
Our Week Without Slack - ShaneBonich
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/an-oral-history-of-our-week-without-slack?utm_source=mbtwitter
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wink
As someone having an IRC client open while working since around 15 years this
is so mindboggling. (Well, everything regarding the buzz about Slack and how
it's a replacement for email, no it's the best thing since sliced bread, no
wait, it's horrible.. etc.pp)

Why yes, of course you need to restrain yourself from chatting all day. And
learn to ignore people or tell them you're not able to talk to them right now
- but it can still be immensely helpful to have your network of people
available to help you solve your problems - because you're also helping them
solve their problems from time to time.

~~~
mixmastamyk
IRC is often mentioned in regards to slack, but I find Instant Messenger(s) a
bit closer in spirit. Did everyone stop using those too, in favor of facebook
and slack, etc?

~~~
fridsun
IM in a corporate setting has never really take off IMO. Email is usually the
choice, which has a more mature in-house management model.

~~~
SyneRyder
I've seen Lync (Skype For Business) gain some traction in more corporate
settings.

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carlesfe
Wait, is Slack now so "mainstream" that it's problematic and the cool thing to
do is to get off it?

> "The longest I can go without checking it even if I'm incredibly busy is
> probably 10-15 minutes."

Well... don't? Maybe close the app?

Our team is 100% remote and we use Slack and email constantly, but when
somebody needs to finish some urgent task, we just close it, no big deal. Is
having a bit of privacy and piece of mind frowned upon now?

~~~
jkoebler
Hey, I'm the guy on the Motherboard team who said this. You make a fair point,
but I think the main difference is that we're a team that publishes 20 or so
stories every single day. That's 20 individual pieces of content that go from
merely an idea to a finished, public product, usually in the course of a
couple hours or so for each one. Each one doesn't _require_ input but input is
often useful for each of those. We have relatively few long-term projects (we
do have them of course, but we don't use slack for those). That means dropping
from slack means you completely lose track / have no input in perhaps many
things that you could have helped out with. It's in theory not the end of the
world, but we got used to providing input on basically every story, and so
that's where I'm coming from on this.

I may be completely off base here, but I'm assuming that most Slack teams
probably don't have products whose entire development cycle is only a few
hours in many cases. Just my theory, maybe I'm a psycho with a short attention
span, but I really don't think that's the case.

~~~
carlesfe
I can understand that different teams use Slack differently.

However, I assume you did manage to work before Slack existed, right? I'm not
saying this sarcastically. We sometimes forget that there are many different
ways to produce the same result. You can perfectly use it less.

It should provide value; if it doesn't, reduce its usage.

> That means dropping from slack means you completely lose track / have no
> input in perhaps many things that you could have helped out with. It's in
> theory not the end of the world, but we got used to providing input on
> basically every story, and so that's where I'm coming from on this

I always think of this quote when one of these dilemmas hits me: "You are not
as important as you think you are". You think you need input or to contribute
constantly, but that's not usually the case. Slow down on your communication,
it's fine. Don't check Slack every 15 minutes when you're writing, check it
less often. Easier said than done :)

~~~
jkoebler
Yep, I think this is the lesson we learned last week. The world doesn't end if
any one of us drops.

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kethinov
They claim Slack is distracting while the picture at the top of the article is
a bunch of people working in cramped quarters in an open office.

I think they have bigger fish to fry here.

Slack has a mute button. All that requires is self control. You can't mute
coworkers sitting too close to you. Even with headphones (which notice half
the people in the photo are wearing) you can only somewhat filter out the
distracting people.

~~~
untog
To be fair, Vice is an online magazine, not a programming firm. I can
absolutely imagine that group conversations are more important in such an
environment.

~~~
voidz
Actually they are an ad agency. Their core business is to create
advertisements for their customers. It may sound weird when you read it like
this, but on the other hand it's not that uncommon: Google is also an ad
agency. So the right point to make here is that their pseudo-magazines are for
the most part intended as an outlet for their ads. This is all what I have
been told anyway, by a buddy who had a job at one of their European branches.

~~~
collyw
I would say its more a case of, Google is a search company who's revenue model
is advertising, while Vice is an online magazine who's revenue model is
advertising. Neither of them actually create the ads, they sell space to
display them.

------
nickpsecurity
It's about what I expected in effect. Very distracting. There's something to
be said for making out-of-band communications easier than whatever is usually
hard but still take work to reduce frivilous comms. My GPG I use for some
chit-chat but mostly important conversations. The reason is that it's a pain
in the ass to use. I have to _work_ to send a message. Even easier ones with
passwords and such still take work. So, maybe take a little trouble to set up
a thread with an expiration that drops out of it in an hour or 30 minutes or
something. They'll get trained to only use the tool for things that matter and
to know if they receive something in it that it probably matters.

Only surprise was in the presentation where I forgot Adrianne was the writer
as I read content first followed by author. Gets me to the goods plus
eliminates various biases. I thought, "What a bizarre response to a question
about how Slack worked for their organization. Is this person trolling the
feedback form?" Lol.

Anyway, I think it was a nice reminder that it's best to make interviewer's
questions stand out from the answers. A good, design pattern. One I recall
was, before Q&A begins, to say something like "interviewer's questions in
(color here)" with the rest a different color. I figured it out by the second
statement with that name that I was reading the interview questions but it
mentally interrupted flow in an otherwise good presentation. So, still worth
mentioning and trying to avoid in the future.

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a_small_island
(Per the picture in the article) I don't think they pack them in close enough
at those desks

~~~
fapjacks
Yes! I can't believe those people actually get anything done!

