I thought this twitter thread would be a lot more about
>Network ops & infrastructure engineers deserve huge credit for 99.999% uptime through absolutely unprecedented growth.
Folded hands
The company I work at are very busy because of the events of the last few weeks and a huge focus of that has been "Okay, we know these things can happen, the focus right now is to focus, follow our contignency plans and make sure everything just keeps working. No new features, no standard releases, stop everything non-essential and focus on making sure everything holds up".
I have said this before but the way Slack is used today is most of the time a net negative of the modern workplace.
And I will agree that it's mainly because people use it badly but Slack encourages to use it as a dopamine fix contributing to an ever lower attention span in the workspace.
An IM tool is needed in the modern workspace but it should be seen as the last resort. A synchronous answer should not be expected. Instead, Slack has been pushed as the replacement of email and is being used as the single place where all the discussions are going on in real-time, making it extremely difficult to work on a complex task without taking the risk of missing an important decision/discussion.
I find it amazing that this tool is used unquestionably by every small/medium company without ever wondering if it really provides a productivity benefit.
You seem stuck in the past and project your problems onto others. For many, IM and chat rooms do not cause productivity problems. Different companies use Slack and other tools in their own way, have their own policies as to what is expected and what not.
The client has enough options available you can set as you like as to not disturb you.
Email has its own problems. Sometimes you need answers to important questions promptly. @<user> works better then, at the same time, it is less intrusive than a phone call.
Also, it is work time, you have to expect to be on the ready, and answer people that needs something from you, so they can get their work done, too. It is not your leisure time.
Some people here talk about work like they think it is their own personal project time.
Our team has become more productive since the switch to fully remote, and we use Slack allthetime to facilitate our communications.
Pro tip: set your notification settings to silent by default. I occasionally turn on notifications for our automated system alerting Slack channel, usually when I'm not actually at my computer.
One thing I do think we do as Slack users is rely on it too much as a general information dump: even with the history, stuff gets lost. Slack is no replacement for wikis or other more static information repositories, make sure you extract valuable knowledge out and put it somewhere more suitable (and findable).
It’s pretty typical of the manager/employee tool adoption cycle. Slack is 100% a net positive if your job description requires you monitor multiple things to make sure they are all ok and resolve issues in a timely manner. As usual people with this job description often get to pick the tools used and don’t see why it’s not “so fun” for their employees to keep up with the firehose they’ve inserted in their computer/phone.
On that topic, I really like David Allen's "hierarchy of communication channels" (name is mine) in Getting Things Done. He says that when you need to discuss something with someone, you should consider the following communication channels, in that order:
- e-mail
- leave hand written note on desk/in pigeon hole
- send IM/text message.
- put topic on a "list of things to discuss i next meeting"
- phone call/face to face
You should choose the first that fits the urgency of the situation. The idea being to maximize trackability and minimize disruptions. In the current Slack culture, I actually put IM just before phone call, given the expectation of quick answer most people have.
I think slack’s secret sauce isn’t actually the day to day team work stuff but the cross team communication and fun aspects of it. I’m on a slack team at work that has 50k people in it spread across 5 cities and sometimes multiple offices in each city. There are topics to talk about almost anything you’re interested in from board games to parenting to woodworking to whatever. I think it makes the whole company feel connected to each other as people in a way that email or face to face meetings or phone conversations or regular instant messenger could never accomplish.
And that ability to make spontaneous connections extends to business related topics as well — I spent about an hour just randomly helping someone on a team that I knew only from slack design a kubernetes deployment and took a project from struggling to get off the ground to going full speed ahead. I switched to a machine learning team here despite having zero work experience doing machine learning because I spend time in the machine learning channel and demonstrated that I had interest and knowledge of the topic.
It works _because_ it’s fun and distracting, not in spite of that, imo.
My actual team never uses it because we’re all sitting next to each other, usually, and our support channel is only ever manned by the engineer on call. It’s all the so-called non-productive uses that make it great.
We (small business with 7 employees at desks and another 5 on the floor) use it exactly the way you suggest. As the sole IT staff, I get the most messages from the other employees, and send out the most, with the company president close behind me. Two online sales staff, the lead shipping clerk, and the physical store manager follow from there. The warehouse manager doesn't bother with it, and the CFO detests the idea of it (she's also one of the oldest team members at 49).
Most communication is by email, SMS/iMessage, face to face (though we are reducing that due to current concerns), 2-way radio, and phone, in that order. Slack is mainly for sharing the odd file or link, or for staff to reach me for computer related issues that require me to see something rather than hear it (screenshot, etc). We could go with any other messaging service, and before Slack we used Skype, but Slack at our level is free, easy, and runs on all platforms we use.
