
A major reason for departures at Slack was “remote work request rejected” - luu
https://twitter.com/rkoutnik/status/1255505362733674499
======
tobyhede
Slack the company really needs to embrace distributed work practices if they
want to actually build a tool for distributed work practices.

Slack has totally become a drag on productivity and a net negative. Channel
and message overload is arguably not much better than the email system it is
meant to replace.

My prediction is that Slack will be replaced quite quickly by the first tool
that really nails remote messaging and coordination. Slack is not it.

~~~
donmcronald
I've never really "got" it when it comes to tools like Slack or Teams. To me
they've always felt like a forum with a handful of mega topics that go on
forever with worse (or no) pagination.

I also don't get why some devs of successful open source projects hang out in
Slack. Do they feel like they need to or do they want to? The specific thing I
don't get is that a lot of projects have both an issue tracker and a forum so
they can filter low level questions into the forum, but then you can get
direct access to the devs by visiting the Slack channel. I mean it's cool, but
WTF?

I guess maybe my thinking is old-fashioned at this point, but I think people
seeking out help should RTFM and be held to a certain standard when it comes
to the effort they make. I self solve more than 50% of my problems while I'm
trying to build a test case or write a good quality forum / SO question.

Maybe Slack, etc. are popular because the informal nature lets people skip the
part of the process where they're expected to make an effort.

~~~
ajuc
It serves the same purpose as irc channels, jabber, skype, discord - always-
on, no friction communication.

It replaces the possibility of asking your friend who sits on the next chair a
quick question.

It can be abused, of course, but I think it creates a healthy hierarchy of
information:

If you need the answer today write an email.

If you need the answer in 10 minutes write on irc/jabber/skype/discord/slack.

If you need the answer now - go in person or use a voice call.

We actually had our manager tell us this in my first job and set expectations
for how fast you should reply on each channel (of course you can answer
faster, up to you). This allows to communication without worrying about
destroying other's flow.

And of course you should check documentation and google before you ask, but
that's tool-agnostic.

Also for remote teams it shows who is currently available, which is useful in
its own way and solves some trust problems employers have with remote workers.

~~~
mjmahone17
How do you get 2 hours of uninterrupted time if you’re expected to respond to
slack within 10 minutes? This becomes a major problem if you’re part of a team
that owns something that supports dozens of teams. Even if each other team
only slacks you one question per day: you now are getting at least one
question every hour or so. If you can’t control your calendar and create
“office hours” to aggregate all those questions and answers, then you either
need to be really great at multitasking and preserving mental state while
dealing with unrelated problems, or you just can’t spend multiple hours of
focused time on a problem during normal working hours.

Even if a slack response expectation is only within your team, requiring
people to check for notifications more than every hour seems really
disruptive, unless you have designated “slack meeting” times.

~~~
tribaal
For me (on IRC) the rule was always that it's fine if people don't answer
within 10 minutes, but _you should be told_.

Specifically, you're expected to answer in IM timeframe _unless you set an afk
message_. This way people know that they should wait for an answer that might
not come until hours later.

In an office this is self evident since if you walk to your colleague's desk
you _see_ if they aren't there, but requires a bit of explicit communication
via IM.

I simply set my status to "AFK deep code" or simply "afk" and turn off
notifications to get 2 hours without interruptions when I need it

------
mrdonbrown
This bugged me about Atlassian when I worked there as well. On one hand, one
of the key marketing messages was about working from home, and additionally,
they had an evangelist talking about the "future of work" being remote. On the
other hand, only a couple teams out of probably 50 allowed remote work. Signs
are showing the pandemic is changing attitudes, hopefully permanently.

I guess the saying "the future is here, just not evenly distributed" can apply
to companies as well as society as whole.

~~~
ReptileMan
> Signs are showing the pandemic is changing attitudes, hopefully permanently.

I wouldn't bet on it. Big corporate middle management is not about
productivity or success but about control.

