[warp_factor]

Congratulation to them. I think what they did is absolutely amazing and will be seen retrospectively as one of the biggest fads of history.

- They managed to disturb millions of worker to an attention-driven work culture in which everything needs to always be synchronous and immediate.

- They managed to change chat from a set of open protocols to a single closed app terribly written in JS.

- They managed to make a lot of people absolute convinced advocate of Slack so that a lot of hyped startups have now to use Slack de facto or risk mutiny and have people create Slack channels on behalf of the company without any oversight.

So yeah I don't blame them but I blame every company that falls for this. I'm convinced that we will see Slack retrospectively as something that destroyed productivity. I will agree that Slack can be useful when used correctly but I never saw a place that used it without it becoming that "attention driven" growing monster.

[nothrabannosir]

I see this complaint a lot, and I'm very sensitive to dopamine addiction myself so perhaps a few of my tips can help someone else make Slack less frustrating:

1. use /mute judiciously. especially on the main chats. only unmute important "#500" style channels. People immediately learn to @you when relevant.

2. disable notifications for everything on mobile: DMs, @here, @channel, @yourname, anything. No notifications whatsoever.

3. Put "Notifications disabled -- in case of emergency, please call me: <phone nr here>" in your status. I've had one person call me ever and it was completely justified. He saw the status, called me and said, "sorry I'm calling but it's an emergency and your status said to call." Great.

4. Disable all notifications on your desktop app, as well. On Mac OS X, don't even have the red app button show up for unread messages. Just check Slack once an hour (or what you want) and deal with any DMs / @mentions / outstanding chat. In reality, you'll automatically check whenever you have mental downtime, or during a conversation. This just allows you to stay in the zone when you are.

This has significantly reduced my Slack-stress. I enjoy it far better now, on my terms.

Most importantly: if someone is frustrated by your poor response time, explain! "I'm very bad with distractions, I need this to cope. If it's an emergency, please call :)". People are good people, they understand.

I hope this helps anyone :)

[midhir]

I moved from the native app to just using the Web app in a pinned tab a while ago. Then you only have to block notifications in one place.

When someone @heres or tags me I only see the red dot on the favicon when I'm already in my browser.

On top of that you get tons of resources back on your machine!

[rus64]

Just wanted to add to this to say that you can use shift-esc to clear all notifications in a workspace.

[vhab]

> They managed to disturb millions of worker to an "attention driven" work culture in which everything needs to always be synchronous and immediate.

I see where you're coming from. But anecdote time.

The immediate communication fixed something for us which would previously be a more disruptive tap on the shoulder, or alternatively an only once a day processed e-mail. Slack gave our devs time to finish their thought, write out that line of code, before tabbing to Slack to see what's up.

Because you see, I love my team, but they're not perfect. Just like the vast majority of people they're imperfect beings working with imperfect information. And in order to get them to output quality code (as in, does what it needs to do, bug free, without incorrect assumptions about data) they need to communicate to each other and me. We can't wait until a PR to catch they didn't fully understand these data models setup by another guy. Nor can we wait until a PR to realize someone took the wrong approach trying to fix a problem.

Someone getting disrupted might mean someone else can progress with their task. What I'm trying to get at, I need my team to communicate and communicate often. We have plenty of issues, just like any team, but most of them come from the lack of communication. Slack, or any other similar platform allowed to strike somewhat of a happy medium where the barrier to communicate isn't too high nor too low. It's less formal and faster than an email. And keeps a better log than an in-person conversation would.

Added bonus, it also helps us to have a more liberal 'work from home' policy.

[anilakar]

What previously was a tap on the shoulder is now a message and a tap on the shoulder after three minutes if there is no reply.

Slack has become the worst possible amalgamation of email and telephone. When previously minor things were discussed asynchronously over mail, only major and immediate issues warranted a phone call. Now all kinds of noncritical correspondence gets pushed to an instant messenger application, where every issue has to be paid attention to immediately.

