18 Oct 2020 -
Some thoughts and comments on this article by Abe Winter:
slack empowers your worst people to overwhelm your best. It has that in common with the open office.
I’m not sure I agree here, you can (and should) disable notifications and mute channels, although either may have been added after this was published.
It normalizes interruptions, multitasking, and distractions, implicitly permitting these things to happen IRL as well as online. It normalizes insanely short reply times for questions.
This is culture-dependent. I haven’t really had this issue on teams I’ve worked on so far, but I have seen it in happen to others.
…if your request isn’t handled in 5 minutes it’s as good as forgotten.
Requests really do need to be routed elsewhere to be prioritized correctly, but there will always be this tempting shortcut of shooting a Slack request. And when that “correct” destination is JIRA, that choice is harder than it should be.
I prefer the G docs model, where comments / questions create an alert and initial text doesn’t.
This seems strange to me. Having an option sounds ok, not that I’d use it, but it still strikes me as…weird.
Chat, at least on slack, isn’t grouped or threaded.
Threads have since been added, but definitely feel bolted-on and need some work.
Scrolling up more than two pages’ worth causes nightmare reflows, anchor jumping
I have nothing to add except a +1. Slack, pls fix.
Email is way better at threading and slack has killed it – nobody will pay attention to both. True, although threading can be broken trivially by a bad client or integration. Or even a hostile user. Try interacting with a company’s support system via email. It ain’t always rosy.
I feel like I’m in a hurry to whisper before someone shouts. … ‘is typing’ allows slow typists to dissolve group thought.
As a slow typist (read: thoughtful writer) I find most of the time those who type too slow get left in the dust. Perhaps this is still true through divergence, where the slow lane and fast lane conversations occupy the same channel. The addition of threading actually helps both of these issues though. I’m also not sure this is any more egregious than a slow (or fast) talker would be in a group setting, but nobody likes having to deal with it in any context.
Paradoxically, speed is just as toxic to group thought, as people will race to get out ideas and leave them half-formed or contradictory.
This feels like a problem with the internet generally, but I agree.
slack search is broken
Also, I dislike having to specify the search context that I am already occupying. Global search is what Ctrl/Cmd + Shift + F is for.
Slack subverts valuable work by making productivity = availability on slack.
I think this can also be resisted culturally, but resisted is the key word there. The impetus will always be there pushing you down that slope.
These points are part of a larger tug of war between middle managers and programmers. That argument is out of scope for this article, except to say that pervasive chat empowers middle managers (i.e. people who like to check in a lot) to do so, at the expense of your creatives’ well-being and your long-term organizational health.
I’d love to see an exploration of that wider dynamic. How do we fix this? It seems evident (to me) that such a tug of war must exist; but its rules, the interface between the two, have yet to coalesce.
I think most people agree that when knowledge workers work together on teams they need to use writing to agree on what to do.
I just want to highlight this point because I don’t want it to go underappreciated. I am a big fan of “paper trails”, so to speak, even if it takes longer to communicate that way. Voice and video calls may solve things quicker, but cannot be referred to for notes, which tends to hinder me when I go to follow-up on the discussion. Even Slack, flawed as it is, does help in this regard. If nothing else, I can (and have) copy/paste(d) a conversation into a ticket or a more permanent documentation medium.
24/7 reachability also hurts good docs practices. When people couldn’t get ahold of each other at all hours orgs had to design for redundancy, i.e. write things down such that they could be understood by someone else.
Yes and no. Having conversations in a channel, not direct messages, exposes more people to it to weigh-in and possibly engenders further clarification. This can then be used as a tool to create that good formal documentation (lol). As I said above, if nothing else, you can copy/paste the conversation with context included, which ain’t bad.
What did a PM think of six months ago that hasn’t been started? Let’s do that.
I hadn’t thought of this before, but it makes sense. Having a backlog of all time does sort of bog down one’s ability to focus on what’s important right now.
JIRA has a screen real estate problem. Have you seen the articles about SERP shrinkage, where a G results page in 2004 was mostly results and now it’s mostly ads? JIRA started out this way. 90% of the text on the screen isn’t your project’s information, it’s JIRA chrome.
This just made me laugh. I don’t know how anyone does anything in JIRA. On a small team with simple needs it was too much. Now I’m on a bigger, more complex team and the junk is practically exponential. Jira, fix pls.
Another JIRA flaw: highly formalized process is usually a hindrance, especially considering who in your organization invents, applies and benefits from process. Hint: middle managers.
Good God. The amount of times I’ve tried to move a story around in the workflow in a way some midman didn’t anticipate… it’s infuriating. Yes, I had a false-start on that ticket so it’s going from In Progress back to TODO without going through Code Review first, get over it. /rant
go dump chat
This is an extreme response and I feel really bad that the author has had such a scarring chat experience that this feels necessary. To the hopeless I say it’s not that bad everywhere. It’s not perfect, but it can work. Push back on the worst of it where you can and disable notifications. Someone will eventually get it right.