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Slack outage: Connectivity issues affecting all workspaces

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Re: Slack outage: Connectivity issues affecting all workspaces

#251

Post by price »

danmg wrote: post #214
swozey wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technical people who haven't used IRC can barely figure out IRC their first time using it. Trying to sell IRC to a company would be hilarious. Bob in Accounting getting on IRC and feeling comfortable with it's UX?

Then you've never seen the 'hilariously' bad UX they already put up with, with things like Quickbooks. mIRC is pretty straight forward compared to that.

A hypothesis I like is that when it's an application you use to communicate with other people, people are a lot less tolerant of a confusing UX.

The reason is that when you sit there clicking through a bunch of menus to find something in QuickBooks (or a typical atrocious enterprise app), nobody sees you; and if you screw something up there, you spend some more time fixing it and nobody sees the screwup. Frustrating maybe, as you waste time, but almost everyone has some frustrating wastes of time at work.

If you're on IRC and people are talking at you and you sit there fumbling to figure out how to respond, it's like you're in a conversation and tongue-tied and everyone's looking at you. And if you screw something up, like send a message to the wrong channel... now you've done it in front of all your coworkers, in real time. Humans hate looking stupid in front of the group.

And if you screw something up on IRC in front of your coworkers, and you're someone with even a little anxiety about not being tech-savvy... that's going to flare right up.

Also, because now you're embarrassed, you're going to want something to blame. So you blame the tool.

Re: Slack outage: Connectivity issues affecting all workspaces

#252

Post by snom380 »

swozey wrote: post #194
7ewis wrote: post #188

Just as we sign a £100K+/annum contact with them... At least it happened before we've migrated.

There are so many open source solutions, Mattermost, Rocketchat, etc, why are companies willing to pay $100k/yr for Slack? What was the defining feature that others didn't have? Even Discord feels like it has far more features than Slack.

There may not be one defining feature. For some it may be look and feel/attention to detail. It could be the number of well supported Slack integrations, or various enterprise features wrt message retention and deletion, SSO and auditing.

Re: Slack outage: Connectivity issues affecting all workspaces

#253

Post by iv597 »

swozey wrote: post #194
7ewis wrote: post #188

Just as we sign a £100K+/annum contact with them... At least it happened before we've migrated.

There are so many open source solutions, Mattermost, Rocketchat, etc, why are companies willing to pay $100k/yr for Slack? What was the defining feature that others didn't have? Even Discord feels like it has far more features than Slack.

Name recognition, employee familiarity (I've used Slack at every job I've worked since early 2015, I pretty much know what to expect from it always), and punting maintenance costs (this is probably the biggest factor).

I love IRC and XMPP. I'd love to run one of those, or some new service (Matrix?), at work. However, my time is arguably better spent doing anything _other_ than maintaining such services, and the same goes for most engineers at most companies, sadly.

Side factor: the mobile clients for IRC and XMPP almost universally suck, at least on Android. I imagine if those problems had been solved in a reliable way, more companies may consider them (assuming the allocation of engineering resources problem isn't a problem).

Re: Slack outage: Connectivity issues affecting all workspaces

#254

Post by rinchik »

neuromantik8086 wrote: post #54
cimmanom wrote: post #20

What backup methods of communication are distributed teams using when Slack goes down?

My group uses Roman fire signals [1]. [1] http://www.romanobritain.org/8-military/mil_signalling_syste...

this is a greatly underrated comment.

Re: Slack outage: Connectivity issues affecting all workspaces

#255

Post by extra88 »

price wrote: post #251
danmg wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you've never seen the 'hilariously' bad UX they already put up with, with things like Quickbooks. mIRC is pretty straight forward compared to that.

A hypothesis I like is that when it's an application you use to communicate with other people, people are a lot less tolerant of a confusing UX. The reason is that when you sit there clicking through a bunch of menus to find something in QuickBooks (or a typical atrocious enterprise app), nobody sees you; and if you screw something up there, you spend some more time fixing it and nobody sees the screwup. Frustrating…

Yes. Also, QuickBooks is accounting, which is supposed to be hard while "chatting" with people is supposed to be easy.

QuickBooks doesn't have to suffer in comparison to better UX performing similar tasks in people's personal lives while IRC can be compared (unfavorably) to texting apps, Facebook Messenger, Twitter, AIM once upon a time, etc.

