41–50 of 62 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even less extreme, I worked at an all remote company that primarily used Skype (pre-Slack). I don't want to go back to that.
Skype had one benefit: it was easier to add folks to your DM. Other than that, Slack is better. It's essentially Skype++ for us. Bots ... well they never really did much.
> It’s a bit like the way everyone gravitates towards the kitchen at a house party. I've solved this problem by dimming or turning off the lights in all the rooms I don't want people to hang out in and having brighter lighting in the room I want people to stay in. It works wonders.
> It’s a bit like the way everyone gravitates towards the kitchen at a house party. I've solved this problem by dimming or turning off the lights in all the rooms I don't want people to hang out in and having brighter lighting in the room I want people to stay in. It works wonders.
Do people not turn them back on?
I'm very distractible, and I get on fine with Slack. I genuinely feel work is easier with it, you just have to aggressively filter the attention-grabbing. My strategy is: notifications for mentions and ultra-important channels only, mute any channel I don't want to definitely read all of (joining a channel and immediately muting is common for me), disable the unread dot completely for non-primary teams, and unsubscri…
OP here. Iit's telling that so many people are commenting in this thread about how Slack isn't that bad because you can customize it to be less attention-grabbing. The fact remains that Slack is engineered to be attention-grabbing out of the box. Sure you can tweak it to make it less shouty, but Slack is still a product that is sold for money by a company. It's not in their interests to make it align with your existi…
But this is kind of an absurd critism. Who wants a real-time business-oriented operations chat system where you don't know about incoming messages by default? Can you imagine people complaining about not knowing about new messages for minutes and support staff having to inform people that you have to turn those on manually? Slack wasn't engineered to suck you in, it's acting in the only rational and useful default for what it is, a standard established by every chat client I've ever heard of before it. It would have been a product that didn't work by default. If slack was missing a seeing you wanted, I could understand, but at some point you're just blaming a chat tool for being optimal for chats because your organization wants you to respond unreasonably quickly or because you're not muting channels or snoozing or not using the settings to the fullest.
It seems we should have at least as much to show as other forms of group comms tools.
Re urgency : same applies. a group should set standards for urgency based on various human and project needs. Point is these should be set my people not the tool.
When does a conversation stop being about a tool or a platform and become about how it's used? Slack is not perfectly opinionated. It does not enforce a single way of working on everyone that uses it. One of the weakest areas I have found on HN has been discussion around organizations and how they function. New tools, like Slack, open new doors, but they are not silver bullets. Switching to Slack doesn't solve inhere…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
OP here. I think the problem is that when tools like Slack are engineered in such a way as to make people dependent on their product, it's unfair to expect users to accept all the responsibility of mitigating against that. Software companies aren't using organizational productivity as a benchmark for their success, just usage statistics. So no, Slack doesn't enforce a single way of working, but it is engineered to co…
> I think the problem is that when tools like Slack are engineered in such a way as to make people dependent on their product It's a chat client. It's an addictive medium. It sounds to me like you're shooting the messenger. Skype, Hangouts, or any IM client wants your attention. Slack is just a better version of all the other IM clients I've used (for work). If you don't want to be disturbed you close Slack. I suspec…
Does that strike you as low, or about the normal expected amount?
Mute all the channels. Ignore messages that don't matter. Configure it to notify you if someone mentions "lunch". Done. Coworkers aren't your friends. Don't have FOMO on their Slack postings.
Also, people swear they can multi-task just fine, when in fact they can't. Just like people swear they only need 4 hours of sleep. It's strange, but very few people say "Hey, I eat 300g of sugar each day, and my body loves it! That's just the way I am. Whatever works for you, right?" But when it comes to cognitive performance, it's as if the human brain is so diverse that there are no behaviors that objectively impede cognitive functioning in all cases. Multi-tasking always makes everyone less productive. It lowers your (effective) IQ. It makes you slow and dumb. It is also an objective fact that those who multi-task are generally unaware about their drop in cognitive performance. [ * ]
Also, there is a bit of a technological bias here. If you were to ask someone what is the worst possible kind of work meeting, they would tell you that it's the meeting that has no clear agenda, no one seems to be in charge, everyone is piping in with whatever's on their mind, and there is no well-defined stop period so the meeting goes on until no one has anything left to chime in about. Basically, Slack.
I wouldn't volunteer to attend a meeting just for fun, nor would I sign up for an open office floorplan, so why spend half the day in a virtual chat when I have work to do.
Once I'm done working, then I can meet with friends at a restaurant or bar, or be on social media.