~~~
smsm42
Yes, but you rarely can put it in the open this way. It's one thing to say "I
think remote teams are hard to make work efficiently, let's not risk that" and
another is "I crave control so I won't allow remote teams even if it were easy
to make it work". And you could get away with the former easily as top
management is happy with "don't mess with a thing that works" approach. But
now when we'll have an example of remote teams working, the former argument is
dead. Now if your _real_ argument is the latter, you won't be able to lay it
bare for everybody to see, so insisting on banning remote work would be way
harder.

~~~
mam2
do we really know it's really working tho ?

~~~
smsm42
We'll know soon.

~~~
mam2
How

------
youeseh
If your team or company's culture sucks, then Slack will amplify it. On the
other hand, if you work in an environment where people respect each other's
time, communicate clearly and don't try to pass the buck, then Slack will
amplify this too.

Our experience has been very different from many of the people here.

We were forced to switch from being in-house to remote only due to the
Covid-19 outbreak. We were using Slack before the whole company started
working from home. If it weren't for Slack, our transition would have been
much more difficult.

The features have been great, including the ability to start a call that
anyone in the channel can participate in. The UX has been great. The uptime
has been solid too.

------
me551ah
The biggest problem with Slack for me is how slow it is. I have been using
chat apps for a couple of decades now, starting from mIRC to IM chat
applications. And slack is by far the slowest chat product that I have ever
used. Takes a few seconds to startup, takes GBs of ram just so that I can send
chat messages and the interface just isn't snappy. Earlier I would keep chat
apps open in my system tray all the time since they were so lightweight and
barely consumed any resources, but every now and then I need to shut slack
down if I'm running out of memory.

~~~
abjKT26nO8
Exactly. Just 30 minutes ago I observed delays between me typing text and the
text appearing in Slack's text input box. With my bare eyes on an idle system
with 32GB RAM and a quad-core i7-6700! It isn't even rare. That's just absurd.

Back around 2012 I would have Empathy (XMPP) always on and I would use GNOME's
wonderful "reply in notification" UI to talk to people. It felt snappy and its
resource use wasn't noticeable on a laptop with 4GB RAM and a dual-core CPU.
Modern chat apps are crap.

~~~
akmarinov
Desktop Slack apps are based on Electron and just so you’ll get a sense of the
bloat of it - all Electron apps have bundled in drivers for Xbox 360
controllers.

~~~
dijit
Is that really true? that sounds too absurd to be true.

I found this:
[https://tonsky.me/blog/disenchantment/](https://tonsky.me/blog/disenchantment/)
which is post dated 2018, I'm sure it has to be configurable by now.

------
gregkerzhner
Someone said that Slack was the "open office" of communication software. I
think this is a good analogy - but at my work it feels more like working from
a huge, lively dinner table. Sure - you can put on some noise cancelling
headphones and ignore the conversation, but it will still be distracting, and
worse, people will judge you for being antisocial.

Every once in a while, if you are lonely or your current task is sporadic and
slow, it makes sense to bring your computer to the dinner table and casually
work while being part of the party. However, if this is your environment 40
hours a week, its highly taxing to productivity. My only answer is to mute all
Slack notifications or turn off Slack all together. This works in the short
term, but in the long term I bet it will be detrimental as I wont be seen as a
"helpful" person that answers questions. Ironically, I think it's exactly
those types of qualities that will help you to get promoted. Our Slack rewards
the developer that just "hangs out" and answers questions all day instead of
getting meaningful work done.

That being said, I think the problem isn't necessarily Slack, but large,
poorly organized organization. Personally, I am part of a dozen "catch all"
Slack channels that put me into direct contact with over 100 people. That
might make sense for some jobs, but it's absurd for a software developer. My
actual day to day work involves mainly working with a few developers and a
manager or two. My Slack should reflect that - it should literally just be a
chat between these 5 people.

