[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.