Slack is the opposite of organizational memory.
From 2014 to 2016, a lot of things happened at my workplace, but Slack became the main nightmare. The managers liked it because “everything is written down,” “the availability of staff is increasing,” and “answers to questions are published quickly.” I believe that it destroys the ability of a team to think, plan and perform complex work.
Slack helps your worst employees crush the best. This is its similarity with the open office.
It turns the constant interrupts, multitasking and distractions back to normal, indirectly allowing it all offline and online. He makes the norm insanely quick to answer questions. In the world of Slack, people go from a direct question to a person before addressing here in a few minutes. And rightly so: after all, if they didn’t answer the question within 5 minutes, they forget about it.
')
Somehow along the way, we forgot that distraction is generally harmful to real work. It used to be different. On the first day of my first job as a trader, the only instruction I received was “When the market opens, turn off the phone”. With the subtext "otherwise you understand what will happen." If someone says this to me today, I will hug this person, although I am not a fan of hugs.
I tried to talk to people on this topic, but they answered me: "This is an office, not a library." At that time I was just furious. If today, after two years of using Slack, someone answers me in this way, then I'm not sure how to react.
The remote work culture is a defense mechanism against distractions in the open office, and the Slack is a loophole to bypass this protection. It wears the adrenal system of your team and makes you live in the moment. Unlike e-mail, here the delivery of messages cannot be postponed until later. Chat translates into reality for your team the law "Now or never."
When everything is urgent, then nothing is as such. This is the main plan of the villain from Pixar's "The Incredibles." Slack is the supervillain's plan to destroy your team.
Chat can not be edited as you would like. You can edit the text for some time, but without notifying the rest. I think correction and thorough research are more important than initial reactions. I prefer the Google Docs model, where alerts are created on comments / questions, rather than on the original text.
Slack chat is not grouped into chains. You will say that there are separate channels. In my experience (at least in four companies) the channels are not a clear delimiter; they are more likely to divide groups than discussion topics, so topics / discussions are still duplicated between channels. In typical situations that I have observed, it is difficult to understand the current topic of discussion - which channel, which topic corresponds to each specific message.
Scrolling a chat would be a great way to identify a topic, but scrolling works terribly. Scrolling more than two pages up leads to nightmarish reconnections with hops to the starting point - such more-educated computer users of the 80s or 90s would be called glitches, and in the modern web they have to endure.
E-mail is much better at grouping discussions into chains, but Slack killed the opportunity.
Slack is inherently always pushing: I feel like I was in a hurry to whisper something until someone else screamed. Here, the function is typing ( typing text ... ) is the nail in the lid of the coffin. She turns off my ability to think connectedly. I caught myself writing messages in the address bar with my eyes closed to ward off panic.
Because of the function of typing text ... one slow user can decompose the thought process of the whole group. Sorry for the rude metaphor, but it's like an old man pees on you a little. For me, it's better to end this faster and wash.
Paradoxically, speed is also harmful for group discussions, because people are in a hurry to express their ideas - and they come out in a half-finished form or contradictory. My favorite is the loss of the “not” particle in the sentence. When a person notices a typo, it publishes
The search does not work as expected for many reasons:
I understand that these are only UX problems and can be fixed, but (1) I don’t know if they can be fixed in principle when your application is based on such a shaky foundation as DOM; and (2) if Slack was a tool to help in the thought process, not to prevent it, then it would have a normal search function.
Goodhart 's law says that if an indicator turns into a goal, then it becomes a bad indicator. Slack undermines important work, because here productivity is the accessibility of a person in Slack.
Productivity is a dubious metric, since it is difficult to measure and even formulate in general terms. In economics, total factor productivity is the remainder after deducting labor and capital costs. This is embarrassed by the fact that it is better to give people less money (employees usually have hourly pay).
At work, productivity combines throughput and business value. We know how to measure the first, but the second is more concerned. Optimization with an eye on throughput badly affects products and teams:
These points are part of a large-scale tug-of-war between middle managers and programmers. However, the topic is not for this article. I will only mention that ubiquitous chat helps middle managers (that is, people who like to check a lot) due to the health of creative employees and the long-term well-being of your organization.
