Slack is the right tool for the wrong way to work

Re:Slack is the right tool for the wrong way to work by cratermoon on Monday December 14, 2020 @04:38PM (#25423718)

At my employer we have Slack channels for engineering teams but anyone in the company can (and does) come in to ask what amount to low-level support questions. I've dealt with it on my team by rotating the job of responding so that whoever is on-call for the week deals with it. It means there's a lot of interruptions, unfortunately, for whoever is on call, but at least the rest of the team is explicitly given permission to ignore it.

As a company we could and should do better at the support system, but that's just one aspect of the problem with company expectations.

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Re:Slack is the right tool for the wrong way to work by closeparen on Tuesday December 15, 2020 @02:17AM (#25427835)

When you force the company to use your custom internal platform instead of an industry standard, it's only fair that you become responsible for providing the instant answers they would otherwise get from Google and Stackoverflow.

Interruption is a feature. If we let our platform teams get into the zone and code too much, they'd NIH our damn editors. It's important to have support burden as a brake on the development of custom crap, and a thumb on the scale in favor of deploying tools that a) developers might already know, b) the internet definitely knows, and c) are higher quality and more capable than even the brightest team with your budget could create.

We have support channels for our Redis and MySQL installations. It is crickets in there. But the people who write a custom NoSQL are rightfully getting slammed 24x7.

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Re:Slack is the right tool for the wrong way to work by paxys on Monday December 14, 2020 @04:41PM (#25423744)

We deal with the same. Here's an easy solution – set up a #support- channel for the team. If anyone asks a question in the regular channel, redirect them. Have a fixed rotation and SLA for the support channel.

In fact everyone now prefers this over the pre-Slack way where you had to randomly email or IM people one by one to try and get some help.

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Re:Slack is the right tool for the wrong way to work by cratermoon on Monday December 14, 2020 @06:15PM (#25424707)

The channel name is not the problem. The problem is that people will go to whatever channel they want and ignore any "official" support system. It's the same as the guy in sales who comes to your desk to bug you about something he promised a customer. He knows he's supposed to go through channels, but he's going to do what he wants, regardless of mechanism.

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Re:Slack is the right tool for the wrong way to work by cbsks on Monday December 14, 2020 @06:59PM (#25425138)

That can be solved with the right company culture and a good manager. If someone was disturbing my work in that manner I would mention it to my boss, who would probably tell me to not spend time answering them next time and direct them to the proper support channel. If it happened repeatedly, then my boss would escalate it with the salesperson’s boss.

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Re:Slack is the right tool for the wrong way to work by paxys on Monday December 14, 2020 @07:29PM (#25425413)

They will keep doing it if they keep getting positive results. Eventually it's up to you and your team to set boundaries.

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Re:Slack is the right tool for the wrong way to work by cratermoon on Monday December 14, 2020 @08:16PM (#25425827)

For sure, but then management gets unhappy because sales people are unhappy.

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Re:Slack is the right tool for the wrong way to work by quicklime on Monday December 14, 2020 @04:50PM (#25423850)

Alternatively, set up a #eng- or #dev- channel so you don't have to redirect anyone to #support-

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