
Sorry, we can't join your Slack - mooreds
https://www.reifyworks.com/writing/2019-09-03-sorry-we-cant-join-your-slack
======
anbotero
I never truly understand issues people have with these things. I tune my
notifications as to avoid true interruptions and filter most false positives
by quick looking.

I see people at my office (and different companies!) saying they quit
Slack/Whatever because they were getting bombarded by notifications... They
had the option to notify on all messages. ¬¬

Even then, come on, I cannot believe experience hasn’t taught most of you how
to handle quick interruptions. I usually just quick look at the notification
to see if it’s really urgent. Otherwise it may be 7-10 minutes until I
actually check the application, in case I’m doing some heavy thinking/coding
session.

There are true interruptions like constant notifications, people physically
talking to you about other things, and stuff, that while you cannot really
tune them all out, you should be able to handle better with 2-3 years of
experience. I read a lot of people on these forums with many more years not
being able to cope with that.

I will die still unable to believe it was the norm, and not the exception :(

~~~
iamnotacrook
My problem (with Skype, so ok that's two problems) is people just put "hi" or
"hello" and then the choice is to either ignore them and hope they'll get
around to actually asking the question, or give in and say "hi" (passive
aggressive or "hi, what's up" (I don't care what's up - you started it). I
can't think of a polite way to say "please don't just type "hi"" without
making it sound like I think I'm special, but at the same time ignoring them
outright seems rude. They know I'm here because of the presence indicator.

~~~
peteradio
How is responding with "hi" passive aggressive? Why would someone type a
potentially large question to a the abyss?

~~~
dumbfounder
It's not the abyss, it's just asynchronous. If you make me say hi back then
you have trapped me rather than giving me the option to look at your question,
determine the importance, and respond at a time that is appropriate for me.

------
danpalmer
There are modes of work where Slack or another instant messaging option make
me far more productive than anything else, and there are modes where it makes
me far less productive.

When collaborating on a time sensitive issue with remote colleagues it's
fantastic. When trying to get my head down and complete a tricky bit of work
it's awful.

I think the most important thing is not using Slack or avoiding Slack, it's
building a culture that allows people to opt-out of it, without any sort of
penalty, perceived or otherwise. If people want to hang out in Slack they can,
if they want to shut it off for the day and just drop in to give a standup
update or something like that, that's fine too. Important things are done
asynchronously in a forum that everyone can experience.

~~~
giancarlostoro
> Important things are done asynchronously in a forum that everyone can
> experience.

This is how email or ticketing systems to an extent work. Though we have a
rule that certain ticket discussions should go into a ticket itself so
decision changes are not lost and people have accountability (which is better
cause I get asked sometimes why I wrote code a certain way by the very person
who suggested the change).

~~~
JohnFen
> we have a rule that certain ticket discussions should go into a ticket
> itself

The last three companies I've worked at had the same rule, except with no
exceptions. _All_ discussions get recorded into the system, precisely for the
reason that you state -- so there's a historical record of what was discussed,
what was decided, and why.

Any "external" communications, such as with email or IM, are expected to be
copy/pasted into the system so its permanently recorded in a useful way.