Why do people not notice this? I think because the majority never understood or did not think about how exactly the work is done. Now Slack has appeared - and has made the “work” visible in the form of instant answers to quick questions, dancing emoji and incessant idle talk. And some are: “Yes! See how much my team has achieved. ”
I think the majority will agree: when knowledge workers collaborate with each other in groups, they should keep in writing what they agreed to work on. In Slack, the quality of these records breaks a new bottom. There is a huge gap between the carefully thought-out Google Docs documentation, which was edited by several people, and the stream of consciousness mixed with the announcements “work from home” and “see what my cat did”.
24/7 availability also harms good documentation practice. When people cannot communicate with each other at any time, organizations have to design a system with redundancy, that is, write everything down in such a way that the document is understandable to another person without further discussion. But now a whole generation of workers and even companies that have never worked this way has grown.
The most important information for your company is stored in three places:
The Slack model increases the percentage of critical decisions that depend on a particular brain. Good luck with such a system.
There is one thing in which Slack surpasses Trello and Jira in project management. They have no back pressure, but Slack does, because human attention is limited.
The Goldilocks rule is valid here - neither the “kitchen sink” model in Jira, nor the “brain removal” model in Slack is ideal. In addition, many people want to use Slack, Trello and Jira at the same time completely free from embarrassment (two are already crying, and three are just insane). And Slack cannot be called a suitable solution for project management, at least for the reason that it does not have a normal type of totals (aggregation view); and Jira doesn't either. We need to create planning tools with thoughtful constraints, not arbitrary limits on what people are able to perceive under strong pressure of attention.
Also programs that I hate.
They promote this "theory of expectations" (icebox theory) in relation to the development. What idea was proposed by the project manager six months ago, and nobody is still working on it? Let's take it. If your best employees do not put forward ideas and do not appoint projects, why should someone appear at work?
Jira has a problem with screen space. Seen articles about the "compression" of the page with Google search results, where in the 2004 screenshot there are mostly search results, and now it's mostly advertising? Jira also went this way . 90% of the text on the screen - this is not your projects, and decorations Jira.
Another disadvantage of Jira: a highly formalized process is usually a hindrance, especially given the fact who in your organization came up with this process, implemented it and benefits from its implementation. Hint: middle managers.
Commoditization of communications does not work . So allow people to get off the train and start making thoughtful plans again. A blank sheet of paper is all that is needed for this.
Organizations really need to answer these questions. You can say that chat is best suited, but it has too many flaws. When Stack Overflow appeared, he presented an interesting innovation - marking up questions that received a good answer. But keep in mind that the previous question and answer leader, Experts-Exchange, was hiding the answers, because it wanted to be paid for access to them, and not for UX reasons. Stack Overflow has now become a relatively lousy site and has replaced documentation for many free libraries.
The campaign to remove the Uber application did not improve the labor relations in the new economy, where employers refuse permanent employees in favor of temporary contracts, but your organization can abandon the chat at any time — simply want to .
Stop reading this article if you don’t care about any of the following:
If you care about these things, stop reading the article too, but after that, go and delete the chat.
In 2015, I went on vacation for four months, and when I returned in 2016, it was a madhouse full of confusion and turmoil. People checked buzzing phones on the board. Notifications from chat click-click-clicked without interruption. There was no cultural support or even real understanding how to make this system work. I said this to the project manager, to which he replied: "Eh, you have attention deficit disorder."
Slack and the harmful behavior that he indirectly encourages will cause attention deficit disorder throughout your company . Want a competitive advantage in one click? Delete your account.
Interruption of work
Slack helps your worst employees crush the best. This is its similarity with the open office.
It turns the constant interrupts, multitasking and distractions back to normal, indirectly allowing it all offline and online. He makes the norm insanely quick to answer questions. In the world of Slack, people go from a direct question to a person before addressing here in a few minutes. And rightly so: after all, if they didn’t answer the question within 5 minutes, they forget about it.
')
Somehow along the way, we forgot that distraction is generally harmful to real work. It used to be different. On the first day of my first job as a trader, the only instruction I received was “When the market opens, turn off the phone”. With the subtext "otherwise you understand what will happen." If someone says this to me today, I will hug this person, although I am not a fan of hugs.