Re: Slack outage: Connectivity issues affecting all workspaces

#256

Post by danShumway »

trcollinson wrote: post #203
coryfklein wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about assigning blame, it's about sharing lessons learned with the broader community and being transparent and honest with paying customers about issues that may have significant impact on downstream productivity.

I entirely understand what you are saying, believe me I do. But that is not the way some communities take it. We still see messages like "You could move to Gitlab but... you know they dropped their production database a couple of years back? Use them at your own risk!" We learned a lot from the Gitlab outage. It was a simple mistake and not one they will have again, yet people still beat them up for it. I'm not sure…

Gitlab's response to the the database mistake was a large contributing factor in my decision to move all of my repositories onto their service.

Anecdotal, sure, but people like me exist. I don't know if we're in the majority. You'd have to measure somehow and do a cost-benefit analysis I guess.

Re: Slack outage: Connectivity issues affecting all workspaces

#257

Post by derefr »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #231
derefr wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not about assigning blame for the company writing the post-mortem. But it’s definitely about assigning blame for most people reading the post-mortem. Very few people read post-mortems for the sake of learning how to be better at release engineering and ops.

If I pay for your service, and you are transparent about mistakes and flaws, I will be more forgiving about mistakes and flaws in the future, and appreciate the work you do to fix them. If I pay for your service, and the only communication is, "We know there is a problem, and we'll let you know when it's fixed", I may assume you are not equipped to thoroughly explain the problem, and therefore not well equipped to so…

It’s more the people who don’t pay for the service, but might, that are quickest to see post-mortems in a negative light. The only reason they have for reading them is looking for justifications for culling the product/service from the list of contenders for when they ever have to evaluate solutions in that category.

In other words: post-mortems are good PR, but incredibly bad advertising.

Re: Slack outage: Connectivity issues affecting all workspaces

#258

Post by repolfx »

calcifer wrote: post #210
trcollinson wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I entirely understand what you are saying, believe me I do. But that is not the way some communities take it. We still see messages like "You could move to Gitlab but... you know they dropped their production database a couple of years back? Use them at your own risk!" We learned a lot from the Gitlab outage. It was a simple mistake and not one they will have again, yet people still beat them up for it. I'm not sure…

On the contrary, I would trust them quite a bit less, not more, if they had an hours long outage without any explanation .

Perhaps - but would you even remember it, without the juicy details of what happened? I probably would forget if some service had a few hours downtime a year or two ago, if I didn't know any details to make it stand out from other outages.

Re: Slack outage: Connectivity issues affecting all workspaces

#259

Post by sanderjd »

ummonk wrote: post #166
sanderjd wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about the protocols, it's about having a client with a user experience that is acceptable to an entire company rather than just a team of engineers. Which decentralized protocol has such a client? (Speaking as someone who got burned trying to advocate for IRC at a company that eventually and inevitably switched to Slack.)

Curious why you got burned with IRC client UX given the multitude of clients available for it.

The multitude of clients is one of the problems! How do you find them? Which one do you use? What features matter? Nobody knows! They just want a product with chat rooms and don't understand why it seems so hard to do seemingly simple stuff like create an account or search for that link that someone posted a month ago.

Re: Slack outage: Connectivity issues affecting all workspaces

#260

Post by sanderjd »

tapoxi wrote: post #159
sanderjd wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about the protocols, it's about having a client with a user experience that is acceptable to an entire company rather than just a team of engineers. Which decentralized protocol has such a client? (Speaking as someone who got burned trying to advocate for IRC at a company that eventually and inevitably switched to Slack.)

There's plenty of decent XMPP clients, like Spark ( https://igniterealtime.org/projects/spark/ ) but they'd take an IT team to configure. Matrix has Riot ( https://riot.im/app ) but personally I find it incredibly confusing.

I'll have to take a look at Spark.

I don't think it's a problem if something needs to be initially deployed and configured by an IT department (or otherwise tech savvy individual or group), as long as its onboarding and primary usage flows are straightforward. An arbitrary non-tech-savvy but internet-familiar employee needs to be able to create an account, browse and join rooms, and search through history without any hand-holding. Slack and its direct competitors pass this test. IRC doesn't. Does Spark?

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