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The Problem with Slack at Scale

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Re: The Problem with Slack at Scale

#71

Post by bengale »

It feels to me that the type of communication slack is used for can't scale to a huge company, rather than it being a tooling issue. It's useful to be able to pull disparate people into a channel when working on a project, or to be able to find someone from another team to ask a question. But, expecting people to be able to discuss things with everyone from a large organisation all of the time just seems destined for failure.

At a certain size it probably makes sense to have actual humans in each department working out what communication needs to flow to the rest of the organisation and moving it in a different tool. Maybe links to those "publications" are posted in an all hands channel that most people have muted until they're ready to sit down and catch up with what everybody else is doing, but I can't imagine a situation where they should be getting notifications in real time about it.

Re: The Problem with Slack at Scale

#72

Post by norman784 »

hexo wrote: post #67

I cant believe I read Slack and fast in one sentence. We use mattermost and its mostly OK to the point i'm willing to use it which cannot be said about Slack. Forcing me to have Slack open all the time was reason I left a job. It was unbearable.

I think is fast if you compare with the other products mentioned, I hope they get their shit together (Slack and Teams) and build a real native app that is fast and use a lot less ram.

Re: The Problem with Slack at Scale

#73

Post by norman784 »

peterbonney wrote: post #27

It’s wild that Google, despite being the leader in startup email/business software and literally giving their Slack competitor to everyone for free as part of their Google Business subscription, STILL has such low mindshare in this space that it didn’t even merit a mention in the blog post. (Full disclosure: my company used Google Chat, and I find the integration ecosystem so pitiful that I’m constantly thinking abou…

I think the issue (read on HN a lot of comments about the subject) is that there is no unified vision/goal inside Google, there are a lot of teams with different goals and visions, but it seems that the most common goal for their employees is to get enough merits to get promoted, forget about the old project and jump into a new one (because new things give you merits to continue climbing).

I could be wrong, with no insight information this was my conclusion after reading comments and also seen too many products killed by Google, even releasing new worst products to replace old ones that were better.

Re: The Problem with Slack at Scale

#74

Post by pjmlp »

diarrhea wrote: post #68
pjmlp wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to hate Slack, then I got involved with some projects that require Teams,....

It's baffling the degree to which Teams doesn't work on a purely technical basis, before UI and UX even come into play. Half an hour ago I accepted an invitation to join a Team. Logged into MS in the browser, checked remember me , and then... a naked JSON response. It had a field "result", value "Success". Good! What now? Nothing else happened. I firmly believe Teams is only usable if you're a Microsoft shop (don't e…

Microsoft shops are one of our customer bases, and that doesn't make me like Teams any better.

I cannot understand how the Teams team does their product management.

Re: The Problem with Slack at Scale

#75

Post by happymellon »

senko wrote: post #70
happymellon wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm always curious about how different teams have "solved" whiteboarding with distributed teams, as they are normally then not whiteboarding but using a collaborative diagramming tool which is much too restrictive. The closest I've found is making sure everyone has a decent sized tablet and using Google Jam.

Miro works well for this, you don't need to use it as a diagramming tool. AWW was awesome at this, free-form drawing was the default, you'd just doodle whatever you wanted, no structure required.

I disagree about Miro, it is definitely a diagramming tool.

Jam is shared Paintbrush, so everyone sketches like a whiteboard which sounds like the AWW you mention.

Re: The Problem with Slack at Scale

#76

Post by another-dave »

Dave3of5 wrote: post #65

I'm actually really interesting in this. What are the top 3 things you could change in slack / teams that would make you switch. I'll go first: * Notifications settings are annoying I'm either swamped with notifications or miss them. I want to be able to switch of notifications for short periods * I want to group discussions about certain things. I.e. if we are discussing a JIRA issue I can select the message and gro…

Notifications need to be more intelligent — if Mary rarely posts in a channel (or joined the channel just to post) it might be worth more attention than John who keeps pressing enter mid stream of consciousness.