I tried to talk to people on this topic, but they answered me: "This is an office, not a library." At that time I was just furious. If today, after two years of using Slack, someone answers me in this way, then I'm not sure how to react.
The remote work culture is a defense mechanism against distractions in the open office, and the Slack is a loophole to bypass this protection. It wears the adrenal system of your team and makes you live in the moment. Unlike e-mail, here the delivery of messages cannot be postponed until later. Chat translates into reality for your team the law "Now or never."
When everything is urgent, then nothing is as such. This is the main plan of the villain from Pixar's "The Incredibles." Slack is the supervillain's plan to destroy your team.
The format is fragmented and limited.
Chat can not be edited as you would like. You can edit the text for some time, but without notifying the rest. I think correction and thorough research are more important than initial reactions. I prefer the Google Docs model, where alerts are created on comments / questions, rather than on the original text.
Slack chat is not grouped into chains. You will say that there are separate channels. In my experience (at least in four companies) the channels are not a clear delimiter; they are more likely to divide groups than discussion topics, so topics / discussions are still duplicated between channels. In typical situations that I have observed, it is difficult to understand the current topic of discussion - which channel, which topic corresponds to each specific message.
Scrolling a chat would be a great way to identify a topic, but scrolling works terribly. Scrolling more than two pages up leads to nightmarish reconnections with hops to the starting point - such more-educated computer users of the 80s or 90s would be called glitches, and in the modern web they have to endure.
E-mail is much better at grouping discussions into chains, but Slack killed the opportunity.
Slack is inherently always pushing: I feel like I was in a hurry to whisper something until someone else screamed. Here, the function is typing ( typing text ... ) is the nail in the lid of the coffin. She turns off my ability to think connectedly. I caught myself writing messages in the address bar with my eyes closed to ward off panic.
Because of the function of typing text ... one slow user can decompose the thought process of the whole group. Sorry for the rude metaphor, but it's like an old man pees on you a little. For me, it's better to end this faster and wash.
Paradoxically, speed is also harmful for group discussions, because people are in a hurry to express their ideas - and they come out in a half-finished form or contradictory. My favorite is the loss of the “not” particle in the sentence. When a person notices a typo, it publishes
* , sometimes a few lines after the initial message. I feel as if I got into the sketch of " World Wayne ."Slack search does not work as expected.
The search does not work as expected for many reasons:
- This is partly because, unlike discussion threads, the original grouping is missing in the e-mail and forums, so you can only search for individual messages.
- Partly because the search function is poorly implemented - nearby messages are displayed as separate search results, even if they have the same context before / after.
- I never know what will happen on a click - sometimes the channel scrolls to this message, sometimes the search results are displayed / hidden or scaled.
- The “More results” button takes you to a page view, but the first three results are the same as I have already seen - that is, “more results” transfers from page 1 to page 1. What the hell is this?
- Ctrl-F, the unchanged standard of interaction on the web, does not work on channels if you are looking for more than one page up. You can blame the DOM tree for this, but I see the reason that because of the heavy use of CSS, the application consumes too much memory to keep a long history of scrolling.
I understand that these are only UX problems and can be fixed, but (1) I don’t know if they can be fixed in principle when your application is based on such a shaky foundation as DOM; and (2) if Slack was a tool to help in the thought process, not to prevent it, then it would have a normal search function.
It increases productivity (in a bad way).
Goodhart 's law says that if an indicator turns into a goal, then it becomes a bad indicator. Slack undermines important work, because here productivity is the accessibility of a person in Slack.
Productivity is a dubious metric, since it is difficult to measure and even formulate in general terms. In economics, total factor productivity is the remainder after deducting labor and capital costs. This is embarrassed by the fact that it is better to give people less money (employees usually have hourly pay).
At work, productivity combines throughput and business value. We know how to measure the first, but the second is more concerned. Optimization with an eye on throughput badly affects products and teams:
- Mid-level managers reduce the size and value of the results they deliver, so that with an increase in “throughput” they can announce their achievement to their bosses, and “jackets” can boast to shareholders.