[ubercow13]

Do people really do that? Did the same ones not tap on shoulder a short while after sending an email too?

[mulmen]

None of this is unique to Slack, it's just a consequence of using a chat app, or email.

The only thing that allows you to have a liberal work from home policy is a healthy company/team/corporate culture.

[jakubp]

It's not just productivity. It can also damage quality of relationships and introduce unnecessary conflict - as any written communications tool does - because people also fall for using Slack to discuss tough issues. It doesn't replace actual in-person conversation, but especially younger workers and managers don't know that and suffer a lot due to lack of emotional fidelity of actually using their bodies to talk.

[gexla]

Communication tools don't create this issue, they only bring it closer to the surface. You have to learn to manage your emotions. If you don't then it's always going to something which holds you back. If it affects younger workers more than others, then that's because they haven't learned this skill yet. It's one of many things which people new to the workplace have to manage.

Some of the other more obvious emotional issues include procrastination and imposter syndrome. Everyone experiences these emotional swings. Experienced workers learn how to manage them. The earlier the better.

There are lots of things broken in the space of "work." Teaching younger workers how to deal with emotions is one of them.

[coldtea]

>Communication tools don't create this issue, they only bring it closer to the surface. You have to learn to manage your emotions. If you don't then it's always going to something which holds you back.

That's close to saying "bullets don't kill people, the hole in their vital organs does".

The thing is, text-based communication tools are problematic compared to face-to-face communication, even in people who know how to "manage their emotions", because they hide non-verbal clues and make statements easier to misconstrue.

[gexla]

In a professional setting, you can fall back on the rules of the workplace. My boss might be angry, but I don't need to read that he's angry. I just need to keep doing my job. Or I get fired. I'll survive either way (losing a job and finding a new one is part of the game.)

I don't need to care about the emotional states of the people I work with. There's base-lines of professional conduct and courtesy. If I reasonably follow those, then I'm good.

And what if your boss is just an asshole? What if the reading you take of the person on the other line isn't just a misunderstanding? This person really is being a jerk, then what? You be a professional. You don't have to take excessive abuse, you can quit. You can warn the customer that you will end the call (and you can carry through with the threat.) Being a jerk isn't necessarily abuse though.

Don't take things personally. Do your job. Work the process. Quit if things aren't working for you. This requires an orienting yourself to an environment which works differently from your home. It requires managing your emotions so that you aren't taking an existential threat level analysis with every non face to face conversation.

It's a different situation if I'm talking to my wife or children. Those are personal relationships.

[TeMPOraL]

Unlike being poked in a vital organ, communication is a repeatable exercise, so reasonable people can keep communicating over the lower-fidelity medium until problem is resolved.

Face-to-face communication may be ideal, but it has huge overhead and limits. Compared to the scale of communication text (especially one over the wire) enabled, I think the world is much better off with the tech than it would be without it.

Now Slack per se, that's another story...

[lostjohnny]

> reasonable people can keep communicating over the lower-fidelity medium until problem is resolved.

That's a very high expectation.

In reality the opposite is true, the less human interaction there is, the more people polarize around their ideas.

[coldtea]

>so reasonable people can keep communicating over the lower-fidelity medium until problem is resolved.

And has empirical evidence, of people communicating in text mediums, from USENET to modern social forums, proven the above?

[TeMPOraL]

Yes? I mean, I don't have issues communicating over text on HN, or the subreddits I frequent, or the Slacks, IRC channels and the mailing lists I'm on, ...

What the empirical evidence shows me is that there's a (possibly very large) chunk of population which I would call unreasonable on a good day, that I only get to observe on the Internet, but can't ever find in meatspace. I know what's going on over at YouTube comments, or /r/all, but such people are all mysteriously absent from my meatspace circles, with no effort on my end to specifically identify and avoid them. I sometimes see them speaking unreasonable things when I pass them by on the street, but that's the limit of my exposure [0].