The idea of it "replacing" email, phone, and radio comms is ludicrous to us. I can't imagine how it can work that way in larger organizations.
No tool is going to do the job of establishing boundaries with your team members so you can do your best work. You decide that.
Any tool can be positive or negative depending on its use and context. I do deep work and have no problem using Slack because my team talks about how we can use it best, and we use it that way.
I moved from a job with Slack to a job without Slack. Finding myself more productive. Some people use Slack but since I saw on the first day that it is not the main medium for comms I now outright refuse to use it anytime anyone mentions it. Nobody seems bothered and email, phone and in person is prefered. And we all (15 employees) regularly worked from home even before this situation.
> making it extremely difficult to work on a complex task without taking the risk of missing an important decision/discussion
Is this any less true for any other digital communication medium?
If the issue is things getting lost in the chat history, typically in my experience important discussions that we want to preserve will happen in a different place; comments on tickets or PRs, google doc annotations, etc. Slack is a "scratch pad" for discussion.
To each their opinion but I work remote, which is so modern and logical and amazing that I vow never to take a non-remote job again. Slack is critical to my job.
It really depends on the culture. When I write code, I close all chat apps, and check them for notifications every 2-4 hours. Everyone who works with me knows it and understands the reasons behind it. They have my phone number in a case of a real emergency.
You're in charge of your own productivity and your own work patterns. Train your coworkers to respect them.
I think you answered your own question with the ´Dopamine’ comment. Slack clearly has an addictive game effect on its users. And since it pleases the crowd and has no visible downside, it’s tempting for busy small/medium business owner to just let it sail initially.
>, Slack has been pushed as the replacement of email [...]
Yes, I empathize your perspective which is very common common among people who want to concentrate without interruptions. Donald Knuth is an extreme example of not wanting to be interrupted -- not even with async email.[1]
However your cause & effect of why chat/Slack is popular is not correct.
Chat apps are more of a replacement for walking up to a coworker's cubicle or desk and interrupting them face-to-face.
>[...] without ever wondering if it really provides a productivity benefit.
It's a productivity benefit to the people who are doing the interrupting. We don't work in an office full of "Donald Knuths" who don't want to bother each other. Because the interrupters outnumber the deep thinkers, that's why a chat tool like AIM/YahooMessenger/Skype/Whatsapp/Slack/etc dominates.
I previously mentioned how early Facebook programmers chatted on instant messaging (AOL AIM ~9 years before Slack) even though they sat next to each other.[2] Their behavior is not replacing "email". They are replacing "realtime speech" without making verbal sounds.
If one doesn't understand that, you'll always be mystified why email isn't used in place of instant messaging!
Email is less ergonomic than chat. Email has extra friction of entering a "subject:" line before the body of the text. Chat doesn't need a subject line because the chat room is already the implied subject. Email also has extra friction of hitting "reply" button instead of just typing. Email is oriented around the "inbox". Chat is oriented around people who are actively online.
Likewise, when my mom texts me an SMS on my smartphone, she isn't replacing email. She's replacing a phone call.
[1] do a mental search & replace :
s/email/chat
s/snailmail/email
...on this excerpt from https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html: >Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don't have time for such study.
>On the other hand, I need to communicate with thousands of people all over the world as I write my books. I also want to be responsive to the people who read those books and have questions or comments. My goal is to do this communication efficiently, in batch mode --- like, one day every six months. So if you want to write to me about any topic, please use good ol' snail mail and send a letter
That trope was old before but is even more irrelevant in these turbulent times when people are forced to work from home. What are you suggesting as an alternative?
I never used email growing up. Real time chat has always been a much more effective method of communication. Email just causes confusion as people misinterpret questions and then write long-winded answers to the question that they misunderstood resulting in a waste of time for both parties. Iterative back and forth communication is key to figuring out an issue. Email does not work.
>If you’re getting easily distracted by your messages, you’re not doing deep work.
What about the possibility in differences in how attention works between people. In an extreme case you would have ADD/ADHD, but in less extreme cases you can have people who are broken out of deep work much easier than others. It can also be highly situational.
For example, I can ignore most noises when reading an interesting book, but I cannot ignore noises from a TV, especially advertisement. So I've had to start wearing headphones and playing songs (which I can ignore) when I want to read while located in a room with someone watching TV.
