From 2014 to 2016, a lot of things happened at my job, but Slack became the main nightmare. Managers liked him because “everything is written out”, “the availability of employees is increasing” and “answers to questions are quickly published”. I believe that it destroys the team’s ability to think, plan and do complex work.

Work interruptions

Slack helps your worst employees crush the best. This is its resemblance to an open-type office.

It turns constant interruptions, multitasking and distractions into the norm, indirectly allowing all this offline and online. It makes the norm insanely fast to answer questions. In the Slack world, people move from a direct question to a person to contacting here in a few minutes. And rightly so: after all, if the question was not answered within 5 minutes, then they generally forget about it.

Somehow along the way, we forgot that distracting is actually harmful for real work. It used to be different. On the first day of my first work 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 tells me this today, I will hug this person, although I am not a fan of hugs.

I tried to talk with people about 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 this way, then I’m not sure how I will react.

A remote work culture is a defense against open office distractions, and Slack is a loophole to circumvent this protection. It wears out the adrenal system of your team and makes you live in the current moment. Unlike email, message delivery here cannot be postponed until later. Chat embodies the Now or Never Act for your team.

When everything is urgent, then nothing is. This is the main plan of the villain from the Pixar's The Incredibles. Slack is a supervillain plan to destroy your team.

The format is fragmented and limited.

Chat cannot 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 the initial reactions. I prefer the Google Docs model, where alerts are generated on comments / questions, rather than on the original text.

Chat in Slack is not grouped in conversations. You will say that there are separate channels. In my experience (in at least four companies) channels are not a clear delimiter; they are more likely to separate groups rather than discussion topics, so topics / discussions are still duplicated between channels. In typical situations that I observed, it is difficult to understand the current topic of discussion - which channel, which topic each specific message corresponds to.

Scrolling through a chat would be a great way to determine the topic, but scrolling works terribly. Scrolling more than two pages up leads to nightmarish rearrangements with jumps to the starting point - such more educated computer users of the 80s or 90s would call such things glitches, but they have to endure them on the modern web.

Email is much better in grouping discussions, but Slack has killed this opportunity.

At its core, Slack always drives you: I feel like I'm in a hurry to whisper something until someone else screams. Here's the function is typing ( typing ...) Is a nail in the coffin lid. She disables my ability to think coherently. I caught myself writing messages in the address bar with my eyes closed to ward off panic.

Because of the function, it is typing ... one slow user can decompose the thought process of the whole group. Sorry for the crude metaphor, but it’s like an old man pissing at you drop by drop. For me, it's better to end this faster and wash yourself.

Paradoxically, speed is also harmful for group discussions, because people are in a hurry to express their ideas - and they come out in a semi-finished form or contradictory. My favorite is the loss of the “not” particle in the sentence. When a person notices a typo, he publishes *не, sometimes a few lines after the initial message. I feel like I’ve got a sketch "Wayne’s World. ”

Slack search does not work as expected

The search does not work as expected for many reasons:

• Partly because, unlike discussion threads in email and forums, the original grouping is missing here, so you can only search for individual posts.
• Partly because the search function is poorly implemented - adjacent messages are displayed as separate search results, even if they have the same context before / after.
• I never know what will happen by clicking - sometimes the channel is scrolled to this message, sometimes search results are displayed / hidden or scaled.
• The “More results” button transfers to a page-by-page view, but the first three results are the same as I already saw - that is, “more results” transfers from page 1 to page 1. What the hell.
• Ctrl-F, the unchanging standard for interacting on the web, doesn’t work on feeds if you search 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 scroll history.

I understand that these are only UX problems and they 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 the DOM; and (2) if there was a Slack tool to help in the thought process, and not to prevent it, then it would have a normal search function.

It increases productivity (in a bad way)

Goodhart ’s law states that if an indicator turns into a goal, then it becomes a bad indicator. Slack undermines the important work, because here the performance is the accessibility of a person in Slack.

Performance is a dubious metric because it is difficult to measure and even formulate in a general way. In economics, total factor productivity is the remainder after deducting labor and capital costs. It confuses the fact that it is better to give people less money (workers usually have hourly wages).

