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Personally, I'm kind of tired of using Slack. I think it is disruptive and hostile to doing deep, focused work.
I'm curious what other developers think about Slack at work. Is it something that disrupts you? Are there features of it that make the disruption worth it?
Historically, I've also been very frustrated with the lack of search features in Slack. The Open Source project I help maintain uses Slack for communication and it isn't good for having technical conversations because you can't search it like a forum.
I've felt a desire to move back to something more asynchronous (not quite email), but something that isn't hostile to the way programmers work. Do you agree or disagree?
Oldest comments (33)
I agree, if I am working in a project, and my coworker is exchanging data about the project in a chat (Slack, or our embeded ERP chat, or whatever...), I ask him to put it in the BitBucket issue, or in our Task manager.
I hate having to search for something related to the task I am working in inside of a chat. Chats can be purged, they can be quickly a hell to look at, slow search and duplicated data makes it even more difficult to trim the good information, ...
Also better if somebody else is taking the lead on a specific task. Instead of dumping a chat history, he/she have everything in the appropriate task/issue.
I've also noticed forcing people (including me) to put questions/suggestions/remarks in the task/issue make people go straight to the point, and avoid unnecessary remarks since it will be peer reviewed by others.
I think that accountability thing is key. Tons of stuff gets lost in Slack threads and DMs that should be recorded somewhere in an easily searchable format.
That's exactly the kind of thing I'm interested in, I feel like developers NEED asynchronous communication to be the default. Otherwise, it's so hard to make time to get deep into a problem.
Starting with more of an abstract comment, but I find the mantra of "developers require focused work more than other professions" to be incredibly unproductive and disrespectful to colleagues in other disciplines. To argue that development is the only profession that requires deep, focused work implies something incredibly negative about other professions. It doesn't matter whether your career is writing code, writing blog posts, completing financial audits, or any other number of things. If your profession requires mental effort then it requires deep focus and, in your eyes, asynchronous communication.
Having said that, I'd argue that - despite its default notification settings, which are designed to get the maximum engagement out of users, thanks to Slack's origins as a VC-backed company that needed to show growth - Slack is an asynchronous communication tool. You can entirely mute channels, DMs, or the whole darn app. You can actively prevent coworkers from interrupting your thought process. If you want you can disable
@hereand@channelnotifications, disable push notifications on your device, as well as leave Do Not Disturb on 24 hours a day, and you'll be able to functionally use Slack the way you'd use email. In fact, it's how most people in my office have their accounts set up. In my mind, Slack is great in that it allows you to choose your level of engagement, and if you'd like that level to be "none" then that's your prerogative.Searchability is a fair argument, though I personally feel that "starring" and "pinning" messages, combined with the new search interface rolled out earlier this year, I no longer struggle to find messages like I used to. Slack search used to be problematic, but I haven't felt that pain in a while.
Okay
People talk about Slack like it is a better, more modern version of email. I think that is really wrong - it's more like a modern version of the water cooler. You have little choice over who can overhear your conversation, it immediately lets you know when you have a notification, and it constantly pulls your attention between channels.
It's pretty nightmarish, in my opinion. That being said, I think there are a lot of ways to make Slack work a lot better and fit with your style of working. I'd highly recommend reading How I Slack by Rands.
Lately at work, we've been trying out buddy rotations for "communication triage". Basically, one dev is working in "deep focus" mode, where they don't have to worry about incoming communication. The buddy dev then handles communication for that time and they swap after a bit. It's worked pretty well so far! I'll probably do a write up on it soon!
That's a super creative approach! Good idea.
Thanks for you thoughts. I didn't mean to say other disciplines don't need focus, but I really feel that pain as a developer.
I think that's an interesting approach, but I feel like the people building the product are opposed to using it the way you've described.
I interpreted developers NEED asynchronous communication to be the default to be an exclusive statement, but I now see that I added some personal context, I apologize for putting words in your mouth.
