

I hadn't seen this - I'll check it out. Thanks! Self-hosted software has its benefits. But, it's inaccessible to a lot of groups. So, I'm intentionally building more of a managed product. Controlling the deployment end-to-end will allow setting up new features more easily such as inbound email parsing.

Agreed, I guess that's why Zulip has a managed version as well.

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

#63

Post by dllthomas »

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…

At a previous company we added an emoji that meant "this needs to be captured somewhere better than Slack", and those would be surfaced in a channel, and then links would be added in response as things were actually moved out.

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

#64

Post by nescioquid »

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…

> Casual, asynchronous chat is great ...

I'm in the lead-weight-dragging tail (working in a bank using Teams, but dealt with this at the last job in Slack as well). The major hassle seems to be getting people to understand this is asynchronous communication (perpetrators are both developers and executives) and this problem seems to stand before the rest of the more sophisticated complaints evinced here can be even addressed.

A: Hello B.

[... typing/waiting animation]

B: Hi.

A: Good afternoon.

B: All clear for transmission, A. What's going on?

[... now B is derailed, waiting several minutes for A to compose his thoughts and type and edit them]

For all the pseudo UX voodoo we go through, can we not do something to give a hint that this is not a fucking phone conversation or something that requires a Q code? Or am I exiled to some benighted colony? Why is this not the first-order problem to be dealt with?

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

#65

Post by dariusj18 »

For me Slack did not replace email, it replaced Instant Messenger. It replaced standing up from my desk and walking into another office to ask a question that I ether needed the answer to now, or never.

EDIT: I hate how all these code projects have their own Slack though, it's super annoying and has been a horrible way to engage with the community and get answers to questions. (Discord too)

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

#66

Post by ydant »

notreallyserio wrote: post #43
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…

> To me, it is incredible that Slack is used WITHOUT threads. The first time information you need is sent in a thread that started a week ago and that you're not already on, you'll get why folks don't like Slack threads. They're an anti-feature, IMO. If Slack offered a way to show all messages whether or not they're in a thread, as they come in, I'd be down. I wouldn't like 'em but at least I could work around their…

And it's such a simple option to add, too - as far as I can tell, each message in a thread is just a message in the channel, just with a "threadId" attached to it. The client's the one that hides it and makes a mess of the experience.

But what it really needs is elevating threads to something like a temporary "sub-channel". Show them on the side-bar just like channels so you don't lose messsages CONSTANTLY if you're in more than 1 active thread at a time.

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

#67

Post by xyzzy_plugh »

munchbunny wrote: post #41

My main gripe with so much of the communication moving to Slack is that a lot of highly technical discussion moves into synchronous chat, and that removes the expectation which email often carried that the author spends time organizing their thoughts into clear linear writing. Of course emails don't always come out coherently either, but my personal experience has been that moving into the streamed sentences model ov…

I think this is on the money.

Often in my career I find myself on the other side of an opinion after noodling on it for a while. The process of typing out a long-winded email, realizing the hole in your argument, then saying Fuck It, deleting it and instead replying LGTM, is a powerful instrument.

Everyone wins when discourse is more thoughtful.

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

#68

Post by d0gsg0w00f »

e2021 wrote: post #3

One of the things I miss working at Facebook is the internal FB (called Workplace). It basically replaced email for the whole company, and worked really well for long form posts where maybe you would write some proposal up or make an announcement and get a bunch of comments. I now work at a slack centric company, and it just doesn't compare - there is no 'newsfeed', so unless you remember to check all the channels, y…

We had Yammer at my last job and it was a pretty good forum for stuff like this.

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

#69

Post by bogota »

no. Slack sucks and I don't think companies realize just how much time and energy it wastes. I am lucky if I can get one day of focused programming in anymore. Most days I am exhausted from constant interrupts and when I finally do get time at the end of the day I am completely spent.

Everyone needs a personal guide through AWS/K8s/Infra Tool when about 50% of the time we have internal documentation answering the questions that are linked to at the top of the channel. Another 40% of questions could be figured out with light googling and 5 minutes of reading. The last 10% are legit questions around issues we have in our environment or require a deep knowledge of how the systems work together.

But hey. If companies want to pay me to babysit lazy developers I'll do it for a good price. I'm fairly close to leaving the company at this point but this seems to happen at every company I have been at once you get to a few hundred developers and my motivation has been completely sapped.

Slack is for leeches.

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

#70

Post by PikachuEXE »

philip1209 wrote: post #47

I'm tired of constant chatting. Slack encourages quick, stream-of-consciousness, short responses. Plus, it's hard to find past discussion, and it's hard to jump in after being gone for a few days (or, even a few hours). Threads are absolutely the answer. But, the defaults matter - Slack isn't encouraging threaded, long-form messages. Instead, it makes all messages feel urgent - and it makes the cost of sending a mess…

I have tried Zulip but I think Twist has better UX & UI.

https://twist.com/slack-alternative

Supported by Doist which also supports Todoist which I am using

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