I’m sorry, but this is poor company culture, not a Slack issue per se. A company with this sort of issue would struggle with any communication tool or medium; the root issue here is an utter lack of understanding about proper working conditions and the concentration needed to do this (and most any) sort of work.

I’ve been in a similar boat at a similarly poor company.

It is trivial to use Slack in a non-destructive way. Our company follows a simple rule. If you need somebody’s attention, you @mention them.

We do not have to monitor anything. It is expected that you will keep an eye on your team’s channel when your time and attention permit as of course there may be some hallway-style conversations going on, but you are never required to monitor any channel, much less several channels. That is what mentions and notifications are for.

It is absolutely mind-blowing that some companies screw this up so badly.

Well, yes, it was ultimately stupid for the group to use Slack in this way. And yet, Slack invites it. It's a bit like cocaine. There are certainly good uses, and still it's easy to slip into bad uses.

As for the @mention, in my current job, some stupid twat kept doing that in a broad group, and unfortunately our current tool (Teams) doesn't provide an easy way to shut them up. So, fuck that, I removed myself from the (otherwise useful) channel entirely. Fail.

Chat is great for useless nonsense. Anything else requires discipline, which rarely exists (the military excepting, perhaps).

Maybe people are too polite? Or not strict enough enforcing rules and guidelines?

Who would tolerate an employee standing in the middle of the open office screaming at the top of their lungs for attention? :)

Of course, we all make mistakes from time to time. Guess the real problem is a lack of learning from them.

I guess this is subjective, but I've never found Slack (or IRC, or Discord, Hipchat, etc) to somehow encourage @mention overuse/abuse.

I just don't see it. Perhaps more to the point, I can't really fathom a communication medium that somehow wouldn't allow an overzealous or inconsiderate person to become a distraction. Unless that system made communication super onerous in the first place.

Perhaps somebody could write a Slack plugin that limits a person to a certain number of @mentions per week, with the option to "purchase" more by contributing money to the company party fund or something :-)

At the extreme, everything is poor company culture, not <insert tool> issue per se. That is not a good argument.

Being tagged @mention several times a day, with the expectation that you respond right away (ie < 3-5minutes) is just as much a drag on productivity. And I have not seen any company explicitly (put in their written guidelines) states that you should not be expected to respond to a slack @mention right away.

Being contacted several times per day seems totally reasonable for, I think, the vast majority of jobs in existence.

Few jobs would allow one to be totally dark until you arbitrarily decide you would like to crawl out of your figurative cave and interact. If you truly have that kind of job (and certainly, they exist) then yeah, maybe a real-time-ish communications platform is simply not right for you or the team.

Now, I am a programmer. One who often struggles with attention issues and getting into the zone.

More than many, perhaps, I realize that even a "quick" 1min. interruption can have a far greater drain on one's productivity than would be immediately apparent - it might take 5, 10, or 30 minutes to get "back into the zone" after an interruption.

Having said that, though, it still seems reasonable in all engineering jobs I've had for others to ask me questions periodically throughout the day, especially as I have gone from junior to senior engineer. Typically if something is blocking them. I don't want somebody sitting around for 1 hour or 3 days because they are missing a piece of the puzzle, held by me, that is leaving them at a standstill.

    At the extreme, everything is poor company culture, not
    <insert tool> issue per se. That is not a good argument.

Sure as heck is. It's not realistic to expect a communications tool to somehow magically allow only "good" communication. Therefore, we have to resign ourselves to considering tools that:

(a) Make efficient, respectful, productive communication the default. Broadly speaking I would define this as making non-intrusive async communication (but making those conversations easily searchable/browsable so you can "catch up" if desired) the default.

(b) Does not somehow encourage bad behavior.

I have plenty of nitpicks with Slack but I believe it passes those criteria. Some would say that the existence of @mentions makes it fail (b) but I can not agree. Certainly at my current employer, we have a nice Slack culture and it required zero pain to get there. Makes it a decent tool in my book.