~~~
noja
That's a lot of extra stuff to read through. Do you summarise the discussion
too?

~~~
JohnFen
Most places that I've been at that have worked this way have had periodic
"checkpoints" in the tracker (usually when the code involved is sent to QA),
where the current state is summarized at a 10,000 ft level.

In practice, these records are only read from beginning to end when someone
new to the issue at hand needs to come up to speed. Otherwise, the value is in
being able to search through the record to find specific things.

------
duxup
Even a customer "should" know that Slack is no small matter.

I worked in a support role for a big company. We had one notorious customer
who was prone to just racking equipment, not setting it up, and calling in
priority 1 support cases to basically have us configure it for them with
little to no data / would not do what we said. (this was their SOP, and
they're also a huge company...)

We used Microsoft's messaging service at the time and I had no idea that IT
had configured it to allow people outside our company to message us.

So as you might expect one day I'm working another customer's "real" network
down priority 1 case and I get a frantic message from someone I didn't
recognize asking a vague question as if we were in the middle of a
conversation. I assume this is some sales guy I never met frantically
messaging me (some sales guys knew me and handed my name out as I was friendly
and I'd help them out if I had time). But then I can't find this guy in
outlook and suddenly I realize.

So I mute my mic and announce to my cube mates "Guys... X company is instant
messaging me ..." The response was hilarious, managers came running, some
folks announced they were shutting off their laptops ... it was immediately
clear that this was an untenable situation.

Fortunately the solution was right in front of me. In another conversation I
had a sales VP in on a chat for the customer who had a "real" priority 1 case.
I told him that I was receiving instant messages telling me I needed to stop
helping his customer and go help X company. Granted I wasn't actually going to
drop him and I phrased the FYI in a way that made that clear, but also let him
know he had some competition for my attention / our focus on his customer's
issue.

Suddenly we had a Sales VP as an ally breathing down ITs neck to shut off
outside access to the support team's instant messaging.

~~~
dillonmckay
The road to hell is paved with good intentions, right?

~~~
duxup
So true.

At one point management had the idea that we should do "chat support" on the
website.

The website (a god awful mess) was run by the marketing department (that's why
all our handy documents were hidden from the world) and they took the lead and
suddenly announced support was just gonna be available to "chat" 24x7... and
support via twitter would come soon too... nobody in support knew anything
about it.

Thankfully even the CEO recognized the amount of manpower it would take and
how bad an idea that was for what often were complex issues.... and really
most social media and chat contacts were from folks who bought second hand
equipment and had no support contract.

~~~
hinkley
Speaking of children in the room.

I've known a few people in my life who could talk anybody, including
themselves, into any stupid idea you could imagine. And then talk themselves
out of it again in six weeks. The whiplash is tremendous. I've started
applying advice for talking to addicts to my conversations with them
(supportive, but don't invest in it). It's so disruptive. And personally, I
find it exhausting.

Most of them have been in sales, at least once.

Promising things that the company can't possibly deliver for a price that will
bankrupt you. Classic marketing dept.

~~~
rurp
Your description of whiplash resonates with me. One of the most common bad
management traits I've run into is constantly changing priorities. Typically
in these environments every single thing is an urgent crisis, but the super
duper critical stuff from earlier in the week almost always gets completely
forgotten about because 1) It was never actually that important, and 2)
Everyone immediately has to jump on the next "crisis".

Working in a place like that is exhausting, but very little ever seems to get
done.

------
wpietri
I definitely feel this one. Slack reminds me of the open office plan, in that
it _seems_ like a solution to a bunch of problems, but in practice creates a
whole new set. It's also a bit like having a candy dish within arm's reach. In
theory, I should just be able to say no, but in practice I know I'm going to
eat more candy than I want.

I'm definitely more productive the days when I keep Slack closed.

~~~
doctorpangloss
> a candy dish within arm's reach

Chatting with the customers and making them feel good is sometimes the actual
product. Some people buy candy and not salads!

Here's a perspective: Since most businesses fail, you're usually making
entertainment for rich people.

~~~
cabaalis
> Since most businesses fail, you're usually making entertainment for rich
> people.

You made me chuckle, since you're definitely right about app-of-the-day
startups. Strive to build something that matters!

------
scandox
When I ran my own consultancy, I went on holidays for a month once, leaving
the company under the management of a long time employee.

I came back to find an employee of one of my customers sitting at a desk in
our office. Turfed him out. Had to "fire the customer". Lost about 30,000
euros of work time and unpaid invoices.

In my view joining someone's Slack Channel would be no different than that
little piece of "management kidnap". Everyone in the office had completely
turned their attention on that single customer's problems.

