[wgj]

Slack replaces in-person conversations, which have the same deficits, and many of the same benefits. It works best for remote and hybrid teams, where the in-person discussions aren't possible. It can even work well for in-office teams by allowing some collaboration to be more async. It's way better than email for this.

It's terrible for being off the record. All Slack should be considered durable for the employer.

[horsawlarway]

> It's terrible for being off the record. All Slack should be considered durable for the employer.

It's also terrible for being "on the record". All slack conversations should be considered ephemeral from a documentation and records keeping perspective.

Which leaves it in a pretty ugly spot. It's good for exactly two things in my opinion:

1. Quickly scheduling a real meeting (occasionally it can replace the meeting if it's just two participants, but I've not seen this be consistently successful past two).

2. Work appropriate chit chat and water cooler discussions - which are beneficial from a "social cohesion" standpoint for remote teams, but are generally wasted time.

Basically - it's the worst of both worlds: you're always on the record and the record is mostly useless from a historical/documentation perspective.

[arp242]

> Work appropriate chit chat and water cooler discussions - which are beneficial from a "social cohesion" standpoint for remote teams, but are generally wasted time.

I don't agree it's "wasted time"; some amount of social interaction is pretty useful for a team to work well together. Essential? Probably not. But it does tend to lubricate the process a bit.

There's also idle work-related conversation that doesn't really neatly fit in a "ticket" but is nonetheless pretty useful.

All of that being said, I think Slack is horrible for all of this as its UI forces stuff into "threads" hard which serious reduces visibility and ability to "join in" on conversations hours or days later.

[msm_]

I agree with both points. One of the things I miss from my previous job is a thriving mattermost instance with channels full of jokes mixed with technical (but not necessarily work-related) info. It really brought the team together and I believe it had many indirect positive productivity effects.

For some reason I never saw this magic replicated with Slack.

[Psychlist]

> All slack conversations should be considered ephemeral from a documentation and records keeping perspective.

We use chat exactly that way. Commonly people respond to questions with a link to either the issue in our issue tracking system, or to the relevant page in the wiki. Certain individuals have learned that saying "but what I want isn't in there" gets them an edit link to the same page.

Once tech support started using the wiki it became more broadly useful. Knowledge that used to live only in the minds of the more experienced tech support people somehow ended up in the wiki thanks to juniors asking questions and the answers being pasted into the wiki. Wiki has also become something of a back channel for things that should be written down but don't really fit the issue tracking system. Common user errors and their symptoms, for example.

[tempestn]

We've been doing almost all of our team meetings (ranging from 5-8 people) over Slack for the past number of years. They're both faster and more productive than the video chat meetings we used to have, and leave a written record. A huge benefit over a spoken meeting is that multiple people can be 'talking' at once (often in threads) without interrupting each other.

I'm also not sure why you consider the record useless from a historical perspective. It's not structured documentation, to be sure, but it's at least a useful as email in that respect. (More-so because it's generally much easier to search.)

[HillRat]

>All slack conversations should be considered ephemeral from a documentation and records keeping perspective.

Unfortunately, from a SOX, HIPAA, or sunshine/FOIA perspective it's not. As you say, you're always on the record, even if you don't know what the record is.

[brookst]

It’s like hallway and ad hoc conversations: a great to get a quick answer, less great as a part of formal business process.

But yes, using it for either secret or formal purposes is going to disappoint.

[enumjorge]

> Slack replaces in-person conversations, which have the same deficits, and many of the same benefits

A couple of disadvantages of Slack vs real-time conversations: there can be multiple Slack threads happening at the same time. On particularly busy days, I find myself having to context switch between threads a lot. Threads can also keep going versus an in-person conversation which has an explicit end (further discussions are done in a follow-up conversation). Some threads play out over the course of multiple days, which requires that you keep the context of it in "working memory" for a while.

I like Slack, but at its worst it encourages multitasking, which can be a real productivity killer.

[georgeecollins]

That's the point. There have always been lots of ways for employees to communicate, Slack is one with a permanent record owned by the licensing company.

It's funny to read people on HN bagging on Slack. My first experience of it was as a middle manager moving to Silicon Valley where everyone expected you to use it, along with JIRA. I used to like to use kanban boards and -- I know this sounds ridiculous -- waterfall charts. It's like these things become fads and then everyone decides they are terrible.

[sfteus]

> Slack replaces in-person conversations, which have the same deficits, and many of the same benefits.

Agreed. Reading this, a lot seems to come down to culture problems that would exist whether that given office uses Slack or not, especially regarding interruptions.

I personally have felt way less interrupted from Slack/Teams in my 8+ years of remote work than I did in an office. All of my employers have understood that if I have Slack notifications disabled, I'm either "out of office" or focusing on something, and have also understood that Slack should be treated as a "something that could go a few hours without a response."

In-person, I'd just have people walk into my office and start talking without seeing if I was busy. I had multiple times where I had the door shut and lights off, and had someone pound on the door because "they could hear my keyboard and thought I just didn't hear them knocking."

Slack just lets the people who are going to interrupt you regardless do so with way less effort.