
How Slack Harms Projects - anudeepsamaiya
https://www.silasreinagel.com/blog/2019/08/12/how-slack-harms-projects/
======
bbx
Slack isn’t the issue. It’s how you use it.

> Not responding to a message quickly is considered a major failing. Not
> responding to a message directed at you in a group channel immediately is
> considered to be a grave sin.

Nope. That’s not an issue with Slack. It’s your interpretation of what a
message or DM is. There’s no timer attached to a DM. This urgency is self-
inflicted.

> You must stop to check your messages at least twice an hour.

Says who? Does the Slack app automatically launched every 30 minutes, and
can’t be closed until you’ve read all messages? Nope. It’s you yourself who
leaves Slack open or checks it every hour.

> ALL WORK, including troubleshooting issues, fixing bugs, and answered
> questions should go through the Product Owner.

So if I send an email directly to a developer, bypassing the product owner,
should I blame email? Nope. The tool isn’t the issue here. It’s the team
discipline.

The problem isn’t Slack. Its never Slack. It’s the lack of discipline of
people using it.

In my last 2 jobs, we used Slack. But it never hindered our productivity.
Because we had more important matters to focus on. But it would still help us
monitor some topics, and engage with colleagues for small tasks not issues.
And personally I would only open Slack a few times a day. Like checking email.

People like to hate Slack, because it’s an easy excuse for poor self-
discipline. And are jealous of its success because it’s just “IRC with
emojis”.

I feel like if people writing these types of articles bought an electric
drill, they’d end up drilling holes in all their walls, because they somehow
felt the urgency to do it, and would end up blaming the tool, not themselves.

~~~
matchbok
> Nope. That’s not an issue with Slack. It’s your interpretation of what a
> message or DM is. There’s no timer attached to a DM. This urgency is self-
> inflicted.

Yes there is. If there is no urgency then it's no better than an email in a
worse, less-searchable UI. Direct chat has been, since it's invention, a
synchronous action. That is how people use it.

> The problem isn’t Slack. Its never Slack. It’s the lack of discipline of
> people using it.

Email does not require discipline to use properly.

~~~
jnwatson
Email does indeed require discipline. Poorly phrased messages, inconsistent
quoting, too many recipients are all bad.

Checking email too often is a productivity killing habit.

However, the worst, most common, problem with email is disorganization. It
takes a great deal of effort to organize received emails so they are
appropriately handled.

I do not miss the days where I’d spend an hour every weekend filing my inbox.

~~~
lanstin
Not to mention the people that never read the whole message if it is more than
two sentences. I can’t count how often I have seen some ‘urgent production’
issue email thread with like fifty people and fifty emails and the stupid
answer was in the logs in the very first email all along.

------
holografix
Everything in moderation, problem is humans aren’t good at self-policing.

I never respond to instant messages instantly. Ever.

15 minutes later when I do respond in 80% of times the issue or question has
been solved. Soon the people who keep pinging me all the time cuz they want to
save 10 minutes googling stop pinging me. It’s quicker for them to do it
themselves.

Slack is very helpful as a means to discover previous conversations and
insights, for companies in multiple time zones and remote workers.

Channels for me are ignorable shared inboxes of CC-all email chains where I
only pay attention if someone calls me out or if I’m looking for something.

Slack’s integrations to other services can be very helpful as you don’t need
to go digging somewhere to get a quick overview of how some other app is
performing or the status of some ticket.

It’s a tool. If you let it dominate your life it’ll harm you for sure and
sometimes it can be hard to recognise when a ha it is developing and it’s
having a negative effect.

~~~
daphneokeefe
What I most disliked about using Slack on a dev team was that there was no way
to locate the information later. Suddenly, a discussion about the project
requirements or technical implementation would take place. That decision
became embedded in the project. But if you weren't there for the discussion,
you had no input. And later, when you wanted to review the decision and the
underlying facts, there was no way to find it.