That’s not realistic if you ever go on call. When you’re responsible for the uptime of a service and people’s first line of contact for issues is a slack message, you need to always have it be in a state to interrupt you.
also, if you need to do deepwork, instead of complaining that slack prevents you from it, just close it! You can re-open it once you are done doing your deep work, and your messages and notifications will still be here.
It is a real opportunity missed for google. Slack/Teams is the current heart of company activities all over the world and Google only provides tens of similar chat tools. They should really communicate about this.
Google is so big I'm sure they had their own ups and downs. I see so many school districts doubling down on Google Classroom--the district may have used it previously, but were now adding accounts for Kindergarteners.
While Google usage is way up, ad buys dropped like a rock.
One thing I found quite striking was that they started allowing "optional WFH". Slack, which not only makes one of the main tools used to enable distributed work, but the most popular one, didn't allow remote work??
It'll be interesting to see what changes come as they start eating their own dog food.
I hope once all this over people will ditch their social media and instant messaging apps and begin to take most discussions with civility. We need less social media, we need less instant messaging, we need less echo chambers.
Missing from that list: last Friday there was a huge hackathon in Germany that tried to create a slack project and invite around 45k people to it, which totally crashed the project.
The hackathon organizers said they were in contact with Slack's CEO or CTO (cannot remember which one), and they continued trying to add people over most of the weekend.
They were in contact with the CEO. They had some problems since they wanted to send out an email to all 42k participants with an invite link. Apparently invite links for Slack are only valid for up to 2k users.
It seems like the Slack team was able to help, but they didn't disclose how exactly [1].
It's addressed in the tweets, but there's also the question of how many existing customers are folding or going to fold before this all wraps up. If you have that plus unsticky new customers, you're looking at a potential loss. I have no idea what's realistic at this point, but I suppose neither do they. These are strange times.
Interesting to see, but I get the impression (purely anecdotal) that once companies have picked Slack, they'll stick with it for years to come. It quickly becomes part of their core communications, and moving to a competitor or back to what they had before is not easy to do (for purely organizational or people reasons, nothing technological - I've only ever used Slack as a very fleeting communications medium, I've never seen it used to drive automation. Maybe some reporting like 'build xyz failed' or 'there is a new issue', but that can be easily switched back to email).
Tangent: is it ok to put sensitive stuff on slack?
I mean sure, they're legally prevented from snooping, but considering there'd be no way to find out if that confidence were breached, is it ok to have confidential discussions or upload sensitive documents or private keys?
I think this is a situation where you need training in best practices and checklists etc. rather than asking questions on HN.
Marginally I don't think it's a problem but given that most people don't treat slack too carefully I wouldn't trust it regularly (Not slack itself but people gaining access).
I freaking hate twitter 'essays' like this. What is it, 30+ tweets in a row? This is such a horrible way to communicate. 240 characters at a time is is not a good way to write, let alone to try to read. I guess it makes me angry I am expected to follow a long, disjointed, meandering stream of thought all the way to the end. Tiny chunk... by tiny chunk.. by chunk.. chunk.. chunk. It just feels bad.
I think I know why people do this, usually people with large followings, and they want to get it in front of as many eyeballs as possible. But if you have this much to say... please can we agree to just write a blog post and post the link on twitter? Then we can go read a long article in a comfortable manner, without all the other distractions of twitter, chunks spinning off a new threads of comments along the way. Meanwhile, you still get to put it in from of all your followers :)
If the pen is mightier than the sword; transferring long-form information via Twitter is like leaving hand grenades lying around.
(The above sentence is 129 characters, feel free to tweet it)
I'm not trying to disparage this person, and I suspect he might even agree based on the screenshot of the message posted in Slack, I'm just wondering why we all keep treating this like it's normal.
Slack even has posts and (public?) file sharing as part of the product he could use to distribute this information!
[+] [-] Traster|6 years ago|reply
>Network ops & infrastructure engineers deserve huge credit for 99.999% uptime through absolutely unprecedented growth. Folded hands
The company I work at are very busy because of the events of the last few weeks and a huge focus of that has been "Okay, we know these things can happen, the focus right now is to focus, follow our contignency plans and make sure everything just keeps working. No new features, no standard releases, stop everything non-essential and focus on making sure everything holds up".
[+] [-] bvandewalle|6 years ago|reply
And I will agree that it's mainly because people use it badly but Slack encourages to use it as a dopamine fix contributing to an ever lower attention span in the workspace.
