Slack

Slackers (Elizabeth Lopatto in The Verge, Feb 12, 2024): “The work group chat is here, and it’s always on, even when you’re asleep. . . . our work lives and private lives are bleeding together.”

Slack? Phone? Teams? Zoom? There Are Too Many Work Communications (WSJ, Apr 26, 2023): “Workplaces become saturated with ways to talk, often breeding mistakes and misunderstandings.”

Meta Rediscovers the Cubicle (Cal Newport, March 9, 2023): “The open office boom is right up there with the spread of Slack as representing the peak of early 21st century distraction culture — a period in which the knowledge sector completely disregarded any realities about how human brains actually go about the difficult task of creating value through cogitation.”

Slack’s and Teams’ Lax App Security Raises Alarms (Wired, Sep 23, 2022): “A new study by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison points to troubling gaps in the third-party app security model of both Slack and Teams, which range from a lack of review of the apps’ code to default settings that allow any user to install an app for an entire workspace.”

Admit it, you’re a totally different person over Slack. And it’s exhausting. (Insider, June 1, 2022): “Bartels has had to cultivate a Slack persona at work that’s markedly different from her real-life demeanor, which tends to be ‘sarcastic and dry.’ Bartels said she often worries that her Slack messages to her team members will be misconstrued, so she ‘fluffs them up with emoji and exclamation points’ to make sure they don’t come across in an overly negative way. ‘I have to make sure I sound nice,’ she said.”

Slack or bust: How workplace tools are becoming job deal-breakers (by Lizzy Lawrence in Protocol, Feb 9, 2022): “Some people might refuse traditional workplace tools in general, like freelance UX director Noah Conk. He says: To hell with Slack and Teams, let’s use Discord.”

Slackers of the World, Unite (by Ellen Cushing in the Atlantic, Oct 12, 2021): “Thanks to Slack I could spend hours sitting in an office, on a work-issued laptop, chatting away on work-sanctioned productivity software and not get a single thing done. This is what the writer John Herrman has called ‘a novel form of work-like non-work,’ with all the superficial trappings of labor—thinking, typing—but very few actual results.”

The new Puritans (by Anne Applebaum in the Atlantic, Aug 31, 2021): "The crowds are no longer literal, as they once were in Salem, but rather online mobs, organized via Twitter, Facebook, or sometimes internal company Slack channels."

WhatsApp for Work: Slack is turning into a full-on messaging app (by David Pierce in Protocol, March 24, 2021): "Connect DMs turns Slack from an app for chatting with co-workers into an app for chatting with anyone." In other words, Slack reinvented email - briefly - before rolling back some of the functionality the same day. (Source: The Verge, later the same day, March 24, 2021.)

What's Better Than Slack? These Companies Have Some Ideas. (by Krithika Varagur in the WSJ, March 7, 2021): "Becky Kane says her workday improved when her company quit Slack."

Slack is the Right Tool for the Wrong Way to Work (by Cal Newport in the New Yorker, Dec 14, 2020): "For teams straining under e-mail's shortcomings, Slack arrived like a digital analgesic. . . . The problem with this trajectory is that no one stopped to ask if it made sense to optimize this style of work in the first place. Though Slack improved the areas where e-mail was lacking in an age of high message volume, it simultaneously amplified the rate at which this interaction occurs."

Salesforce Confirms Deal to Buy Slack for $27.7 Billion (WSJ, Dec 1, 2020): The deal will turn Salesforce "into a more formidable competitor to Microsoft Corp. and Google parent Alphabet Inc."

You Can Now Buy 'Slack' Sneakers, but Please Don't (Daily Beast, Oct 8, 2020): "Cole Haan's new Slack running shoes are not fashion. They are a $120 made-for-Twitter joke."

Slack Is Having An Identity Crisis (Shoshana Wodinsky in Gizmodo, Oct 7, 2020): "Right now, I think it's safe to say we need more boundaries between our work-life and social-life, not less. . . . these upcoming features are bound to exacerbate the issues that Slack's most vocal critics have been saying for years. They'll make the platform more distracting, more noisy, and more about being on Slack than actually working."