So I would spend a lot of time reading back through the discussions in the
various channels. And sometimes those micro-decisions were later contradicted
with no acknowledgement.

~~~
notduncansmith
This seems like another case of using Slack outside it’s appropriate scope.

While you may have impromptu meetings and make decisions on Slack, any
company’s most important directives should be codified and accessible outside
that medium. You don’t send executive meeting minutes to the whole company and
have them parse our what decisions are made: decision-making meetings result
in memos and other documentation.

Likewise, if a team’s decision-making process leaves out important
stakeholders or makes it difficult to have influence, that’s another
management problem that has nothing to do with the use of Slack. You would
have the same problems if meetings are held spontaneously at the water cooler,
and in fact I’ve seen this very thing happen without Slack’s influence.

------
wildermuthn
I agree that Slack is a productivity-minimizer. However, my deeper qualm is
how conversations about Slack (and other tools) inevitably end with someone
saying,

“It isn’t the tool, it is how you use it.”

Malarkey. Tools dictate usage. The phrase people need is,

“When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.”

Slack is a tool for communication. But it is helpful to define communication
and then to ask what kind of communication Slack facilitates (and thus
encourages).

Communication is a poor word, because it embeds within the word many slightly
different but important meanings. Communication can mean the mere transfer of
information. But communication can also mean a successful transfer of
information.

So really, we can’t simply define “communication”, but must rather define
“good communication”. And its definition is simple: transmitting the right
information to the right entity at the right time and in the right manner
(i.e., in a way the entity can understand correctly).

Slack facilitates transmitting any information to any person at any time, and
(with the use of plugins) in almost any manner. This is almost the definition
of bad communication.

Yes, you can try to limit the use of Slack to avoid these problems. But you
are working against Slack, not with it. Every tool that facilitates good
communication does so by disciplining and focusing the transmission of
information. Slack’s mission is the opposite. Slack aims to achieve a riot of
information. Slack is information anarchy.

Maybe this helps for work that is by nature anarchic, where information flow
is more important than knowledge exchange. But for the rest of us, it is a
cursed tool.

~~~
count
> 'You can try to limit the use of Slack to avoid these problems. But you are
> working against Slack, not with it'.

So, if I have a hammer, I shouldn't try to use that hammer in a constructive
manner, but should throw it away and find something that is universal for all
of my tool using needs? Rather than using the hammer as a hammer?

Sure, any team can screw up communication. I'd argue that many teams ship shit
software in shit environments, and that adding slack is like adding 'devops'
or 'agile': if your team sucks, it doesn't matter what tool you use, you're
gonna suck. Adding new tools may even make you suck worse, because you now
have 2 problems: poor comms AND a tool that doesn't fix that which you have to
deal with.

Slack is a hammer. And I have a shitload of nails to hammer in. I don't have
ONLY nails, and Slack isn't my ONLY tool, and it's not appropriate for ALL THE
THINGS. But your own argument is that you shouldn't look at it as the solution
to everything, but then throw it away because it's not the solution to
everything.

Is it the tool for you? Apparently not! And that's fine. That doesn't make it
_a bad tool_. Some of us have lots of nails to hammer in, and some of you have
screws that need another approach (even if you could hit it hard enough to
drive it home...thats probably non-optimal).

------
burlesona
A few months ago I directed my team (size 12, co-located) to turn off Slack
and Email from 9am to Noon every day. From noon to 2 we decided to prioritize
being “reachable” for ad-hoc meetings and whatnot, and then we go back to
normal “use your discretion” work for the rest of the day. We ran this as a
trial for one month, then evaluated the results.

In the end, productivity (as measured in completed story points) was up about
50%. I’m glad, because the change was popular and would have been difficult to
reverse if it had gone the other way.

This doesn’t fit every situation. We’re part of a very global company, and
responding quickly to a ping from a team on the other side of the world can
mean the difference between solving a problem today or having to wait another
24 hours. But for my immediate team this is easier. Because we work together
in an office they can just, you know, say something, if they have some urgent
reason to break focus time.

So, not universally applicable, but I think many teams could benefit from
prioritizing focused work in this way.

------
grogenaut
My problem with slack is that some of my co-workers are very good with it.
Some are super busy so many very long half attention conversations are how
they think they're very effective (I end up in this group because of my role),
and the rest react like alcoholics when you suggest going without slack, it's
impossible to hold that discusion with them.

For the first group, often managers, it works well. For the second group lots
of ad hoc video chats help take multi day discussions into 10 minutes chats
and resolve arguments amazingly fast.

