For the last several years, we have used Slack as our primary way of communicating in the Development department. However, company-wide we have Microsoft Office 365 licences, so other departments use Teams. I always thought it was a dumb decision to use Slack due to essentially paying twice for a communication tool. Slack isn’t that expensive on the lower tiers but it adds up when you have a large amount of staff. Plus, due to stricter security policies, we wanted to use single-sign on so had to upgrade to the Business+ licence which didn’t seem to be worth the cost.
As time goes on, we keep “improving security” which I often think is just an excuse to get rid of certain software. How do you really determine which software or companies are secure anyway? They could tell you they use certain security practices or have some accreditation but if your data is exposed in a data breach is another story.
“not sure what you can hack via Slack. Just over reacting like everything these days. 2FA all the things!”
me
On Slack’s Enterprise licence, they boast even more security features and with our new strict security policies, the management decided that we would have to pay significantly more to keep using Slack, or just get rid of it. So they decided to get rid of it.
To be fair, Teams has improved a bit over the years, and although I prefer the way Slack looks, and its excellent emoji support (you can add custom emojis!); I can’t justify the cost.
why is slack not secure as opposed to teams? probably just nonsense. Where does the data go when it is lost? surely doesn’t leak out onto the dark web!
Rob
We somehow had over 900 members according to Slack Analytics but I reckon that was every historic user since we started using it. Scrolling down the list and roughly estimating, we seemed to have around 300 which could reasonably be called “active”. Then looking at the Business+ costing, it should cost $45,000 per year. Enterprise is one of those tiers where it says “contact sales for a quote”. One manager reckoned it would cost $250k a year to use which doesn’t sound right. How can you justify such an expense for a chat application? Even if it did cost that much on paper, surely you can haggle that down significantly. I’m sure Slack won’t want to lose us. Surely charging $60k is good profit for them.
I often think the way companies charge for software licences doesn’t make sense. They often just charge “per user per month” but there will be times where people don’t actively use the licence due to the work they are doing, or maybe have annual leave to take. Then there’s people that join temporarily, then people just naturally join/leave the business over time. So who really tracks what the accurate amount you need to pay. Companies just end up overpaying for licences they don’t need. Slack seem to suggest they charge just for active users. But what happens if you just send a few messages for 1 day in the month; is that an active user for the month? I often think the best approach would be to charge for a certain amount of users, but then give out an extra 25% keys for light usage.
One thing that I found interesting when looking at Slack Analytics is that most people seemed to be sending as little as 20 messages per day. I think that they are either super focussed and just work independently, or they are chilling out. It’s hard to believe that you can work well in a team, or even have a good relationship with them if you only send 20 messages. I find that some people use instant messaging by sending a sentence per message, which will inflate the message count which makes the numbers even more surprising. For example, they could send 4 messages for this interaction:
Hi
Are you free?
I was wondering if you can help me work out this error
I have just got the latest code but am unable to log in
The decision to remove Slack was disappointing for some, but the bizarre thing is that we got told by our manager on the Wednesday, it was formally announced on Thursday, and gone by Friday 4pm. If you were on annual leave that week, you would be confused when you could no longer access Slack on the following Monday. There was some great information that we had on there, and was great to search for common errors and find solutions to them. We didn’t have enough warning to try and extract the information.
“Has the cost of the loss of productivity and collaboration been factored into the decision to remove slack?”
Sad developer
One developer had a crazy idea of developing our own solution:
“We are a software development company. If we’re that desperate, can’t we write our own messaging system, protected to the security standard we want?”
Ambitious developer
The thing is, we already made a chat application for our users. I never understood why users would want a native chat app when they could use something more widespread. Since we already have a chat app, then it could actually make sense to add more features to it; then use it internally.
Making your own tools isn’t as cheap as you would think. If a developer’s wage is £35k, then paying only 1 developer to develop and maintain it each year is £35k. You may as well just pay for Slack then. But if we are using it and selling it to our users, then it does make more sense.
The weird thing is, for our upcoming software, we originally used Okta for the login functionality but it was decided it was too expensive, so a few developers got together and made their own solution. That seems bonkers to me because that is about security, so surely you should leave it up to the company that specialises In security. So the fact that we do make custom authentication makes the idea of making a chat app even more realistic.
However one of the architects working on this upcoming software ironically replied:
“We need to move away from homegrown solutions, especially based on the presentation happening now from our Head of Security”
Hypocritical software architect
Another architect supported this claim:
“This is about minimising home grown solutions when an off-the-shelf solution would do just as well”
Software Architect
Does that mean he should be bringing Okta back?
Stranger Coding Tings 