I agree with you that for your final sentence it's optional. That said, I still do it.
But that's kind of ancillary to the point of this post, no? The main point it's trying to drive home is be as informative as possible. Don't assume your audience knows your tone, your conventions, your abbreviations.
I suspect this is largely for those who have newly entered the work force, who may only know texting style communication (with friends, shared corpus of knowledge), and formal business communication, and this is to warn them that Slack, while less formal than the latter, doesn't imply the shared context that the former would often have.
>Stuff spoken in person is imprecise, secretive and easily forgotten. Slack is clear, persistent, and public.
I don't get how verbal stuff is imprecise but slack is clear. I find it to be the opposite. It's much better to have a face-to-face chat or a voice chat than converse in writing. It's more clear and you can get more feedback from the other person. Also, if you need to be more precise, you can just write stuff on a board/notepad/chat while talking.
The best form of communication is ultimately based on the amount of shared context (Eg: acronyms), so it’s silly to create rules per the communication medium — slack, email, HN comments, etc. Even within a medium, a slack DM to a friend has very different shared context from a message to a company-wide channel. Being mindful of that, and communicating respectfully, regardless of the actual medium, is likely to be far more useful. Nothing special about Slack.
For me, respectful written communication also includes proper punctuation & capitalization — since it makes reading easier.
Because it's the standard for communication at your company. I don't mind Slack, but I have co-workers who hate it, but don't really have a choice but to use it at least occasionally.
I've used Slack when contracting at companies (remote and sat in the same room)
> Have you worked with people who do expect that?
Yes. Manager expects it to be like talking to you across the room. You answer there and then. If you slack him though he doesn't expect to reply immediately and gets annoyed if you interrupt him to say you really need an answer.
> Do you wish that for the people you’re chatting with?
Yes, saves making a telephone call.
There again, if I Slack someone, it'd better be important not time-wasting.
No. You don't have to read it all. Treat Slack like a hallway conversation. Do you insist on being there for every hallway conversation? Of course not. If you miss one that's okay because people know to put anything important in an email or on a wiki, after the hallway conversation is done. Treat Slack the same way. If it's the only place any important conversation lives you're doing it wrong.
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).
> this [this fast and loose style] interrupts more productive work and deters deep thinking
This doesn't mesh with how I feel toward Slack. Slack itself is the thing that's disrupting my productivity and deterring deeper thinking by pinging me all the time. When I open Slack, the vast majority of the time, I'm looking to express my point as clearly AND concisely as possible so I can get back to doing whatever it was, which is 99% of time more important. As a result I use (or don't use) grammatical conventions, capitalization, and emoji depending on the context of my message and what will allow me to get my entire message across the fastest, and hopefully correctly.
If I'm messaging the person I've pairing with all day, or if I'm coordinating with my team about who will pick up a story, I'm much less likely to give my message all the proper formatting. These people what I'm like and how I tend to communicate, and so I can rely on that prior knowledge to "cut corners" here and there. I'm also much, much more likely to use emoji because I can communicate my intentions and my "intonation" nearly instantly, without having to sit there and worry about wordsmithing my whole message.
That being said, if I'm message in a large public channel that perhaps has multiple teams or belongs to a team I don't normally interact with, I'll spend much more time wordsmithing and editing to make sure I'm following proper conventions - mostly for the sake of clarity.
It does make some very salient points (think about how others could misinterpret your message, expand acronyms/use them sparingly, write to your audience, etc.) but I think they bought a little bit too much into the "Slack has replaced email" argument. For me, the main benefit of Slack over email is the lowered barrier to entry to starting a conversation and the ability to keeping it flowing, and part of achieving that is being okay with lowering the standards of communication.
I see the note at the top of the post that it's meant to be extreme and satirical, but a lot of people actually try to substitute Slack for a meeting or quick zoom call and I think it's incredibly counter productive. The efficiency of verbal communication should be prioritized any time a Slack thread goes beyond ~10 replies. Slack is where work goes to die; not meetings.
> Never send a direct message that just says “hey” or “hello.”
I first started hearing people suggest this recently (within the past month or so). I never really understood why these message bothered people so much - they never bothered me and always actually seemed a bit more polite than just barreling forward with a question. But I guess if even Slack themselves are saying don't do that, it must really get on other people's nerves.
This isn’t a slack thing, it’s a humans thing. Whether it’s a telephone, a marked urgent email, am @mention, or whatever. If someone wants to get your attention, that’s not a technology problem.
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.
I agree. But I like slack more than talking because I get time to think and a transcript after. Probably yet another reason I love working from my home office.
And again, I think it comes down to culture. In your workplace, you're in a room with your coworkers: do you ask "Excuse me everyone, could I have a moment of your time? Does anyone know the status on the internal project Crusade Against Initialisms? Thanks in advance!" or do you say "yo what's the latest on CAI?". In our org, Slack is the same as talking in person (since we, you know, can't do that anymore thanks to WFH and whatnot).
Oh yeah, good point. A lot of people these days have never used a communication medium like that. It would be interesting to work at a company that really prioritized people who prefer that communication style, over the non stop stream of consciousness that Slack turns into.
Slack in real time = I ran into a problem and I will bother you in real time until you fix it. Endemic to data scientists!
Not writing email = I need you to answer me now, not later. Also, I don't want to waste time composing text when I can just talk to you over video right now.
Meetings all the time = I want the highest bandwidth communication immediately, instead of having to wait for an unspecified length of time, only to realize that I have a follow-up question.
This is precisely about responsibility and responsiveness, right now, immediately, and in real time, until the problem is solved. It's very much a young person and startup thing. Maybe it works differently if you contract with a large, slow bigcorp of some kind, but I've never worked in such an environment.
I have no ideas how many times I'd have been fired if Slack did this. Let's just say my first pass on a message in the heat of the moment can sometimes be less than professional.
But that's kind of ancillary to the point of this post, no? The main point it's trying to drive home is be as informative as possible. Don't assume your audience knows your tone, your conventions, your abbreviations.
I suspect this is largely for those who have newly entered the work force, who may only know texting style communication (with friends, shared corpus of knowledge), and formal business communication, and this is to warn them that Slack, while less formal than the latter, doesn't imply the shared context that the former would often have.
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