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aaronbrethorst
I disagree with the article. Slack is invaluable for my needs as a software
engineer. However, none of the people mentioned in the article are software
engineers.

Different jobs require different levels and forms of collaboration. Maybe
collaboration between journalists can and should take a different form than
Slack. That doesn't seem very surprising to me.

~~~
tlogan
Can you please explain how do you use Slack for development in your team?

For devs, it is just too much noise to have any reasonable conversation: maybe
because writing emails ensures that writer/sender thinks more about what to
write in email. Or because we try to check email only twice a day (so that we
are focusing on actual development).

We tried using for checkins and build statuses but web page seems a better
way.

Just way too distracting.. but maybe we are missing the use case.

~~~
joshmn
> For devs, it is just too much noise to have any reasonable conversation:
> maybe because writing emails ensures that writer/sender thinks more about
> what to write in email. Or because we try to check email only twice a day
> (so that we are focusing on actual development).

Nailed it.

------
beilabs
Has anyone noticed how the Slack client seems to just consume resources. I
don't recall my IRC clients down the years use as much memory / CPU as my
slack client seems to do.

Surely there should not be too much computational overhead involved here or am
I missing something?

~~~
halotrope
It halves my macbooks battery life. I wonder if this is a result of the php/js
stack. I would not be suprised all these cpu cycles are burnt with busy
waiting for new messages.

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flavor8
Our teams are entirely remote, and slack fills in for some of the things we
miss by not being in the same room. Async tech conversations, status and
reachability, crisis coordination, a feed from various other systems, and some
banter. I actually like that the free tier deletes messages; we have other
tools (wiki, bug tracker) to serve as a permanent record, so everyone is clear
that anything that needs to be documented should be written up elsewhere. If
it didn't exist, irc would for us almost fully replace it; it's just a
slightly nicer ux.

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Mendenhall
I like slack as a tool. How I used it mostly was for important things right
then. We would have slack up and if something was posted you looked, because
it was most likely urgent. No meme sending or idle chat allowed. I dont want
my time wasted by looking at a stupid meme. Work and work only on slack is
what works for us. (exception we use it when ordering lunch lol)

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Wonnk13
I too find it distracting. Sooo, I just left our channels with stupid memes
and keep only the ones that provide the information I need to do my job. I
don't get how people can complain how distracting it is when your not
obligated to stay in those channels. n=1 anecdote, but with my team in four
offices on two continents Slack (or Hipchat) is valuable.

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Animats
From the article: _I don 't miss it at all, at least not in terms of doing my
job well. I miss the memes and the ~banter~._

On the other hand, from their picture, it appears that all their people are in
the same room. They don't really need an online system for this.

~~~
kilroy123
They did mention remote workers. I imagine the need to communicate to everyone
in the room and the remoties.

~~~
jkoebler
Yeah, we have three people in the UK, two in Canada, and a handful of remote
freelancers / contractors. Slack is definitely useful for keeping in touch
with them. The question is, how much constant communication do we actually
need to put out a day's worth of content? Most of us can work autonomously or
with a little one-on-one chatting with our editors, but we were just on Slack
because we were trying to create a virtual office that, while nice, probably
isn't necessary to actually put out a product.

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fapjacks
How do those people get any work done in a room like the one in the headline
photo?

~~~
trhway
It works just fine when you're young. Look at the age of people there. Beside
keeping leasing costs down, it is a very efficient way of keeping old farts
out. I worked in an even bit more overcrowded conditions around 20 years ago
surrounded by the guys of my age, and we were very productive with no issues
caused by overcrowding and with all the benefits of instant
collaboration/teamwork/etc. These days, the open floor office is felt like a
big downer for me, and the office like this in the photo - i'd have to be
really desperate to agree to work there.

------
fallenshell
I'd quit the same day if I had to work in that office.

Exaggeration aside, how do you guys get anything done?

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kordless
> I felt a little bit like I was a freelancer again, which I think was kind of
> the point ... a lot of us are writers who ended up weighing in on every
> single little thing in Slack because it felt like that was our job when
> really it probably isn't.

Over analysis leads to paralyzation, which isn't necessarily a Slack problem.
Sounds more like they are blaming the messenger rather than themselves, which
is exceedingly easy to do in this day and age.

There's a similar argument made for gun legislation, where the restriction in
distribution of guns leads to less violence. People are still responsible for
their actions, but other people's actions (such as turning off Slack) lead to
greater awareness that those actions will not be tolerated in a social group.

~~~
AznHisoka
They're just saying Slack creates an environment that makes it easy to be
unproductive. So they made the right decision to not use it rather than force
themselves to use up their "discipline energy" and use it properly.

It's like going on a diet and deciding not to have any junk food in the house
rather than have it around and force yourself to be disciplined.

An entirely valid (and correct) approach.

~~~
kordless
And what of those that don't need to expend "discipline energy" whatever the
fuck that is? Slack is not the problem, nor the removal of it the solution.
This is corporate bullshit in action.

~~~
AznHisoka
Then go ahead and use Slack. To each his own. For Vice it obviously didn't
cultivate a productive environment.

