New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: As a dev, slack has ruined my life
Ask HN: As a dev, slack has ruined my life
5 by hnthrowaway1099 | 1 comments on Hacker News.
I've been reflecting over the past 2 years of covid lockdowns, the shift to remote work. I love remote work, it has given me more flexibility and made it easier for me to be better at work and better at home. However, it has taken a significant and largely unseen toll on my mental health. I am not sure why, I'm still trying to figure it out, but I have made one key observation. And I'd welcome either confirmation or denial from this crowd if you've experienced the same. For context, we have shifted largely to using Slack, video call, and email for communication. Slack is the biggest culprit in the whole mess. My biggest takeaway is that text is not lossless compression for communication. Or put another way, text doesn't capture the vocal inflection and nuances that communicating by voice does. And also, for some reason, I tend to interpret a written message in a much worse way than I do a message that is communicated verbally. One message on its own is not a huge deal, but across the 100+ channels I belong to and the probably hundreds of messages that come my way in a day, it adds up to a lot of added psychological burden. I think email already had this drawback, but with slack because people are empowered to just fire away a message, less thought goes into it, the frequency goes up, and the psychological toll increases. Does anyone feel the same? Do you have any tips to deal with this? Sometimes I think I'm a snowflake for thinking this way, and I've definitely had to learn to toughen up during this pandemic working a very stressful job at a FAANG. But it is one of the things I think has made the largest change, as far as a psychological toll goes. Thanks for reading.
5 by hnthrowaway1099 | 1 comments on Hacker News.
I've been reflecting over the past 2 years of covid lockdowns, the shift to remote work. I love remote work, it has given me more flexibility and made it easier for me to be better at work and better at home. However, it has taken a significant and largely unseen toll on my mental health. I am not sure why, I'm still trying to figure it out, but I have made one key observation. And I'd welcome either confirmation or denial from this crowd if you've experienced the same. For context, we have shifted largely to using Slack, video call, and email for communication. Slack is the biggest culprit in the whole mess. My biggest takeaway is that text is not lossless compression for communication. Or put another way, text doesn't capture the vocal inflection and nuances that communicating by voice does. And also, for some reason, I tend to interpret a written message in a much worse way than I do a message that is communicated verbally. One message on its own is not a huge deal, but across the 100+ channels I belong to and the probably hundreds of messages that come my way in a day, it adds up to a lot of added psychological burden. I think email already had this drawback, but with slack because people are empowered to just fire away a message, less thought goes into it, the frequency goes up, and the psychological toll increases. Does anyone feel the same? Do you have any tips to deal with this? Sometimes I think I'm a snowflake for thinking this way, and I've definitely had to learn to toughen up during this pandemic working a very stressful job at a FAANG. But it is one of the things I think has made the largest change, as far as a psychological toll goes. Thanks for reading.
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