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Comment by hamandcheese | Hacker News Reader

If not Slack, then what? Nothing?

I work as part of a fully remote team and I can't really imagine not using Slack.

Generally we discuss in Slack, immortalize in GitHub issues (using ZenHub, thank god), and do ad-hoc video calls for screen sharing and whatnot. Announcements and such usually go out as an email blast.

I'm really curious what life would be like using email/issue comments only. Obviously this must be possible since so many open source projects operate this way, right? But they also have a totally different organizational structure.

Any insights, HN?

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Remove asynchronous interruptions and go back to old-fashioned synchronous interruptions (scheduled meetings, either in person or calls/video chats) for the stuff that requires high-bandwidth communication and asynchronous non-interrupting queues (emails, or other similarly-shaped things like tickets or wiki page edits / comments) for the stuff that requires low-bandwidth communication and more intensive thought / work.

If you need asynchronous interruptions, pre-Slack and even pre-email culture had ways to do this - phone calls, pages, knocking on people's doors - but they were viewed as rare and exceptional, and the coworker who would knock on your door all the time to ask if you saw the message they just sent was viewed as rude and distracting.

I'ld much rather be IM'ed or emailed than called or paged. If I am called, the phone rings or the pager beeps, and I have little choice but to interrupt my work. My slack client, on the other hand sits in the system tray, silently displaying a little blue or red dot. I can open chat when I feel like it, or ignore it until such a time when I am not concentrating on something else.

Asynchronous communication is empowering: You can choose when you communicate and when you want to concentrate. Synchronous communication does not afford you that luxury.

The problem is, chats are being interpreted as synchronous - you are expected to be available and to reply in real-time.

I found that to be a problem of organizational culture, not of chat itself. In my experience, if it was culturally fine to interrupt other people's work, quick answers were expected via chat, too. If it was the organization's culture to let people work without unscheduled interruptions, that extended to the expectations around chat, too.

Indeed. However, chat facilitates this particular kind of organizational dysfunction much more than e-mail; that's probably why people pin the problem on chats.

Why is using Slack in this workflow superior to using email? I also know if I have unread emails via the tray icon or mobile app badge, same as with Slack.

Is it just that short frequent messages in email feel weird?

That, the superior handling of short-message group conversations and the fact that the number of people who could email me is vastly greater than my team members on slack. As such, I tend to check slack relatively frequently, while I check my emails only twice a day - I do not have push notifications enabled for email. Basically, slack means a usually-within-2-hours response time, while email means same-or-next-workday response time.

How is email non-interrupting but Slack is? You can enable/disable notifications for either of them and respond to either when you like.

Culture and expectations. Same reason I'm listing video calls as non-interrupting when they certainly are capable of interrupting: set expectations that scheduled meetings are normal and unannounced calls are for emergencies.

If you can make your Slack non-interrupting, fantastic, but probably the advantages over email are slim.

I'm remote from time to time. I really can't think of how the synchronous nature of Slack helps anything. If you need real-time chat, it's faster and more productive to have a phone/video call. If it's a long chat with lots of detail, email or issues? If you are spending > 10 seconds writing something to someone on Slack, you are already wasting time - if it's important, it needs to live elsewhere. It if it just "chat", then talking is faster.

Talking over the phone doesn't show me the code/command/text we are talking about. It takes far more words to "talk" through a problem than it does to show the source...

I think OP assumes collocation, and would suggest in person discussion. See the 'sheet of paper is all you need to plan' note.

Since they also complain about open office, I think their ideal mode of work is a small team with their own office, caring only about their little silo and not much for what the rest of the company is doing. For some types of work, that is indeed optimal!

To me, not having an instant messenger at work would be a great loss. You now either have to come to someone in person, and be way more disruptive - after all you can silence slack notifications, but you can't suppress someone coming to you, make calls - same problem, or do with something like email, where the back-and-forth is much slower.

> where the back-and-forth is much slower.

This is a feature. Slower back and forth means people put more thought into it and communicate better.

Even i think so, need to know why people think otherwise

Or, more commonly, give up trying to communicate for everyday task and build silos of knowledge.

We use slack, communicate for everyday tasks, and have so many silos of knowledge it’s ridiculous.

> "If not Slack, then what? Nothing?"

I've not used it before, but I can see the potential benefits of a tool like Huddle:

https://www.huddle.com/

At the very least, tools like Huddle mean that discussions can be focused on the documents that a team are working on.

Whatsapp? Obviously lacking the gimmicks but still

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