| My personal opinion is that Slack is a terrible medium for long term info exchange, acronym notwithstanding. I work for a company where we have almost 2 public channels for every full time employee, and that's not counting the private channels, DMs, and so on. I was on a ski lift last winter with a guy who ran a small company (~20 engineers) who banned Slack and I think he had a strong argument. Reading through the comments, I see a number of antipatterns emerging from this thread. I'll enumerate some: * Urgency etiquette: @channel, @here, or just plain message? How about @here with a few personal @ throw in, which is like the gratuitous CC: in email? This depends a lot on your org's topography. I do contract work for a global org, and @channel is almost never appropriate. It's kind of looking at alerts as an SRE: does EVERYONE need to know this? * Search really is terrible: I know people say "just search Slack". Reminds me of a former colleague who joked about "Google Battleship" (referring to the guessing game of Battleship), where you hunt for the right combination of words. Some questions are just hard to answer via context-free text queries, and this leads to the next point * Atrophy of other documentation like Wikis and READMEs. The big problem with Wikis is that they have to be gardened - they need dead pages removed, outdated info updated, etc. Slack also needs gardening. The 2 week ban is draconian, but I imagine that in this org, people start moving important information to permanent storage. * Private channels are unsearchable, as are private conversations. I've personally banned my private conversations. People DM me about comments I've made on a PR, rather than responding in comments or a public channel. I always direct them back to a public comms channel. The idea of Slack is to make communications public and searchable, but people need to enforce that individually. I don't allow DMs except for social BS like lunch plans. * On the flip side, information-free channels. Some of my channels at work are completely noise - basically all they are is alerts from PagerDuty, or automated build noise, or the #fyi channel for all employees. Anybody who cares about "slack zero" mutes these channels anyway. * Somewhat related to the last point, the auto-responders. At its simplest, if you have an auto-responder keyed to a single word or phrase, that indicates a problem, not a need for an auto-responder. * Final point is info fragmentation and overload. You don't know what channel to ask a question in, and you can't keep up with it all. I have a personal keyword filter, but basically in Slack, I've created a personal info silo simply to be able to have a chance to focus on my work. |