I agree with OP. Slack is like watercooler, on steroids.
I guess having occasional spontaneous watercooler conversations may be good for getting to know your peers better, but in a lot of cases watercooler conversations result in clique behaviors.
Slack takes this to whole new level. People hang around on slack channels posting animated Gifs and chatting all day, on topics that have nothing to do with work.
The problem with this is you have to keep up all day with the chatter or otherwise you get left out as an "outsider" (the clique effect).
Sometimes I would see these people talk behind backs of people who they know are not part of the group. This creates office politics. I know because I saw it first hand.
Lastly, there's nothing worse than penalizing people for working hard and not participating in meaningless gossip and chatter all day.
If you want to work with robots then you were probably born a few decades too early. I can't imagine a more depressing life than spending 8+ hours a day with a group of people and being so determined not to make any friends (what you describe as "cliques").
If people are "SLACKing" off so much work doesn't get done then that gets escalated just like any other performance concern. If not, it feels a lot more like sour grapes than anything else.
Like I mentioned in another comment below, I am not an anti-social guy. I played the game, and I did just fine. Everybody at work liked me and I had no issues.
But I'm not talking about me. I'm talking about how the system is messed up. I didn't enjoy being unproductive. I didn't enjoy having to keep Slack open all day to make sure I don't miss out on what people are up to. I do believe the company lost a lot of talented developers because of the office politics.
And you know what? Everyone did just fine before they started using Slack. Everybody was friendly to one another, we regularly had globally inclusive face-to-face social gatherings, many of the team members ate lunch together, the team was pretty social.
But with slack, everything became political. It didn't bring people closer together in any way because people were already friendly enough before. What it did do was create more politics and make everyone waste more time than they used to.
Before slack, wasting time was a single player thing, you would maybe slack off for a bit reading hacker news but quickly get back to work, but after Slack, slacking off became a multiplayer thing, and just like any other multiplayer architecture, Metcalfe's law applies here too, which means the amount of wasted time grows exponentially.
I didn't enjoy having to keep Slack open all day to
> make sure I don't miss out on what people are up to.
Why did you feel you had to keep it open all the day?
Just skim the channels for anything interesting and/or relevant and check for new private messages occasionally when you're not in the zone. That could be once a day or few times a day, depending on your rhythm.
For example, I tend to directly continue the work in the morning where I left off the previous day for maximal productivity and it's not until my energy begins to wear out after a few hours when I go check back email, Slack, and other communications. Same for afternoon. I don't let email or instant messages interrupt my flow because the flow is a precious thing that doesn't simply come back when summoned. I always try to give the flow the priority and email/slack/IM are not urgent enough to break that. I can always reply back to messages in detail once the flow breaks down.
I have experienced different types of communities using Slack in their own ways, and for some it works, but for a lot it doesn't.
In my experience it works nicely for distributed organizations where people can't physically get together.
My point is Slack does introduce more politics into workplace. This is something you as a single user can't control.
Maybe you're doing fine there because your org doesn't have this problem, good for you. But I've seen this happen with a lot of different teams, in a lot of different ways, and that was what I was pointing out.
If you work at a company where there's office politics, you WILL miss out and lose a lot of opportunities if you don't participate actively.
Different people have different methodologies of working. Some could probably perform fine with work interspersed with random chatter at intervals. For others this would completely destroy productivity.
Imagine parent poster is one of the latter. Now imagine that people like yourself judged that he was "determined not to make friends" because he didn't opt to participate much or at all in group chats. Then all you need is people talking about other people at work something people do everywhere and shockingly we have exactly the situation parent poster described.
There may even be people like that at your work who feel the same way he does.
Perhaps Ive been lucky in this regard but I've never seen that. In fact, the people most disengaged from the tertiary work activities tend to, in my experience, also be the lowest performers. Honestly, if the existence of chatter "destroys" your productivity I don't think it was all that high to begin with.
I have worked with some of the best developers in the world (top developers at top tech companies, and developers who singlehandedly build things that lead the industry), and not all of them are well rounded people.
And I can confidently say most of them absolutely do not appreciate anything wasting their time, and most of them prefer to be acknowledged through skills instead of politics, and they do manage to pull it off. If they can't because of the toxic office politics, they simply move to another company that will treat them much better because they never run out of offers.
You may think these people are super anti-social and everybody will hate them, but a lot of them are nice people and helpful to coworkers. Unless they act like assholes, most co-workers like them and they get along just fine even though they don't get to interact very often.