~~~
Aloha
How does this happen exactly, and why is having one of your customers working
temporarily out of your office an issue - I think I'm missing context

~~~
jsty
I read it as the customer wasn't happy with something, and having learned that
'the boss' was on holiday, decided to parachute in their own management to
oversee things.

~~~
Aloha
that could very well be it - but I'm not sure I'd leap there - as someone who
has been embedded inside my customer sites for months at a time, its not
unusual for me to get attempted micromanagement from the customer - I've
learned how to push back both politely, and impolitely, as the situation calls
for.

~~~
hinkley
Bidding.

They learn that you will say no, every time. So they ask someone else, and
someone else, until they get the answer that most resembles what they were
after, then they lock into that as a commitment instead of a hypothetical
conversation.

As a child you figured out which parent was more likely to say yes to treats,
and under what circumstances (mood, which sibling asks, how they ask).

The thing is the customer gets rewarded for results, no matter how they get
them. So if they stoop to juvenile tricks and get a promotion for it, they're
just gonna keep doing that forever.

------
ubercow13
I had the opposite experience. A client of ours was souring on us and we
invited them to our Slack to try and help them with some issues. Slack was the
easiest way to help work through their issues. The ability to quickly and
fluidly clarify ideas in a conversational manner as a discussion is ongoing
make it far superior to email for technical conversations. Often in emails
people seem to talk past each other, as there is too much time between emails
and people lose track of the conversation too easily.

Video calling might be even more efficient during the call itself but
personally I would spend so much time thinking about the call, preparing or
worrying before the call itself that it would be a bigger drain on my
productivity overall.

Not to mention that my personal productivity is not even the most important
thing. In this case these Slack conversations fixed a client relationship and
moved our work with them forward in a way that was far more valuable than any
SLOC I could have produced in that time.

------
tiborsaas
I don't have a slightest clue how they derived to not join slack from the 25y
rule.

~~~
joosters
Yes, all their reasons for not joining a customer slack seem reasonable, but
none of them seem related to the 25-year theme. They are all about problems in
the here and now, you don't need a quarter-century-long stare to see them.

------
jdauriemma
This is a testament to the value of purposeful, scheduled, and task-oriented
interactions.

~~~
htek
Absolutely. Nothing has destroyed my productivity over the years as
effectively as the expected instant response from ICQ, instant messenger, and
Slack chat messages.

------
ChrisMarshallNY
I like this essay. I'm not anti-Slack, but I'm not much of an "IM" person.
Partly comes from the way I work (I get "zoned," and don't surface for hours),
and also because I used to work for a Japanese corporation, where IM was
worthless.

I like the fundamental ideas he puts out:

• We felt busier, but were getting less real work done

• We knew the clients better personally, but we knew the product less

• We had more superficial conversations, but fewer substantive ones

• We were able to react more quickly, but our responses were less measured and
effective

That said, Slack is a pretty cool tool, but there's lots of cool tools that I
don't use that much.

------
nikolay
I hate Slack. It started as a copycat of Yammer and didn't grow outside of
that. It doesn't have native apps on the Desktop and although they've improved
things a lot, it still not as good as it should be. Compare it to Spectrum,
let's say, which builds up profiles and is affordable. Why I can't have a
single profile, which I use across different companies? Why do I need to
create tens of accounts? Don't they get what "identity" is? On top, they shot
themselves in the feet not building identities as that opens the door go grow
well beyond Yammer. What I don't get it why developers still choose it - it's
code-pasting unfriendly, it converts your quotes and dashes - even in URLs.
There's no syntax coloring, etc. Microsoft Teams is much better although it
suffers from many the limitations of Slack - including the limitations in the
vision. Slack is not a replacement of email either - it lacks basic features
to be a replacement. In general, I don't think Slack will survive this as
Teams appears to be winning.

------
robbiemitchell
Some teams fundamentally don't work to work in something like Slack, anywhere.
That makes sense.

If you're using it internally, though, it probably makes sense to use with
high-value customers, too. Slack's shared channels go a long way toward
enabling teams to stay in their own space, on their own terms, while working
together.

On its own, Slack isn't as well suited to working with customers --
notifications and confused ownership get complicated, and stuff starts to slip
through the cracks.

We've helped teams scale up Slack-based support and customer management with
an add-on called Frame for Slack (disclaimer: I work at frame.ai).

With @frame sitting in the channel, it's way easier to manage these channels
just like a support system. Tailored escalation schedules to fetch only the
people who need to respond in a given channel at a specific time, state
management to remind people a conversation has not been resolved, and
analytics to provide transparency into the level of effort by each person in
each channel, responsiveness, full text search and reporting on the substance
of historical messages, etc.

------
nicolashahn
> Assume your company is going to be around for 25 years, and treat the first
> few years accordingly.

This statement makes sense in the smaller context of the point the author is
trying to make, but is IMO pretty bad advice taken generally, and it smacks of
survivorship bias. It's a good way to overengineer, overplan, and run out of
money without delivering much, from my experience.

