The implied expectations here are part of what bothers me so much about Slack. The people who really embrace it are putting too much of the burden of communication on all recipients instead of on themselves when they produce content. It is selfish and inefficient since every recipient has to do the same redundant work to sort it out.
Careless mixing of realtime chatter, async memos, and reference documentation leads to a fear of missing out. You have to wade through a stream of junk to see if you missed something important. Eventually, people even expect you to know the whole stream whether you were present or not. How mad! If something important happened during your vacation, someone in your organization should tell you about it once you return. Otherwise, you should return to a clean slate, only tracking the chatter that happens while on duty.
In the best recent office cultures I've seen, instant messaging is used without history. It's water-cooler banter or popping your head in the next office. Important but still transient things can go in email and be read a week or two later when you return, but there aren't so many of them. And stable things go in a wiki, not in email, i.e. if subsequent new hires are supposed to know about it too. Nobody should be onboarded by telling them to crawl through transcripts of previous work weeks, and a proper vacation lets you return as if you are onboarding.
By the way, early in my career, these same types of careless people abused email the way they abuse Slack today. Busy people dealt with hundreds of emails in a day, not counting spam nor automated notification messages, which weren't so common then. Your inbox would be flooded with realtime chatter, async memos, and attached documents that should have been in a repository somewhere. Eventually, those with enough clout were driven to set auto-reply messages that they are on vacation and no email received during their absence would ever be read.
agreed. I love Slack. where I work, it is used for helping coworkers/other teams with issues - but there is no expectation of fast replies. the author implies this expectation is implicit to Slack, but it's not. for me, it's perfectly normal to not expect a reply to something even on the same day, especially if it's complex and people are busy.
additionally, if the volume of messages is too high to be able to catch up with after working for a while (like you would catch up on emails), this is probably an issue of not splitting things up adequately into granular channels. or, again, some weird culture of just spamming Slack for everything.
I would agree with you, except that Slack promotes actively that culture of quick response and disruption.
And I indeed blame that most work cultures took that in blindly without reflecting on what the impact would be.
I see it as something similar to the rise of open-spaces. Now there is a backslash against it because people finally realize that it was overhyped and that open-spaces are maybe not always that good.
Regarding emails, I disagree with you. It is still my go-to channel for deep technical discussions on difficult subjects on which you need to reflect. With emails, I have no pressure to respond directly. When I respond, I will write multiple well constructed paragraphs where I explain why I would do this or this technical choice. Emails are archived easily and can be reread and referenced later.
Slack is a dumping ground of irrelevant messages, the opposite of your experience.
Yeah I was another Slack-complainer until I joined an organisation without any sort of business-chat system. That's when my amnesia cleared up and I remembered just what a slog email is without a Slack-like. I remembered that email is used as chat when there's no proper chat system, that it's an unsearchable unstructured endless soup of important stuff, cat videos, unnecessary reply-all mashing, mysterious banishment to the spam folder, and wheat-to-chaff (greetings, unnecessary opening pleasantries, huge sigs) ratios that make enterprise-Java look lean. I'm in a constant state of anxiety over my inbox because I never know if I'm mistakenly ignoring or overlooking something important. In various ways, Slack ameliorated all these things for a downside that is in retrospect completely acceptable.
> we use Slack all the time to facilitate our communications.
> Pro tip: set your notification settings to silent by default.
You're lucky that your company lets you treat Slack like an asynchronous e-mail inbox with multiple channels. If you have the luxury of ignoring Slack notifications until you're ready to respond, you're in a good place.
But your company isn't using Slack the normal way. The implicit expectation is that Slack is an instant messenger, and that you're expected to reply right now. That's why the default settings lean toward aggressive notifications, and that's why you need to take extra steps to turn them off.
Slack has been a powerful tool for remote work and distributed teams, but it's also an interruption factory by default. Before I left my last company, I routinely had 300-500 notification pop-ups per day as people shifted toward DMs and managers started abusing @channel to rise above the noise and get their answers ASAP.
> "Noone is forcing you to look at it immediately every time there's new conversation happening."
