okay, i'll bite. My employer recently made the switch from Hipchat to Slack, and I can't really tell any difference in functionality. The only thing slack has is that it's pretty/shiny, which doesn't really make any difference to me personally. If anything, I miss being able to arrange the channels like I could in Hipchat.
My employer also recently switched from Hipchat to Slack, and I'd say Slack is vastly superior.
Most important for me are the notifications. Slack lets you set per-channel notification settings. With Hipchat I'd either miss messages I wanted to see or have to get constant notifications. "More granular notifications" was either the #1 or #2 highest-voted issue in their feature requests for over three years, and they're only now getting to the point where they have a beta version of the feature.
Also, if I received messages while I had Hipchat closed and opened it back up later, there'd be no indication I had received a message[0]. With Slack, I can always quickly catch up on messages I missed in channels I care about.
It's possible to edit posts in Slack, which isn't as essential, but still very useful.
Hipchat would initiate laggy emoticon autocomplete after I typed an opening paren, which I found very obnoxious. My goal was almost always to add a parenthetical statement, not an emoticon. There didn't seem to be a way to turn the autocomplete off.
Hipchat uad miscellaneous minor bugs that I've never experienced with Slack.
The only real thing I see in Hipchat's favor is the integrated video/voice chat, but there are plenty of other ways for me to do that when I need to. Plus, hopefully Slack will have Screenhero integrated soon.
[0] If I was @tagged I'd receive an email, but the app itself still wouldn't give me any indication of unread messages.
Since I used the keyboard for most of my navigation in HipChat I find Slack incredibly annoying. With HipChat I could rearrange channels and have my most often used 3 at the top and switch between with a couple keystrokes. With Slack it's so much more cumbersome.
Slack feels much slower.
In Hipchat you can edit your last message with Vim style substitution strings. i.e.: s/were/where/
The Channel/Group distinction in Slack is useless and annoying since you have to adjust team broadcasts to the channel you're in (@group or @channel).
Slack doesn't have @here (so offline people don't get pinged). i.e.: "@here Anyone up for lunch?"
I'd be much less annoyed with Slack if it let me rearrange Channels. But still. It seems like it trades obvious functionality for stupid meme integrations. Gets under my skin.
Personally, being in a ~20 person company, I really don't really care about per-channel notifications. YAGNI. If I don't want to be notified, I just don't join that channel. Otherwise if someone pings me with @group, I want to see it. And if it's important enough, don't depend on the chat app sending my phone a notification. Text or Call me. We're a Mac shop so that's just a keystroke away with the Messages app or FaceTime Audio if you're at your desk anyways. Don't tell me sites are down and the building is on fire through Slack.
I know about the s// substitution, but it just isn't very useful. Sometimes I'll have sent a couple messages before I notice a typo. Also, it's very limited in the type of edits it can make. Last time I tried to use it I realized I had typed "it's" instead of "its", but it turns out I had already using "it's" earlier in the message. I ended up making both "it's" wrong instead of correcting the one I wanted to.
Slack added @here a few weeks ago. Otherwise that would have been on my list of Hipchat pluses.
Being able to rearrange channels would be nice, but it isn't a big deal to me. I mostly use the "Jump to next unread message" hotkey in Slack to switch between channels.
okay, you're right. The per channel notifications and showing notifications on logging back in are both things I really wanted in Hipchat at the time. I guess now that I'm so used to having them in Slack, I completely forgot about not having them!!
HipChat is playing catchup constantly with Slack (except the @here feature; Slack was behind the ball on that one). Slack's channel integrations are incredibly smooth. Message delivery is so much more reliable on Slack mobile than HipChat's app ever was (perhaps this was iOS specific?). Message management (stars, pinning, history links I can take from Slack and throw into Github issues, commits, or other SaaS team tools). The management of multiple teams in one interface on both mobile and mac desktop app (Slack handles this extremely well).
Github issues are enough for me to stick with GH. It Just Works. So you don't have to provide me with Github, Slack, etc as an employer. But it'll effect my decision to work there. I've interviewed people at my previous job, and they have flat out decided not to join when they were told we weren't using Github and had no plans to move to it.
When you're spending 8 hours (or more!) a day in tools, you expect them to be the best/easiest/most productive to use.
Slack:
1. I agree on the part about multiple teams, but since I only use it for work, it hasn't really been much of an issue.
2. I never really had any issues w message delivery, I'm on Android though, and it seems like you're on iOS.
3. I also don't remember having any issues w integrations, do you have a specific example of something that it wasn't able to do?
4. What exactly do you mean by "stars, pinning, history links I can take from Slack and throw into Github issues, commits, or other SaaS team tools"? Do you mean a bot or something that performed those actions on certain keystrokes?
Github:
1. I don't really care for Github issues to be honest. We don't use them at work, and for a lot of the open source repos, it's just a bunch of +1s with the occasional constructive comment sprinkled in somewhere.
2. Also, the comments on the PR don't have a way to mark someone's suggestion as accepted, and the comments aren't threaded either.
3. My biggest concern is that anyone can accidentally force push, though I don't know if Gitlab has a way of preventing that either.
My point is that for all the talk about meritocracy in the field of technology, when it comes to success and adoption, marketing and visual aesthetics usually outweigh the actual quality of the product. (also see: mongodb, beats etc)
Regarding (Slack/4)... I believe that toomuchtodo is talking about the following features within Slack:
* Stars: the ability to privately star individual messages (so you can easily find them again)
* Pinning: the ability to publicly highlight specific messages within a channel, much like pinned posts in a forum (effectively channel-wide starring)
* History links: click on the timestamp next to any Slack message and it'll open a canonical URL for that message, allowing you to drop these links to specific messages or points in a conversation into other chats, GH issues or anywhere else you fancy.
i see. History links does seem like a useful feature (I've pasted links to SO answers in slack, so same could be applied to when someone answers a q on slack)
Stars also seems like a useful feature, but I'm so used to pasting useful stuff in a google doc, never even thought of it
GitLab protects the master branch by default and other branches can be configured to be protected. Protected branches don't allow force pushes or deletions from anyone.
Isn't visual quality a part of "quality"? You can't assume that everyone is like you, and it's a very important factor for a lot of people. Slack didn't invent anything new, but their chat somehow crossed the line to being polished enough for "normal people". As for beats, all I'm going to say is that people don't buy Chanel handbags for their carrying capacity.
"Github: 1. I don't really care for Github issues to be honest. We don't use them at work, and for a lot of the open source repos, it's just a bunch of +1s with the occasional constructive comment sprinkled in somewhere."
I have a similar probably-not-well-enough-informed opinion of Github issues. Does anyone have a quick example of a (public) Github project using Github issues in an obviously useful way?
>"But it'll effect my decision to work there. I've interviewed people at my previous job, and they have flat out decided not to join when they were told we weren't using Github and had no plans to move to it."
This is a bit extreme IMO. Tools should be a secondary concern for any developer. If a job is right for a person, such details should not matter.
Those details influence whether the job is right, though. I won't work for a company that uses CVS, for example, because it tells me a lot about the culture of the company. They may have perfectly defensible reasons that make sense to them to use it, but I will, through my own cultural biases and feelings, not be comfortable there.
I restarted slack about three hours ago, and as of right now it's using 552MB [0] across 5 processes. It goes back down if I restart it, and that was enough of a "wontfix" for the slack team when I reported it.
14 channel, I don't know how many there are on the server. Not sure on the number of messages / hour, but it is quite a lot. Leaving slack on overnight has my numbers up to about 800MB. Regardless of how many messages, 800MB for a chat client is nuts.
Also, what does Github give you over Gitlab?