An IM tool is needed in the modern workspace but it should be seen as the last resort. A synchronous answer should not be expected. Instead, Slack has been pushed as the replacement of email and is being used as the single place where all the discussions are going on in real-time, making it extremely difficult to work on a complex task without taking the risk of missing an important decision/discussion.
I find it amazing that this tool is used unquestionably by every small/medium company without ever wondering if it really provides a productivity benefit.
[+] [-] erikbye|6 years ago|reply
The client has enough options available you can set as you like as to not disturb you.
Email has its own problems. Sometimes you need answers to important questions promptly. @<user> works better then, at the same time, it is less intrusive than a phone call.
Also, it is work time, you have to expect to be on the ready, and answer people that needs something from you, so they can get their work done, too. It is not your leisure time.
Some people here talk about work like they think it is their own personal project time.
[+] [-] davedx|6 years ago|reply
Pro tip: set your notification settings to silent by default. I occasionally turn on notifications for our automated system alerting Slack channel, usually when I'm not actually at my computer.
One thing I do think we do as Slack users is rely on it too much as a general information dump: even with the history, stuff gets lost. Slack is no replacement for wikis or other more static information repositories, make sure you extract valuable knowledge out and put it somewhere more suitable (and findable).
[+] [-] pixelrevision|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tduberne|6 years ago|reply
- e-mail
- leave hand written note on desk/in pigeon hole
- send IM/text message.
- put topic on a "list of things to discuss i next meeting"
- phone call/face to face
You should choose the first that fits the urgency of the situation. The idea being to maximize trackability and minimize disruptions. In the current Slack culture, I actually put IM just before phone call, given the expectation of quick answer most people have.
[+] [-] empath75|6 years ago|reply
And that ability to make spontaneous connections extends to business related topics as well — I spent about an hour just randomly helping someone on a team that I knew only from slack design a kubernetes deployment and took a project from struggling to get off the ground to going full speed ahead. I switched to a machine learning team here despite having zero work experience doing machine learning because I spend time in the machine learning channel and demonstrated that I had interest and knowledge of the topic.
It works _because_ it’s fun and distracting, not in spite of that, imo.
My actual team never uses it because we’re all sitting next to each other, usually, and our support channel is only ever manned by the engineer on call. It’s all the so-called non-productive uses that make it great.
[+] [-] morganvachon|6 years ago|reply
Most communication is by email, SMS/iMessage, face to face (though we are reducing that due to current concerns), 2-way radio, and phone, in that order. Slack is mainly for sharing the odd file or link, or for staff to reach me for computer related issues that require me to see something rather than hear it (screenshot, etc). We could go with any other messaging service, and before Slack we used Skype, but Slack at our level is free, easy, and runs on all platforms we use.
The idea of it "replacing" email, phone, and radio comms is ludicrous to us. I can't imagine how it can work that way in larger organizations.
[+] [-] montagg|6 years ago|reply
Any tool can be positive or negative depending on its use and context. I do deep work and have no problem using Slack because my team talks about how we can use it best, and we use it that way.
[+] [-] helij|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _bxg1|6 years ago|reply
Is this any less true for any other digital communication medium?
If the issue is things getting lost in the chat history, typically in my experience important discussions that we want to preserve will happen in a different place; comments on tickets or PRs, google doc annotations, etc. Slack is a "scratch pad" for discussion.
[+] [-] Waterluvian|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] golergka|6 years ago|reply
You're in charge of your own productivity and your own work patterns. Train your coworkers to respect them.
[+] [-] crocal|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jasode|6 years ago|reply
Yes, I empathize your perspective which is very common common among people who want to concentrate without interruptions. Donald Knuth is an extreme example of not wanting to be interrupted -- not even with async email.[1]
However your cause & effect of why chat/Slack is popular is not correct.
Chat apps are more of a replacement for walking up to a coworker's cubicle or desk and interrupting them face-to-face.
>[...] without ever wondering if it really provides a productivity benefit.
It's a productivity benefit to the people who are doing the interrupting. We don't work in an office full of "Donald Knuths" who don't want to bother each other. Because the interrupters outnumber the deep thinkers, that's why a chat tool like AIM/YahooMessenger/Skype/Whatsapp/Slack/etc dominates.
I previously mentioned how early Facebook programmers chatted on instant messaging (AOL AIM ~9 years before Slack) even though they sat next to each other.[2] Their behavior is not replacing "email". They are replacing "realtime speech" without making verbal sounds.
If one doesn't understand that, you'll always be mystified why email isn't used in place of instant messaging!
