<story><title>Atlassian launches Stride, its Slack competitor</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/07/atlassian-launches-stride-its-slack-competitor/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>erikb</author><text>A common discussion I have with other developers.&lt;p&gt;For a developer I&amp;#x27;d say I&amp;#x27;m a little more people minded than average, and a lot more big picture success oriented. And in both regards your personal productivity doesn&amp;#x27;t really matter.&lt;p&gt;The biggest problem in software development is actually not per-coder-performance but that the right things get solved, and that the solution are actually good and quickly finished. Think about how much time you wasted using a colleagues API that simply wasn&amp;#x27;t designed well, at least for your usecase.&lt;p&gt;So, if more information means you are working on the right things, and that you understand your users better, and therefore make your tools more intiutive and usable, a hit to your performance, even 50%, is not a problem.&lt;p&gt;The funny thing is from a big picture perspective sometimes it would be good if some developers would just reduce their code output, without providing anything else, because it would help keep all other developers in the loop.</text></item><item><author>morinted</author><text>Now we have Slack, Discord, Gitter, Microsoft Teams, and Atlassian Stride.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not sure when chat rooms became a business tool. Personally, I find myself distracted more than anything from all the notifications these apps cause, I get less done.&lt;p&gt;I have to be sure to quit every chat app and put my phone in &amp;quot;do not disturb&amp;quot; to disconnect and focus, and then I get coworkers mad that I&amp;#x27;m not online.&lt;p&gt;At least with email I could take a while to reply without anyone blinking an eye.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>shadowmint</author><text>This is well said... although I think its unlikely to be a popular opinion with people at a personal level, but I hope the people who find themselves disagreeing take a moment to reflect on it.&lt;p&gt;While I think it&amp;#x27;s fair to say these sorts of applications &lt;i&gt;do&lt;/i&gt; disrupt people and reduce their productivity, I&amp;#x27;m &lt;i&gt;certain&lt;/i&gt; that they help focus team efforts in a way that meetings just don&amp;#x27;t.&lt;p&gt;You can&amp;#x27;t split off 3 members of the team and have an important technical discussion during a meeting (or if you can, your project manager &amp;#x2F; meeting organizer isn&amp;#x27;t doing their job). You can&amp;#x27;t come back later and see &lt;i&gt;exactly&lt;/i&gt; what it is you said that you&amp;#x27;d do after a meeting. You can&amp;#x27;t tell a bot to create a bunch of tickets or what the current status of a system is.&lt;p&gt;If you find that your chat apps are not providing you with any value, maybe you&amp;#x27;re using them for stupid purposes like sharing funny pictures &amp;amp; this mornings cool tech blog post, or you&amp;#x27;re subscribed to the support channel, or your team is treating them like a social hang out space.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s not that its a bad tool; its that you&amp;#x27;re using it wrong.</text></comment>
<story><title>Atlassian launches Stride, its Slack competitor</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/07/atlassian-launches-stride-its-slack-competitor/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>erikb</author><text>A common discussion I have with other developers.&lt;p&gt;For a developer I&amp;#x27;d say I&amp;#x27;m a little more people minded than average, and a lot more big picture success oriented. And in both regards your personal productivity doesn&amp;#x27;t really matter.&lt;p&gt;The biggest problem in software development is actually not per-coder-performance but that the right things get solved, and that the solution are actually good and quickly finished. Think about how much time you wasted using a colleagues API that simply wasn&amp;#x27;t designed well, at least for your usecase.&lt;p&gt;So, if more information means you are working on the right things, and that you understand your users better, and therefore make your tools more intiutive and usable, a hit to your performance, even 50%, is not a problem.&lt;p&gt;The funny thing is from a big picture perspective sometimes it would be good if some developers would just reduce their code output, without providing anything else, because it would help keep all other developers in the loop.</text></item><item><author>morinted</author><text>Now we have Slack, Discord, Gitter, Microsoft Teams, and Atlassian Stride.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not sure when chat rooms became a business tool. Personally, I find myself distracted more than anything from all the notifications these apps cause, I get less done.&lt;p&gt;I have to be sure to quit every chat app and put my phone in &amp;quot;do not disturb&amp;quot; to disconnect and focus, and then I get coworkers mad that I&amp;#x27;m not online.&lt;p&gt;At least with email I could take a while to reply without anyone blinking an eye.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Retric</author><text>That&amp;#x27;s still small picture thinking.  Dropping efficiency by 50% is the equivalent of spending 4+ hours in a meeting every day.&lt;p&gt;If your team needs that kind of overhead then something massive is broken and a chat room is not going to fix it.&lt;p&gt;As a general rule, on large teams informal communication is vastly less efficient than formal communication.  A major goal should be avoiding having the same conversation repeatedly.</text></comment>