Nobody except your employer. In shops that use slack it is often the expectation that slack messages should be read and responded to ASAP. If someone PMs you in slack that is taken to be the equivalent of an IM or a phone call, with the same implications of urgency. If there is a chat for your specific team then it's expected you are following that pretty closely (at least as closely as your email if not more so).
Additionally, sometimes it's not possible to avoid paying too much attention to slack. If people have a habit of dumping lots of context and decision making into slack without putting that info elsewhere (like wiki, issues, email, etc.) then at some point you need to go back and read all that backlog to keep up to date on what the hell is going on, typically it's far easier to do that as close in time as possible to the original messages, so that you're in the loop. Relatedly, people have a habit of having substantive conversations and effectively virtual meetings in slack which can include decision making as well. Meaning they can make decisions without your input, advice, or consent if you're heads-down and not paying attention, which can mean people make the wrong decisions (they did it without additional context, information, or advice you could have provided) or they make decisions that put you individually at a disadvantage (because you "weren't in the room" when things got decided).
Yes, these are absolutely undesirable and unnecessary ways of using the platform but they are also very common and they are some of the big reasons why people tend to dislike slack.
> Slack is fine and works fine. As a user, you can very easily turn it off and on at will, mute it, even set status messages like "I will check my messages twice a day".
From a workflow standpoint, this is optimal.
The catch is that many people view Slack as e-mail but with an expectation of instant response. The farther your Slack communications stray from engineers, the more likely you are to encounter this mindset.
Years ago I would have argued that Slack is merely a tool and these are personal problems, but after setting Slack up at a few workplaces I've realized that they structure the defaults and notification settings to encourage this "always connected, always on" mode by default.
> 2. Don't expect people to be online. It's the same as irc. If people are there, they are expecting to be interrupted / they are feeling helpful at that moment.
One of the reasons I don't like Slack is that people contact me when I'm off shift. I support APAC and so work different hours from most of my company. If I have a problem, I have to either email someone, or DM someone who isn't online. Either way, my voice goes into the black hole. Likewise, they return my DM in the morning, and their reply goes into the void if Slack doesn't wake me.
But with our corporate culture buying into the "always online" concept of Slack, I can't easily communicate how email-like it can be.
Slack isn't necessarily the problem in many situations. The problem is often how the tool highlights personal and culture problems instead of helping to smooth them over, by making them less evident. Email and other asynchronous communication can hide gaps in an organization by removing the pressure to respond immediately.
> What I find the most damaging is the expectation that you should always be online watching all your channels in order to not miss some bit of information (or show that you are online, busy, doing work).
That sounds either like toxic work culture or maybe the way slack is used in your company has created assumptions that may not be entirely warranted.
Where I work, there is no such expectation. If it's something urgent, people use @-messages so the recipient gets a notification, with reasonable care not to abuse them. If it's anything else, it's normal messages which can be read when convenient. Some, including me, turn off Slack entirely when diving deep into some task but I still get phone notifications for @-messages and a couple of keywords I've set up for urgent matters. If people appreciate each others time and attention, it's actually a fairly pleasant tool to use. We're not a large team, though, maybe it's different in larger orgs.
That's a culture problem, not a Slack problem. I've interacted with people who expect me to read E-Mails within 30 minutes during off-work hours too. That doesn't mean E-Mails are inherently distracting.
I think the issue is that people already learned how to avoid going crazy with email. A large part of that is reading it in batches and not getting any notification when messages arrive. Some other people are bothered by this and seem to forever seek a way to worm their way back into your foreground attention.
Slack conflates mentioning someone with notifying someone. Some of my coworkers use mentions like metadata. They think they are creating a better informatics resource by mentioning people by their Slack id instead of their name. They had no intention of it actually sending an immediate notification to interrupt anybody.
They see Slack more like some kind of wiki and not like a chat system. I see Slack as a chat system and an even more worthless wiki than all the other wikis everyone creates and then abandons due to editorial debt. Unfortunately, we don't get to join different Slack systems with entrance exams to filter out the wrong sort of user...
