Something in-between. I'm the only engineer in my position. The fear is an unnoticed fire. A lot of things are monitored but a few things still require someone to take a quick glance at them at least once a day.
If I were you I'd try to add some friction to that process. Make it harder to access work stuff during vacation, it should help to decrease the bad habit.
As someone else suggested, I've been thinking about uninstalling Slack during holidays. But in lieu of another employee to share my responsibilities with, any potential problem grows the longer it takes before I'm aware of it.
Funny, I always grew to like the damn app more when I was using it on vacation. Usually just to reread some old thread or make sure I didn’t miss something. Now I don’t use it at all however, and at least that part of my life is going nicely.
There are to many damn chat apps, someone make a memey ffs.
I miss IMAP being so fucking cool. CalDav is “good enough”-ish and still beats being locked to google. This actually might be worth a real rant sometime (again?), but I’m way off on a tangent here this morning.
The only people who should be allowed make these kinds of criticisms on platforms that go down infrequently when compared to the industry standard are folks whose own apps and platforms never, ever go down. Which is to say, nobody really has a leg to stand on in this regard.
I just saw an e-mail in my inbox this morning that started with “Slack, one of our main tools for communication and collaboration, is currently unavailable…” and ended with “In the meantime, we recommend using Teams as a workaround.”
Once again: centralized non-e2ee systems like Slack and Discord are a liability, not the least of which is because of downtime. (The DM logs being mined by an acquirer or intruder is another.)
Patch out the phone-home Segment spyware and selfhost a Mattermost, or a Zulip, or a Discourse (for non-real-time) for your team.
Selfhost a Gitea and a Drone.
It's more simple than you think, and you can backup and restore it onto a new hosted VM in minutes.
> Patch out the phone-home Segment spyware and selfhost a Mattermost,
Just to clarify, by patching out, all you need is to disable a config setting: https://docs.mattermost.com/manage/telemetry.html. It's not like you have to modify the code or anything more intrusive.
Another fan of Mattermost here. Four or five years w/o outage. Maintenance is moving to a new VM every 6mo. Cost is roughly $120/yr. And we can have clients click into our chat w/o requiring them to make accounts with third parties.
I really hate the: For support with CompanyA make account to use service provided by CompanyB to contact A.
Every time I have to use a Slack/Discord to reach a company I'm spam/alert bombed all over again - triple annoying.
Bigger, heavier, requires more resources to set up, maintain, and use. On the other hand it's more stable, mature, has more features and integrations, and I'd guess more secure. Having run both I'd recommend defaulting to Forgejo[0] or Gitea unless your requirements steer you towards Gitlab.
[0]: Fork of Gitea, discussed here previously. Recall that Gitea is itself a fork of Gogs!
I'd add that if you require CI/CD, definitely use Gitlab over Forgejo. I remember they added actions as an experimental feature, but CI/CD in GitLab is quite mature and powerful - it will take time to Forgejo to catch up.
Did you give Zulip a try? We use it internally (self-hosted) and very much prefer it to anything else. Devops-wise, once setup, it takes very little effort (~10 minutes every month, sometimes not even that, when there are no updates) to keep the instance running and updated.
In my experience half the reason people like Slack is for the ecosystem. We tried getting our company to adopt Google Chat but everyone wanted Slack because of integrations and apps (and they were just more familiar with it from using it at previous companies).
I reluctantly let the company switch to Slack. But 100% driven by employee demand/satisfaction. If as an IT person I recommend anything other than Slack, it will immediately get shot down if I do a poll of employees. Employees like slack for whatever bizarre reasons, even when comparing it to basically identical chat apps.
It’s almost like making a Mac person switch to Windows (or vice versa). People have a strange emotional connection with Slack making it hard to use anything else.
Curious about your setup: did you use their recommended install method or a Docker image? And, more importantly, did you encounter any serious issues during that time? I'm considering replacing Slack with Zulip and wondering what could possibly go wrong.
Not your parent but I did setup Zulip at two orgs now. Just used the official method. Never had a problem. Zulip has a very good Puppet setup that works very well.
Ubuntu Server, used their standard install instructions, no docker. So far all their upgrades went without any problems at all, including major version bumps.
As for running the server, I cannot recall any bigger problem I had, Zulip runs in our org for more than 5 years.
If you committed to changing the services you paid for every time one went down, you’d
A) spend a ton of time migrating your workflows instead of being productive
B) eventually run out of options because everything goes down at some point
As a regular Slack team, we did a test chat on Teams simply so we can record the video and man the experience was 10x better. Video quality, audio, controls, the lot. And bear in mind we are used to Slack so it had home advantage on UX. Also as Azure AD/360 users it is probably free effectively.
So we will switch tomorrow?
Not so fast: it is such an upheaval changing chat system company wide - thats how they get the retention!
Oh man, I wouldn't personally recommend switching to teams if the chat functionality is the majority of your use for it. The paradigm of chat on teams is a very different experience. Calls are pretty good though.
I will also say, teams may actually be better aligned for business use given two reasons, threads promote conversation focus, and threads also make me not want to post idle thoughts. A lot of slacks devolve into chatter, making a thread for a minor thought doesn't feel right. Upside, less idle chit chat, downside lots of things probably go unsaid and it's a less communal feeling.
- It doesn't allow viewing both the (text) list of people and chat at the same time
- The vast majority of the time, people don't include a dial-in. This, alone, kills it for me
- Every time I want to mute myself, I wind up needing to search for the mute button (I know it's in the same place every time, but the fact that I need to "find" it every time tells me there's something poor about it's placement; I couldn't say what, though)
- It's an extra step opening it in the browser, because it tries (twice) to get you to open the application.
It's a death by 1,000 cuts. Just tons of little things that make it annoying (and the one big "no dialin" thing)
For certain use cases, teams works reall well.
Unfortunately it doesn't have threads, so discussing indivual issues in a non-blocking way is pretty difficult.
Maybe we have different teams configs, it definitely has threads. Chats do not have threading, but teams/channels only have threads. At least on our install.
I find this quite silly. All chat networks (IRC, Discord, Slack, Teams, WhatsApp, Instagram, etc) will have issues eventually.
On IRC you had netsplits where half of the people could still talk to each other and the rest were disconnected. I would guess it was equally rare (back when I used irc more, 8 years ago?) as outages of "centralized" services today.
Netsplits, chan takeovers, dictator opers and most servers being donated by random people and companies. I love IRC, but in the context of modern, mission critical chat it has significantly more problems than Slack.
What problems do you have with Slack? I use it for like 3-4 years, and have some "sending delay" problems about once every six months, that are solved within an hour or so anyway, and otherwise it's rock solid.