~~~
tjchear
I got a different take out of it though. I think the author's point is that
one has to be more careful with their decisions and choices as the
consequence/effect could last a long time (this is where the 25 years
assumption comes in), and I could see how this advice applies even in the
general sense.

------
cj
> We felt busier, but were getting less real work done

> We knew the clients better personally, but we knew the product less

> We had more superficial conversations, but fewer substantive ones

> We were able to react more quickly, but our responses were less measured and
> effective

These are very similar to the reasons our company moved from Slack to Google
Chat a couple years ago. It was quite liberating.

Edit: In addition to Slack, we also started using Twist
([https://twist.com/](https://twist.com/)). We use Google Chat for quick
communication, but anything requiring more than a few seconds of thought goes
into Twist. So far this has worked really well for us.

------
dollar
Written like a total noob who built their business in a boom and never had to
survive an economic downturn. When the next recession, you’ll be begging to be
added to your clients slack, IRC, forum, whatever. Hell, you’ll take change
orders by fax machine if that’s what it takes to get the PO. GTFO of here with
this attitude. If you’re this much of a pain in the ass with something so
small, I’d hate to work with you when the fit hits the shan. We ask ALL of our
vendors to join our Slack. Don’t like it? Neeexxxxt.

------
wuliwong
My experiences (with different situations) were nearly the opposite from those
described in the article. My previous company (real estate company with a
small software development team in house) hired various outside contractors.
One was a company that worked on a mobile app, they invited us into a slack
channel and it was effective. It worked well with our workflow as we already
used Slack for a large part of our engineering communications. We also
communicated with them via email and even some regular old phone
conversations. Additionally, we hired a devops engineer who we invited into
our slack channel and that was effective. Nearly 100% of our communications
with him was in Slack. The devops engineer wasn't someone we communicated with
on a daily basis but occasionally we messaged him and it worked fine. We also
hired a few engineers through Upwork and invited them into some slack channels
in our company and again nearly all our communication occurred through those
channels. So, our experience of being invited to another company's Slack as
well as inviting outside contractors into our slack channels were both
positive. Our work is very different than a marketing firm, so I guess
everyone can take these anecdotes with a grain of salt.

------
cookiecaper
They say that Slack brought them closer to the clients on a personal level and
then they chose to kill it. That's a terrible choice that clearly shows their
25-year priorities are whacked out.

As long as the output is basically acceptable, clients are going to prefer to
employ contractors with whom they have strong personal rapport. Making
communication difficult and intentionally avoiding the "distraction" of
building that relationship is a quick way to die.

------
kylecordes
Setting aside the organizational issues here…

I'm in about 15 different Slack, with 15 different credentials. Authentication
is a miserable problem, yet Slack chooses to make it worse.

~~~
seanalltogether
It's amazing to me that Slack has been operating this long with such a
backwards concept of Organization > User hierarchy. After Apple fixed their
portal a few years ago, Slack is the only tool I have left that requires this
multiple credentials. It's also frustrating that every time a user leaves an
organization, my entire chat history with them is deleted as well.

