Our Week Without Slack

As someone having an IRC client open while working since around 15 years this is so mindboggling. (Well, everything regarding the buzz about Slack and how it's a replacement for email, no it's the best thing since sliced bread, no wait, it's horrible.. etc.pp)

Why yes, of course you need to restrain yourself from chatting all day. And learn to ignore people or tell them you're not able to talk to them right now - but it can still be immensely helpful to have your network of people available to help you solve your problems - because you're also helping them solve their problems from time to time.

I disagree with the article. Slack is invaluable for my needs as a software engineer. However, none of the people mentioned in the article are software engineers.

Different jobs require different levels and forms of collaboration. Maybe collaboration between journalists can and should take a different form than Slack. That doesn't seem very surprising to me.

> I felt a little bit like I was a freelancer again, which I think was kind of the point ... a lot of us are writers who ended up weighing in on every single little thing in Slack because it felt like that was our job when really it probably isn't.

Over analysis leads to paralyzation, which isn't necessarily a Slack problem. Sounds more like they are blaming the messenger rather than themselves, which is exceedingly easy to do in this day and age.

There's a similar argument made for gun legislation, where the restriction in distribution of guns leads to less violence. People are still responsible for their actions, but other people's actions (such as turning off Slack) lead to greater awareness that those actions will not be tolerated in a social group.

It's about what I expected in effect. Very distracting. There's something to be said for making out-of-band communications easier than whatever is usually hard but still take work to reduce frivilous comms. My GPG I use for some chit-chat but mostly important conversations. The reason is that it's a pain in the ass to use. I have to work to send a message. Even easier ones with passwords and such still take work. So, maybe take a little trouble to set up a thread with an expiration that drops out of it in an hour or 30 minutes or something. They'll get trained to only use the tool for things that matter and to know if they receive something in it that it probably matters.

Only surprise was in the presentation where I forgot Adrianne was the writer as I read content first followed by author. Gets me to the goods plus eliminates various biases. I thought, "What a bizarre response to a question about how Slack worked for their organization. Is this person trolling the feedback form?" Lol.

Anyway, I think it was a nice reminder that it's best to make interviewer's questions stand out from the answers. A good, design pattern. One I recall was, before Q&A begins, to say something like "interviewer's questions in (color here)" with the rest a different color. I figured it out by the second statement with that name that I was reading the interview questions but it mentally interrupted flow in an otherwise good presentation. So, still worth mentioning and trying to avoid in the future.

(Per the picture in the article) I don't think they pack them in close enough at those desks