It's kind of similar to what Scott identified[1] as "dark matter people", except they seem to be inhabiting all the non-niche Internet forums.

Point being, if you exclude unreasonable people, text-based communications are fine. If you include unreasonable people, I wouldn't trust face to face communications either; if someone wants to abuse you with words, they can do that just as well in physical proximity.

--

[0] - Actually, the closest I've ever been to talking with such people was the couple of times during my university years when I ended up on some completely random party with people I didn't know. This suggests to me that there's a strong but barely noticeable filtering/selection effect in meatspace social networks. School selection, or workplace selection, aren't random enough to break out from it.

[1] - https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin..., C-f "dark matter".

[thatfrenchguy]

Technically tools shape you and how you think, the same way the company culture shapes the actions you do.

If you see everyone answering slack messages at 10pm, you’re likely to do the same unless you’re strong-willed.

[todd3834]

An alternative perspective:

- Chat apps have been around for a while but now that Slack has been so widely adopted working remote has become a lot easier.

- Screen sharing for pair programming where everyone has the client installed and we don’t have to convince anyone to pay for it is great. (I’m very sad Slack is shuttering this service though)

- When I’m in the office I find that people who used to interrupt me by walking up to my desk and completely detailing my work are more polite with a Slack message now. That is much easier to delay even if only for a few minutes when needed.

- large meetings where it is tempting to completely tune out can still be productive if I can interact on slack.

Your points are all valid for some but it’s only one side of the coin.

[dtech]

> They managed to disturb millions of worker to an attention-driven work culture in which everything needs to always be synchronous and immediate.

I experience quite the opposite. With in-person communication, people barge in, demand you drop what you're doing now and answer their question/conversation.

With slack, you can answer them when you need a break or have finished something up.

[pelario]

Isn't what you are describing the de-facto use case of email?

[piva00]

No, on Slack (or any other similar chat) I can jump in and answer a co-worker that had a question when I'm available, if they are also available they reply and we have a short convo that takes much less time than e-mailing back and forth which usually ends with a "let's talk this in person".

Having realtime chat has saved me countless hours of participating in e-mail threads that end nowhere, at the same time as helping me be less interrupted as I tell people to send me a message first and if it's really urgent to interrupt me.

I don't care about Slack as a company but I'm happy that a IRC-like chat ended up in the mainstream and is useful for my day-to-day.

[lostjohnny]

> I can jump in and answer a co-worker that had a question when I'm available

Isn't what you are describing the de-facto use case of a mailing list?

[piva00]

Not when I have to keep sorting my mailing lists into its own "label/category/folder/whatever your e-mail client calls it" on a sidebar so I can keep track of activity happening in which mailing list.

In Slack or any IRC-like chat I can keep track of the channels that interest me, I keep track of live operations, my team's public channel to see if there are stakeholders having issues with our systems, our private channel for internal team discussions (even more when I'm working from home). The engineering announcement channel to keep track in realtime of changes being performed to other systems or our infrastructure and getting quick status updates.

Yes, e-mail could be used for all of that, it would also make my inbox completely useless.

[lostjohnny]

> Not when I have to keep sorting my mailing lists into its own

There's a field on emails called subject.

Linux kernel is still developed using mailing list, I can imagine only a few things harder than that, still the kernel team manages to work on it just fine, without being in the same physical space.

Channels are just another way of labeling stuff...

> (even more when I'm working from home)

emails have been distributed, async and remote-aware since the 60s.

I'm really genuinely curious to understand why people keep making this point, while that's one of the most irrelevant feature of Slack.

I'm not saying email is perfect, just saying that your points are not a unique feature of slack, anyone of them have existed for decades.

> Yes, e-mail could be used for all of that, it would also make my inbox completely useless.

Just like channels on Slack after a while.

