Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year

What are people putting on their chat that makes them beholden to Slack? To me, the team chat app is like a terminal: it shows lines of text, but I don't expect to be able to find anything in the far future. A bit like a real-life conversation, once it's happened it turns into a vague memory. A full transcript is not that interesting.

I thought maybe integrations, but those tend to be webhooks that display an alert. Of course you don't want to have to change them, but it's limited how much pain it causes to switch to some other chat service.

If I look at the chats I'm in at the moment, moving off would be annoying, but if I got a massive bill I would certainly do it.

I spend around 30%, if not more of my work time on Slack (collaborating with others, solving customer issues, searching, documenting)

I want that experience to be good, and not using a subpar tool like (Teams, IRC etc)

As a rule of thumb, I want to use the best tool available for the job, IntelliJ for the IDE, the best coding model (whatever that is at the time), the best Video call tool, the best monitor, the best keyboard etc

Although best is usually subjective, in some of this cases what is "best" is objectively clear, in some cases the gap between the best and the next one is small in others is huge. In the case of communication tools I think the difference is huge.

Is this needed to do my work? nope It makes working more pleasant? definitely yes

> I don't expect to be able to find anything in the far future

Tell that to project maintainers switching from old-school good forums to chat apps such as Discord...

A lot of companies gravitate towards putting more and more into Slack. It has a tendency to take over email. The integrations also just accelerate that process.

If you can convince people to put everything in "project rooms" (or "team rooms" or whatever) instead of DMs, then you effectively end up with the ability to search all the historical knowledge of the company.

Slack Connect is also big. Having a chance to talk to most (if not all of your clients) from the same place where you talk to colleagues is a great thing. Far more bandwith than email, links, mentions, etc., so this is a big thing that other platforms lack.

People with such strong beliefs can be unpleasant to work with as well. Not saying you are, but there are often considerations beyond the immediate needs of developers that dictate tool choice in a company, and I find it not great if people complain about such minor inconveniences all the time (it's ok to discuss to some degree, but not in an overzealous way). Same goes for tech stacks, frameworks etc., I avoid hiring people that express extremely strong views (e.g. "JS is utter garbage") as they tend to be difficult to work with since they drag the team down with endless tech stack discussions and make others feel bad/inferior.

Google, microsoft, apple, amazon, netflix etc. were all *built* using email. I don't see why all of a sudden people think that it's low bandwidth.

Not to mention that basically every scientific breakthrough achieved since 1995 was achieved using email as the *only* form of communication (other than physical letters here and there).

They used the tool that was available at that time. I am sure they use internal chat apps as well in today's environment.

I really don't want to try to promote Slack as 'one tool to rule them all' or advocate for its features, but it definitely more bandwidth than email. Not sure have you received any of the long quoted emails recently, I have, and it can be a nightmare (and ridiculous that an email client from a USD 3 trillion dollar company cannot render it properly).

Given that Slack has integrations with various tools (incident reporting, various bots, feed submissions, apps of all sorts), video/voice chats, file storage, rich messages, advanced notifications, and, most importantly, seamless communications with clients using it, it is just a tool that has replaced so many different tools.

Sure, it is not perfect, and many other tools offer same things as Slack, this pricing situation is ridiculous, but there is a reason why nearly every single startup or a team formed in the last decade uses it or its equivalent.

It is not indented to cover all possible usages out there, and in academia I could see email working better than Slack, but as we are on the topic of Hack Club, it would be hard to argue it would exist in this form without Slack-like tools.