Everyone I work with is part of at least a dozen Slack workspaces with disparate notification settings. I get loads of notifications at times when I can't reply immediately, but there is no system comparable to _not archiving an email_ so I remember to come back to it. I get the convenience of semi-synchronous conversations and being able to engage and catch people up better than forwarding an email chain, but Slack and its ilk are very, very far from replacing email.
> For the next five years I operated in “Slack culture”, the communication paradigm that I suspect is in use by many companies these days. Email inboxes were more or less reserved for broadcasts from exec and HR along with JIRA spam. Everything else happens on Slack.
This is the real problem, IMO.
Slack shouldn't be replacing e-mail or meetings or phone calls. It's great for impromptu discussions with a lot of back-and-forth, but once it becomes a serious conversation with multiple parties you need to escalate to a call or meeting or e-mail. Casual, asynchronous chat is great for low-importance conversations that aren't time sensitive. It's terrible for coordinating and making important decisions in a timely manner, though. Don't be afraid to schedule a synchronous communication session in whatever flavor you prefer.
Once you start making Slack the center of communication, you stop making deliberate decisions about who is included in e-mails/meetings. Now everyone in the channel has to skim everything to make sure they're not missing out on anything important. Busybodies love it because they can be a fly on the wall for everything. Heads-down workers hate it because they have to choose between focusing on their work or checking into Slack all of the time. It optimizes for the wrong kind of engagement.
Trying to enforce a lot of rules around threading is a band-aid, IMO. The real solution should be to create a culture where people aren't trying to force every interaction into Slack or avoid meetings at all costs. Excessive meetings are a problem, but going out of your way to avoid all meetings will waste more time than it frees up.
I guess I do not really understand the backlash at Slack. I think it is more of highlighting broken company cultures. If someone expects an immediate response for any communication does it matter if it is Slack, the phone, your office, your email (plus follow up email and/or phone call)?
For me Slack has cut down immensely on people randomly showing up in my office. Just forcing someone to write something down, and think about needing an immediate response cuts down frivolous questions. The biggest plus between it and email is that Slack pushes using public chats. I like this because I can go through during my work mental downtime and stay aware of other things going on.
I'm shocked at many of the responses here, when people will also complain about hostility towards remote workers.
Slack is a vital part of my working, PARTICULARLY when one of the parties is remote. Sure, as this article is saying, having some space to not be interrupted is a good thing - but that's hardly the same as saying USUALLY having no synchronous option is good, much less EVER having a synchronous option.
1) Email was great...until too much crap showed up in email and people stopped reading it. Remove the synchronous option and you'll just have another form of email. The Mythical Man Month talks about communication overhead -
2) The vast bulk of my slack communication is quick questions/answers. Sure, an interruption is annoying, but usually well worth it if it unblocks someone. (and when that someone is me, I value it much more). The value here tends to vary in proportion to someone's quick response time. I have a few coworkers that wont' check Slack more than once or twice a day. I hate having to work with them on anything, and we tend to have more scheduled meetings that are far less efficient. Others can be counted on to respond within 10 mins, and usually within a min - working with them is a breeze.
There is definitely a number of tricks to adopt and etiquette to follow...just like any form of communication. It can be used poorly and have more costs than benefits, or well and have the reverse.
My tricks:
* I replaced the default notification sound with something less jarring. Basically a gentle sound that clues me in to glance at the notification. If it's not something I need to respond to, I'm usually not pulled out of flow. This is a huge difference.
* When that notification is still too much, and/or someone starts a detailed chat about something I don't care about, `/dnd 10min` tells slack to shut up for a bit, without me having to tinker with settings and worry about remembering to UN-tinker those settings.
* If using a Pomodoro technique, add in a scan of Slack between sessions. That's fast enough that most people are happy and not blocked long, but doesn't break up your work efforts. This advice is only partially tested, as I'm still struggling to adopt a routine.
* Many people will tell you to turn off notifications - I recommend AGAINST this unless you're using a technique like the last to make sure you don't miss things. Instead, make sure you're only in channels that are relevant to you - if you're getting pinged and aren't interested, the problem is not the tool. In particular, you want to manage the expectations about reaching you - if people think you aren't responding, they'll just get more annoying, not patient. I have coworkers that will often join into channels for related teams, get their answers, then leave...a process they repeat possibly multiple times that day, while I hang out in many, many channels. Both ways do the job well.