BTW https://www.mattermost.org/ offers the same features Slack offers, but I guess people are not switching because mattermost is not a recognized brand.

Just like people don't buy Nike shoes to ditch them for equally comfortbale but brandless flea market shoes.

It's a shame that tech people are so fashionable.

EDIT: formatting

[Cthulhu_]

Yes and no, but the problem with (and benefit of) email is that it's a bit more formal. It's like writing a letter vs calling people.

Email threads tend to become illegible messes too, at least in the circles I'm in. Different formatting, different quote styles, and there's one email chain nowadays where the background color turned black so I can't read it without highlighting the text. There's also the thing where it's far too easy to CC people, which, granted, is a thing in Slack as well possibly but it's not yet ingrained in Slack culture in most places to make big group chats with all kinds of managers and only tangentially involved people. A lot of email is written in cover-your-ass mode with excessive formality and CCing a lot of people.

I'll take a direct message anyday when it comes to day to day stuff. I prefer important announcements, events, etc to still be in email though.

[sieabahlpark]

You must not have someone who sends you a slack message and them come over to your desk to ask if you read their slack message.

[benjymo]

I know people like that but they also write emails and then come over to tell me that they've send me and email.

[yzmtf2008]

> So yeah I don't blame them but I blame every company that falls for this.

While I understand where your complaints are coming from, I encourage you to think about the fact that so many companies are "falling" for them.

You and I might care about disturbances, "attention driven" work culture, open protocols, etc., but not everyone is a software engineer. The world is bigger than that. Clearly, some people quite enjoy Slack. I'm not saying it's the most optimal product, but perhaps being optimal is not as important as it seems.

[Barrin92]

Many people enjoy candy too, doesn't mean it's good for you. Not everyone is a software engineer, but everyone has limited attention.

Slack's chat nature as the OP points out favours instant messaging over batching up replies, which, like many bad habits, appeals to the reward portion of our brain but is genuinely unhelpful in structuring work. There's a reasonable (and increasing amount) of evidence that multitasking and context switching can lower your working IQ by 10 to 15 points. Deep Work by Cal Newport does a good job of going into the detrimental affects that distraction from workflows has on people.

[warp_factor]

you put it better than I did in my initial post. They managed to hack that reward part of the brain with immediate interaction at the expense of deep meaningful work that require long periods of reflection before producing anything.

[tdj]

My beef with Slack is that everyone in this comments section is pretending it's an async communication tool, but that is only true people that are used to working without context switching and acknowledge that interrupting someone has a cost. For everyone else, there is an expectation of prompt responses, or you are considered untrustworthy if you take too long to respond.

I suspect a lot of frustration fundamentally revolves around trust. If there is a lack of trust, it must get compensated with an increase in visibility. Slack just happens to be a decent tool to provide visibility.

Story time: in a company I worked for, the Most Senior Engineer requested to be exempt from participating on Slack as the only person outside management, and skip the daily stand-ups. He did get a lot more done. I envied him quite a bit - mostly because our stumbles and challenges (just normal development stuff) were very visible and prompted lots of nervouse queries from PMs and sales people via Slack about why our tests are failing and why we needed to refactor code, whereas he only needed to show the end result of his work after a few months. Even if we had both experienced the same amount of 'challenges', his way of working gave him a lot more credibility because he got to control the narrative where his solution emerged working as designed (because any development hurdles he may have had were invisible to our PMs and sales). However, he did have a lot of pre-existing trust with key people to pull this off in the first place.

I hope I get to a point in my career where I can operate like that.

[cush]

> not everyone is a software engineer

It's sad you have to point this out. What works for a some might not for a dev.

[lostjohnny]

> I encourage you to think about the fact that so many companies are "falling" for them.

People also love cocaine.

If many companies are falling for this, it actually means it is not good for workers, only for the company.