~~~
Merad
> It's also frustrating that every time a user leaves an organization, my
> entire chat history with them is deleted as well.

That may be a setting in the organization or something that your Slack admins
are doing? I'm able to look up DM history with former employees in our Slack,
their account is just tagged as having been deactived.

------
fivre
Slack is less than ideal from a customer support perspective due to its
extremely limited channel organization tools. I loathe having a blob of 15
customer channels that I'm contractually obligated to be in, but for the most
part only have activity once a month or so, if ever.

Stuffing those in a folder a la Discord would be a boon, but the only option
that comes close is using a separate organization, which would cost more.

------
scarface74
_We liked this because it revealed that building something for the long haul
is very different than building something designed for a quick exit,_

Once they took VC funding, by definition they are building for a quick exit.

[https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/reify-
health](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/reify-health)

~~~
lincolnq
Why is that by definition?

~~~
scarface74
A VCs goal is always a quick and large exit. They aren’t in the business of
owning small profitable private “lifestyle companies”.

It no longer matters what they want, it matters what the VC wants.

------
kreck
We made the exact same experience (our company is also roughly 3.5 years old).
In the beginning it was US who suggested to open a slack because we thought it
would help us to resolve questions quickly. However we observed that this only
incentivises to have chat discussions over topics that are better discussed
and resolved in person/over Skype or via an thoroughly thought through e-mail
that cuts straight to the problem. In addition it added another communication
channel we HAD to monitor from that point onwards because our clients had
learned from US that we’d respond quickly, so not responding was not an
option. This was especially problematic for our developers who would get
disrupted way more often. In addition communication was scattered among
channels which made it difficult for the PM to stay ahead.

Our lives are easier and our communication with our clients is way more
productive ever since we abolished slack.

------
halbritt
Should this be considered controversial? I’m not sure what service they offer
but if a client asks for someone to join the their slack why would anyone
accept unless they were paying someone to monitor it on a full time basis?

Would you do work for free? Nah. This isn’t a slack thing.

~~~
RandallBrown
Why would you accept an email from someone unless they were paying someone to
monitor emails on a full time basis?

Maybe it's just the way the companies I've worked at have used slack, but it's
never been expected to be any more "real time" than email.

~~~
luckylion
This. In my experience: if "joining slack" means you spend a lot of time
chatting about random things and get to know the people privately, you're not
doing your job and the work culture is a red flag. I've seen people do the
same via email, where they quickly spiral out of work and end up sending each
other pics of their pets all day. I don't think it's a medium thing, it's a
people thing.

------
haddr
I actually fully understand this situation. If you build stuff you want to
reduce communication channels and keep it lean, otherwise you get a lot of
distraction about mostly superficial and insubstantial matters. Important
things will happen there too, of course, but you prefer to have a controlled
ways of communication (e.g. something that works in your team). Sometimes it’s
good to shorten some communication paths and directly reach relevant people.
But in the longer term you want to avoid it. Otherwise you will have your devs
being contacted from other different people and it will create a lot of
communication mess. You want to secure your people from such noisy
communication.

------
YPCrumble
Wouldn't a solution be to have a public slack channel that your customers can
join? SparkPost does this and it has been quite helpful to me as a customer,
without the overhead of SparkPost having requests to join hundreds of client
slack channels.

------
petetnt
My background is in hanging around 100+ IRC channels which is probably why I
never have felt Slack distracting a bit. I have notifications on for only
direct @s and I can postpone any interactions accordinly when needed.

Compared to that emails (and Basecamps and such) feel anxious: tens and tens
of different information cramped in a long form text and the expectation us to
handle all of them at once and as soon as possible, after all it’s email.

And then again I know of people that have it completely other way around and I
understand that. I also think that there’s no solution for that in software
form, but in behaviour: we need to embrace the asyncronisity.

