I dunno. I use Slack for a couple of groups as well as my full-time remote work.<p>I turn off all notifications & just check from time to time. I have a project manager who tends to pester me with DMs a little too much, but if I'm trying to concentrate I just turn it off.<p>I'm 50 years old & still "pre-internet" in much of my thinking, but I don't have a smartphone, turn off ALL notifications and then turn them on one-by-one on a need only basis, and still can't figure out why people have so much trouble managing their internet lives.<p>It's not the tool that's causing your problems.
It seems to be trendy to blame Slack for all the ills of modern civilization. Is it the somewhat smug tone of all Slack's corporate communication? Maybe. Other than that, it seems to me to be more or less the same general bucket of telegrams, telephone calls, pages, texts, emails, etc. that each preceding generation has blamed on their inability to focus. If you can't resist distractions, whether it's Slack, or watching the ducks in the pond through the window, yes, you should close the blinds. I don't know why this rated a post on Medium...
I agree with OP. Slack is like watercooler, on steroids.<p>I guess having occasional spontaneous watercooler conversations may be good for getting to know your peers better, but in a lot of cases watercooler conversations result in clique behaviors.<p>Slack takes this to whole new level. People hang around on slack channels posting animated Gifs and chatting all day, on topics that have nothing to do with work.<p>The problem with this is you have to keep up all day with the chatter or otherwise you get left out as an "outsider" (the clique effect).<p>Sometimes I would see these people talk behind backs of people who they know are not part of the group. This creates office politics. I know because I saw it first hand.<p>Lastly, there's nothing worse than penalizing people for working hard and not participating in meaningless gossip and chatter all day.
Slack is not hard to ignore. As I've mentioned in previous threads:<p>* Mute all channels.<p>* Take long periods of time to respond to people. Trust me, this isn't ever going to lead to any sense of shame.<p>* Set yourself to away most of the time.<p>* Disable gifs.<p>* Set notifications for keywords like "lunch" and "meeting".<p>* Disable the icon badge. (the red dot if you're using macOS)<p>Now you can be productive with Slack.<p>I know all these things are designed to grab our attention but, seriously, have some agency in your life. Deciding to go "offline" is perfectly legitimate, but I do think Slack can be easily used in a way that doesn't waste time.
Do this at your own peril. The most important part of your job as an engineer is politics, not engineering. You might think that blocking out pointless meetings and other useless distractions will help you to focus on actual engineering. What you'll find is that within mere weeks, others are taking credit for your work. Before you know it, you will be sidelined and marginalized, and no meaningful work will be assigned to you. Never turn your back to your coworkers.
I don't get that, really.<p>For at least a couple of decades there has generally been some internal instant messaging system at whichever company I've worked for. Nerds used to like plain local IRC server. In some places the expected tool was Windows Messenger despite it sucked bad and kept disconnecting. Slack is just another communication system: if you have problems with Slack you're likely to have problems with any messaging system if you configure them to allow interrupting your work.<p>The very reason I've personally always preferred online communications for anything non-urgent at work is because nobody gets to interrupt me and I get to check messages when I have an idle moment. The alternative is face-to-face communication which means someone is interrupting you at your desk several times a day which I ten times worse.<p>I currently use Slack over their irc gateway which works just fine. I have an Slack-connected irc client running in one tmux window and when I have time I can easily see if someone called for me or if the team channel has new activity.
While this may be great for him, this is probably counter-productive for the org -- and he's preparing to be left out of a lot of decisions and conversation.<p>I've been in an org where there were stragglers who didn't want to use Slack for whatever reason -- "I'm too old" for it was one I found particularly retarded.<p>Communication is key -- get your whole team on one tool - silence notifications if you have to, but you should aim to participate.
I see lot of IRC channels move to Slack and I don't get it, Kubernetes being one of them. Honestly why? I don't mind Slack for a small team but not for a channel with a few thousand user, it's a mess. Furthermore, maybe it's somehow because of my anti-ad addons but slack is generally slow and laggy for me. Takes quite a while to open the channel, lot of features don't work under Firefox.
