Using “here” or “channel”

Let’s talk about slack and @here & @channel keywords. Those 2 words are useful and dangerous at the same time.

With great power comes great responsibility

Uncle Ben

How it works?

It’ll basically notify everyone in the channel. Literally everyone

How to use it right?

With common sense. if channel has 8 members and they all should be notified - don’t hesitate. In all other cases - don’t use it unless you know what you are doing.

How to use it wrong?

Almost all remaining use-cases.

Please ask yourself few questions:

• Do you really need to jnotify everyone?
• Is it that important?
  • Remember that stuff important to you doesn’t have to be important for someone else
• How big is audience?

Why such a fuss

Because people tent too notify to wide audience. This is a problem due to a cost & co-existence.

Assuming you have notified 200 engineers on a single channel and 60% of them were focused on real work. What has happen? 120 people has lost focus to read your message. Context switching has just happen. 120 souls has to stop a proces of thinking, debugging or analysis to check why they were directly notified.

Getting back to the original thinking varies from 2 to 30 min(depends on task complexity) once reading message is fast(let’s say 10s).

Please imaginge it’s 2:52PM.

10% of the engineers have a meeting at 3PM. They have 8 minutes to next meeting. Will they even try to get back to debugging or will they take another cup of the tea?

let’s say 2% are working on complicated task and disturb has 20 min impact.

Now let’s do some math:

200*(0.15+0.6*2+0.1*6+0.02*20) = 470m
470m ~= 1d

🎉 you just burned whole day 🎉

what if there is 2000 people on a channel? Impact is 10x biggers - fortnightly salary was just burned.

---

So don’t use @here