Actually triggers a good, 8-9 year old memory. Two places I worked at used to communicate through HipChat. It was simple, native, and did the job until Atlassian fucked it up with a massive rewrite. But even then it was still decent.

In both cases there was a massive bike shedding moment where the company engaged in a chat-war, with one half being solely devoted to Slack, and the rest of us holding back and saying why we need to switch. In both cases the Slack advocates went rogue and since they were also the loudest voices, people switched over just to get back into the conversation.

I have no idea what spell was cast on those people by Slack but, god damnit, it worked. It's just IRC in a walled garden and costing 10x as much, with shitty features you can't opt out of (like the new editor and threads, which birthed a whole cadre of slack micro-managers).

Also, I think Slack's threads are useful. You can have channels where you just post a single message for your question/issue and then have people reply in a thread, so that messages are naturally grouped together by topic instead of being a firehose of interleaved messages. Combined with good search, this makes Slack more of a valuable knowledge store than just an ephemeral chat tool.

I don't want to name the exact place this happened but it was certainly a unique culture that I now miss. It was neither British or American.

It was the only place I've worked where I had easy and direct access to the founders, the C level, and the VPs, as a lowly senior engineer. And not because I brown-nosed my way up; we'd connect outside of work because we liked the same things.

A total tangent, but it's just to say that we never needed Slack in the first place. I doubt many places do.

Ok, so Slack solved #2 I feel and formerly solved #3 (but has regressed significantly in recent months). Not sure gaining #2 was worth the new negatives we got.

This was 4 or 5 years ago. Now in my current company we also use Slack. It’s good, but not great either. Mostly because the UI is super slow when running in my desktop browser (Cliqz, Firefox-based). But it’s still better than Teams in my experience (I did not try the other alternatives).

One other advantage of HipChat was that it‘s native Android client would run without requiring Play Services; Slack purposefully won't run without it.

In a number of companies / assignments, Slack was introduced "from the trenches" and adopted officially later on. You don't get a tool to rise up from the trenches if it doesn't fulfill a need - that other, comparable tools also fill, especially now that a number of good competitors have jumped on the wagon.

Slack has become the new corporate mandated unusable messaging application.

It's officially adopted making it the incumbent. Now the company can stop to pretend caring about quality and start digging moats. Predictably, the proprietary workaround becomes proprietary garbage. And no problem was solved after all.

Will we ever learn?

Asking myself this question everyday in an org that uses Skype for Business, Teams, Slack and...yes, there’s an island of engineers and ops people using IRC sneering at all of us from the horizon. Hell we still have people struggling to set up conference bridges and video calls and have resorted to buying their own solutions and expensing them back to payroll. I’ve been given expense reports for paid accounts for Zoom, LogMeIn and someone even tried expensing $3 after buying their own phone number and writing a single serving conferencing app on top of Twilio.

I found that last one especially creative and especially worrisome if these are the lengths people are going through.

I’ve sat through four all hands calls now where “unified communication” was brought up and “infra-departmental communication” was mentioned as the leading gripe on preceding employee satisfaction surveys.

Yet here we are.

Hilarious, when you consider we sell wholesale communications platforms and services.

(When is the next “who’s hiring”? Mid-level Product Manager shackled by golden handcuffs seeks short walks to happy hour and a 4 day work week, heh)

To communicate with them, I was issued a cellphone (natch), and when I asked if there was a preferred way to juggle the multiple teams, my predecessor said "Just keep the calls short so you minimize the chances of having to put one on hold when another calls you."

"Can I set up a conference bridge and then have them all call into it?"

"Those are expensive. No."

So apparently everyone at this enormous phone company was still living in the 80s when teleconferencing was something you paid for. I called up a buddy who set up a private bridge on his asterisk box, and I gave that number to all my field techs. It was great, I could step away for a moment and come back to find one tech giving advice to another, and in the end my buddy made a few bucks on recip comp over the thousands of minutes we logged.

Did anyone else in the whole company know this was possible?

Okay. I’ll do it: it was Sprint wasn’t it? ;)

Slack is not the end solution. It's a step in the direction to being less terrible in the realm of corporate communication, and will be replaced by something else that does better in the future. For now it'll hold on whilst it still can.

The sad part is, Slack was better in the past. It's the "digging moats" part GP mentioned that makes software shit. Corporate or otherwise. Consider: once upon a time, they supported an IRC gateway. But that was just a lure to get techies on-board, and predictably (like e.g. Google before with XMPP), once they've reached critical mass, they've shut it off.

(And I'm part of the problem too. I don't complain much, because as long as Ripcord - the not shit third-party desktop client - works, I don't have to deal with Slack's web and Electron crap.)

And if your corporate IT wasn’t completely nightmarish about locking it down you had multiple client options on almost every platform.

Besides, there were tons of integrations, scripts already available, and it is super easy to write your own irrespective of what scripting language you know.

Technically it sucked in that it could, when used terribly, clog up an entire network (such as the infamous NHS mail chain reply fiasco from a few years ago), but I have no clue who decided Slack was better than emails for what emails did.

Slack is better than Lync and similar corporate messaging platform. But that’s not what people tried to sell it as, or for that matter, Slack advertising sells it as. They sell it as an alternative to email.

It’s weird how difficult to use their slack competitor is. Hard to search within teams and across channels. There’s a weird interaction between itself and OneDrive/SharePoint that I don’t get the mental model.

I used to hate Slack’s UX a lot until I started to use Teams.

This. I was told MSFT has switched to Teams. They don't use Skype. Both my current and soon to be new employer (company bought) use Skype for business.

Skype is terrible in many ways.

Teams has a slicker UI. But it brings the horror to a whole new level. Someone mentions you passing in a group. You get a notification in email. But hey, if you aren't signed into that group, you can't see it. And you can only see like 4-5 groups at a time. So you really can't track conversations in real time.

The whole multi-teams experience ... is not well thought out. I have to switch between at least two different company teams multiple times per day, to do my work over the last 4 months.

Slack, for all its annoying mis-features, handles this workflow quite well. The UI, while somewhat simplistic, just works. Search and threading are terrible, but at least search works. Still have not figured out how to download conversations for transfer into tickets/etc.

I just want something that is simple, works well, allows me to search, to reliably enter code/screen caps/etc. Right now, though I don't like it, Slack comes close to working with some annoying misfeatures. Teams ... does not. Skype is best forgotten about.

The main failure of IT or computer science is the lack of open standards and federation. 40 year old Email was the last somewhat succesful one. You can use various clients like Emacs, Thunderbird, mutt, Gmail web UI and there is no need that sender and recipient share either provider or client.

In communism it was the central planning commission that decided what products consumers want to buy. Today it's Slack that decides how people do IM at work. And Google or Apple how people use mobile apps. Facebook how you interact with your friends. I hope that these monpolies/duopolies would share the fate of communism. How do we get there?