------
roland35
I think Slack/IM is a great tool, but maybe not for "deep" engineering work
and requirements discussion. For things like this it is more important to have
some structure and documentation behind it. As mentioned in the article Trello
works well, I personally like Wrike but anything written down in one place is
good!

Where Slack helps me the most is asking my group questions which seem too
small for an email, like "hey what is maximum RPM of the motor we are using?"
where anyone could respond and also other people can benefit from the answer.

~~~
JohnFen
> Where Slack helps me the most is asking my group questions which seem too
> small for an email, like "hey what is maximum RPM of the motor we are
> using?"

That's interesting, because I view this exactly the other way around -- an IM
is like a phone call, in that if someone is sending one, it's because they
have an urgent need and are expecting an immediate response. Email is for the
lower-priority things.

------
anvisha
Slack has shared channels now which solves this quite well for my company.

------
ben7799
This is not really any different than customers clamoring to get the direct
email/phone # of developers instead of going through the normal tech support
process, or to clamor for daily meetings/phonecalls/sessions.

Slack might just be worse by degree.

I hate all of the above often having to "support" Tech Support.

I have often wanted to tell a customer, "We will not make progress on this
till we stop updating you on progress every 5 minutes."

This stuff is even worse when you have an army of internal "Customer Success"
types at a big company.

------
noer
I used to work for a digital consultancy, one of the projects I worked on had
a shared slack team between the client and my company. It definitely created
problems, but IMO, the problems were because there weren't limits or
understanding around how slack should have been used. The staffing of the
project changed pretty significantly throughout the years I worked on it and
the trouble came from not setting expectations around how slack (and channels)
should be used.

------
Ghost25
I never even considered that people would add clients to Slack. We don't even
have all our consultants on Slack. We use it as a purely internal message
board to communicate short thoughts, updates, publishing reports, maybe ask
for an impromptu meeting etc. External communication is almost all by email,
phone, or Zoom.

That said the 25 year rule is absurd. Who really thinks Slack is going to
exist in 25 years? Netscape was just founded 25 years ago.

------
thebosz
I agree that Slack can pull me out of the zone. Also it's terrible when you're
trying to find a decision your team made in the past.

I tried Twist but couldn't get any buy in from the team. Seems like it would
solve the issues I have with Slack: it has real-time chatting, but also long-
term async storage. It's also easy to move a conversation from the real-time
chat to the long-term storage thing.

------
matchagaucho
We've started inviting strategic customers as guests to private channels.

No noise. Just 2-3 people having a very focused discussion.

------
devy
Noisy notifications is NOT inherently a Slack issue - slack is just a
communication platform; it is however a company culture /team
culture/communication style. Fix that instead, Slack is just a tool, it also
has controls of muting notifications as many others mentioned here.

------
ineedasername
Something they didn't mention is that joining would not at all be a
sustainable course of action. You'd end up having to join for all of your
customers, or at least all of them that use slack and thought to ask.

------
pbreit
Complete opposite experience here. I assist customers with technical
implementations and the projects where we connect via Slack go SO much better.

------
mdip
I have a bit of a different take on this. Personally speaking, I've only been
a Slack user for 2 years. Prior to that, I lived out of Skype for Business
(now Teams[0]).

On one hand, I've had each of the issues he lists in his bullet points when
dealing with Slack (though we only ever join customer's Slack channels),
though I've adapted my approach and it's been minimal-to-non-issue, lately --
and I've got no customers asking for this at this very moment. The thing is --
I do not and have not had these problems on Teams.

I believe these sorts of problems aren't general problems that messaging
applications introduce, but are problems Slack doesn't handle well. At first,
my thinking was "everyone can have it, so it's like the old days of AIM,
except people use this for business and a _lot_ of businesses use it", so I
went to "it's a public form of AIM that corporations are _asking_ employees to
use". None of that is particularly accurate, and it ignored the fact that
every OCS - Teams installation that I've used had been federated with people I
worked without outside of my organization. Slack didn't really "mainstream"
this sort of thing with the people I worked with, so why do people on Slack
behave differently?

The only reason I can guess is "Status". Microsoft always pushed this as a
huge selling point to their product and I remember thinking "that's dumb" for
the first several iterations, but right around the Lync time-frame, I realized