If you haven't met one of these people in your career, it means you haven't worked with extremely talented people. That is just the reality.
Plus, my argument was not even about this type of extreme case. You're the one who's dramatized it into this.
You describe a rock star. Rules don't apply to rock stars.
For the vast majority of everyone else, not participating is exactly as described - statistically speaking those tend to be the lowest performers in my experience even if they might be the hardest working. For the rest of us communication and teamwork is the primary name of the game and how most "normies" will be the most productive. I have zero clue how you'd expect to operate a remote devops team (for example) without a constant flow of communication over what's happening, and I've found those that try to silo information off (typically with the "productivity" excuse) are about the worst in the world to work with.
Have there been exceptions? Of course. One of the best developers I've ever worked with refused to participate in chat and required everything done over e-mail to the point of absurdity. This was worth doing because he was exceptional. It also severely limited his usefulness to the organization to a very specific type of work. Very few folks I've worked with have been so exceptional as to warrant that type of kid glove handling.
"Rules don't apply to rock stars" This is utter and complete nonsense. You are a manager. Socializing is both an integral part of your job and most importantly how you get noticed by people above you and move up. Being extremely social is connected in your mind with individuals who are likely to be upwardly mobile and therefore valuable to socialize with. You fail to realize that that doesn't correlate in any way with the productivity of people who do actual work.
This isn't to say that being good at communication isn't a valuable thing in any profession. Life is a team sport. But by and large this means communicating in the context of your job regarding things that pertain to their work.
Plenty of people can do an effective job at that while spending 95% of their time actually you know doing useful work.
Your instincts are hyper specialized to your type of individual and I predict you will continue to move up well but I cannot imagine how difficult it must be for you to manage people you don't even slightly understand.
The idea that the hardest working but least social person is one of the lowest performers is... extraordinarily unintuitive. Do you mind explaining why you feel like socializing at work makes a person more performant?
You gave an example of a management type (who operates a team remotely). Do you really think that holds true for the people actually doing the work?
It really depends on what you mean by "socializing". You described (in my estimation) someone who turns off all notifications in company chat, and simply refuses to participate unless it's on their specific terms and time schedule. Perhaps I read into that a bit too much.
That goes well beyond not "socializing" - that's simply not communicating in real time.
Do you really think that holds true for the people actually doing the work?
Really depends on the work. An ops team? Absolutely holds true. You can't do your job effectively without constant communication with other team members, as those projects tend to be short lived, rapid paced, and involve half a dozen disciplines working together at a time. There is a strong correlation between how much someone participates with their co-workers in such an environment and in job performance as seen by the customer.
A programmer working on deep algorithms that are implemented as third party modules into a larger application? I wouldn't expect them to ever participate in chat.
A programmer who is working with 4 other programmers on a rapid development project of a bunch of microservices that must interact together cohesively? Yeah, unless they are a rockstar I would rather a mid-range dev who is great at teamwork vs. a stellar dev who refuses to participate and help the team on demand. A good team won't randomly bother everyone for no reason - there has to be a balance though.
All in all it really depends. There is certainly room for all types, it's simply the jobs where you can afford to not be available and communicative with a team in real time have been rather rare in my career. Statistically speaking I pretty much stand behind my statement - unless you are exceptional (and most people by definition are not) doing the "head down working" thing is likely bad for your career and I'd even go further and say it's likely bad for your actual productivity in general.
If you simply mean hanging out in the random non-work-related channels and chatting about off topic stuff, then I agree. My experience is also with 100% remote teams, and I assume if you added up the chat+office socializing in a "regular" organization you might get a different sum.
Thanks for humoring me. For context, my day job is not software development; I'm a command judge advocate in the Marine Corps, meaning I manage the legal portfolio, which most coworkers (outside the Commanding Officer) have limited visibility on.
I find a lot of my coworkers have an attitude like yours, and I find it incredibly frustrating. We spend huge amounts of time talking about doing work, and not enough time actually doing work. I spend upwards of three hours a day just talking to people and not making any actual headway on mission-critical projects.
I agree with your reply to me that it may really come down to the different types of jobs. In your initial post it seemed like your position was that only rock stars rated "head down working" time. I think my position is more analogous to the "deep algorithm" module developer.
