Agreed. My Slack experiences have been fine: just a few channels, notifications off, mostly relevant work chats, etc.

I dunno. I'm in like 3 slack teams and dozens of channels and I maybe spend an hour in the morning catching up with everything, then I glance at it a few times a day during builds and such. Every once in a while it'll suck up half my day, but I rarely think of it as wasted time.

I learn a lot in slack and we have a big company, so I feel like helping people out with stuff during the day raises your profile. I'm kind of a python dabbler, but now I have people asking me directly about stuff because I'm 'the python expert' since I answer questions in the python channel a few times a week.

Doing my own work is obviously important, but I think helping other people get work done is important as well.

Just this week I introduced a guy on a totally different team to cloudformation, and in the process learned quite a bit about how they were using elastic map reduce, something we've never touched on our side of the company. He learned something, I learned something and I think the company as a whole benefits (even though I probably delayed my own work by a little bit)

It's really good at blowing up silos if you're a large-ish company. The difference in how connected I feel to the rest of the company is night and day since we switched to slack.

Yeah before Slack I was constantly getting interrupted with questions that could have been answered any time and random co-workers just wanting to chat. However, I agree with the analysis that Slack is good for immediate communication and communication that doesn't really matter too much. Before Slack we didn't really have a tool that fit that and so every communication was a co-worker walking over and interrupting whatever you were doing.

> Before Slack we didn't really have a tool that fit that and so every communication was a co-worker walking over and interrupting whatever you were doing.

I don't get it. Doesn't any popular chat client fit the bill? The thing Slack adds is big persistent chat groups which doesn't help with the problem you're describing.

I think big persistent groups sometimes do help with that. If you want to know which client requested X, then messaging one person is slow, and walking up to ask one person is disruptive. With Slack, you can ask 30 people and get an answer from whoever looks first (and so presumably isn't disrupted). Everyone else who's busy ignores things and skims things when they're not occupied.

That's all contingent on a culture of async Slack usage, but I've found it valuable.