I think that's completely fair, but I don't much care if they disagree with my notification setup :) Twitter probably doesn't like that I have notifications entirely disabled, but I'm not letting that stop me either.
It's probably only exclusive in that this is a developer-centric site. In the small, remote fishing village where I do stuff, we use the term Maker (as in Maker vs. Manager) to describe those of us who need focus — artists, designers, developers, writers, etc.
I agree that Slack is disruptive. It does have features to make it more asynchronous but actually using them and getting the team as a whole to use them so your culture of communication isn't instant takes some real discipline. It's great to see comments with ways to solve this problem!
That is super brave of you to offer your personal phone number up for work access!
GV (and similar services) are great for retaining control of your phone number. Set your default answer policy to "straight to voicemail" (optionally enabling call-screening), then dump known callers into different groups that you can make rules for (e.g., co-workers can call me any time M-F from 0700-1800 but go straight to voicemail outside that daily; friends can reach me daily from 0600-2300; family has no restrictions).
I like slack but I keep mine on silent and I am prone to hyper focusing so I don't notice when I get notifications until I need to use slack. That being said my team is small and we only really use it for short logistical things, so there's never really a whole lot happening on it. I think it makes communicating with the remote people on the team easier though, and having a place where I can go to find things people have said. I use it pretty asynchronously though, and I never expect people to reply immediately it's more like a group email with organized sub spaces
Do you have trouble with finding old conversations or do you have another space for recording decisions made in Slack?
Important decisions definitely end up in jira either as tickets or part of our documentation. Normally when something like that comes up we make a plan in slack to record it somewhere, either assign someone to make a ticket or send a more formal email if it involves people outside our team. I use the search feature too, it's not amazing but it works for searching by words I remember and it's similar to searching emails
I have to say though, one of my favorite things about slack is honestly the ability to slack myself things I need to remember or articles I want to read at work the next day
I've experimented with the "do not disturb" mode which has worked well. But I also occasionally work from home and when you do that you also have the desire to be always available.
One thing I enjoy doing is starting my day really early and working on stuff before even opening Slack or email. That way you can easily get 2-3 hours of uninterrupted work accomplished.
By the end of that chunk of work you may also have pending questions for your co-workers so may be a good time to open Slack and start chatting to hash things out.
Do you find that you're not able to block off 2-3 hours if you don't get up early?
I feel like the need for immediate feedback is a big problem with the way people use Slack, if you could just not be expected to respond within 20 minutes it would be easier to block that time off.
To be honest I start my day early most days even at the office so I usually do have a good chunk of time for dedicated work to start my day.
There are some days where I don't write any code at all but it's not always due to Slack. It's usually meetings, planning, troubleshooting, brainstorming with teammates.
Have you actually been told you need to respond within 20 minutes or is that just the general feeling you have?
If you are really blocked you could just try closing Slack for an hour and do some work. If someone really needs to get in touch with you they'd come find you :)
Haha, no one has told me that, but Slack is engineered to make people feel an urgency to respond.
I feel like it takes an organizational change to get teams to fight the urge to treat Slack like an instant distraction machine, so it'd be nice if the tool itself fought that pattern. However, I think it's built to encourage that pattern ☹️
Another idea that might work depending on your team and work environment is bringing it up at the next team meeting and see if you could agree to set aside a certain time of the day where you can all take a "slack break" or just not be obliged to respond immediately.
For example "No Slack before 930am and after 1pm" or something like that?
Sounds like you guys have a corporate culture problem. In general, chat tools should be seen to be inherently asynchronous – though typically less delay-oriented than email. Which is to say, while tools like Slack can be used for interactive conversation, if you're not actively participating in an existing conversation, there shouldn't be an expectations that you'll simply drop everything just to reply. If someone needs you, you should have an established urgency-escalation path (e.g. Slack direct message or @-mention, SMS, phone-call). Also, people should take your Slack-status seriously (if I've marked myself away – especially if I've snoozed notifications – "take the hint").
👏👏 You said it all.