Work is work, fun is fun. There's a clear line between them, mixing them leads just to trouble. I don't slack off at work, and in return I expect the minute I leave the office to not get any work messages anymore.
All this fake friendliness and clique behaviour is just more stress and distraction.
I don't think that mailing lists work well any more. I've tried to subscribe to some, but they get buried in my inbox, and I'm so tired of emails by the time I get to the list messages that I usually just highlight them all and delete them without reading, unless there is an interesting title.
That is what Sieve [1] is for. Use it to move all mailing-list traffic into its own mailbox/folder/whatnot and you'll be able to use mailing lists like it still was 1995. Either use a MUA which supports editing sieve filters or just edit the filter definition by hand. It looks like this, more or less:
Running your own server or convincing those who run the server that Sieve support is a boon for productivity - which it definitely is. If 'those' are the likes of Google or Microsoft, good luck with that.
Do you run your own mail server? I'm not opposed to the idea of trying it, but it seems like it would require a lot of work, and the potential for losing critical emails would be higher. It definitely sounds fun though.
Yes, I've been running my own server ever since I got a permanent internet connection some 22 years ago. It takes about 8 hours of work per year, not exactly a large burden given the advantages.
That sounds great. I don't think I would have the extra time required to learn how to do it though. Also, if I lose emails during the learning process, it could be a disaster.
SMTP is quite robust in the light of adversary conditions, it is not that easy to lose mail down a black hole. If you misconfigure the mail will be retried for about 4 days after which it is returned to sender. Once the mail has been delivered there are no safeguards anymore but by then it is just data on your server, open to backup. From MTA (Exim, Postfix, Sendmail...) via MDA (Dovecot, Cyrus, etc.) to MUA (mutt, Thunderbird, claws) the path is quite well-trodden so there are not that many surprises waiting.
The only real gotcha is how strict to tune the spam filter, get that wrong and you can actually lose mail. Assuming you'd use SpamAssassin the risk of getting false positives at the default setting is low, as far as I know it has not happened to me yet. If you regularly exchange important messages with people who speak Marketeese that might be different though...
Comments
I agree with OP. Slack is like watercooler, on steroids.
I guess having occasional spontaneous watercooler conversations may be good for getting to know your peers better, but in a lot of cases watercooler conversations result in clique behaviors.
Slack takes this to whole new level. People hang around on slack channels posting animated Gifs and chatting all day, on topics that have nothing to do with work.
The problem with this is you have to keep up all day with the chatter or otherwise you get left out as an "outsider" (the clique effect).
Sometimes I would see these people talk behind backs of people who they know are not part of the group. This creates office politics. I know because I saw it first hand.
Lastly, there's nothing worse than penalizing people for working hard and not participating in meaningless gossip and chatter all day.
If you want to work with robots then you were probably born a few decades too early. I can't imagine a more depressing life than spending 8+ hours a day with a group of people and being so determined not to make any friends (what you describe as "cliques").
If people are "SLACKing" off so much work doesn't get done then that gets escalated just like any other performance concern. If not, it feels a lot more like sour grapes than anything else.
Like I mentioned in another comment below, I am not an anti-social guy. I played the game, and I did just fine. Everybody at work liked me and I had no issues.
But I'm not talking about me. I'm talking about how the system is messed up. I didn't enjoy being unproductive. I didn't enjoy having to keep Slack open all day to make sure I don't miss out on what people are up to. I do believe the company lost a lot of talented developers because of the office politics.
And you know what? Everyone did just fine before they started using Slack. Everybody was friendly to one another, we regularly had globally inclusive face-to-face social gatherings, many of the team members ate lunch together, the team was pretty social.
But with slack, everything became political. It didn't bring people closer together in any way because people were already friendly enough before. What it did do was create more politics and make everyone waste more time than they used to.
Before slack, wasting time was a single player thing, you would maybe slack off for a bit reading hacker news but quickly get back to work, but after Slack, slacking off became a multiplayer thing, and just like any other multiplayer architecture, Metcalfe's law applies here too, which means the amount of wasted time grows exponentially.
Why did you feel you had to keep it open all the day?
Just skim the channels for anything interesting and/or relevant and check for new private messages occasionally when you're not in the zone. That could be once a day or few times a day, depending on your rhythm.