At work, productivity combines bandwidth and business value. We know how to measure the first, but the second is more concerned. Bandwidth-optimized optimization has a bad effect on products and teams:

• Mid-level managers reduce the size and value of the results provided, so that with increased “throughput” they can announce their bosses achievements, and “jackets” can show off to shareholders.
• Because of this, design work moves from experts in their field to project managers, resulting in crazy projects.
• The load increases, which leads to burnout, reduces acceptable safety limits, and suppresses innovation (that's what those free time periods were used for).

These items are part of a large-scale tug of war between middle managers and programmers. However, the topic is not for this article. I’ll just mention that ubiquitous chat helps mid-level 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 don't people notice this? I think because the majority never understood or thought about how the work is done. Now Slack appeared - and made the “work” visible in the form of instant answers to quick questions, dancing emoji stickers and a continuous chatter. And some are: “Yes! See how much my team has achieved. ”

It replaces the documentation.

I think the majority will agree: when mental workers collaborate with each other in groups, they must keep in writing what they have agreed to work on. In Slack, the quality of these records is breaking new ground. A huge gap between the carefully thought-out documentation of Google Docs, which was edited by several people, and the stream of consciousness mixed up with the announcements of "work from home" and "look at what my cat did."

24/7 availability also hurts good documentation practice. When people cannot communicate with each other at any time, then organizations have to design a system with redundancy, that is, record everything 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 in this way has grown.

The most important information for the work of your company is stored in three places:

• brain
• documents (including mail)
• software

The Slack model increases the percentage of critical decisions that depend on a particular brain. Good luck with such a system.

What slack does right

There is one thing in which Slack excels Trello and Jira in project management. They don’t have back pressure, but Slack does because human attention is limited.

The Goldilocks rule applies here - neither the "kitchen sink" model in Jira, nor the "brain removal" model in Slack is ideal. In addition, many want to use Slack, Trello and Jira at the same time completely unashamed (two are already egregious, and three are simply insane). And Slack cannot be called a suitable project management solution, at least for the reason that it does not have a normal aggregation view; and Jira doesn't either. We need to create planning tools with deliberate limitations, and not with arbitrary limits of what people are able to perceive under strong pressure of attention.

Trello and Jira

Also the programs that I hate.

They promote this "icebox theory" in relation to development. What idea was suggested by the project manager six months ago, and no one is still working on it? Let's take her. If your best employees don’t come up with ideas or assign projects, why would anyone come to work?

Jira has a problem with screen space. Have you seen articles about the "compression" of the page with Google search results, where in the 2004 screenshot are mainly search results, and now mostly ads? Jira also went this way . 90% of the text on the screen is not your projects, but the decorations of Jira.

Another disadvantage of Jira: a highly formalized process is usually a hindrance, especially considering the person who invented this process in your organization, implemented it, and benefits from its implementation. Hint: middle managers.

Commoditization of communications does not work . So let people get off the train and start making smart 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 introduced an interesting innovation - marking questions that received a good answer. But keep in mind that the previous Experts-Exchange Q & A leader hid the answers because he wanted to get a fee for access to them, and not for UX reasons. Stack Overflow has now grown into a relatively lousy site and has replaced documentation for many free libraries.

#deleteuber

The Uber app removal campaign has not fixed the employment relationship in the new economy, where employers give up permanent employees in favor of temporary contracts, but your organization can opt out of the chat at any time - just want to .

Stop reading this article if you don't care about any of the following:

• increase the well-being of the best people
• less responsive to distractions
• focus more on real progress

If you care about these things, also stop reading the article, 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 mess and turmoil. People checked buzzing phones on gliders. Click-click-click chat notifications without interruption. There was no cultural support or even a real understanding of how to make this system work. I told the project manager about this, to which he replied: "Eh, you have attention deficit disorder."

Slack and the harmful behavior that it indirectly encourages will present the attention deficit disorder of your entire company . Want a one-click competitive advantage? Delete your account.