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.
Comments
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.