For the third group, I don't know. Had a coworker who was complaining about
how much they paid attention to work. When we dug into it they were reading
slack constantly over the weekend, partially cause their job was their family.
We encouraged them not to do that, uninstall slack on the weekends. They were
a lot happier very quickly. A few months later they quit :). I believe they
would have not quit if they hadn't been so tied to their jobs for the 4 years
before from talking to them.

Anecdata I know.

Not to say text based communication isn't quite useful. I love it. But it's
not the only form and I really dislike how tied to the company slack tricks
you into being. A false sense of community that evaporates the instant you go
against it, like being electronically shunned. I think this leads to a lot of
disgruntlement where people don't want to lose their "friends" (coworkers) but
do hate their jobs. So they stay and get real angry. It's not the only reason
it happens but it does exacerbate issues.

------
metalgearsolid
The author works for bad management. I once related to all these pain points
too.

On the other hand I don't think its fair to blame the author for their self-
discipline or whatever. When a QA engineer tags you _and your manager_ on
Slack to raise an "extremely urgent" issue, I really cannot predict how my
teammates and managers will perceive me if I just ignore these fire alarms,
regardless of how real or not the urgency is.

------
cdent
Aligns with my experience.

Which, of course, is only one person's experience amongst many, and different
people will have different experiences.

For people like me, however, the problems listed in this article are painfully
obvious, especially with regard to false sense of urgency. When everything is
urgent, nothing is urgent, except my heart rate.

Slack isn't really the issue here: it's any form of synchronous communication
(IRC, someone coming to your desk, getting a phone call). Slack just happens
to be the latest flagship for the interruption armada, swooping in with their
false urgency and lack of sufficient information.

~~~
dtech
But... slack isn't synchronous. At least not any more than email is.

In my team people look at it when they have the time or could use a context
switch, and if you need them immediately adding @username send them a
notification during business hours.

~~~
matchbok
Chat is synchronous. Always has been.

~~~
notabee
No, a meeting or a phone call is synchronous. You can't put a meeting down for
10 minutes, do something, and pick it up later. There is no requirement to
answer chat messages immediately unless your organization has ridiculous
expectations. Chat is asynchronous like email, but facilitates faster exchange
than email.

------
ahnberg
Flawed logic. The idea with asynchronous communication such as e-mail, chat
and such is that you CAN be slow in replying, if you chose to. Establish that
culture, and this is not a problem.

Most of these articles against chat or digital communication base their
criticism on the fact that people can't focus, can't plan, can't decide what
to do. With that assumption or decision nothing will work.

Figure out how to focus instead, figure out how much chunk of time you as an
individual need to perform a task and make progress. Then check e-mail, Slack,
phone etc in between ... and it will be just fine. fud!

------
guntars
Slack is bad if you use it bad!

At a fully remote company that I work at we have “quiet hours” in the
afternoon where the expectation is that any messages in the channels are not
going to be seen until the next day. Everyone is also encouraged to
automatically enable Do Not Disturb for that time period. There’s also no
expectation that DMs are immediately responded to. If it’s not a blocking
issue, I’m happy to get a response the following morning.

~~~
matchbok
I guess I always wonder how that is better than email. Once a channel has more
than one conversation going on is becomes unusable.

~~~
lanstin
Threaded replies.

------
the_gipsy
> ALL WORK, including troubleshooting issues, fixing bugs, and answered
> questions should go through the Product Owner.

I would not want to work like that. Makes you feel like a code monkey or
ticket jockey.

~~~
philwelch
It can go either way. A lot of the time people will end-run product owners and
try and ask random devs to do low-value work that doesn’t need to happen. The
role of a good product owner is to shield against this.

------
namelosw
From my experience, it doesn't destroy focus. I just don't look at it and turn
off the notification and switch to it when I take a break.

Those guys demand direct response destroy focus.

------
DiseasedBadger
Slack is good for organizations that deal with complex, difficult information,
and have a strong respect for seniority.

If questions are easy, inane, and ubiquitous, anti-communication swarms become
the norm. When most communication is about a plethora of trivial facts that
have to be constantly wrangled, it's better to use a ticket system with forms
that naturally rate limit low-effort questions.

When it's about deeper information, and invalid conversations can be trivially
spotted and rejected, the ability to instantly organize any kind of
conversation whenever, is a god-send.

