
Slack Is Awful - dfabulich
https://redfin.engineering/slack-is-awful-bd2eed50b72f
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andrei_says_
I see the author generating 51000 messages in a year. That’s 196 per workday.

196 interruptions per day. Counting just the messages he produced, this is 196
micro interactions with _other people_.

Even if the exchanges come in sets, the amount of wasted attention is mind
blowing.

~~~
egid
Yep. That realization is a big part of what led to serious changes in habits
and thinking about Slack. The stats now are around 1/2 of what they were, and
that's in a different role as a team lead rather than a full-time remote
engineer.

Given my communication style — basically a line per sentence and (for better
or worse, probably worse) the byproduct of IRC — that 196/day average was
likely more along the lines of 10 to 15 conversations per day. Probably some
number less than half were truly wasted; they were still work-relevant, but
the randomization is the concerning part.

~~~
andrei_says_
As a programmer, it takes 10-20 min to fully “submerge” in the context and
approach the state of flow. With this amount of conversations, and I presume
double the amount of distraction through “checking” slack, entering that state
would just not happen for me.

What was your experience?

~~~
egid
I didn't honestly find it ruinously distracting, but it was a handicap. Much
of the work I did at the time relied on interacting with a team of developers
while I was remote. Slack allowed me to ask and answer questions
asynchronously, while scheduling a meeting or getting a video call together at
least _felt_ like a greater burden.

On average, at peak slack usage, I was probably interacting with it several
times per hour, in bursts of messages per conversation. After reevaluating,
I'd quit slack for hours at a time while focusing.

I'm not really sure how to quantify the impact that had; it's mostly that I've
forced myself to recognize when I'm in the zone on work and proactively shut
down communication until I'm ready for a break. Before, I'd occasionally get
an interruption or reach out to someone and lose some time and focus to Slack.

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social_quotient
Slack is awesome! The way people use it coupled with our expectations of feal-
time follow up... is awful.

Don’t blame the straw if the drink is bad?

~~~
andrei_says_
How do you use it?

Doesn’t chat imply immediacy?

How do you deal with the disappearance of content?

How do you deal with not knowing where information is because now you have an
additional place where it may be?

~~~
egid
I have a feeling that companies using Slack that don't have retention polices
- for compliance with Sarbanes–Oxley etc - probably have no issue with content
disappearing. It's something we at Redfin only recently have had to deal with,
and it's a total pain in the ass; people operated for years as if Slack was
the total repository of knowledge, and now 3/4 of that information is gone.

I've thought for a while that Atlassian and other providers of corporate wiki
software could make a killing providing Slack integrations that let you search
in one place.

~~~
andrei_says_
It’s an interesting problem. Maybe a chat or that adds a conversation as an
article on request?

