Re:Slack is the opposite of organizational memory (2018)
by atomicnumber3 on Thursday January 26, 2023 @08:19PM
(#34541292)
This is my experience too. Slack is what you make of it. Annoyed at interruptions? Be honest and communicate how you like to work, adjust expectations about responsiveness, and then stick to it. I've never had issues.
Re:Slack is the opposite of organizational memory (2018)
by jackbondpreston on Friday January 27, 2023 @05:15AM
(#34544477)
agreed. I love Slack. where I work, it is used for helping coworkers/other teams with issues - but there is no expectation of fast replies. the author implies this expectation is implicit to Slack, but it's not. for me, it's perfectly normal to not expect a reply to something even on the same day, especially if it's complex and people are busy.
additionally, if the volume of messages is too high to be able to catch up with after working for a while (like you would catch up on emails), this is probably an issue of not splitting things up adequately into granular channels. or, again, some weird culture of just spamming Slack for everything.
If you are constantly interrupted and expected to drop everything and reply immediately, moving from Slack to email or anything else won't magically fix it.
If you don't have proper data repositories (organized docs folders, wikis, issue trackers), switching off Slack won't fix that.
If middle managers are interfering in your work, signing out of Slack isn't going to fix it.
If people aren't documenting code, they will continue to not do it regardless of the existence of Slack.
Slack is a tool. It is not a fix for human problems at any company.