[dahart]

> The properties of communication in remote work seem very hard to crack

Many good replies here about what Slack is good for and what it’s not good for, but I wanted to take a moment to reflect on this part of the premise. The properties of in-person communication have always been hard to crack, and having everyone remote makes it that much harder. This is not an easy problem, regardless of the tools. But if people aren’t getting what they need out of Slack, it’s up to the team and the leads especially and the whole org to identify, discuss, and solve communication problems. This might be educating ICs about what to do when they don’t get responses, it might be about providing a system to escalate questions as needed, it might be about picking and choosing different communication tools.

In addition to some of the Slack problems others have listed, in the last two years, I’ve experienced a lot of: 1- new hires being very afraid to speak up in larger groups, they prefer to DM someone who’s friendly and receptive to interruptions, and especially prefer to steer away from asking questions in channels that their boss/manager is in. 2- Slack is pretty terrible for retention and searchability of info after a couple of weeks, it’s just kind of a void when it comes to keeping or tracking important information.

It’s great that you’re thinking about it a lot, because most people have reflexive opinions without a lot of careful thought. Communication is a hard problem, and it’s worth internalizing this and realizing that there aren’t easy answers to this nor single tools that will magically solve it.