Sorry, totally off topic but I can't help but be reminded of this [0]:
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
You're going to get a lot of denial, because chatting with colleagues and sharing memes/news is fun -- and hey, it's related to work. And every once in a while, important info is transmitted.
Also, people swear they can multi-task just fine, when in fact they can't. Just like people swear they only need 4 hours of sleep. It's strange, but very few people say "Hey, I eat 300g of sugar each day, and my body loves it! That's just the way I am. Whatever works for you, right?" But when it comes to cognitive performance, it's as if the human brain is so diverse that there are no behaviors that objectively impede cognitive functioning in all cases. Multi-tasking always makes everyone less productive. It lowers your (effective) IQ. It makes you slow and dumb. It is also an objective fact that those who multi-task are generally unaware about their drop in cognitive performance. [ * ]
Also, there is a bit of a technological bias here. If you were to ask someone what is the worst possible kind of work meeting, they would tell you that it's the meeting that has no clear agenda, no one seems to be in charge, everyone is piping in with whatever's on their mind, and there is no well-defined stop period so the meeting goes on until no one has anything left to chime in about. Basically, Slack.
I wouldn't volunteer to attend a meeting just for fun, nor would I sign up for an open office floorplan, so why spend half the day in a virtual chat when I have work to do.
Once I'm done working, then I can meet with friends at a restaurant or bar, or be on social media.
Multi-tasking is insidious because there are plenty of people who can sustain productivity whilst spending a significant amount of time on Slack; their acceptable level of production blinds them to just how much further ahead they could get without Slack(and other distractions), and it can cause others to feel ashamed for their lack of performance. I keep a presence on Slack and do some of the usual fun stuff, but have taken the steps I outlined after I continued to discover just how much of a penalty gets imposed on the brain when it has to frequently switch contexts.
> Also, there is a bit of a technological bias here. If you were to ask someone what is the worst possible kind of work meeting, they would tell you that it's the meeting that has no clear agenda, no one seems to be in charge, everyone is piping in with whatever's on their mind, and there is no well-defined stop period so the meeting goes on until no one has anything left to chime in about. Basically, Slack.
What you said here is a very astute observation. I'm tempted to print it out and post it on my wall.
To be fair, people hate those sorts of physical meetings because they usually don't serve to bolster the social proof of most of the individuals involved. Even when Slack is a distraction, there is a perceived redeeming value to the lack of productivity because posting a meme or a poignant joke can make one appear to be more funny in general. True, a person's Slack persona can affect how others perceive that person in real life, but then you have to wonder just what you're getting for impressing these particular people. TLDR; people actually hate formality.
As I stated before, coworkers are not your friends. I say this as someone who works with an unusually friendly team. We pay Mario Kart after work every few weeks, and we sometimes hang on Saturdays to chill and play Civ V. In fantasy land, these people are my friends. In reality, that friendship would sublimate instantly if I ever left the company. I've never experienced otherwise. It's friendship in the most superficial sense, which isn't a bad thing, but people with similarly friendly coworkers shouldn't sacrifice energy they'd be devoting to their craft for the sake of cultivating fake friendships.
Kind of. I won't get a mobile notification or the little red dot in my macOS dock, but it will still show a little red thing next to the channel name in Slack. I don't know if there's a way to get rid of that.
> It’s a bit like the way everyone gravitates towards the kitchen at a house party.
I've solved this problem by dimming or turning off the lights in all the rooms I don't want people to hang out in and having brighter lighting in the room I want people to stay in. It works wonders.
I don't disagree with the article's premise that Slack hijacks your brain, but as someone who worked for a far-flung company that didn't have Slack, and instead relied on email/phone/web meetings, I NEVER want to go back to that.
Skype had one benefit: it was easier to add folks to your DM. Other than that, Slack is better. It's essentially Skype++ for us. Bots ... well they never really did much.
When does a conversation stop being about a tool or a platform and become about how it's used?
Slack is not perfectly opinionated. It does not enforce a single way of working on everyone that uses it. One of the weakest areas I have found on HN has been discussion around organizations and how they function. New tools, like Slack, open new doors, but they are not silver bullets. Switching to Slack doesn't solve inherent organizational problems, bad organizational habits, poor management practices, or unrealistic (or misaligned) expectations.
We don't blame email for the emails your boss sends you at 2 in the morning.
