"discussions are faster and more productive in realtime"

Real-time discussion is great if you don't have to think about what you're going to say before you say it. Unfortunately, that places a very, very low upper limit on the level of depth and consideration that a discussion can reach. Some decisions are hard enough and some situations are nuanced enough that you need to take your time with them, enough that the additional cost of making all of that time strictly synchronous can grow exponentially.

It also excludes large categories of people, including introverts and non-native speakers. I've worked with a number of people who just flat out did not or could not participate in real-time face-to-face discussions, but who could express themselves masterfully via email.

Of course, the "faster! instant! now! now! now!" crowd don't even have the patience for slower, deeper, better-reasoned discussions, which is why they shy away from any form of communication that has any more depth than a tweet or a PowerPoint slide. Slack is great for these people because they don't even have to string words together to communicate, they can just click on a reaction emoji.

Sure, some things (operations, for instance) have genuine urgency to them, and I think real-time communication is essential for situations like that. But if you're doing work that will have an impact on the span of months, quarters, or years--either major strategic business decisions, design, or project development--you're better served by thinking deeper instead of thinking faster, and deep thought is exactly what the long-form written word was invented for.

I agree with you and I feel your points are well articulated. I especially like how you summarized the internet as 'the illiterates took over.' Very poignant, indeed. So much of the average person's internet usage boils down to memes and videos, it's quite unfortunate.

One thing to think about with respect to memes and videos is they may evolve to be more dense in their ability to symbolize and convey a much larger amount of information.

There are so many examples of teams successfully communicating state, sentiment and other information among each other with memes and videos an what not.

Also, to help people blow off steam. We don't need to be absolute productive units operating at 100% all the time.

Goofin off is healthy

I don't disagree with not being productive 100% of the time. My gripe is that for many non-tech people, their computer time is majority memes and videos. The ratio is all wrong, IMO. This incorrect ratio has created the click-bait internet and other scorns of the modern internet IMO as corporations are catering to the masses.

The internet is such a large collection of knowledge, I just wish more people used it to improve themselves, or at least their understanding of the many different things we have in the world.

Goofing off via chat has been a thing since IRC, and you don’t really need much above and beyond IRC to goof off. And if tech companies treated Slack as belonging to the same class as ping pong tables and kegerators, that would be highly appropriate. But they treat Slack like it’s a serious business communication tool.

One of my biggest frustrations with e-mail as long-form discussion like this is misunderstanding points. Someone will write paragraphs of text arguing their position, but they made a bad assumption or missed something simple at the start that either partly or completely invalidates the rest of what they are saying. Depending on if people realize this or not, it's easy to slip into a kind of bike-shedding discussion arguing about the incorrect details. I've been on both sides of this, and it's one of the reasons I dislike e-mail for it.

I tend towards being an introvert, and I'm not always good at coming up with an argument on the spot. I recognize this, and I will often end the real-time discussion by literally just saying "Ok, I need to go think about this before we discuss it anymore. Let's come back in a day or two." Just like you don't have to respond to e-mails the instant they come in, you don't have to do it for real-time or chat, either.

I will also do the same to others when I can. For example, yesterday I suggested a new approach to how a certain part of our product works, and pitched it to the team. There was only minor feedback so I just said "okay, go think about it, and I'll bring it up again later", so I will probably ask tomorrow to see if anyone has further thoughts on it. It's amazing what sleeping on ideas can do.

The thing I'm really trying to get at here is real-time doesn't mean "now! now! now!". There's absolutely nothing wrong with several meetings over the course of days or weeks or months. For strategic and key design discussions, there should absolutely be documentation written between those discussions. In fact, that's basically the way I operate: discuss, document, give time for people to review, and then discuss again, repeating as much as needed.

There's people that are opposite and want the response "now!", and don't want to take time to think through problems -- but I would guess there's a large overlap with the type of people that come over to your desk / call you and say "I just sent you an e-mail, did you get it?" and then only read the first sentence or two of your reply anyway.

Its superficial to suppose the immediacy of slack is its only feature.

The reality is that email fails to serve the purpose for complex discussions that involve many people, especially when you're using a rubbish email system like outlook.

Another form, be it meetings, chat, forum, whatever is required for this... and to be fair, gmail and the like offer some form of searching and sorting nested threads...

...but your complaint is broadly the same as the argument against having meetings in general.

Certainly, it is an oppinion, but not helpful or realistic.

Slack is disruptive, but 'just use email' isn't the answer.

Outlook may very well be shit, but that’s largely because business/enterprise email products are optimized for the same PowerPoint-addled minds that Slack is. Rich text is where email first started to go wrong.

Seriously, go read the lkml archives sometime, and go tell the authors of one of the most important and high quality pieces of foundational software in the world that they would be better served with something like Slack.

Your suggestions may work inside a company. E-mail is the only federated system we've left. If you need to contact somebody outside it, you're screwed. XMPP/Jabber could have solved some of this, but it's pretty dead right now.

I generally agree with greg, and that covers 90% of the cases, for the times where Email is used with external entities, it usually gets dumped into issue tracking / wiki

Most work communication is usually within our issue tracking system

We use slack very lightly,

- most of our conversations are face to face but anumber of remote employees, and slack is used instead of face to face. Often for video calls

- copy pasting things to other people

- a sort of mini internal HN where links are posted to interesting things in the dev world and we discuss

- prodding people "Oi, my PR is still waiting .... " "did you setup ... ?" etc

- telling people where we went to lunch so they can find us.

The org I work for has a bunch of Slack channels that we invite our clients into as single channel guests (If they don't already use Slack). We have Gov & corporate using it without issue and they love it.

I think if you ask Slack about that they'll happily tell you about Slack Grid.

EDIT: Whoops actually Shared Channels is the feature I was thinking of: https://slackhq.com/introducing-shared-channels-where-you-ca...

> Tasks belong in tickets, long-term documentation/policies/meeting notes/etc belong in shared space (wiki), and discussions are faster and more productive in realtime (in-person, video call, or chat).

I wonder how much of this attitude is a result of poor email client UIs. I switched over to using notmuch for my mail about a year ago, and I now consider email to be a great place for discussions: I can search my entire history almost instantaneously, far faster than with Gmail or Inbox.

> The problem I think most people run into with the realtime discussion is failing to document the outcome of the meeting -- and that of course goes into a ticket or long-term docs. A meeting with no notes or outcome might as well have not happened.

I definitely agree here. This falls under the heading of 'things we used to know as a society that we've forgotten.' Every meeting should have an agenda, even it's just a single agendum 'discuss $FOO,' and every meeting should have some sort of minutes, even if they're just 'discussed $FOO, decided to pursue course $BAR.'

> The problem I think most people run into with the realtime discussion is failing to document the outcome of the meeting -- and that of course goes into a ticket or long-term docs. A meeting with no notes or outcome might as well have not happened.

I think the attraction of email is it looks like it short-circuits the need for this. "It's all in writing in the email trail" makes moving fast look easy (no realtime meeting that then has to be written up, the document amended on people's feedback etc). But understanding is missing and misunderstanding happens.

I'm starting to move an organisation's planning from emails into meetings and specifications. They are resisting massively because it "wastes" time. Given every project up to now has changed spec twice after launch, I see time being saved if it's correct at launch.

I'm in the same camp. In my company there is so much knowledge hidden in inboxes that should be available and searchable by everybody instead. I ask my colleague and be forwards me an email thread from three months ago where I was not included. This is inefficient.