[zubspace]

We're a small team of a bit more than 10 people and slack has definitely improved our lifes. It's easy to use, has lots of integrations, looks good, is free to use without the unlimited archiving of messages and works on desktop an mobile. Everyone can use it, developers, marketeers and managers alike.

Before there was always someone moving around to talk to someone else or internal E-Mails which are bad, too.

We use slack sparingly and only have a few channels with many people. Most things happen in private channels. We always "idle-ping" other team members first and do not expect an immediate response.

The result is a much calmer office. People move around less and there is less chatter. And we still have the option to use group chat if required.

We even added a channel where new commit messages are automatically posted. A wonderful thing to keep informed about what's going on and you can take immediate action if you see something strange.

I think this all falls apart if our team size would increase. But I believe for teams with less than 25 people slack is perfectly fine. Above that size notifications probably start to be annoying.

[Al-Khwarizmi]

As a long-time IRC fan (I found many important persons in my life there!), I'm also a bit salty that open protocols didn't triumph and so many people salivate about features of Slack that were already in IRC in the nineties. But I don't get the horror stories about Slack poisoning work culture, I haven't experienced them.

At my workplace, we are a team of 7 (in a research project, it's academia but I don't think our way of organizing things is too different from a small startup), we have been using Slack for like a year and we have a sane relationship with it. Yesterday I think there were like 2 or 3 messages in our Slack, no more were needed. At other points (with looming deadlines, etc.) there is more activity, but it's always activity related to work that needs to be done, and my feeling is that it mostly reduces the amount of email, and sometimes also substitutes private messaging that some of us were using for work-related issues. Which is a plus for work culture, because we keep work and leisure separated. And as there are no notifications outside working hours, I think it has actually been positive for work-life balance, compared to using email or other messaging systems.

I don't know if it's a matter of team size (I can imagine that Slack may be more prone to becoming a behemoth in a huge team?), the personalities of the people using it, or that companies/teams where Slack is problematic already had a problematic work culture in the first place. Maybe it also helps that we don't have the paid plan at my team, so since logs are not stored, we use it for immediate teamwork and we instinctively shift to email or other means for important stuff that needs to be on record or consulted later. But for whatever reason, for us it hasn't become a growing monster. I'm curious about the factors that make it a blessing or a curse.

[wonnage]

1. you don't have to reply right away 2. chat being a set of open protocols has been a pipe dream of nerds for ages, the reality is that slack is your universal protocol now and everything preceding it forgot that actual humans had to use it 3. you seem unable to comprehend that people actually...like Slack???

[thatfrenchguy]

Let’s not forget how it helped this « we need to be connected to work all the time » BS culture.

[nautilus12]

Slack is a giffen good for me in terms of attention. I have to pay so much attention to it that now it's all I pay attention to

[czechdeveloper]

As remote developer, I must disagree.

There has always been distractions in office. Colleague would just walk over to you.

Now you get message. You can choose what you check and when. And reaction that is not immediate is usually fine. At least at my company.

And best of all, I don't have to be in same office to be able to communicate. I'm not even in same country, yet we can work realtime with team.

[avip]

>They managed to make a lot of people absolute convinced advocate of Slack

That's interesting. Any idea how could they possibly do that?

[ehnto]

Probably by having a product people like to use. They never used any crazy marketing as far as I saw, so kudos to them for building something people wanted to advocate for.

[warp_factor]

by hacking the reward circuits of your brain with immediate interactions? The issue is that those are counterproductive in the long term.

The exact same reason why people initially loved Facebook and spent so much time on it?

[lostjohnny]

using addiction techniques

do I absolutely really need to know that a Docker build has completed on the project channel?

Do I really care?

But it gets rewards points to those involved in that build: "Look! I did something good! I deserve a treat"

[codesushi42]

The world deserved an upgrade to IRC, embracing openness.

Instead we got Slack.

At least its success made developers take Electron seriously for desktop apps.

[hn23]

So what is the difference to Skype for Business?