The rest of the organization should not be able to Slack me that easily, and
instead only be able to contact me through a triage process. If there is
really a question from someone that I am best qualified to answer, then I am
willing to answer it, but they should have to first determine that from other,
more external facing people. So I think the ultimate problem with Slack is
that it makes it too easy for too many loosely related people to contact each
other. It's like giving every passenger in the airplane a way to send a
message to the pilot.

~~~
Tagbert
Do you still have notifications turned on for messages? Turn those off, mute
most channels, and get control of your communications. Same for email. You
don’t need to be distracted every few minutes. Take a break once and hour or
two and check for high priority messages. Once a day you can catch up on
secondary priority messages. delete or ignore the rest. Your job title is not
slack reader or email reader.

~~~
dingaling
> Take a break once and hour or two and check for high priority messages.

But that requires parsing a torrent of mainly chatter messages. Slack is
really poorly suited to time-shifted message review; scroll, scroll, scroll...

------
henriquez
To be fair what the hell are they supposed to do with all their remote workers
when Slack (frequently) goes down? Do they put everyone on Skype?

~~~
jowday
At other companies I've worked at ops teams fall back to IRC if the main comms
infra is down.

~~~
shlant
can someone recommend a IRC client on OSX that is still maintained and isn't
garbage?

~~~
deanclatworthy
Weechat. runs in Cli. Supports mouse mode and is cross platform. Run it in
tmux or even better on a shell. It’s superb.

------
smsm42
It sounds very ironic that the company whose whole business is built on
facilitating remote workplace communication would be willing to lose talent in
order not to let people work remote.

~~~
dehrmann
Their model is around workplace communication in general, it doesn't have to
be remote. And maybe they're just pushers, not takers.

~~~
smsm42
> Their model is around workplace communication in general, it doesn't have to
> be remote

It doesn't, but I think the added value of Slack is much more prominent in
remote scenario than when everybody is in (roughly) the same room. If it's not
good enough to enable that - makes one think what it's good for?

> And maybe they're just pushers, not takers.

Then reasonable question to ask is - why not? What do they know that the
takers don't?

------
paxys
If a team isn't set up for remote work, a single employee moving to a new
location and timezone (while the rest are in SF) is absolutely going to affect
everyone's productivity.

Unless the role was remote to begin with, such requests would get denied at
most companies, so I don't see what the big point of contention is here.

~~~
bfdm
My reading is just that there was documented demand and they likely lost
talent over it.

~~~
random32840
My reading is that people who are planning to move _anyway_ put in remote work
requests just in case.

You need more context to evaluate something like this.

~~~
6510
the context is remote work

------
unexaminedlife
I'm in the midwest. It would be a long list if I tried to name all the
companies who (pre-covid) were not hiring remote. I haven't forgotten their
names and hope others won't either. They all had the resources and know how,
but the folks in control of these companies are all about power. My personal
opinion is those companies should not end up in powerful positions in the
market after this just because they were forced to do what they should've done
in the first place.

~~~
gwright
I don't understand the need to insist on the righteousness of your particular
opinion with regard to remote work. To conclude that an organization that
doesn't meet your expectations about remote work as you is "all about power"
seems to me to be a huge leap.

~~~
unexaminedlife
I would disagree. I think it's definitely a power move when what you decide to
do is (a) more expensive (b) unnecessary (c) less efficient. By ignoring an
entire planet worth of qualified (probably highly qualified) people when you
don't have to you're doing no favors to your shareholders.

~~~
gwright
Where do you get so much self righteousness to conclude that your assessment
is appropriate for all companies, all positions, everywhere?

And why does there have to even be a single "formula" for work in any case? I
find that attitude extremely narrow minded.

At the same time I fully support your freedom to seek out the opportunities
that work for _you_. I just don't understand the attitude that other people
must be on power trips if they don't think they way you do in this regard.

~~~
unexaminedlife
I think it's strange you are saying this idea of remote work is a "single
formula". If anything, refusing to do things differently is more like a
"single formula" in my mind.