The author (OP?) positions the article to blame Slack as the root cause of productivity ills. However, multiple times it’s pointed out that Slack in and of itself isn’t the problem, but can simply exacerbate other root cause issues if misused.<p>>> Although Slack is positioned as a productivity tool, it becomes counterproductive when misused.<p>The conclusion doesn’t follow the premise here. The author concludes that the root cause of counterproducitivty is misuse of the tool, not the tool itself. This doesn’t do anything to discredit the premise, as it’s easy to argue that any tool can be counterproductive/dangerous/etc. when misused.<p>>> Organizations that find enough value in using Slack should introduce rules of engagement.<p>So the OP admits organizations can find value in using Slack, but should address the potential for misuse by introducing rules of engagement. Or rather, that rules of engagement should be put in place to prevent other root cause issues from being worsened by misuse of the tool. Again, the author is arguing that Slack isn’t the problem here.<p>The article may strike a chord with those who don’t like Slack, but the arguments presented are very sloppy. To me, this reads as a plug for a particular work style the OP finds themselves more productive under. The Slack attack is misplaced. The expectation of constant availability and immediate responses sound like cultural issues, exacerbated by the communication channels that Slack provides.
Do people not realize how customizable Slack is? Everything that bugs OP can be turned off, there’s do not disturb mode. away mode, you can mute every alert with granularity, etc.<p>The idea that “I don’t use this communication channel that all my coworkers do and everything is fine” seems risky at best.
Slack is a great product, but with a wrong communication model. We have for the last three years developed Twist, which focuses on asynchronous communication by default. It includes some of the best features of Slack and email. We currently have about 1000 teams actively using it. Read more of our reasoning here: “Why We’re Betting Against Real-Time Team Messaging” <a href="https://blog.doist.com/why-were-betting-against-real-time-team-messaging-521804a3da09" rel="nofollow">https://blog.doist.com/why-were-betting-against-real-time-te...</a>
Working with the kind of person that OP seems to be is a pain. Sometimes I need your help, a code review, feedback or advice. Sometimes I even need it ASAP because I am dealing with something time sensitive. I do my best to be respectful of people's tome, but sometimes a distraction to help a colleague is unavoidable.<p>I'll send an email when appropriate, but in most other cases I'll look for you on Slack. If you're not there then that means I'll just have to walk over to your desk to find you instead.
Slack lowers the friction involved in communicating. Depending on the kind of communication that it is, maybe that's bad or good.<p>In many corporate communications platforms, it is quite effortless to ask an idle question, use an emoticon, paste a giphy image, write a bot to push notifications into your team channel, express a witticism, or vent complaints. It was my experience that Slack made it easier to do all of these things more than any platform I'd previously used. I've been off of it for 3 months and hope I never have to return. The worst problem seemed to be the number of ad-hoc channels I could be automatically invited to, and it was not often clear whether the information exchanged there was something I needed to pay attention to (although in retrospect it is more so).<p>Different organizations will utilize it differently, and feature-wise Slack seems to have gotten pretty far ahead of the competition. But if there's any truth to the medium being the message, then I think that it can be inferred from much of what transpires on Slack is that as a platform it is a big time sink. There don't seem to be a lot of important degrees of urgency between an email, a phone call, or a drop-by. For me about 90% of the value in corporate messaging is pasting web links to resources, which doesn't require the other bells and whistles.
I agree with the author here but not for the reasons he stated. my biggest gripe with Slack is that it results in less and less one-to-one conversation.<p>We used Slack at my last job but we were encouraged to stop by the person's desk for any matter that requires immediate attention. I sat near our CTO and sometimes I saw many engineers standing around his desk trying to debug a production issue. This resulted in knowing other people's name/face (which I realized after I joined my current company).<p>At my new company we use Slack for pretty much everything. If there's a production bug you're encouraged to @here on the dedicated channel and someone would take a look at it. There's no one-to-one interaction to debug it. We had our holiday party last month where I introduced myself to some of my coworkers and once we started talking we realized that we have chatted on Slack but never saw each other even though we were all working in the same office. I never associated the engineer's face to the name.<p>I do think Slack is a powerful tool in modern work environment but people shouldn't be too dependent on it.
I don't like any kind of IM/chat apps used like an endless meeting. They're good for tackling one single issue with probably a handful of people at a time. Even with @mentions, hashtags and channels, chat is still a single stream that pretends to have context like email or forum posts do (with subject lines and conversation threads).<p>As a habit, I don't use any chat group (be it Telegram or any other app or platform) if there are more than five people. The explosion in the number of messages and the frustration in not being able to catch up is too big a cost on one's health and productivity. These tools don't enhance collaboration. On the contrary, they provide a facade of "being busy".<p>We seem to keep trying to reinvent email and forum discussions (that have more context and confine discussions by topic) again and again, but not achieving better results.
To be perfectly honest... It's hard for me to look at quitting Slack as anything but deeply selfish. How much more time is someone now spending writing you an email? Or waiting for you to answer one? How much more time are they spending walking over to your desk? Or wondering if they even should, since you're that one guy who refuses to use Slack?<p>If you need long periods of quiet time to work, locking yourself in a closet is extremely effective, but that doesn't mean it also positively affects your organization. Slack is an organizational productivity tool. Nearly every post I read about people quitting Slack focuses on how much better <i>they</i> are able to work without it, not how much better their team or organization is without them on Slack...<p>You're right, Slack isn't for you. It's for your team.
