[lowii]

The way I see it, it's not that people don't like Slack, it's that people don't like online chatting in general as the official way of communicating inside a company. I don't think that the solution to that problem could ever be another chatting tool.

[not2b]

Exactly. Chat means you need to stop what you're doing all the time and chat, which is hell for people who need quiet time to actually get work done. Email can be addressed when there is time for it. (and yes, in principle you can wait to reply in chat applications as well, but the drift is for people to expect quick response).

[grey-area]

Yes I honestly have no idea what problems in our workflow chat would solve, but I can think of loads of problems it would introduce.

I have no idea how other programmers tolerate chat as a communications medium for work. Why would you prefer chat over other async mediums?

[a13n]

Chat is just as async as email or any online communication platform - there's no obligation to respond immediately, and you can disable notifications for as long as you please.

[grey-area]

In practice, people expect a response in a relatively timely way, it is after all chat, not email. It does seem a lot of companies treat it explicitly as ephemeral (and therefore requiring frequent checks). Even slack deletes old messages for free accounts, and the search is pretty poor IME. It is also full of chatter irrelevant to the topic at hand as far as I've seen in the slack groups I've participated in (though I have avoided it for work, so have not experienced it working well in a work environment).

I can imagine it is very useful for responding to a live incident for example, so perhaps people use it for that sort of thing. For a developer working on product though it seems crazy to me to have a chat window open for any significant part of a working day. People work differently though I guess and perhaps I just haven't seen it used well.