> Being contacted several times per day seems totally reasonable for, I think, the vast majority of jobs in existence.

Sure. I do not agree that developers belong to the same group with the vast majority of jobs with regards to interruption and synchronous communication though (async slack is fine, if the developer got to decide when to see and reply to the @mention).

Being blocked for 3 days is definitely bad (although we do not solve it with Slack), but I do not agree that someone being blocked for an hour is worth the interruption of another developer. I just took on an engineering manager role lately, which gave me more time observing others. And one thing I have noticed is that a couple of junior developers pinging each other every 30 mins to ask a question that they might or might not be able to solve with some more effort just ruin everyone's productivity.

It seems like we end up agreeing with each other on both your a) and b) point. So I will just make my point more explicit: too many team culture expects synchronous Slack usage. And I do not know how much Slack encourage that, but it is definitely more synchronous than email, which Slack is supposed to replace

    So I will just make my point more explicit: too many 
    team culture expects synchronous Slack usage. And I
    do not know how much Slack encourage that, but it is 
    definitely more synchronous than email, which Slack is 
    supposed to replace
 

Slack certainly makes gratuitous "drop what you're doing and think about my problem" messaging easier than email. But email makes it easier than sending it by snail mail or carrier pigeon.

To say that Slack encourages that kind of thoughtless communication... I can't agree. Those @mentions are not the default. You have to either consciously think, "yeah -- this is worth interrupting my coworker" or fail to consider your coworkers' feelings at all.

If developers are being lazy and using their peers as substitutes for Google, that needs fixing at the root level.

It's possible they honestly aren't considering their coworkers' feelings. It's worth discussing.

I have guided junior devs in the opposite direction before - they have sat there spinning their wheels for too long before getting help. Never had one that erred in the opposite direction!

I generally tell them that if they are spending much more than a half hour stuck, to please ask me for help. I've never worked with deadlines so lenient that I can have engineers losing large chunks of days, or entire days.

Now, if they were needing help more than a few times per week, I would know there is an issue there.

Maybe they just haven't worked with Framework XYZ before and need time to get their bearings. Maybe some pairing is in order, or they could take a class. Maybe they were a bad hire. Maybe they are inconsiderate. Maybe the thing they're doing is just too advanced for where they're at, experience-wise. Maybe they need me to suggest that they could batch up their questions and we can some time together going over them a each morning at a regular time. Whatever the reason, I would like to stay on top of it.

This conversation has made me think, though, that a Slack plugin that limits team members to a finite amount of @mentions per ___ days might be a fun experiment, though. :-)

> Being contacted several times per day seems totally reasonable for, I think, the vast majority of jobs in existence.

If it's your boss, or one of your critical colleagues, maybe. If it's some idiot in a distal group trying to justify their existence by being vocal, hell no.

And if the chat tool doesn't have a "mute the idiot" feature, that makes the whole thing useless.

    If it's your boss, or one of your critical colleagues,
    maybe.

I'm surprised a few people pushed back on my assertion that it's okay/normal to have coworkers synchronously contact you several times per day. Are there a lot of engineers who are able and permitted to work for entire days on end, totally "dark" without some realtime pings from coworkers?

    If it's some idiot in a distal group trying to 
    justify their existence by being vocal

I'd certainly agree here. An old manager of mine referred to these sorts of outside-the-group disruptions as "drive-by shootings."

I have always liked that phrase. Those disruptions are definitely a great way to unexpectedly murderer productivity.

You need cross-group pollination, but random productivity-murdering drive-bys are not the way to do it.

What’s weird to me about this is no one would have their knowledge workers also be on call for external customer support full time, but for some reason that’s the norm with internal customer support.

I've had non-remote jobs that were similar. A lineup forming outside my cubicle. Days when I got absolutely nothing done except address constant interruptions from others who needed help Right Now.

Only the medium has changed, not the message.