[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.