Maybe you think differently about this, but I can't fathom a real-world
scenario where tapping into all qualified candidates in the entire world vs
tapping into all qualified candidates within a 20-30 mile radius from my HQ
could be even close in comparison.

Obviously we won't decide who is "right" here in a forum. But I will be
interested to follow what happens to the companies who weren't prepared for
this and companies who already were.

I anticipate some major reshuffling will be happening in the coming years. The
companies who built their entire culture around on-site teams vs companies who
built infrastructure and culture around acceptance of work from home.
Companies with large balance sheets will be able to hide it for some time, but
their unpreparedness will begin to show within 1-3 years I think.

This is all given the premise that things don't 100% go back to "normal".

~~~
CathedralBorrow
> Obviously we won't decide who is "right" here in a forum.

Is there any debate to be had about that anyway? From what you've written
here, you are right and everyone who thinks otherwise clearly hasn't thought
things through well enough.

~~~
benibela
It is true. Here, unexaminedlife is right about everything

~~~
CathedralBorrow
What exactly is true? That remote working is always better in all conceivable
scenarios and that anyone saying anything else is stupid and wasteful and
probably smells too?

~~~
benibela
> That remote working is always better in all conceivable scenarios and that
> anyone saying anything else is stupid and wasteful

This. Exactly this.

>and probably smells too?

But not this.

It is probably the opposite. When I work remotely, I rarely shower. Showering
is stupid and wasteful. Millions of people lack potable water and here we are
wasting it for showering

------
ProAm
Slack is the Sharepoint of communication tools, we just have to use it because
our companies force us.

------
purplezooey
Why do I _still_ get an instant headache when I read Twitter. It's like a bad
meeting with a few blowhards that suck out all the air, except magnified by
100x.

~~~
standardUser
Strange how just because it's on Twitter, people treat it as if it has more
value than any other online comment thread. No one is going through YouTube or
Breitbart comments and pretending they have value beyond anonymous ranting.

~~~
7177Y
I think because Twitter's energy is different. People intend their forum
accounts to be relatively anonymous, but expect twitter to be a place where
you show your name and face. Twitter is more personal.

~~~
ganstyles
Yeah, and while some people talk big with no credentials/experience to back up
the talk, there are a lot of people I don't know personally that I follow
whose opinions I trust more than some anonymous forum commentator.

That being said, I deleted Twitter in January and am much happier for it.

------
bbarn
I don't know why people think Slack is a remote working tool. The reason slack
is popular, is it was better than hipchat, which was better than
gchat/hangouts/lync, which was better than IRC. It solves a specific problem,
but when you try to shoehorn it in as your solution to remote-everything, of
course it fails.

~~~
brown9-2
The very first words on slack.com right now are:

> WORK FROM HOME

> Slack brings the team together, wherever you are

> With all of your communication and tools in one place, remote teams will
> stay productive no matter where you’re working from.

They are heavily marketing Slack as an essential tool for remote work since
Covid hit.

~~~
mosselman
So if something is marketed as a means to reach a certain goal, it suddenly is
the way to reach that goal?

In other words, if I start wearing Nike shoes, will I become an athlete? If I
start drinking Heineken, will I become an amazing socialite and travel the
world from party to party? If I use Axe body-spray, will gorgeous women fall
over themselves to be with me?

~~~
CathedralBorrow
This seems weirdly combative and aggressive. The original question was "I
don't know why people think Slack is a remote working tool" so I'd say a
legitimate answer would be "Well they say so themselves in their marketing
copy, maybe that's why people think they are?"

~~~
mosselman
You are right, it was a bit combative.

I was responding to brown9-2 though, not bbarn.

I read brown9-2's comment as saying that Slack is a good remote tool because
it is marketed that way. I am not critical of people thinking it is a good
tool, but the premise that what is said in marketing messages is true per
definition.

~~~
CathedralBorrow
Fair enough, thanks for clarifying.

