Re:Slack is the right tool for the wrong way to work
by Nimitz14 on Monday December 14, 2020 @04:58PM
(#25423939)
> Strongly agree, but it's not just clients. Sales people, for example, love to use Slack because it's a backdoor channel to circumvent management and go straight to the engineers.
And that's bad because?
Re:Slack is the right tool for the wrong way to work
by bitdotdash on Monday December 14, 2020 @05:45PM
(#25424389)
Because management should be rigorously defending devs from being needlessly interrupted with whatever some sales guy thinks is important in the moment? Management can filter out the garbage, condense down the really important bits and deliver them during a time it won't knock dev out of the zone?
Re:Slack is the right tool for the wrong way to work
by Nimitz14 on Monday December 14, 2020 @07:05PM
(#25425193)
Worked fine where I worked. You know you can turn notifications off? You know you can tell a sales guy he's being annoying?
Re:Slack is the right tool for the wrong way to work
by denton-scratch on Wednesday December 16, 2020 @08:54AM
(#25442464)
We were banned by management from turning off notifications.
Re:Slack is the right tool for the wrong way to work
by joeax on Monday December 14, 2020 @05:43PM
(#25424369)
I once worked at a (open) office where sales people were constantly berating engineers, asking for a feature or pestering for a status update on a feature/bug in progress. It got so bad they installed a wall around that area.
Sounds good in theory, rarely works well in practice.
The only times I've seen Slack work well is when everyone involved starts with similar expectations about how it should be used and what's appropriate. In my experience, this is easiest to achieve when Slack channels are closely aligned with teams who are working together.
The model tends to break down when Slack is used for communication that is better served by e-mail, calls, or meetings. An easy rule of thumb is that if it crosses department boundaries and/or is something that needs to be formally communicated to an entire team, it's better to direct it to e-mail or a scheduled call.
> Speaking of the example in the article, there is absolutely no reason clients should have direct message channels with your company's employees and expect to get a response 24/7.
Strongly agree, but it's not just clients. Sales people, for example, love to use Slack because it's a backdoor channel to circumvent management and go straight to the engineers.