OP here. I think the problem is that when tools like Slack are engineered in such a way as to make people dependent on their product, it's unfair to expect users to accept all the responsibility of mitigating against that. Software companies aren't using organizational productivity as a benchmark for their success, just usage statistics. So no, Slack doesn't enforce a single way of working, but it is engineered to consume as much of people's time as possible, for better or worse.
Jason Fried wrote his in his (much more comprehensive) post about group chat pros/cons:
"It’s common in the software industry to blame the users. It’s the user’s fault. They don’t know how to use it. They’re using it wrong. They need to do this or do that. But the reality is that tools encourage specific behaviors. A product is a series of design decisions with a specific outcome in mind. Yes, you can use tools as they weren’t intended, but most people follow the patterns suggested by the design. And so in the end, if people are exhausted and feeling unable to keep up, it’s the tool’s fault, not the user’s fault. If the design leads to stress, it’s a bad design."
> I think the problem is that when tools like Slack are engineered in such a way as to make people dependent on their product
It's a chat client. It's an addictive medium. It sounds to me like you're shooting the messenger.
Skype, Hangouts, or any IM client wants your attention. Slack is just a better version of all the other IM clients I've used (for work).
If you don't want to be disturbed you close Slack.
I suspect that if you've got problems with Slack, it means that there's a problem in the culture of where you work.
Where I work, individual @ mentions are barely used, maybe 0-5 per day. But there's nothing that's written in stone, or ever been discussed, it's just that colleagues respect each other's focus. Then the rest is less important that all can be ignored unless you're not concentrating on something.
> I suspect that if you've got problems with Slack, it means that there's a problem in the culture of where you work.
One can work somewhere that has a problem in the culture, and Slack can make that worse. It's been interesting to me to observe when my company changed from hipchat to slack, my productivity went down until I recognized how slack was messing me up (because of the default UI patterns it came with) and I've had to unwind that by changing a bunch of settings and patterns.
It's been a similar change when I moved from a company that used email and tickets for team communication, to one that uses chat.
Yes, the culture if the heart of the problems, but the tools can amplify those problems.
It's like if you can't cut a piece of wood effectively with a handsaw, but I give you a power saw, you may soon have much bigger problems on your hands. (or hand, if you really mess it up)
> I think the problem is that when tools like Slack are engineered in such a way as to make people dependent on their product, it's unfair to expect users to accept all the responsibility of mitigating against that.
You write this as if it's a given. I never said anything about mitigating against dependency... I'm talking about mitigating against a dysfunctional organization, which are far more common than I think most people realize, or (especially) care to admit.
> Software companies aren't using organizational productivity as a benchmark for their success, just usage statistics.
Again, I'll accept that software companies care about the number of active users even over productivity, but it's not a given that Slack cares (at all) about how much time I actually spend on Slack (as opposed to, for example, Facebook).
> So no, Slack doesn't enforce a single way of working, but it is engineered to consume as much of people's time as possible, for better or worse.
If you show me that Slack is trying to monopolize people's time (something that, quite honestly, would be bad for its business and product) then we can talk about how much responsibility a user has to mitigate a product's designed purpose. Otherwise, I'm speaking about how much accountability a user is willing to assign to his or her organization because, quite frequently, people are unwilling to point out things they find wrong within an organization.
> Jason Fried wrote his in his (much more comprehensive) post about group chat pros/cons:
I find a lot wrong with Jason Fried's writing in general, and this post isn't different. That quote specifically falls into one of his common issues, oversimplification to the point of absurdity.
If a design leads to stress it's bad design? Well what if communicating one-on-one with your boss about things you're accountable for stresses you out (something that is fairly common)? And since Slack is designed to make that pretty easy, is it Slack's fault you're stressed? Is Slack poorly designed because you are? No. That's an organizational issue.
I'm very distractible, and I get on fine with Slack. I genuinely feel work is easier with it, you just have to aggressively filter the attention-grabbing. My strategy is: notifications for mentions and ultra-important channels only, mute any channel I don't want to definitely read all of (joining a channel and immediately muting is common for me), disable the unread dot completely for non-primary teams, and unsubscribe from threads as soon as I'm done in them.
As mentioned elsewhere, if I don't want to do something straight away, I star it for the next morning's run through my starred list, or if it's more particular than that set a reminder or something. It's really not too bad.