that it created a behavior change in me. We used OCS for everything, including
telephony, so when someone had a meeting blocked out in their calendar, or was
using their phone, their status said "In a call" or "In a meeting" and was
bright red. When you shared your screen, your status went do not disturbt[1].
Screensaver pops up and your status goes yellow "Away". You can also set these
statuses, manually (which was rarely abused at the 3 shops I was at).

Another important factor was that chats were not persistent[2]. This changed
with Teams, and the jury is still out as to how this impacts things, but I
think it will make the specific bullet points he mentions worse. In general,
when I would send someone a message on Teams, I'd not expect an immediate
reply -- even if their status was green -- and if I didn't get a reply, I'd
follow up with another method of communication. The idea was to _avoid a phone
call for something easy_. Yes, this eliminates a lot of the "personal hands-on
sort of interactivity" that a phone call grants, but it also eliminates 10
minutes of talking about spouses/families when you and I are in the middle of
3 other things and aren't terribly interested in keeping up with cultural
norms.

 _Because_ status gave me enough information to answer the questions (1) "Are
they likely to respond?" and (2) "Am I likely to interrupt them?". I did a lot
of development for this platform and I had a ~15,000 person installation to
get stats from -- it's interesting to see who had "status change alerts" setup
for whom, when they'd be turned on/off, how often people would set their own
statuses vs. using the one automatically set. It worked about as I described;
replies fell off when statuses were not green, follow-up phone calls
frequently followed unanswered chats -- all of this data was relatively easy
to grab out of the massive set of SQL databases that powered the whole thing
on-prem.

Contrast that with Slack. Unfortunately, at my new employer, we use Slack and
are migrating to Teams, online, so I can't get stats like that any longer and
my only visibility is myself and my immediate coworkers. There are,
effectively, three/(four?) -- mostly worthless -- statuses, some of which
behave in a manner that contradicts the features they provide:

(1) Zzzz - it's before or after work; useful when I need to reach out to folks
in Seattle and I forget how to subtract by 3. Otherwise, as useful as a clock
or my own two eyes looking at the desks nearby. And why warn me not to send
this message? You're going to keep it there until they wake up and _look_ , so
how about just warn me that you're not going to notify them because they've
snoozed alarms, but that the message will be waiting for them when they
return?

(2) Offline - grey circle - they're not there or left, or maybe they went to
screen-saver or their client as acting up. The thing is, I rely on status so
minimally that I can't remember if there are two to cover Offline and Away.
Both mean "don't bother" even though they shouldn't -- they're saving my
history (if I'm paying, but even if I'm not ... for at least a few hours!)

(3) Online - green, solid, circle - they might answer me.

In addition to that, you can set an icon with a secret (/s) message. I say
"secret" because nobody ever sees or reads it. I set mine last week to a "BIG
RED STOP SIGN" with a message indicating that I was focused solely on a single
project and in the middle of a crunch. I've been done with that for a few
days; I received more messages about other projects I had to table last week
than any other time working here and this message was so noticeable that I
didn't even remember to turn it off until I looked at it just now for the
purpose of this post.

So people message more. And they still follow up with phone calls and e-mail,
just like they did before, but the messages are reaching their audience less
frequently. When people at my last employer sent messages on Teams (Lync at
the time), it was 85-90% targeted at "Available" and "In a meeting[3]". I'd
bet it's the same way now, only "Available" covers a whole lot of time when
nobody is available, causing more messages, less success and more frustration
with the product

[0] To be accurate: I lived out of Office Communications Server (OCS), OCS R2,
Lync, Skype for Business (and all of the CUs in between) -- I used to develop
for these platforms so I was an early adopter.

[1] So intelligent -- never have someone send you a sarcastic or embarrassing
comment while you're sharing your screen.

[2] Not, strictly, true and not true at all with Teams. If administrators
enabled the capability, chats were stored in your e-mail box where they might
as well have been deleted. Group Chat behaved exactly the opposite -- you had
to install a massive client and all chat logs were kept forever with no way to
delete them IIRC. Very few actually used this product. Teams behaves more like
Slack but with all of the capabilities of Skype for Business.

[3] This was puzzling; we assume it was because the vast majority of meetings
were conference calls after full adoption of OCS R2, so "In a meeting" meant
"I have a meeting on my calendar that got cancelled" or "I have a very rare,
in person meeting with only people in the office", otherwise it said "In a
call". So really, it became "Extra Available" since you had time blocked out
that freed up.

