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Thank you. I will fight this new trend of 100% Slack/Teams/Etc. as long as I possibly can. Email provides a barrier between you and the work -- email isn't a r

Thank you. I will fight this new trend of 100% Slack/Teams/Etc. as long as I possibly can. Email provides a barrier between you and the work -- email isn't a real time form of communication. Chats, meanwhile, imply immediate response. Hell, these apps even show when you're active -- I've gotten passive-aggressive messages like, "I know that you have DND on, but can you confirm you're seeing these messages?" chats outside of working hours. I get why Slack/Teams/Etc. is a great supplement to email, especially when it's a smaller internal team collaborating. But ditching email is a terrible idea.

sanderjd 3y ago
This is just culture / familiarity. Absolutely nothing about chat implies immediacy by necessity. But I agree that expectations are often set badly, and that's an important cultural problem to solve.
shortrounddev2 3y ago
My problem with email is the amount of spam makes it unusable, and I don't just mean unsolicited advertisements. I get spam from work in the form of notifications and unnecessary CC's, so I'm accustomed to ignoring all emails. I think it may also be generational: at my previous job, I get chewed out by my manager for not responding to some question another coworker had sent me. I was confused because I don't remember getting any questions from them, and I was told that he had emailed it to me. He's in his 40s and I was 26. I told him I get so many useless emails I never check work email. And the best way to reach me is via slack. Still, some on the team continued to use email
- danaris 3y ago
  Sounds like you need to learn to manage your email inbox. I have dozens of filters set up to direct emails to particular folders before I ever see them. This is precisely the way to deal with automated notifications. They're always coming from the same source; in some cases, they're not going to your email directly, but to a group address that you can easily filter on. If you're getting unnecessary CCs from particular people commonly, you can set up a filter to automatically route that category (from:thisuser@company, cc:me) to a folder of "check this once a day (or whatever timetable) to see if anything real got through". The answer to "I have trouble with email," in an organization where email is a normal mode of communication, is not "so the whole rest of my team needs to change their workflow to deal with me." It's "so I need to pick up some skills and make checking my email part of my daily workflow."
  - shortrounddev2 3y ago
    The rest of the team didn't use emails, only the older team members did. Honestly, none of the companies I worked for used email for communication, I think it's abnormal to be the one using it on the team. Slack doesn't require as much configuration as you described. I don't get the point of email when we have slack
alberth 3y ago
Glad to hear I'm not alone. Question: do you think this would still be a problem if only 1:1 chat was allowed (no group chat existed). I've often wondered if the real problem is group chat / channels, and not per se the 1:1 type of chat messages.

sanderjd 3y ago

This is just culture / familiarity. Absolutely nothing about chat implies immediacy by necessity. But I agree that expectations are often set badly, and that's an important cultural problem to solve.

shortrounddev2 3y ago

My problem with email is the amount of spam makes it unusable, and I don't just mean unsolicited advertisements. I get spam from work in the form of notifications and unnecessary CC's, so I'm accustomed to ignoring all emails. I think it may also be generational: at my previous job, I get chewed out by my manager for not responding to some question another coworker had sent me. I was confused because I don't remember getting any questions from them, and I was told that he had emailed it to me. He's in his 40s and I was 26. I told him I get so many useless emails I never check work email. And the best way to reach me is via slack. Still, some on the team continued to use email

danaris 3y ago
Sounds like you need to learn to manage your email inbox. I have dozens of filters set up to direct emails to particular folders before I ever see them. This is precisely the way to deal with automated notifications. They're always coming from the same source; in some cases, they're not going to your email directly, but to a group address that you can easily filter on. If you're getting unnecessary CCs from particular people commonly, you can set up a filter to automatically route that category (from:thisuser@company, cc:me) to a folder of "check this once a day (or whatever timetable) to see if anything real got through". The answer to "I have trouble with email," in an organization where email is a normal mode of communication, is not "so the whole rest of my team needs to change their workflow to deal with me." It's "so I need to pick up some skills and make checking my email part of my daily workflow."
- shortrounddev2 3y ago
  The rest of the team didn't use emails, only the older team members did. Honestly, none of the companies I worked for used email for communication, I think it's abnormal to be the one using it on the team. Slack doesn't require as much configuration as you described. I don't get the point of email when we have slack

alberth 3y ago

Glad to hear I'm not alone. Question: do you think this would still be a problem if only 1:1 chat was allowed (no group chat existed). I've often wondered if the real problem is group chat / channels, and not per se the 1:1 type of chat messages.