Related question for the masses:<p>I run a fully remote startup. My goal is to make as much communication asynchronous as possible, to facilitate people being in multiple time zones and having different optimal work times and places.<p>We have slack right now, but for the most part people understand that it's an async tool -- i.e. don't expect an instant response. Usually the only "instant" convo is if we're having a video meeting and need to share links (which of course we try to avoid since video meetings aren't async but are sadly unavoidable).<p>My question is, as we grow, how to I keep Slack that way, and make sure it doesn't turn into a huge distraction and just a bunch of gifs and watercooler talk, without imposing rules about "the proper use of Slack"?
Most offices have bad cultures that don't foster good communication. The odds of people blaming a tool because they don't have good communication is very high.<p>I think the bit about "my team is starting to notice I'm offline" is very telling. Oh you're so fancy, you special person who doesn't tell your team when you're not available and you aren't checking your messages. You sure showed them. I bet you're just the best facilitator of communication.<p>Personally, I tell my team how they can and can't expect to contact me when I'm changing methods of communication. Call me crazy.
I feel that emails and Outlook style meeting systems should be enough for all day to day activities of a software developer. Rarely, there will be a situation that needs immediate attention. In that case a phone call would be sufficient. There is no need for a chat or instant messaging solution. However I must say that Skype's desktop sharing has come in very useful at times, and I don't know of a way to do that without having a chat client.
I've found exactly the opposite. People love to randomly interrupt me by showing up at my desk with questions. I tell them to use Slack instead, as this allows for asynchronous communication that doesn't interrupt my workflow.<p>I also push people to ask questions in a channel instead of directly to me, as usually someone else will help them before I even see the question.
> Instant messaging applications enable communication that is online, synchronous and on-demand.<p>No. It's totally wrong. One needs to learn how to configure his chat tool that it doesn't disturb one in productive times, but is easily available when free. It's possible. I do it since ICQ. Unread chat messages will also still be unread if you continue to work 4 hours on your current task.<p>> Without [instant messaging], days are calm, purpose-driven and productive.<p>How can days be purpose driven if you don't sync your own work with your colleague's work any more? I'd argue that people who act like that are the least productive because they only work on things that are not valuable for the team at large.
We've had this kind of of posts as long as I remember. People blaming tools because they can't figure out the most basic skills of work, communication, planning, division and focusing of attention, etc. It's always a panacea to turn something off completely.<p>But it's never about the tool. It's just the author learning how to operate themselves. What they did has minimal relevance to others in general, except perhaps for some validating "me too!"-s.<p>It's much more valuable to step back and think critically about how you approach tasks and decisions, how you feel and what it tells you, and how much you can actually control all of it.
Here's a nifty counter of Slack activations per day: <a href="http://focuslist.co/escape2/" rel="nofollow">http://focuslist.co/escape2/</a><p>Kinda eye opening.
I find it useful for asking 'has anyone changed x because I'm seeing this stacktrace when I do abc?'. I don't expect an immediate result but when a devleoper has some downtime then they can check and respond.<p>It's better than email because they can see the chat from other devs around the issue.<p>The only thing I'd like to do is be able to stop auto-playing gifs and block @here from certain people who abuse it.
I find it very useful for those who are quick to reply on slack, there are some who check slack once a day and those for types it's easier to get up and talk to them or email them. There is the downside which I find more common amongst the younger users straight out of uni just using it as a social chat mechanism
We were forced to move to Slack as well. Do not like it. It is more distracting than making us productive.<p>I enjoyed HipChat [<a href="https://www.atlassian.com/software/hipchat" rel="nofollow">https://www.atlassian.com/software/hipchat</a>]
> Without it, days are calm, purpose-driven and productive.<p>Like you can't distract yourself with 40 other apps if not slack. Slack isn't the problem, they're ALL the problem. Anyway, Slack is mandatory if you're remote.
Communication is necessary. Slack is one way of communicating .. by all means get rid of it, but if you do .. make sure the replacement medium serves you better.<p>I'd rather receive a DM than a phone call in most cases.
I find the "All Unread" view works really well to use Slack asynchronously. You can just check it every so often, marking entire channels as read in one click if a skim doesn't interest you.
For software developers, the best way to communicate is through the bug database. Developers don't use "slack" at our company.<p>Of course, it may be different for sales and support people, etc.