As a long-time IRC fan (I found many important persons in my life there!), I'm also a bit salty that open protocols didn't triumph and so many people salivate about features of Slack that were already in IRC in the nineties. But I don't get the horror stories about Slack poisoning work culture, I haven't experienced them.
At my workplace, we are a team of 7 (in a research project, it's academia but I don't think our way of organizing things is too different from a small startup), we have been using Slack for like a year and we have a sane relationship with it. Yesterday I think there were like 2 or 3 messages in our Slack, no more were needed. At other points (with looming deadlines, etc.) there is more activity, but it's always activity related to work that needs to be done, and my feeling is that it mostly reduces the amount of email, and sometimes also substitutes private messaging that some of us were using for work-related issues. Which is a plus for work culture, because we keep work and leisure separated. And as there are no notifications outside working hours, I think it has actually been positive for work-life balance, compared to using email or other messaging systems.
I don't know if it's a matter of team size (I can imagine that Slack may be more prone to becoming a behemoth in a huge team?), the personalities of the people using it, or that companies/teams where Slack is problematic already had a problematic work culture in the first place. Maybe it also helps that we don't have the paid plan at my team, so since logs are not stored, we use it for immediate teamwork and we instinctively shift to email or other means for important stuff that needs to be on record or consulted later. But for whatever reason, for us it hasn't become a growing monster. I'm curious about the factors that make it a blessing or a curse.
At my workplace, we are a team of 7 (in a research project, it's academia but I don't think our way of organizing things is too different from a small startup), we have been using Slack for like a year and we have a sane relationship with it. Yesterday I think there were like 2 or 3 messages in our Slack, no more were needed. At other points (with looming deadlines, etc.) there is more activity, but it's always activity related to work that needs to be done, and my feeling is that it mostly reduces the amount of email, and sometimes also substitutes private messaging that some of us were using for work-related issues. Which is a plus for work culture, because we keep work and leisure separated. And as there are no notifications outside working hours, I think it has actually been positive for work-life balance, compared to using email or other messaging systems.
I don't know if it's a matter of team size (I can imagine that Slack may be more prone to becoming a behemoth in a huge team?), the personalities of the people using it, or that companies/teams where Slack is problematic already had a problematic work culture in the first place. Maybe it also helps that we don't have the paid plan at my team, so since logs are not stored, we use it for immediate teamwork and we instinctively shift to email or other means for important stuff that needs to be on record or consulted later. But for whatever reason, for us it hasn't become a growing monster. I'm curious about the factors that make it a blessing or a curse.