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.