How Big Technical Changes Happen at Slack

Keith Adams and Johnny Rodgers

Most new things in technology turn out to be fads: patterns of talking and doing that come and go without leaving a permanent mark. Microkernels; EPIC architectures like IA-64; object request brokers; and 1990s’-style neural nets are gone, and will not return. Sorry for the deep throwbacks; only time proves which things are fads, so for uncontroversial examples we have to reach pretty far back.

While it is hard to imagine today — at their height — all of these defunct technologies were wildly popular, with charismatic, sincere, and smart advocates. They were supported by plausible first-principles arguments that showed why their chosen tech would inevitably triumph. The fads spawned movements, manifestos, conferences, and companies. To be clear, these fads are not to be confused with deliberate frauds, which are much more rare. The motivations behind these technologies were heartfelt. Things just turned out differently, despite all available appearances at the time.

On the other hand, a crucial few new techniques are revolutions : potent, enduring changes that confer long-term advantages to their adopters. Object-oriented programming, hardware virtualization, the world wide web, public cloud, CI/CD, and 2010s-style neural nets (reborn as deep learning) are now permanent parts of the world of computing that were once indistinguishable from fads. We are, already, surrounded by concrete technical successes that we did not know how to achieve before these things came along.

Like all technology companies, Slack wants to make sure we catch revolutions at the right time, while limiting the energy we spend chasing fads . What strategy can we follow to ensure this? This post outlines our approach to this problem, which we continue to refine and apply through our practice at Slack.