[matwood]

I guess I do not really understand the backlash at Slack. I think it is more of highlighting broken company cultures. If someone expects an immediate response for any communication does it matter if it is Slack, the phone, your office, your email (plus follow up email and/or phone call)?

For me Slack has cut down immensely on people randomly showing up in my office. Just forcing someone to write something down, and think about needing an immediate response cuts down frivolous questions. The biggest plus between it and email is that Slack pushes using public chats. I like this because I can go through during my work mental downtime and stay aware of other things going on.

[timanglade]

Agreed! Tools almost always reflect the flaws of their users — but it’s not to say that the flaws of the tool proper can’t harm a user too. In Slack’s case, I think their notification settings (and the defaults in particular) encourage an always-on culture that can be hard for some corporate cultures to resist.

Regarding public communications — I think that only aggravates the noise/always-on issue, but if that’s your think, you can of course do that on email. See examples from Stripe [0] and Buffer [1]. (Not sure if/how that scales though! Was there a follow-up from these companies?)

[0]: https://stripe.com/blog/email-transparency

[1]: http://joel.is/how-we-handle-team-emails-at-our-startup-defa...

[matwood]

I agree, the defaults in Slack are too chatty. I think the web interface also does not differentiate as well between messages directed at you and message in a channel you're a part of.

My public communications preference I have based on Buffer and Stripe. It's not that everyone has to respond, but that I think that the more information everyone has the quicker they can respond to problems in the right manner.

[user5994461]

The cure to Slack: Do NOT install slack on your phone. And if it is, remove it.

It's the hell to get notifications all day, before you're at work, after you left work. The slack dev didn't bother putting a button to stop beeping on incoming message or to stop receiving messages at all.

[greggman]

Because in slack I have to check 100 inboxes full of messages not important to me rather than a single inbox with a far higher signal to noise ratio

It doesn't matter if I turn off notifications I'm still expected to know generally what's happened in my company's 100 channels.

With slack it becomes my responsibility to dig through those 100 channels. With email it's the sender's responsibility to make sure I'm on the list if they need/want my response/input and if it turns out I'm not interested I can easily mute that one thread

[linkregister]

I agree; Slack includes features to disable notifications outside of working hours. An @here message will trigger a pop up with "sure you want to wake up the people outside of your time zone?" I have been fortunate enough to not be compelled to answer messages outside of working hours, even with 10-hour variance between time zones in a remote team.

Can anyone describe a situation where the introduction of Slack changed their company's culture to an "always on" mode?

[eropple]

"Changed", no. Reified an existing one by providing additional reinforcement to the expectations of instant access? Certainly.

[res0nat0r]

But that isn't at all Slacks fault, it is your company culture and people.

[eropple]

I don't agree with that at all. I am a consultant. I see lots of companies. I see lots of companies jumping on the "plug our employees 24/7 into everything" bandwagon. Slack has a moral obligation--we all have the moral obligation--to not be the stooge of bad actors just as it works to improve the productivity of good ones. If Slack took this seriously, it would do significantly more to protect its users from toxic behavior.

For example: it is possible to ignore people's do-not-disturb settings (added relatively recently, after a long period of asking) to force their phone to blow up at four in the morning. This empowers assholes to be bigger assholes and strengthens a shitty culture by providing tools to be shittier; you can never not be at their beck and call; if you refuse to answer, that's you being bad and not the person who feels entitled to interrupt your life on a whim.

You also cannot mute or block users on a Slack. This disempowers people downrange of assholes and strengthens a shitty culture by not providing tools to avoid the perpetuators of shitty culture. (They have been asked for this feature and have refused.)

[matwood]

> For example: it is possible to ignore people's do-not-disturb settings (added relatively recently, after a long period of asking) to force their phone to blow up at four in the morning.

How is this any different than someone calling you at 4am? Or sending a bunch of emails? This has nothing to do with Slack and everything to do with a bad company.

[eropple]

The context of email, in my experience, is that "you'll get the email when you see it." Slack's ephemera, the social contract that it encourages, is "you are on all the time." It is an asynchronous communication tool that it tries to convince its users is synchronous, and if you aren't using it in a synchronous manner (as I don't, for the most part), you are breaking that perceived illusion. You are not being a Team Player.

There is a significantly different social implication to clicking the "fuck your do-not-disturb settings" link and calling you. (I would argue that the former should be worse, but it isn't, ever.) Ephemera matters. Context matter. Slack creates a bad context. They own that.

[Terr_]

> I think it is more of highlighting broken company cultures.

Then why are their own advertisements touting their product being used in dysfunctional ways? Doesn't that set the tone for how (and where) it will be deployed and used?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11197449

> The lion-manager is gazing out a window, has a passing thought about "flying umbrellas". Naturally, he instantly sends a mass-broadcast, interrupting and disrupting the work of the entire office. (Who all, of course, leap joyously to implement his brilliant vision.)

> Now, this makes a lot of sense if you want to sell copies of Slack, since it appeals to the managers with the power to approve-purchases and mandate-adoption... But it implies Slack is going to either become the latest tool-of-oppression at a dysfunctional company, or that managers are going to buy Slack with the idea that they can use it to micromanage everybody.

> Further on, as the Slack team adds features, guess what kinds of features are going to get priority? The ones that sell. Which ones are those? The ones that lion-managers love and other-employees hate.

[thearn4]

I can vouch for it being a major success for my team.

But, like pretty much anything, I could see it being extremely frustrating if forced on a group in an awkward way.