Unslacking Tideways Company • Hacker News Board

Re: Unslacking Tideways Company

#31

Post by village-idiot » Sun, Oct 28, 2018, 5:10 PM UTC

I know everyone has their own take on why slack is bad. From the interruption factor to Electron using all their memory. For me, the issue is that it gives teams a false sense about their tech debt.

In every case I've seen, Slack slowly replaces persistent documentation. Every issue one runs into can be resolved with a quick @here to the proper channel, or a DM to the tamer of Eldritch horrors (every company has one). This reduces the incentive to eliminate footguns or properly document everything, because look at us being all collaborative and solving problems together!

The smell for this behavior is having to search Slack for that last time someone helped you solve your problem. Slack is a great way to spread information, but it's a terrible tool to organize and store information.

Re: Unslacking Tideways Company

#32

Post by goatherders » Sun, Oct 28, 2018, 5:11 PM UTC

With the fire of 1000 suns I despise Slack. Aside from the interruptions it creates (which is not exclusive to Slack admittedly) the PC version of the app is a resource hog. So is the android mobile version.

Re: Unslacking Tideways Company

#33

Post by IshKebab » Sun, Oct 28, 2018, 5:11 PM UTC

Sounds like he could have saved a whole lot of hassle just by removing some slack bots and using threads.

Re: Unslacking Tideways Company

#34

Post by jgelsey » Sun, Oct 28, 2018, 5:13 PM UTC

I don't understand why folks want less information by eliminating Slack. I've adopted Slack and 2 companies so far and find it a tremendous performance optimizer. It's a tool for passively receiving info by choice about many things, and for efficient conversations - especially with folks not sitting next to me - about specific things that are important to me.

FWIW my impressions is hatred of Slack is more a hatred of "I can't control by impulse to read everything so it's a tremendous time waster." Slack's not the problem, it's the person's self-control that's the problem in these situations.

Re: Unslacking Tideways Company

#35

Post by beberlei » Sun, Oct 28, 2018, 5:13 PM UTC

sdan wrote: post #7

Definitely agree with your decision. After leaving slack entirely from a robotics team and a science club, our productively increased. No longer were we going off topic wasting precious time and making everyone in the channel read every 500+ messages some people engaged in. We instead chose to make more plans during meetings and through direct chat (Messenger). However, Slack is usefull for forums such as donkeycar.s…

Author here. I agree about forums and "hobbyiest communities". I had a paragraph on this in the post, and how I manage them by muting most of the channels and reading up later. Removed the paragraph for simplicity :-)

Meetings are also bad productivity killer and if you are co-located in an office you must be careful not to summon ad-hoc meetings that interrupt one participant from their deep work.

Re: Unslacking Tideways Company

#36

Post by goatherders » Sun, Oct 28, 2018, 5:14 PM UTC

Kaveren wrote: post #6

Some form of communication that's reasonable to be real-time is important. Slack is one of the better options for this. It makes much more sense to change the expectations / culture surrounding Slack usage at a company than to drop it outright. You can use Slack and related applications for asynchronous communication in direct messages. On the other hand, I don't want to have to wait multiple hours for a reply when I…

What's wrong with the phone as a real-time communication tool?

Re: Unslacking Tideways Company

#37

Post by hw » Sun, Oct 28, 2018, 5:17 PM UTC

dvtrn wrote: post #4

Slack makes this very difficult and at least for me, is a primary cause of anxiety and fear of missing out I unironically wonder how widespread this problem is among the specific group of people who blame their lack of productivity on Slack, or failing that, how many people would admit their FOMO is enhanced by chat apps. So many of the "productivity killing" problems I hear people griping about with Slack aren't rea…

> Things are going to get missed

Hit the nail on the head here. Things will get missed. The nice thing about Slack is that you can at least catch up with some conversations you missed at the end of day or in your free time. When you miss an IRL meeting, it's much harder to catch up. FOMO will be an even bigger problem when people start setting up meetings, especially ones where you aren't invited to or you can't attend because you're in another meeting.

Re: Unslacking Tideways Company

#38

Post by beberlei » Sun, Oct 28, 2018, 5:17 PM UTC

jgelsey wrote: post #34

I don't understand why folks want less information by eliminating Slack. I've adopted Slack and 2 companies so far and find it a tremendous performance optimizer. It's a tool for passively receiving info by choice about many things, and for efficient conversations - especially with folks not sitting next to me - about specific things that are important to me. FWIW my impressions is hatred of Slack is more a hatred of…

Author here. You might be right, we could be using Slack wrong. But have you read the book "Hooked"? The author writes about Slack here: https://www.nirandfar.com/2014/11/slack.html - Slack is built to addict people to use it. I don't want to fight against that, I want to have tools that support my workflow.

Re: Unslacking Tideways Company

#39

Post by orliesaurus » Sun, Oct 28, 2018, 5:17 PM UTC

Well Slack might have not worked for you. It doesn't work for everyone! Probably it works the worst for devs? Here is a story. I was working with a team of couple people located in different corners of the city. Everyone is remote except two who share an office. Up until a month ago everything was done over email. Sometimes you would send an email and get a reply in minutes, other times after hours. This was highly inefficient, to the point where I would call people to ask them to open emails... Guess what happened since we installed Slack and a couple of general open channels?

Re: Unslacking Tideways Company

#40

Post by dmarlow » Sun, Oct 28, 2018, 5:18 PM UTC

a13n wrote: post #19

Check out Twist. https://twist.com I have no affiliation with the company/team, but love the product so much that I want to share it here! The whole idea behind Twist is to be a team communication that doesn't have the productivity issues Slack does. I think it's a very well positioned and timed product. We've been using it for months at our startup, Canny. Threads are a useful level of organization, such that it's a…

I've always thought that things ought to be thread based, much like forums today are. I'm not sure how I feel yet about how twist does their interface. I'd like to see things more like traditional forums, but incorporate Slack-like features.