For example, I tend to directly continue the work in the morning where I left off the previous day for maximal productivity and it's not until my energy begins to wear out after a few hours when I go check back email, Slack, and other communications. Same for afternoon. I don't let email or instant messages interrupt my flow because the flow is a precious thing that doesn't simply come back when summoned. I always try to give the flow the priority and email/slack/IM are not urgent enough to break that. I can always reply back to messages in detail once the flow breaks down.
I have experienced different types of communities using Slack in their own ways, and for some it works, but for a lot it doesn't.
In my experience it works nicely for distributed organizations where people can't physically get together.
My point is Slack does introduce more politics into workplace. This is something you as a single user can't control.
Maybe you're doing fine there because your org doesn't have this problem, good for you. But I've seen this happen with a lot of different teams, in a lot of different ways, and that was what I was pointing out.
If you work at a company where there's office politics, you WILL miss out and lose a lot of opportunities if you don't participate actively.
Different people have different methodologies of working. Some could probably perform fine with work interspersed with random chatter at intervals. For others this would completely destroy productivity.
Imagine parent poster is one of the latter. Now imagine that people like yourself judged that he was "determined not to make friends" because he didn't opt to participate much or at all in group chats. Then all you need is people talking about other people at work something people do everywhere and shockingly we have exactly the situation parent poster described.
There may even be people like that at your work who feel the same way he does.
Perhaps Ive been lucky in this regard but I've never seen that. In fact, the people most disengaged from the tertiary work activities tend to, in my experience, also be the lowest performers. Honestly, if the existence of chatter "destroys" your productivity I don't think it was all that high to begin with.
I have worked with some of the best developers in the world (top developers at top tech companies, and developers who singlehandedly build things that lead the industry), and not all of them are well rounded people.
And I can confidently say most of them absolutely do not appreciate anything wasting their time, and most of them prefer to be acknowledged through skills instead of politics, and they do manage to pull it off. If they can't because of the toxic office politics, they simply move to another company that will treat them much better because they never run out of offers.
You may think these people are super anti-social and everybody will hate them, but a lot of them are nice people and helpful to coworkers. Unless they act like assholes, most co-workers like them and they get along just fine even though they don't get to interact very often.
If you haven't met one of these people in your career, it means you haven't worked with extremely talented people. That is just the reality.
Plus, my argument was not even about this type of extreme case. You're the one who's dramatized it into this.
You describe a rock star. Rules don't apply to rock stars.
For the vast majority of everyone else, not participating is exactly as described - statistically speaking those tend to be the lowest performers in my experience even if they might be the hardest working. For the rest of us communication and teamwork is the primary name of the game and how most "normies" will be the most productive. I have zero clue how you'd expect to operate a remote devops team (for example) without a constant flow of communication over what's happening, and I've found those that try to silo information off (typically with the "productivity" excuse) are about the worst in the world to work with.
Have there been exceptions? Of course. One of the best developers I've ever worked with refused to participate in chat and required everything done over e-mail to the point of absurdity. This was worth doing because he was exceptional. It also severely limited his usefulness to the organization to a very specific type of work. Very few folks I've worked with have been so exceptional as to warrant that type of kid glove handling.
"Rules don't apply to rock stars" This is utter and complete nonsense. You are a manager. Socializing is both an integral part of your job and most importantly how you get noticed by people above you and move up. Being extremely social is connected in your mind with individuals who are likely to be upwardly mobile and therefore valuable to socialize with. You fail to realize that that doesn't correlate in any way with the productivity of people who do actual work.
This isn't to say that being good at communication isn't a valuable thing in any profession. Life is a team sport. But by and large this means communicating in the context of your job regarding things that pertain to their work.
Plenty of people can do an effective job at that while spending 95% of their time actually you know doing useful work.
Your instincts are hyper specialized to your type of individual and I predict you will continue to move up well but I cannot imagine how difficult it must be for you to manage people you don't even slightly understand.
The idea that the hardest working but least social person is one of the lowest performers is... extraordinarily unintuitive. Do you mind explaining why you feel like socializing at work makes a person more performant?
You gave an example of a management type (who operates a team remotely). Do you really think that holds true for the people actually doing the work?
It really depends on what you mean by "socializing". You described (in my estimation) someone who turns off all notifications in company chat, and simply refuses to participate unless it's on their specific terms and time schedule. Perhaps I read into that a bit too much.
That goes well beyond not "socializing" - that's simply not communicating in real time.