------
tzs
The perfect tool for a lot of work communication would be newsgroups served by
an NNTP server. I never understood why that was not more widely used.

~~~
zzo38computer
I agree. And, I also wrote a NNTP server software (and I run it on my
computer), which is smaller than the other ones (it is a single source file
with less than 2600 lines of code), and uses a SQLite database to store the
data. (You could also provide other interfaces to the same data, such as a
mailing list and a web interface, although my software does not currently have
these features.)

(I don't use Slack myself, and I do not intend to. For my own projects I can
use IRC and NNTP.)

------
vinceguidry
> They destroy focus

I see this sentiment a lot and it strikes me that deep focus work simply isn't
something that is needed or even wanted in most orgs. Just about every single
org I've ever worked at prioritized a more extraverted work environment. In
this regard, Slack is promoting the interests of the org and not harming them.

I personally have been focused on making positive changes with 15 solid
minutes of effort. Because that's all I'm going to have before I'm
interrupted. It's annoying and I would much prefer a quieter work environment,
but that's clearly not what the org wants.

On the flip side I never have to feel bad about not being productive. I
suspect most of the actual work on my team gets done at home after work hours,
work is being increasingly treated like social hour.

~~~
tdewitt
> I personally have been focused on making positive changes with 15 solid
> minutes of effort. Because that's all I'm going to have before I'm
> interrupted. It's annoying and I would much prefer a quieter work
> environment, but that's clearly not what the org wants.

Doesn't that just feel terrible? I bought noise cancelling headphones because
of the open office concept. When that wasn't sufficient, I moved and am now
remote. When Slack came in, I used the IRC bridge and setup ignore rules for
all the botspam. Now that's gone and I found a web plugin that would do it.
Slack changed their code and that no longer works. Every effort seems to be
going toward a more disruptive world. 15 minute chunks are no sufficient to do
quality work, in my opinion.

We shouldn't spend our days screwing around and our nights on work. If I have
to work nights to be productive, I shouldn't have to show up during the day.
Even if I didn't have a kid, I'd have a personal life.

~~~
vinceguidry
> Doesn't that just feel terrible?

The depth of the work I've been doing at work has been steadily decreasing. I
feel less like a software engineer and more like a manager of SaaS. It's still
much more technical than work your average office worker can do but the
pendulum of power seems to be swinging back towards employers at the moment.

I don't know if it will ever swing back. I worry that the days of software
engineers being able to build up expertise and have that expertise be a
vehicle to social advancement are already over. Coders now need to be
businessmen to get ahead just like everyone else.

~~~
dasil003
You probably can, but it's like finding a needle in a haystack because the
growth of software engineering jobs has been driven by direct business lines
instead of the government and R&D focus that drove things early on. Also,
salaries are higher, and you have glut of engineers coming in purely for the
money and career which breeds a different culture as well.

------
AhtiK
I've been somewhat thrilled by the Twist teamwork app [1], I think it's built
by the Todoist team, at least the company is the same. It specifically tries
to bring back the focus aspect and goes against Slack [2].

Unfortunately my team is too small to have a substantial test whether it
scales well, but on the surface, it seems quite a wonderful email and Slack
replacement.

[1] [https://twist.com](https://twist.com)

[2] [https://doist.com/blog/switching-from-slack-to-
twist/](https://doist.com/blog/switching-from-slack-to-twist/)

------
tzhenghao
I've learned to dislike Slack as my career takes me to larger teams. It's
great for discovery (think internal Stack Overflow for eng roles), but
terrible at maintaining context on a specific "project thread". The argument
against this is "you're using Slack wrongly", but at that point, how much more
value add do you get from traditional communication methods aka email? Oh, and
the "X is/are typing..." is a hostile feature. It's like I'm obligated to sit
there with lots of anxiety, waiting for you to deliver the message.

------
daenz
>Not responding to a message quickly is considered a major failing. Not
responding to a message directed at you in a group channel immediately is
considered to be a grave sin.

I've noticed this as well, but it's mainly been at places with a lot of
location flexibility (WFH for example), but micro-managing managers. When
you're remote, the game that gets played is you have to give the illusion of
being immediately accessible because even though you're not present, you're
still working. It's a silly game but inexperienced micro-managers can be very
paranoid.