Email is less ergonomic than chat. Email has extra friction of entering a "subject:" line before the body of the text. Chat doesn't need a subject line because the chat room is already the implied subject. Email also has extra friction of hitting "reply" button instead of just typing. Email is oriented around the "inbox". Chat is oriented around people who are actively online.
Likewise, when my mom texts me an SMS on my smartphone, she isn't replacing email. She's replacing a phone call.
[1] do a mental search & replace :
...on this excerpt from https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html: >Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don't have time for such study.>On the other hand, I need to communicate with thousands of people all over the world as I write my books. I also want to be responsive to the people who read those books and have questions or comments. My goal is to do this communication efficiently, in batch mode --- like, one day every six months. So if you want to write to me about any topic, please use good ol' snail mail and send a letter
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18321783
[+] [-] Kiro|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mlindner|6 years ago|reply
Email needs to die.
[+] [-] ulisesrmzroche|6 years ago|reply
I personally suffer from neck pain because I can do deep work. A distraction (my dog) is put in place to shake me from deep work and force rest.
If you’re getting easily distracted by your messages, you’re not doing deep work. This is why you’re so easily distracted.
[+] [-] SkyBelow|6 years ago|reply
What about the possibility in differences in how attention works between people. In an extreme case you would have ADD/ADHD, but in less extreme cases you can have people who are broken out of deep work much easier than others. It can also be highly situational.
For example, I can ignore most noises when reading an interesting book, but I cannot ignore noises from a TV, especially advertisement. So I've had to start wearing headphones and playing songs (which I can ignore) when I want to read while located in a room with someone watching TV.
[+] [-] thanatos_dem|6 years ago|reply
Your personal website is down, btw.
[+] [-] anoncake|6 years ago|reply
Psychology is an entire academic discipline. You can't just extrapolate from your own introspection to everyone else.
[+] [-] jypepin|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dang|6 years ago|reply
(Or so I remember. I can't seem to find the original source.)
[+] [-] gowld|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fxbois|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pfranz|6 years ago|reply
While Google usage is way up, ad buys dropped like a rock.
[+] [-] vowelless|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gregmac|6 years ago|reply
It'll be interesting to see what changes come as they start eating their own dog food.
[+] [-] yread|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] christiansakai|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] perlgeek|6 years ago|reply
The hackathon organizers said they were in contact with Slack's CEO or CTO (cannot remember which one), and they continued trying to add people over most of the weekend.
[+] [-] moooo99|6 years ago|reply
It seems like the Slack team was able to help, but they didn't disclose how exactly [1].
[1] https://twitter.com/WirvsVirusHack/status/124104522882975334...
[+] [-] pas|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dclusin|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] steve_adams_86|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Cthulhu_|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] twomoretime|6 years ago|reply
I mean sure, they're legally prevented from snooping, but considering there'd be no way to find out if that confidence were breached, is it ok to have confidential discussions or upload sensitive documents or private keys?
[+] [-] mhh__|6 years ago|reply
Marginally I don't think it's a problem but given that most people don't treat slack too carefully I wouldn't trust it regularly (Not slack itself but people gaining access).
[+] [-] paxys|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 40four|6 years ago|reply
I freaking hate twitter 'essays' like this. What is it, 30+ tweets in a row? This is such a horrible way to communicate. 240 characters at a time is is not a good way to write, let alone to try to read. I guess it makes me angry I am expected to follow a long, disjointed, meandering stream of thought all the way to the end. Tiny chunk... by tiny chunk.. by chunk.. chunk.. chunk. It just feels bad.
I think I know why people do this, usually people with large followings, and they want to get it in front of as many eyeballs as possible. But if you have this much to say... please can we agree to just write a blog post and post the link on twitter? Then we can go read a long article in a comfortable manner, without all the other distractions of twitter, chunks spinning off a new threads of comments along the way. Meanwhile, you still get to put it in from of all your followers :)
[+] [-] jrandm|6 years ago|reply
(The above sentence is 129 characters, feel free to tweet it)
I'm not trying to disparage this person, and I suspect he might even agree based on the screenshot of the message posted in Slack, I'm just wondering why we all keep treating this like it's normal.
Slack even has posts and (public?) file sharing as part of the product he could use to distribute this information!
[+] [-] empath75|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] barnyfried|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] effnorwood|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] GoodJokes|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] sanguy|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] golergka|6 years ago|reply
Source?
[+] [-] teslademigod1|6 years ago|reply
but mannn the way it is now -- at least, more accurately, the way people are using it -- it's such a huge distractor
and these damn messages at 9pm or 8am or saturdays and sundays...
[+] [-] jve|6 years ago|reply