- Because of this, project work is being transferred from experts in their field to project managers, resulting in crazy projects.
- The load increases, which leads to burnout, reduces the permissible safety limits, suppresses innovations (this is what those free time intervals were used for).
These points are part of a large-scale tug-of-war between middle managers and programmers. However, the topic is not for this article. I will only mention that ubiquitous chat helps middle managers (that is, people who like to check a lot) due to the health of creative employees and the long-term well-being of your organization.
Why do people not notice this? I think because the majority never understood or did not think about how exactly the work is done. Now Slack has appeared - and has made the “work” visible in the form of instant answers to quick questions, dancing emoji and incessant idle talk. And some are: “Yes! See how much my team has achieved. ”
It replaces the documentation.
I think the majority will agree: when knowledge workers collaborate with each other in groups, they should keep in writing what they agreed to work on. In Slack, the quality of these records breaks a new bottom. There is a huge gap between the carefully thought-out Google Docs documentation, which was edited by several people, and the stream of consciousness mixed with the announcements “work from home” and “see what my cat did”.
24/7 availability also harms good documentation practice. When people cannot communicate with each other at any time, organizations have to design a system with redundancy, that is, write everything down in such a way that the document is understandable to another person without further discussion. But now a whole generation of workers and even companies that have never worked this way has grown.
The most important information for your company is stored in three places:
- brain
- documents (including mail)
- soft
The Slack model increases the percentage of critical decisions that depend on a particular brain. Good luck with such a system.
What does slack do right
There is one thing in which Slack surpasses Trello and Jira in project management. They have no back pressure, but Slack does, because human attention is limited.
The Goldilocks rule is valid here - neither the “kitchen sink” model in Jira, nor the “brain removal” model in Slack is ideal. In addition, many people want to use Slack, Trello and Jira at the same time completely free from embarrassment (two are already crying, and three are just insane). And Slack cannot be called a suitable solution for project management, at least for the reason that it does not have a normal type of totals (aggregation view); and Jira doesn't either. We need to create planning tools with thoughtful constraints, not arbitrary limits on what people are able to perceive under strong pressure of attention.
Trello and Jira
Also programs that I hate.
They promote this "theory of expectations" (icebox theory) in relation to the development. What idea was proposed by the project manager six months ago, and nobody is still working on it? Let's take it. If your best employees do not put forward ideas and do not appoint projects, why should someone appear at work?
Jira has a problem with screen space. Seen articles about the "compression" of the page with Google search results, where in the 2004 screenshot there are mostly search results, and now it's mostly advertising? Jira also went this way . 90% of the text on the screen - this is not your projects, and decorations Jira.
Another disadvantage of Jira: a highly formalized process is usually a hindrance, especially given the fact who in your organization came up with this process, implemented it and benefits from its implementation. Hint: middle managers.
Commoditization of communications does not work . So allow people to get off the train and start making thoughtful plans again. A blank sheet of paper is all that is needed for this.
Organizations really need to answer these questions. You can say that chat is best suited, but it has too many flaws. When Stack Overflow appeared, he presented an interesting innovation - marking up questions that received a good answer. But keep in mind that the previous question and answer leader, Experts-Exchange, was hiding the answers, because it wanted to be paid for access to them, and not for UX reasons. Stack Overflow has now become a relatively lousy site and has replaced documentation for many free libraries.
#deleteuber
The campaign to remove the Uber application did not improve the labor relations in the new economy, where employers refuse permanent employees in favor of temporary contracts, but your organization can abandon the chat at any time — simply want to .
Stop reading this article if you don’t care about any of the following:
- increase the well-being of the best people
- react less to distractions
- focus more on real progress
If you care about these things, stop reading the article too, but after that, go and delete the chat.
In 2015, I went on vacation for four months, and when I returned in 2016, it was a madhouse full of confusion and turmoil. People checked buzzing phones on the board. Notifications from chat click-click-clicked without interruption. There was no cultural support or even real understanding how to make this system work. I said this to the project manager, to which he replied: "Eh, you have attention deficit disorder."
Slack and the harmful behavior that he indirectly encourages will cause attention deficit disorder throughout your company . Want a competitive advantage in one click? Delete your account.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/348898/
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