It serves the same purpose as irc channels, jabber, skype, discord - always-on, no friction communication.
It replaces the possibility of asking your friend who sits on the next chair a quick question.
It can be abused, of course, but I think it creates a healthy hierarchy of information:
If you need the answer today write an email.
If you need the answer in 10 minutes write on irc/jabber/skype/discord/slack.
If you need the answer now - go in person or use a voice call.
We actually had our manager tell us this in my first job and set expectations for how fast you should reply on each channel (of course you can answer faster, up to you). This allows to communication without worrying about destroying other's flow.
And of course you should check documentation and google before you ask, but that's tool-agnostic.
Also for remote teams it shows who is currently available, which is useful in its own way and solves some trust problems employers have with remote workers.
How do you get 2 hours of uninterrupted time if you’re expected to respond to slack within 10 minutes? This becomes a major problem if you’re part of a team that owns something that supports dozens of teams. Even if each other team only slacks you one question per day: you now are getting at least one question every hour or so. If you can’t control your calendar and create “office hours” to aggregate all those questions and answers, then you either need to be really great at multitasking and preserving mental state while dealing with unrelated problems, or you just can’t spend multiple hours of focused time on a problem during normal working hours.
Even if a slack response expectation is only within your team, requiring people to check for notifications more than every hour seems really disruptive, unless you have designated “slack meeting” times.
For me (on IRC) the rule was always that it's fine if people don't answer within 10 minutes, but you should be told.
Specifically, you're expected to answer in IM timeframe unless you set an afk message. This way people know that they should wait for an answer that might not come until hours later.
In an office this is self evident since if you walk to your colleague's desk you see if they aren't there, but requires a bit of explicit communication via IM.
I simply set my status to "AFK deep code" or simply "afk" and turn off notifications to get 2 hours without interruptions when I need it
The term seems impossibly dated, but the "watercooler" type moments or discussion also happen much more organically in an always-on communications system.
>And of course you should check documentation and google before you ask, but that's tool-agnostic.
the tool which significantly decreases the cost of asking naturally encourages the asking and discourages the documentation and google check by virtue of making the check a waste of time when the answer can be quickly obtained by the asking.
It replaces the possibility of asking your friend who sits on the next chair a quick question.
It can be abused, of course, but I think it creates a healthy hierarchy of information:
If you need the answer today write an email.
If you need the answer in 10 minutes write on irc/jabber/skype/discord/slack.
If you need the answer now - go in person or use a voice call.
We actually had our manager tell us this in my first job and set expectations for how fast you should reply on each channel (of course you can answer faster, up to you). This allows to communication without worrying about destroying other's flow.
And of course you should check documentation and google before you ask, but that's tool-agnostic.
Also for remote teams it shows who is currently available, which is useful in its own way and solves some trust problems employers have with remote workers.