[Bartweiss]

It's funny - I'd have said that this is a fairly good outcome, including the "pings you on Slack" part. It separates "this question is best answered in person" from "this question is best raised in person", which does a lot of good.

It means that if you need 30 seconds to save, commit, and pull the relevant branch (or 50 minutes for an urgent bugfix), the other person doesn't have to hover awkwardly or walk away. And it means that if you don't know the answer and have to check something, you can do that before talking to them. And then, yes, you can talk in person. Because that still really is the best answer a lot of the time.

I think I understand their complaint, because depending on how an open plan office is laid out this might be efficient for 2 people and distracting for 10 around them, but I don't think that's inevitable. Even with open plan, it's possible to have relatively low interference and seat people who talk often close together. (Companies seating by rank or function instead of need for contact are, obviously, doing it wrong.)

For all the complaints about Slack as a distraction, my experience has been that it's a huge boon relative to what it replaces. It's pretty well understood that in-person and phone contact mean "answer now" and email means "answer in some hours" or even "tomorrow morning". Channel messages as "someone answer in 10-60 minutes" and DMs as "answer in a few minutes barring a crisis" are a huge improvement in terms of focus.