Slack Has Made Remote Office Communication Easier. It Can Also Be Less Civil. (WSJ, Aug 20, 2020): "You can't have large, nuanced conversations over Slack. . . . That's where you just see it going off the rails."

Damning profile of Away, the luggage startup (by Zoe Schiffer in The Verge, Dec 5, 2019): Away employees were required to use Slack. Only Slack. "Employees were not allowed to email each other, and direct messages were supposed to be used rarely . . . The rules had been implemented in the name of transparency, but employees say they created a culture of intimidation and constant surveillance."

Mar Hicks on Twitter (Nov 22, 2019): "Slack is an invasive tool that furthers a culture of overwork and taylorization even as it rescues people from the smoldering hell of their inboxes. Many people are forced to use it, many businesses can't run without it anymore."

Is Your Workplace Slack a Surveillance Tool? (by Dell Cameron in Gizmodo, Nov 4, 2019): "Slack has become... a tool for corporate surveillance... workers have good reason to avoid discussing anything on the platform they wouldn't say aloud in an elevator standing next to their boss."

Our bosses live in our phones (by Vicki Boykis, Oct 22, 2019): "Don't forget that employers can read absolutely everything you put in Slack, including DMs."

Slack Is Bad, Actually (by Monica Torres in HuffPo, June 24, 2019): "Your boss can read your DMs, and everyone can see how much you talk."

Death By a Thousand Pings: The Hidden Side of Using Slack (by Alicia Liu in a Medium blog, March 20, 2018): "How the ubiquitous productivity app that I loved became the ultimate productivity killer that I loathe. . . its greatest strength, amazing ease-of-use, is also its weakness: making it far too easy for everyone to default to using Slack for communicating."

What Happens When Work Becomes a Nonstop Chat Room (by Molly Fischer in NYMag, May 2017): "I used to wake up and turn off the alarm and check Tinder . . . Now I wake up and check Slack."

Asynchronous Communication: The Real Reason Remote Workers Are More Productive (Doist.com corporate blog, undated): "Real-time communication overhead makes it hard to focus, drains employees' mental resources, and generally makes it more difficult to make meaningful progress on work." Related: Why We're Betting Against Real-Time Team Messaging Apps Like Slack (Doist.com corporate blog, undated).

My Company Tried Slack For Two Years. This Is Why We Quit. (Doist.com exec writing in Fast Company, June 22, 2019): "Because conversations in Slack happen on a one-way conveyor belt, our team began feeling like they had to stay constantly connected to keep up."

After 4 years of running a public Slack community, we've decided to shut the whole thing down (John O'Nolan on Twitter, April 2, 2018): "Slack community usefulness is inversely proportional to its size. . . most Slack community owners I know are migrating (or already have) to Telegram groups or Discord channels."

Slack is the opposite of organizational memory (Abe Winter in github blog, Feb 11, 2018): Slack "destroys teams' ability to think, plan & get complex work out the door. Read on for the full story. . . It normalizes interruptions, multitasking, and distractions."

How Slack Has Changed The Workplace (WBUR, May 22, 2017): "It feels good to be engaged with your colleagues moment to moment . . . But it does also feel like it's a constant barrage of notifications. . . . It's easy to feel like you're not really participating in your workplace if you're not, sort of, present on Slack."

Curing Our Slack Addiction (by Dave Teare on Ablebits.com corporate blog, April 17, 2016): "Being connected doesn't magically enable effective communication. . . the lack of threading made it very difficult to have meaningful, deep conversations about complex subjects."

Slack, I'm Breaking Up with You (by Samuel Hulick on UserOnboard blog, Feb 29, 2016): Slack was "turning my workdays into one long Franken-meeting."

Are You Just LARPing Your Job? (by John Herrman, Apr 20, 2015): "Working in an active Slack is a productivity nightmare, especially if you don’t hate your coworkers."