OP here. Iit's telling that so many people are commenting in this thread about how Slack isn't that bad because you can customize it to be less attention-grabbing. The fact remains that Slack is engineered to be attention-grabbing out of the box. Sure you can tweak it to make it less shouty, but Slack is still a product that is sold for money by a company. It's not in their interests to make it align with your existing workflow if they can upend that workflow entirely. No one's making money from you having a meeting or sending a well thought out email, so I think it's worth being cynical when considering paid alternatives.
I think it's also worth remembering that for hacker type folks like us, customizing software is the norm. But default settings are default for a reason, and they will inevitably end up being the most commonly used. When everyone else in your company expects you to use Slack they way do, i.e. for 8 hours a day with instantaneous reply times, then it becomes hard to push against that and eventually it becomes the status quo
> The fact remains that Slack is engineered to be attention-grabbing out of the box. Sure you can tweak it to make it less shouty
But this is kind of an absurd critism. Who wants a real-time business-oriented operations chat system where you don't know about incoming messages by default? Can you imagine people complaining about not knowing about new messages for minutes and support staff having to inform people that you have to turn those on manually? Slack wasn't engineered to suck you in, it's acting in the only rational and useful default for what it is, a standard established by every chat client I've ever heard of before it. It would have been a product that didn't work by default. If slack was missing a seeing you wanted, I could understand, but at some point you're just blaming a chat tool for being optimal for chats because your organization wants you to respond unreasonably quickly or because you're not muting channels or snoozing or not using the settings to the fullest.
I'm very sympathetic to that line of argument, I'm no fan of capitalism, but choosing the default settings for something like Slack (whether you are selling it in order to make a profit or not) appears to me to be a tradeoff between making it immediately useful, and obvious to non-nerds why it is useful, and being less attention-grabbing when your team gets a bit more unwieldy. I've no doubt there's more they could do and more care they could take, but Slack do publicise the customisations you can make.
(In an ideal world of course we'd be using a chat system that has a great user experience, is based on open standards, _and_ is somehow easy to deploy... but within our current economic system that is clearly a tricky one.)
Sadly, artificial urgency is the status quo of modern application design and development. A successful app often takes several cues from gambling, wherein the user gets a dopamine hit with a new notification, and is encouraged to check periodically for the possibility of another hit.
Slack for work mostly sucks. It's OK for communities where urgency is obviously not there -- basically as an alternative IRC. I have worked at a couple companies that used IRC. They beauty of IRC is no offline notifications (unless you're using a cloud service, I guess) -- so it was only used during the workday.
I'm not sure if this is the case with other teams, but I've been noticing my team has been using public channels less and less lately, and I guess most slack-based communication must happen in private messages. We could probably change to a traditional IM client and not have to deal with Slack anymore.
If slack is only used during the work day then you would have the exact same application without the nice CI/file sharing and all the other bots slack has
How would you change the IM client??? Make it like slack. Just use slack.
"Slack for work mostly sucks." ... Whats your point? People use it after work hours?
Slack is not basically an alternative to IRC it IS an alternative, a better more feature rich one.
Slack has more features than IRC so slack sucks ... this typical tradition speak, fearful of new things. Many techies dont need slack but for those that have yet to take on the message app craze Slack is catalyzing a lot of new non techies.
I guess I hit a nerve. FWIW I've been using Slack since 2014, so it's not like I'm unfamiliar with it or have been shunning new technologies. I do like it for communities. I just don't like it for work.
I'm fairly indifferent towards Slack, but I don't get your point about the beauty of IRC. If you don't want to receive Slack messages outside the workday, why are you on it at that time? I just close the client.
> "What lures people to Slack in the first place is its ability to manufacture an artificial sense of urgency..."
I think it would be far more accurate to say that it's due to a lack of other products that as easy to use for so many.
I've considered putting my internet savvy parents on Slack, and they are well into their retirement years.
I don't think Slack is addicting as much as most humans enjoy contact with other humans. We are wired to be social. It helped us survive and thrive. Slack et al is simply a symptom of that wiring.
i agree but even a nice thing and a more innovative application of slack is making the anti social become social.
If you dont like seeing people face to face and you still need to communicate with team members slack has the ability to be flexible enough to communicate many different ideas very accurately. With bots and file sharing slack is the one stop collaboration board (along with google docs for co file editing)
and for people that are social or non technical slack has that friendly feeling ... its has taken exactly what we have been hoping from the internet , efficient communication and sharing and made it be homey instead of cold.
