Comment by holografix | Hacker News Reader

Comment by holografix | Hacker News Reader

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.

I agree for the most part and also turn off all my notifications except for @‘s.

The only thing I wish existed was an option for the sender to tag a directed message as low priority, sort of like an @-lite. It would show up in my queue of things I need to respond to but not interrupt when I’m focused on something else.

It’s similar to how email functions, but we’ve mostly migrated away from using email internally and bringing that back feels like a step backwards in notification management.

Our current hack is to deprioritize all Slack messages, including direct messages and @‘s, while adding in text messages for urgent responses. Not ideal, but better than a culture of everyone feeling compelled to respond to every message within a few minutes.

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.

This is the biggest danger IME for my team as well and everyone from QA to Dev to middle-management is guilty of it. Worse, my job also has Confluence, OneDrive, and JIRA, and not a one of them is the final source of truth.

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.

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

In comparison to something like Skype - yes, in comparison to Gmail - no.

This is a great habit, if the organization allows for it. I have worked for companies where managers would get bad ratings by employees because of exactly this. They were “slow to respond”, which employees were not used to.

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