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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

#121

Post by FalconSensei »

thrower123 wrote: post #27
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.

The problem with Slack-alikes is that you get buried under a deluge of notifications, so it is needlessly difficult to stay on top of things. Email is far better in this regard.

I only have notification for DMs, @'s and threads I'm following. No problem so far.

Now, if someone sends me an email, it might get buried between other stuff

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

#122

Post by FalconSensei »

runarberg wrote: post #33
Raphmedia wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uninstall it from your phone? Turn off notifications? Make a work profile on your android and get off it once your shift ends? I use Slack daily and I've never brought it home with me.

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.

If you don't have you work computer at home, you will not see Slack at home. If you install a work app on your personal phone, that's not Slack's fault.

The same pressure to check Slack on your personal phone on your off-time would be applied to work email, sms, or whatever it's used instead of slack

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

#123

Post by closeparen »

cratermoon wrote: post #65
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…

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…

When you force the company to use your custom internal platform instead of an industry standard, it's only fair that you become responsible for providing the instant answers they would otherwise get from Google and Stackoverflow.

Interruption is a feature. If we let our platform teams get into the zone and code too much, they'd NIH our damn editors. It's important to have support burden as a brake on the development of custom crap, and a thumb on the scale in favor of deploying tools that a) developers might already know, b) the internet definitely knows, and c) are higher quality and more capable than even the brightest team with your budget could create.

We have support channels for our Redis and MySQL installations. It is crickets in there. But the people who write a custom NoSQL are rightfully getting slammed 24x7.

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

#124

Post by DangitBobby »

denimnerd42 wrote: post #81
paxys wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are definitely the non-vocal majority.

or the one still in the honeymoon period.

I have been using chat tools for in-office work for 2 years and more recently at home work for another 2 years. I am well past the honeymoon period for these chat tools, and I quite like them.

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

#125

Post by StavrosK »

FalconSensei wrote: post #118
StavrosK wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

The reason I don't like threads is that I can't expand a thread without seeing it in the sidebar. That's so effing annoying.

Yeah, they really botched the implementation of such an essential feature.

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

#126

Post by sleepysysadmin »

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…

I think this is very wise. Slack as the scapegoat isn't quite correct, the actual root cause is how they used it.

>Speaking of the example in the article, there is absolutely no reason clients should have direct message channels with your company's employees and expect to get a response 24/7. This is true with email, Slack, SMS and every other form of communication.

the craziness is that without slack this client would have still done this. I've had clients with my personal cellphone # printed out and put in the server room 'for emergencies only' but I'd have managers call me in the middle of the night because their helpdesk hasnt responded to their problem yet.

I was effectively on-call 24/7 and couldnt go do anything.

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

#127

Post by runarberg »

FalconSensei wrote: post #122
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.

If you don't have you work computer at home, you will not see Slack at home. If you install a work app on your personal phone, that's not Slack's fault. The same pressure to check Slack on your personal phone on your off-time would be applied to work email, sms, or whatever it's used instead of slack

There is a slight difference. Slack is used by workers for personal social interactions as well. For many workers Slack is as much a social media tool as it is a work tool. Many workers actually prefer to have slack open during off work hours to share memes with their work buddies.

Even for workers that don’t engage in social activities over slack normally might install it to their personal devices during a conference because that is where their colleagues are conversing, and then simply forget to uninstall it after the conference is done.

A workplace has to be aware that this is how normal people use this tool, and needs to make sure that no one misuses this access to workers during off hours.

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

#128

Post by andrei_says_ »

FalconSensei wrote: post #119
andrei_says_ wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slack expects you to look at slack during your work hours - and robs you from the focus needed for deep work. Or, you do deep work, and lose on the decisions, chatter made in real time. Slack turns the working environment to an equivalent of n open office where everyone chatters all of the time. Good luck doing anything else.

Slack doesn't expect you to do anything. Your coworkers do. People don't interrupt me on Slack, simply because Slack doesn't jump in front of my IDE. When I see a notification dot and have time, I'll look at it and reply

I don’t mind the pedantry; the issue I’m pointing out is that people will not wait for you to chime in but will make their decisions and move on. Because slack as a chat encourages that attitude.

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

#130

Post by denton-scratch »

Nimitz14 wrote: post #103
bitdotdash wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Worked fine where I worked. You know you can turn notifications off? You know you can tell a sales guy he's being annoying?

We were banned by management from turning off notifications.
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