
Ask HN: What happened when Slack didn't consolidate communication @ your office? - vwcx
Looking for tales or advice about Slack not working out for your company.<p>My employer adopted Slack but only amongst certain groups — we are stuck in a limbo that spans generational understanding of modern tech and institutional practice that&#x27;s hard to change. Reliance on both Slack and email, depending on the employee, is reducing focus and increasing the amount we all need to read just to keep in touch. Management is unwilling or unable to recognize the problem and define a default method of internal communication.<p>Anyone else work in a frustrating landscape like this? How did you move past it?
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makecheck
For me, “chat” can be so frustrating that I literally log out of it to get
work done.

First, there has not been _single_ message better sent in chat. Every _single_
one should have been an E-mail, especially considering:

\- I am usually trying to finish something and random chats interrupt me.

\- People essentially ignore “status” (“I can see you online” = “I can send
complex questions out of the blue and expect an immediate response”).

\- Any history/information becomes fragmented: instead of being collected in
one place (E-mail), it is split up or lost entirely.

\- Not all chat clients are good. They screw up formatting. They have lousy UX
in other ways. I want the full power of real communication in E-mail.

There are also wrong assumptions made. I saw a friend get basically scolded by
an upper manager for not attending some stupid conference call, which was
“communicated” to him via offline chat message. Well messages don’t always
deliver. _Talk_ to people or, you know, send reliable E-mails.

So the only solution is to “hide”: log that stupid thing out if you need an
hour of uninterrupted work.