Slack is just another message board for tech guys but to the rest of the people tech guys have to communicate with (and would want to make this communication as fast and accurate as possible) slack is a world of difference from other chat services.
While I agree with this article in general, I do believe the distractiveness of Slack can be mitigated by disabling notifications on certain channels while keeping them open on others.
It the same reason I close email and chat apps during periods of work to get stuff done.
You have to create and control your own context switches. I also disable email notifications on my cell. This let’s me check email outside of work but doesn’t force it into my view every moment.
The killer feature of slack is that alerts are highly configurable and work properly across devices - it lets you eliminate unnecessary and duplicated alerts
Sure, but there are still two major problems IMHO. Firstly, there's no practical and intentional workflow to postpone things (an equivalent of "mark as unread"). Secondly, because a majority of people responds to notifications immediately, it becomes socially unacceptable to not do it in a timely manner.
that last one is a feature , that last one is what the company was hoping for when deploying it in your org. Its that feature that makes it actually useful
What good is a messaging app that keeps you from communicating with me. The whole reason we have this app is for us to communicate, quicker and easier.
"Socially unacceptable" ... maybe you are neglecting some important communication? If your answer is no then you should discuss your availability with your team about your slack hours. Its fine to trun off the email and slack. When when you are one work time slack/email make communication better/easier. You should not blame or allow slack to employ a standard you would not be comfortable with even if slack was not invented (ex: your boss calls you at on the phone at 7pm, if thats not ok then you should also tell your boss you dont answer slack after 7pm)
Do you use slack? You seem to be criticising the thing that slack is really good at.
The postpone workflow is to switch alerts off, can be done on schedule for when you are not at work and manually for meetings etc. And it allows you to fine tune these between channels and people etc. There are a number of statuses that show to your co-workers (on holiday, sleeping, in meeting, dnd etc). Those messages are there unread for you to come back to when you are ready.
There's the "remind me about this" feature for messages. The intervals are well-spaced, too. (in 20 mins, in 1 hour, in 3 hours, tomorrow). I find it to be a great way to deal with an interruption that can't be ignored entirely, but comes while I'm in the middle of doing something more important.
Like has been stated. This is a feature, not a bug.
If you've read a message, why aren't you responding? It's likely not a problem with Slack that you cannot tell one of your coworkers that you will look at something or do something later.
I never really understood the hype around Slack. I keep reading articles like this one, I constantly hear people saying "zomg we transitioned to Slack and are having such an awesome time, it's way better then [insert messaging app]!".
I'm probably getting old, but I've been using it for about 3-4 years now (because work) and it seems just like a polished IRC client tied to a proprietary service to me.
You say "IRC" to your marketing or sales cohorts and enjoy the contorted face they make.
It's not just a dancey, polished IRC. It _is_ a dancey, polished IRC that invites people from all backgrounds to use it and enjoy it. As a communications glue for a company, I find it to be very valuable in talking not just with other developers, but other departments.
I feel like the premise of this article is wrong because does slack really care how much you use it? Don’t they just get $$$ per seat. They just want businesses to keep buying. This is opposed to Facebook where their business is keeping users engaged.
I think personal comms + general channel announcements are OK. Just close slack and when you come back check any specific communications for you asynchronously, or if you want to catch up on "what's been up" you can browse message threads.
On the other hand @here/@channel messages are terrible! Now these are terrible because they confuse the "broadcast" nature messages with personal messages.
Yeah, I've started to persecute the offenders individually by telling them privately how disruptive their @here messages are.
It's weird though, because sometimes I want to announce things to everyone, e.g., to bring to everyone's attention something that I've done, but I have to follow my own do-not-spam everyone rule.
I guess comms is hard no matter what tools you use. O(n^2) hard, for a team of n people.
It is a lot easier (several orders of magnitudes) to change software than to chance people (especially for programmers) - so the focus should be on changing software.
>> I have probably spent thousands of hours of my life using it. And yet I have absolutely nothing tangible to show for this.
It seems we should have at least as much to show as other forms of group comms tools.
Re urgency : same applies. a group should set standards for urgency based on various human and project needs. Point is these should be set my people not the tool.
You also have to take into account is that chatting is how the younger colleagues want to collaborate. Just like email replaced phone calls, chat apps are supplanting email. What's next? Bots.
Coworkers aren't your friends. Don't have FOMO on their Slack postings.