If you've a long running channel like a "developers channel" it probably has some bot integrations — "the last PR failed linting". It should be possible to mute these without muting the whole channel.

A lot of problems come down to company culture though. I think the hard work of fostering good practices is something outside of a tool's remit.

Maybe it should be a point on people's annual review if you want to get people to use it as less of a rubbish bin. "Sorry Peter, you won't get a pay rise this year as you sent an at-channel message to the team every day in Feb even when we told you that was really disruptive"(!) Most places don't care about these efficiencies enough though (yet). E.g. if people were as wasteful with company expense accounts as they are with other people's attention it would definitely get sorted out.

Re: The Problem with Slack at Scale

#77

Post by maarf »

rtpg wrote: post #50

I think Twist is the right answer. It's basically a forum, which is nice because: - people have to write "real messages", with a beginning, middle, and end. Subject line. - Doesn't suffer from e-mail's "I wasn't on the original to/cc" problem where information is completely silo'd by default - Messages by default need to be categorized and a bit organized. Less of a firehose E-mail gets a lot of shit, but from my exp…

I use Twist daily and it seems abandoned. There are few UI/UX problems that hurt me constantly and I don't remember when was the last time the app was updated.

Re: The Problem with Slack at Scale

#78

Post by michaelt »

onion2k wrote: post #33
FullyFunctional wrote: post #20

We adopted Slack and I hate it but use daily. What I find so frustrating with Slack is that it's 1. Super terrible at threading. Threads are clearly discouraged and don't nest. This appears to be by design, but even Usenet handled threading better. 2. Slack is an information wastebasket - at least in my experience it's really hard to find information once there's a significant traffic in a deployment. 3. Too Much Not…

Slack is a tool, and like all tools it can be used badly. You work at a company that uses it badly. - No one should be using Slack for deep, branching conversations that require nested threads. Those would be lost and hard to refer back to in any system. Learn to separate and focus on things better. - Slack is not a documentation system or a knowledge base, and shouldn't be treated like one. Pull salient points out o…

> You work at a company that uses it badly [...] Learn to separate and focus on things better.

Maybe, but it's not within my power to change the behaviour of dozens or hundreds of other people, none of whom report to me.

So if I join a company where Slack is a shitty experience, I'm going to have a shitty experience with it - even if the company is "holding it wrong"

Re: The Problem with Slack at Scale

#79

Post by chiefalchemist »

Not to get off topic but the problem I find (consistently) with online comms (i.e., email, Slack, Teams, FB Groups, LinkedIn, etc.) is subpar human to human communication skills.

Typically, adding (unnecessary) friction is: vagueness or ambiguity. We can't read each others' minds. We're not sitting in each other's seats / moments. My current context (i.e., what I'm focused on) has influence on where my thought process can go next. Dropping your without-warning thought bomb in the middle of that without a hint of context is too assuming. Assumption-based Comms creates unnecessary noise and friction.

And yes, these missteps at scale certainly don't help.

Re: The Problem with Slack at Scale

#80

Post by kranke155 »

onion2k wrote: post #33
FullyFunctional wrote: post #20

We adopted Slack and I hate it but use daily. What I find so frustrating with Slack is that it's 1. Super terrible at threading. Threads are clearly discouraged and don't nest. This appears to be by design, but even Usenet handled threading better. 2. Slack is an information wastebasket - at least in my experience it's really hard to find information once there's a significant traffic in a deployment. 3. Too Much Not…

Slack is a tool, and like all tools it can be used badly. You work at a company that uses it badly. - No one should be using Slack for deep, branching conversations that require nested threads. Those would be lost and hard to refer back to in any system. Learn to separate and focus on things better. - Slack is not a documentation system or a knowledge base, and shouldn't be treated like one. Pull salient points out o…

The UX of an application defines behaviour.
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