* I gave a presentation where I worked on effective ways to communicate with text. One of the best is to not ask A or B questions - instead ask yes/no questions.
Not: "Is the API key for foobar still in file.env? Or is it from the new service call?" (You will be told "Yes" or "no" and have no idea what the actual answer is)
Instead: "The API key for foobar is still in file.env? And not yet from the new service call?" ("yes" or "no" will have a clear meaning)
This technique alone has taken a big bite out of my frustrations in using slack (and any other communication) and reduced unnecessary traffic, though it takes some practice.
I responded to Slack pings in the course of writing this :)
I feel like people complaining about this didn't grow up in the IRC/IM era. It probably depends on your corp's culture as well, but for us, Slack is a very informal communcation mechanism. If you need to write something formal, you use an email. Slack is equivalent to shouting out to the room (as if you were there in person).
Yeah, an interaction that could have easily been an asynchronous e-mail before is now an interruption (or multiple interruptions) in Slack. Unfortunately, my corporate culture is heavily Slack-oriented, so turning it off entirely isn't an option for me. I do configure my Slack channels to disable @here notifications, to avoid the people who abuse that feature. (Hey, let's interrupt 100 people with a question, not just the three who might know the answer we're looking for!)
I also find it hard to search for saved messages in Slack. If someone said something in Slack that actually needs to be remembered for more than a day, I'll just copy it into an e-mail so it can be searched for, archived, forwarded, etc. If the message would have been an e-mail to begin with, it would have been less work. If a Slack message requires more than a couple of sentences as a reply, I always reply that I'll be replying by e-mail.
It's worth pointing out that email is a form of instant message.
It's one that comes with some sensible expectations of response time. But there's nothing stopping you from seeing it immediately or replying to it quickly.
One could build a corporate culture around email usage that was just as insane as the current Slack distraction culture. Or you could have anything in between where the two sit now. It's very similar technology. But it comes with a big advantage of nobody needing to install anything or keep some random website open 24/7.
Personally, I tend to treat Slack as though it was a poor substitute for email. I'll check it every once in a while when I have some down time, and I make sure it can never send me a notification of any description.
Unless, of course, (as I mentioned elsewhere) the current gig is at a shop that is willing to pay the productivity cost of being able to distract its developers whenever it wants. In that case, let it bingle away non-stop. Just don't expect me to get things done very quickly.
>> The catch is that many people view Slack as e-mail but with an expectation of instant response.
I don't get this, because email is instant response. It arrives more or less instantly. Almost all digital non-verbal communications can invite an instant response.
Why is Slack so different than email?
The excuses are the same... "Well, I didn't have Slack open..." "Well, I didn't have Outlook open..." Hell, you could go back in time and say, "Well, I didn't have ICQ open..."
Careless mixing of realtime chatter, async memos, and reference documentation leads to a fear of missing out. You have to wade through a stream of junk to see if you missed something important. Eventually, people even expect you to know the whole stream whether you were present or not. How mad! If something important happened during your vacation, someone in your organization should tell you about it once you return. Otherwise, you should return to a clean slate, only tracking the chatter that happens while on duty.
In the best recent office cultures I've seen, instant messaging is used without history. It's water-cooler banter or popping your head in the next office. Important but still transient things can go in email and be read a week or two later when you return, but there aren't so many of them. And stable things go in a wiki, not in email, i.e. if subsequent new hires are supposed to know about it too. Nobody should be onboarded by telling them to crawl through transcripts of previous work weeks, and a proper vacation lets you return as if you are onboarding.
By the way, early in my career, these same types of careless people abused email the way they abuse Slack today. Busy people dealt with hundreds of emails in a day, not counting spam nor automated notification messages, which weren't so common then. Your inbox would be flooded with realtime chatter, async memos, and attached documents that should have been in a repository somewhere. Eventually, those with enough clout were driven to set auto-reply messages that they are on vacation and no email received during their absence would ever be read.
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