Now, when you say that you read their comment that way... did you truly read
it that way? Do you actually believe that brown9-2's position is that
everything that is said in marketing messages is true?

~~~
mosselman
Did I truly read it that way?

------
SteveMorin
Asana with its inbox workflow (most people don’t pay attention to this
feature) will help all remote companies. It basically is a non noisy inbox for
tasks , when paired with a culture of not providing immediate feedback works
nicely. Didn’t believe it at first but after using it for onboarding all
remote like how it enables async work. We also use slack and think the two
pair really well. Allows for deep work even as a manager. Disclaimer I am a
recent Asana hire that onboarded remotely.

------
irrational
My work has more than 100 slack channels (I once asked if there was a place to
see a list of all slack channels and was met with laughter. Apparently that
isn’t something slack provides?) Whenever I need a question answered by a
particular team I’ll post it to what seems like might be the most relevant
channel. 99/100 they will direct me to a new channel I’ve never heard from. So
I’ll join that channel and post my question. At this point I have about 80
channels spread across 5... whatever groups of channels are called in slack.
Frankly it is overwhelming. It would be a full time job just trying to keep up
with all the channels (I’d estimate there are 3000-10000 new messages everyday
across all channels). I haven’t figured out anyway to know if something has
been posted that would interest me under the deluge. On occasion I’ll be
searching for something and discover that on a channel a very important
announcement or policy change was made recently that I missed under the
deluge. Anyway, I’ve given up. I’ve turned off notifications and don’t even
open it up unless I have a question that needs answered. Then I start the
arduous task of trying to figure out the right channel.

~~~
t-writescode
This seems like something you need to discuss with management and your
coworkers about changing.

~~~
irrational
I work for a Fortune 100 company with thousands of IT people. I literally have
no idea who I would talk to about this. Maybe there is a slack channel for
that ;-)

~~~
t-writescode
I would start with your immediate boss and maybe his skip-level. For the skip-
level come with a precise explanation of what Slack is doing well, what your
experience with Slack seems to show for negative and some potential remedies
:)

~~~
irrational
Well, one problem is that I don’t work for the IT department at my company.
I’m not sure if my boss (or his boss or his boss’s boss) even knows what slack
is.

------
coldtea
So the hypocrisy is strong at Slack...

~~~
dehrmann
This isn't hypocrisy. This is like calling people who make dog food but don't
eat it hypocrites.

~~~
coldtea
It's more like calling a company who builds a remote work product and touts
the advantages of remote work in their blog and marketing, but frowns upon it
internally, as hypocrites...

Not to mention that this is a bad choice of example, as the verbatim
suggestion to "eat your own dog food" is an old-time best practice in the
software world.

------
klyrs
This kinda reinforces the cynical narrative that slack is intended to replace
the "watering hole" so we have less excuses to leave our desks.

------
diogenescynic
As much as I like Slack, I think they go hand in hand with Jira and
Confluence—-and I think all of them are more relevant and necessary than ever.

~~~
caogecym
Agreed. One powerful feature of Slack is search. The best thing about it is
that it works! You can look for troubleshooting discussions (e.g. code build
issue) and usually there’s a solution already. In that sense it’s also a
permanent information page like Confluence, albeit less structured, but a
perfect fit for info like tedious bug finding thread where people just don’t
feel like writing up a well organized wiki for it.

~~~
CameronNemo
Is this a joke? Slack should not be used as a permanent information store, and
the search is fairly terrible.

~~~
caogecym
You can search for data years back, but you don’t have to. E.g. code
troubleshooting tips are only relevant for a couple months, since the code
keeps changing. The other nice thing is that you can share the findings via
link of a thread or single comment with your team, and they don’t have to
leave Slack to be able to see them, which is definitely a smooth experience -
if they are already on Slack at that moment. In terms of search experience, it
probably depends on use case, but I dont think Slack’s search is apparently
worse than its alternatives like Outlook, Confluence, Jira etc. - if at all.

~~~
diogenescynic
Agree, it's not perfect but it's better than nothing at all which is usually
the alternative.

------
rtpg
Before all of this I would be very happy to dunk on Slack for this.

But _they are now doing remote like all of us_. They have fixed the problem.

Dunking culture that just doesn't let people get credit for improving is
exhausting and just boring as hell.

