Ask HN: Remote / Async work without chat?

2 points by burlesona 4y ago ↗ HN

My team uses Slack quite a bit, but I don't feel it's actually working well for us. Too many decisions and task requests are made in chat, and then there isn't really a permanent record of them. We're not a very big team, but we already have too much reliance on humans plus meetings to share context and make sure everyone is on the same page.

My gut says we'd be better off without chat, but I think that if I just turned off our Slack instance we'd end up falling back to SMS and Email for quick pings, rather than really improving the situation. I would like to build a culture of thoughtful async discussion where people organize their ideas in writing, but I've never been part of an org where that was prominent, so I'm not very confident how to establish that from scratch on my own team.

I'd love to know if any of you have experience working in a distributed engineering org that doesn't use chat, and if so, what tools and processes do you use for discussions and keeping shared context? How well does it work, and would you recommend it for another team?

3 comments

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sneak 4y ago ↗

I find chat to be essential (but I grew up on IRC), but I don't use it to supplant email/ticketing. I think there is a good balance to be struck between chat (more social than anything, tbh), a ticketing system (source of truth, via comments on issues, for most decisions/research), and email threads (official formal "I say x to you" sort of businessy things).

I think the key is getting people to use the right tools for the job. There will always be people who think chat is their hammer, to be used in all circumstances, and they are wrong.

burlesona 4y ago ↗

How do you recommend actually getting people to use the "right tool for the job"? Nag them if they post in the "wrong" place? Do a training? Have a manual for how to communicate? I haven't seen that work well before.

I don't think "nag" is the right term. It's more of the idea that training people in the effective use of their collaboration tools is an ongoing process.

The tools aren't static, so neither should the staff's use of them be.