~~~
ricktdotorg
some good comments and thoughts in here.

the Slack status feature you mentioned is -- sadly -- most often used by Slack
users to add a cute emoji or whatnot. this is unfortunate.

Slack administrators can set suggested or "default" statuses. it's at
[https://<yourslack>.slack.com/customize/statuses](https://<yourslack>.slack.com/customize/statuses)

and so, a company can set statuses that staff can be required to pick from,
perhaps some common ones like:

\- In the office \- Working from home \- In a meeting \- PTO

and the company can then make it known to staff that their status icon should
accurately reflect their current work ... status, and not whatever cute emoji
they want to use.

DND/Do Not Disturb should not affect use of Slack status. Force the
notification through if your message is urgent.

this is not rocket science.

if Slack usage is affecting how a company works because staff can't tell if
someone will respond or not -- change the way the staff use Slack to better
suit the business.

/shrug

~~~
mdip
You make fair points and I'll be the first to say that my experience (and
preference) lies elsewhere, so I'll explore the links on Monday to see if they
make life easier.

The major point that I didn't make clear enough about statuses "not working"
is that even if there were more statuses, they are manual. We observed that
people manually changed their status, most often, to "Available" from another
non-available status, under Skype for Business. Outside of that, people simply
_didn 't_ manually manipulate their status. And when they _did_ , they'd often
leave it that way for a ridiculously long time because they'd simply "forget".

Inadequate status choices are not as bad as completely unreliable statuses.
Teams shined in providing enough status about a user, automatically, for a
non-developer, non-technical user to reliably answer the question "Will I get
an answer to my IM/call when I send it?" and "Is my IM/call highly likely to
be an interruption?".

If you used it for telephony, or had the Skype for Business mobile client
installed, you switched to "In a call" when you were on the phone, "In a
conference" when you joined a Skype for Business conference call, "Do not
disturb - Sharing" when you started screen sharing (and it kept inbound
messages from showing up on-screen for your audience). Honestly, it seems like
one of those under-the-fold bullet point features, but it is its most
important.

In the scenario you talk about, above, two things have to happen (after
configuration is altered to allow changing statuses). The user has to
regularly change their status to signal their availability (not physical
presence or time of day, but "I am busy doing something that should keep me
from responding"). And the rest of the users have to rely on that status. The
only way that happens is if the status is accurate far more often than it is
wrong. That won't happen unless everyone is rigorous with making status
changes... and that's not a memo I want to send.

Lync/Skype for Business (and I assume Teams) gives you both options. Let it
run automatically and it'll switch your status when you receive/make a call,
join a conference or have a meeting time blocked out in your calendar for you
and put it back when you're done, or set it to what you want. And you could
extend this capability[0] and automate it in different ways.

[0] The old on-prem version was insanely customizable; you could completely
re-implement the client, they provided every hook required to re-implement
dial-in conferencing (an "Enterprise" feature) in Standard edition (and
actively assisted in a project I worked to do just that).

------
jshowa3
Never used a chat client for anything other than work. Not sure why that's so
difficult.

Not to mention, chatting with people usually means they treat any request you
have as low priority. Whereas going to them elevates that priority
substantially.