Really depends on the work. An ops team? Absolutely holds true. You can't do your job effectively without constant communication with other team members, as those projects tend to be short lived, rapid paced, and involve half a dozen disciplines working together at a time. There is a strong correlation between how much someone participates with their co-workers in such an environment and in job performance as seen by the customer.
A programmer working on deep algorithms that are implemented as third party modules into a larger application? I wouldn't expect them to ever participate in chat.
A programmer who is working with 4 other programmers on a rapid development project of a bunch of microservices that must interact together cohesively? Yeah, unless they are a rockstar I would rather a mid-range dev who is great at teamwork vs. a stellar dev who refuses to participate and help the team on demand. A good team won't randomly bother everyone for no reason - there has to be a balance though.
All in all it really depends. There is certainly room for all types, it's simply the jobs where you can afford to not be available and communicative with a team in real time have been rather rare in my career. Statistically speaking I pretty much stand behind my statement - unless you are exceptional (and most people by definition are not) doing the "head down working" thing is likely bad for your career and I'd even go further and say it's likely bad for your actual productivity in general.
If you simply mean hanging out in the random non-work-related channels and chatting about off topic stuff, then I agree. My experience is also with 100% remote teams, and I assume if you added up the chat+office socializing in a "regular" organization you might get a different sum.
Thanks for humoring me. For context, my day job is not software development; I'm a command judge advocate in the Marine Corps, meaning I manage the legal portfolio, which most coworkers (outside the Commanding Officer) have limited visibility on.
I find a lot of my coworkers have an attitude like yours, and I find it incredibly frustrating. We spend huge amounts of time talking about doing work, and not enough time actually doing work. I spend upwards of three hours a day just talking to people and not making any actual headway on mission-critical projects.
I agree with your reply to me that it may really come down to the different types of jobs. In your initial post it seemed like your position was that only rock stars rated "head down working" time. I think my position is more analogous to the "deep algorithm" module developer.
Work is work, fun is fun. There's a clear line between them, mixing them leads just to trouble. I don't slack off at work, and in return I expect the minute I leave the office to not get any work messages anymore.
All this fake friendliness and clique behaviour is just more stress and distraction.
I wonder if mailing lists suffer from this at all.
I used to believe that ML were the best ratio of work+content / noise. Because the medium is limiting, so it doesn't invite for smalltalk(sic).
I don't think that mailing lists work well any more. I've tried to subscribe to some, but they get buried in my inbox, and I'm so tired of emails by the time I get to the list messages that I usually just highlight them all and delete them without reading, unless there is an interesting title.
That is what Sieve [1] is for. Use it to move all mailing-list traffic into its own mailbox/folder/whatnot and you'll be able to use mailing lists like it still was 1995. Either use a MUA which supports editing sieve filters or just edit the filter definition by hand. It looks like this, more or less:
That looks like fun, but also like it requires running your own mail server. :)
I use Thunderbird filters to sort incoming emails, but it's still out of control. In 1995 there wasn't this kind of email overload.
Running your own server or convincing those who run the server that Sieve support is a boon for productivity - which it definitely is. If 'those' are the likes of Google or Microsoft, good luck with that.
Do you run your own mail server? I'm not opposed to the idea of trying it, but it seems like it would require a lot of work, and the potential for losing critical emails would be higher. It definitely sounds fun though.
Yes, I've been running my own server ever since I got a permanent internet connection some 22 years ago. It takes about 8 hours of work per year, not exactly a large burden given the advantages.
That sounds great. I don't think I would have the extra time required to learn how to do it though. Also, if I lose emails during the learning process, it could be a disaster.
SMTP is quite robust in the light of adversary conditions, it is not that easy to lose mail down a black hole. If you misconfigure the mail will be retried for about 4 days after which it is returned to sender. Once the mail has been delivered there are no safeguards anymore but by then it is just data on your server, open to backup. From MTA (Exim, Postfix, Sendmail...) via MDA (Dovecot, Cyrus, etc.) to MUA (mutt, Thunderbird, claws) the path is quite well-trodden so there are not that many surprises waiting.
The only real gotcha is how strict to tune the spam filter, get that wrong and you can actually lose mail. Assuming you'd use SpamAssassin the risk of getting false positives at the default setting is low, as far as I know it has not happened to me yet. If you regularly exchange important messages with people who speak Marketeese that might be different though...
That's a good point that I didn't think of.
Maybe I'll tinker with it when I have a little free time. I would also like to learn how to use Mutt.