~~~
unexaminedlife
IMO they should get no credit for doing what they refused to do when they
could but didn't have to. Now that they have to, and are doing it, what credit
do they deserve?

~~~
t-writescode
Positive reinforcement when someone does the right thing is a great way to
keep them doing the right thing. For many people, if someone isn't treated any
differently when they change their behavior for the better, what value is
there in changing behavior to something harder and less self-serving?

------
t-writescode
It seems there's a lot of frustration here about the use of Slack effectively,
so I'm going to re-post something I posted a bit over 2 months ago in a
different conversation about slack.

You can find it here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22574009](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22574009)

I've used Slack at 3-ish different companies.

Each company has different practices when it comes to Slack; and, as someone
who has used Slack so much that it's mentioned about him at those companies
(not always in a positive light?), I have a few thoughts and rules about the
best Slack usage that I think help, in general.

1) At any not-small company, you're going to want to almost immediately change
your Sidebar from "Everything" to "Unread and starred conversations".

2) Star all channels that you personally need to keep track of (or want to
keep track of for a certain amount of time) and all people that you want to
talk to or are currently in an important conversation with.

3) Unstar channels and people where #2 is no longer the case.

4) Create private channels for any conversation / project or issue that will
ever require more than the people that are currently in a 'multi-person
private message'. Archive them when the issue is over.

5) Use @here sparingly and @channel way more sparingly. If you're at a company
that doesn't use @here / @channel sparingly, mute them for the channels that
use them in excess. My current company has a meeting room shortage, so every
single time a meeting room is freed up unexpectedly, there's an @here in one
of our channels. That channel has @here notifications disabled.

6) If you can, in your broader "all the devs hang out here and can chat about
work stuff" or "talk with ops here" channels, consider adding group aliases,
so you can say, in those channels @ops, or @team-ops to notify just that group
when things are important.

7) Use @here sparingly, yourself. Use it only for extreme situations.

8) Give chatty bots their own channel. Having the pull request bot for your
dev team in the same channel as active development is going on, or in the same
channel as other teams are supposed to come in to talk to you about a project
your team is working on is just not the best.

9) Current, unproven experiment: at my current job, my team is experimenting
with a heavy use of threads. Previously, we had multiple projects occurring
concurrently and historical knowledge on features is spread across the team
with a lot of new members, so we can't use the tricks of private channels per
project to as much effect. Threads have a lot of weaknesses when it comes to
readability and following; but, they do reduce the chances that someone's
important message will get lost in a swarm of other messages on more pressing
issues.

edit: Whoops, thought of more.

10) Use snippets for any bit of code even slightly long. I'm thinking like 7
lines or more. There's syntax highlighting, and they're collapsible, saving
precious screen real-estate

11) Use Posts for large format messages you want to post to a channel or
multiple channels. They have formatting, headers, and so on. They're also
collapsible, again to save on screen real-estate.

12) Personal preference: try to not send multiple, short messages, unless
that's your company's culture. It breaks up the conversation and makes it a
bit hard to follow where a thread is, if you're using threads. For example,
which message do you put the response on? The part where the situation got
confusing? A random message in the middle? The last one? The first one?

edit 2, 3: more adding (I'll just add more after this and not say I'm adding
more, if it happens again), and some removing some unnecessary information

13) Mute channels that you want to remain in, but don't want to be bothered by
(maybe unmute @here and @mentions on this channel). This could include your
company's random chatting channel, or the operations channel, or even your
personal team's channel if you're currently heads down in a major project, but
you might need to be pinged for something serious.

------
GrumpyNl
I never understood slack and why it got so populair.

------
princevegeta89
Slack sucks ass from a UX perspective.

