So apparently everyone at this enormous phone company was still living in the 80s when teleconferencing was something you paid for. "Can I set up a conference bridge and then have them all call into it?"
To communicate with them, I was issued a cellphone (natch), and when I asked if there was a preferred way to juggle the multiple teams, my predecessor said "Just keep the calls short so you minimize the chances of having to put one on hold when another calls you." I'd have 3 or 4 teams in the field, and I was at a desk pulling marionette strings in the network for them. You're not kidding! I once worked with teams of field techs for a large american cellular operator who shall not be named. (When is the next “who’s hiring”? Mid-level Product Manager shackled by golden handcuffs seeks short walks to happy hour and a 4 day work week, heh) Hilarious, when you consider we sell wholesale communications platforms and services. I’ve sat through four all hands calls now where “unified communication” was brought up and “infra-departmental communication” was mentioned as the leading gripe on preceding employee satisfaction surveys.
I found that last one especially creative and especially worrisome if these are the lengths people are going through. I’ve been given expense reports for paid accounts for Zoom, LogMeIn and someone even tried expensing $3 after buying their own phone number and writing a single serving conferencing app on top of Twilio. Hell we still have people struggling to set up conference bridges and video calls and have resorted to buying their own solutions and expensing them back to payroll. It's just IRC in a walled garden and costing 10x as much, with shitty features you can't opt out of (like the new editor and threads, which birthed a whole cadre of slack micro-managers).Īsking myself this question everyday in an org that uses Skype for Business, Teams, Slack and.yes, there’s an island of engineers and ops people using IRC sneering at all of us from the horizon. I have no idea what spell was cast on those people by Slack but, god damnit, it worked. In both cases the Slack advocates went rogue and since they were also the loudest voices, people switched over just to get back into the conversation. In both cases there was a massive bike shedding moment where the company engaged in a chat-war, with one half being solely devoted to Slack, and the rest of us holding back and saying why we need to switch. It was simple, native, and did the job until Atlassian fucked it up with a massive rewrite. Two places I worked at used to communicate through HipChat.
Now we have this, in a full-blown browser runtime that doesn't integrate with the OS very well.Īctually triggers a good, 8-9 year old memory. Yep, basically don't have a choice and discussing alternatives is hopeless.