------
cryptozeus
This totally depends on team and management. It’s better to set the
expectations that if you have set your status on busy then you may not respond
right away. I have now set an expectation with my team that if it’s urgent
call. Same thing we do in life outside of work as well. If you have urgency
then you are not good to msg your friend and wait for urgent reply. You would
just call.

------
donnie3000
“Real-time sometimes, asynchronous most of the time”, is the approach we take,
and we built an internal tool
([https://www.scenery.app](https://www.scenery.app)) to help facilitate longer
discussions that is intentionally slower and visible for our fully distributed
team.

------
peter_d_sherman
Disclaimer: I am neither for nor against Slack.

This article contains an interesting argument against Slack. Is it ultimately
correct for all Slack users and circumstances? Probably not -- but it is an
interesting argument and might be applicable to a number of companies and use-
cases of Slack...

------
TazeTSchnitzel
They say it undermines management. But it works well at our workplace: a build
error or some strange thing comes up on Slack, and if it's difficult to fix, a
ticket gets made and appropriately scheduled. Where's the problem?

------
jbmsf
How many companies put thought and effort into defining how they want
communication to work?

I've seen Slack work when there is both intention to how channels are
organized and leadership nudging people to follow these intensions.

------
jbverschoor
The problem with slack, texting, calling and sometime email is that certain
people are unable or unwilling to work autonomously.

They rely on others to help them. It’s a different question if you cannot
proceed because you are absolutely dependent on others. In that case an email
should be fine and you should continue working on something else.

If that’s a problem, you either have a bad plan and/or worklist.

~~~
falsedan
> _They rely on others to help them_

I'm an employee in a large organisation, I rely on other people doing their
job to get my job done and they rely on feedback to know what to prioritise. I
can't just work on something else because I have schedules & deadlines, and
clients don't care that something is late because the expert at database
replication checked their email at 5:30pm, after I had to leave.

~~~
lanstin
That sounds like bad planning. You always need more than one active stream of
work in a large org. Or you end up blocked more than working. If you need ASAP
you just have to walk over. If your DB expert only checks msgs late, pad the
schedule and learn how to debug it yourself.

~~~
falsedan
In large organisations is unrealistic to expect technical employees to be
experts with every system in use. When I can’t log in, I call the Helpdesk
instead of busting out ldapsearch. And when I’ve consulted someone and been
recommended to use some solution, when it doesn’t work I contact them again to
check if I understood them correctly, or if they Walter aware of my intended
use-case and the solution actually is fit for purpose.

I feel like if your opinion has the caveat that it only works in orgs where
it’s possible to skill up in everything then it’s probably only applicable to
very small operations.

------
buboard
The purpose of slack was to ditch email. Big mistake , email enables
asynchronous work focus.

------
ummonk
Chat (such as Slack) is far superior to other modes of communication. Only in
person or video communication is more efficient, but even for that Slack is a
good way to initiate since it is less interruptive.

Some of the points in the article actually highlight reasons why chat is
better:

 _They promote a false sense of urgency_

This is very much a culture thing. You can always vary the communicated
urgency by e.g. saying "when you get the chance" vs. @-mentioning people.
Importantly though, when you do need a reply soon, Slack is much better at
getting that.

 _They destroy focus_

The article mentions paranoid checking. My experience is the exact opposite -
with async tools (e.g. email, task manager, google docs) I find myself
paranoidly checking / browsing to make sure I'm not missing anything. With a
tool like Slack, it's easy to know when I've read everything (or read
everything in channels that matter), and don't need to keep paranoidly
checking because I'll get a notification for important stuff.

 _They allow for bypassing project prioritization ... ALL WORK, including
troubleshooting issues, fixing bugs, and answered questions should go through
the Product Owner._

That's ridiculous. You shouldn't have to go through a high overhead
prioritization process just to do some quick work. Sure, put it in
prioritization / whatever when you realize it's a big piece of work and / or
needs to be kept track of, but don't take away the ability to get things done
quickly without having to go through a burdensome product process.

 _They strip away essential business context_

Feature, not a bug. You can always link to extra context, but often the
concise nature of chat forces people to use tl;dr which results in far more
efficient communication for the reader.

 _They encourage poorly thought-out communication_

Again, feature not a bug. Lots of brief communication is far better than a few
carefully drafted essays. Well written communication requires a lot of time
and effort to write, and people don't need that overhead to get on the same
page, which is the point of internal communication.

