We Tried Slack and Regretted It

Here's the problem I have with this:

1. You have an organization (can't tell if for profit or non-for-profit) that explicitly states that it helps people "become a Software Engineer".

2. Yet, one of the organizers of the company (?) states "we blithely shepherded 300 to 500 new campers into our Slack every day, hopeful that this messaging company, now worth $2.8 billion, would hire more engineers to flog their LAMP stack application into shape."

Thanks for this...you're now creating a culture of developers who "blithely" makes architectural decisions with little proper thought and publicly trash technology choices (in this case, LAMP).

EDIT: Upon further review it looks like the person in question has a bit of an agenda...

http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-pros-and-cons-of-MEAN-java...

http://www.quora.com/Having-built-web-stuff-the-old-way-PHP-...

I appreciate that people are stepping up to the plate and getting more people involved in coding, but this is seriously dogmatic and potentially harmful.

I authored this blog post. There is a lot of merit to your criticisms of my decision making.

I want to point out that communities are increasingly using Slack, and many of them are also in the thousands of users. Slack does nothing to discourage this, aside from posting warnings about archiving messages.

The real problem is that they have an undocumented user limit. Like I said, I'm pretty sure we're the first community to hit this limit.

Big online courses, for example, routinely draw 100,000s of students, and might make the same mistake we did (Harvard's CS50 class did).

Slack may be able to fix its sluggishness for these other communities, and someone might build integrations that routinely export then delete messages so as to stay below the 10,000 message limit and remove the warnings. But it's too late for us. We can't pause our community growth while we wait for Slack to engineer around their undisclosed user limit. So we have no alternative but to switch.

The main reason I wrote this post is to provide a cautionary tale to other open-membership organizations who are considering using Slack. Slack doesn't seem to be intended to do this! Please don't do this!

I love reading stories like this. While it could have been worded better, it's important to share information about migration failures, so that other people can learn from them. When done right, it's called a postmortem. We need more of them.

I also think it's proper to point out that bandwagon effects played a role. Marketing shouldn't be used an excuse to skip due diligence, but in practice, it's often a factor in bad decisions.

Their first clue that maybe this was an issue is they had to hack an undocumented API to even get people onto the system. Slack is going to need to do something about this because they're increasingly being used for communities of strangers around a common interest.

Despite Slack doing everything they can to discourage this use case, there's a clear need there which Slack is filling. I'm currently part of 3 separate slack groups where this is the case. Either a "Slack for communities" forms to absorb that niche or Slack needs to start thinking of a service offering for these communities because they aren't going to go away and they're going to complain as vocally as free code camp when they don't get their way.

So I go to an all you can eat buffet, and stuff my face until I literally burst. "Hey it was written there clear as day!"