A Sad Love Song About Chat Backchannels

I love a good chat backchannel. I’ve gone on vacations with my backchannels. I have enamel pins, stickers, and other custom merch from backchannels. I’ve landed at least three jobs via backchannel connections. I’ve listened and strategized with backchannel members who were getting shut out, pushed out, or overlooked, and I’ve been there to celebrate as backchannel friends went from ICs to managers, directors, executives, founders, and investors. I’ve made some of my best friends in backchannels. I’ve helped teams avoid what might have been serious hiring mistakes through them, like bringing on employees with a proven track record of harassment and abuse.

I’ve also seen them spread misinformation, leak private facts, drain morale, make hard problems harder, and cause needless suffering. As someone who is demographically outside of the tech mainstream in some ways (mixed-race, gender non-conforming & queer, woman), backchannels are a part of my reality whether I like them or not. They have great power — often not as much power as actually being in the mainstream can offer, but still quite a lot — and with that, there is an imperative to find ways to use them fairly and effectively.

If you are already a member of many chat backchannels yourself, you’ll probably want to skip the next section and just head to #Observations & Lessons.

Definitions

A backchannel is any “secondary or covert route for the passage of information” (Oxford). For me, almost always, the specific backchannel platform ends up being Slack, but most other chat services can support backchannels with similar mechanics. I’ll specifically focus on my experiences with chat backchannels at technology companies where the channel was themed around some facet of role or identity (women engineers, employees of color, LGBTQ+ ICs, etc.), although much of this applies to other sorts of backchannels as well.

In my experience, there are three primary types of chat backchannels:

• Semi-public. The existence of these channels is widely known. Anyone can join without an invitation. An accountability mechanism, like audit logging or public notices about who entered a room, discourages those who aren’t meant to participate from joining or watching.
• Private. These channels reside in some larger shared chat context (like a company’s private Slack organization) but require an invitation to join. Their existence may be openly acknowledged or not. These often feel very private, but often can be accessed (with some administrative hassle) by the organization’s HR team or leadership.
• Off-world. These channels are also intended to discuss some shared context like an employer, but they live somewhere wholly separate, like a different Slack organization or an entirely different chat platform. They may be harder for company HR or leadership to access (those entities might need a subpoena, access to a physical device with a persistent login, or a cooperative channel member), and it may be less clear which sets of company or community rules and norms apply.

All of these types of backchannels are generally persistent and long-lived, often springing up early in an organization’s history and living indefinitely. Their unstated goal is often to help mitigate, rectify, or cope with the specific stresses that come from being part of a specific group in a particular company context.

People who participate in few chat backchannels sometimes imagine they’re used mostly for gossip, office politics, or conspiracy, but in my experience, that overstates the median backchannel’s level of drama. The four most common uses I see are a mix of:

• Social. Just as it might be exhausting to be an introvert in a party full of extroverts and frustrating to be an extrovert stuck in a library full of introverts, it is taxing to be surrounded by people who have a lot in common with each other and little in common with you. Backchannels often provide a place for underrepresented folks to socialize with coworkers that may share a common identity even if they wouldn’t collaborate naturally during their workday.
• Problem solving. These channels also often become ad hoc problem-solving spaces, especially for dealing with situations that the group in the channel has found to be harmful, but the rest of the company has largely ignored.
• Venting. Channels often take a turn in this direction when attempts at problem solving have met with limited success. Sometimes there is a norm that encourages using the space for venting and processing before moving on to taking action, and sometimes not. Sometimes the norms are unclear, and there are constant wires crossed between those who just want to vent and those who want to solve every problem. (The best practice of asking specifically whether someone wants advice/help or just wants to share has bloomed from the cultural ashes of more than one venting-heavy channel.)
• Education and resource-sharing. Relevant blog posts, articles, and other resources are often circulated widely in these channels. (Slack and other popular chat providers make efforts to hide themselves as a traffic referrer for privacy reasons, so if you’ve, say, written a blog post about management or DEI and seen a spike in traffic with no apparent cause, shares within chat may be part of the explanation.)

There are plenty of other uses (reference checks, politics, industry news analysis, etc.), but the four above are the ones that usually take up > 90% of the space in the channels I’ve been in.

Observations & Lessons

Here are some patterns I’ve seen in my own backchannels and some things I’ve learned along the way.

Problems grow old quickly in backchannels

I can’t stress this one enough: problems discussed in backchannels age like trash in the hot summer sun. At first, they’re freshly concerning, but after a few mentions, they start to feel old and intractable — whether or not anyone has yet made a serious attempt to solve them.

People are often more open about their problems in backchannels than they might be with their manager or wider team. This is usually good for initial debugging, assessment, and validation (e.g. to combat gaslighting), but it has a double edge. People end up preferring to talk in the backchannel and don’t take their problems out of the backchannel to someplace where they could best be addressed.

Meanwhile, other people in the backchannel have heard about the problem so much that it starts to feel unsolvable, and they start to believe that the company lacks the will to address the issue, whether or not this is true.

If you can’t fix a problem wholly inside a backchannel and you believe it’s safe to escalate a problem out, do it early, do it often (seriously, bring it up more than once), and tell the channel that you did it — it can be the key to maintaining a channel as a useful problem-solving space, rather than spiraling into just venting. This is so important that it’s worth repeating: when you raise a problem in a backchannel, try as much as you can to also escalate it out of the backchannel, and let the group know you’re doing it. Backchannels that do this have a chance of becoming wildly effective forces for positive company evolution. Backchannels that don’t do this have a much higher chance of becoming toxic dumping grounds where misinformation and sad feelings reign.

All of this leads me to…

You need space for negativity, but boundaries can be helpful

Venting can be a good thing, and for many people, it can be a necessary first step to untangling a difficult problem. But for me, being in too many spaces with unmitigated venting or negativity takes a heavy emotional toll. I’ll continue my ongoing quest to figure out how to stop absorbing other people’s feelings, but in the meantime I’ve liked being in Slacks where there’s a specific space for venting (e.g. a dedicated #rants or #venting channel ) and other spaces for advice or problem-solving. I’ve also grown to despise any sort of women’s channel where people commonly dump every new article about all the things that are broken or difficult for women in tech (especially when these articles fail to acknowledge the existence of other gender minorities or take an intersectional view of the issues). I’ve particularly liked channels that have specific rules or norms around dropping links or content, e.g. to always include at least one line of analysis about what you learned from an article.

They improve with a host

Usually a small number of people become the moderators or informal hosts of these sorts of channels. You often figure out who they are without anyone mentioning it. Sometimes it’s the channel creator, sometimes not. They often do a lot of visible emotional labor to support people in the chat and make new members comfortable. In a favorite past backchannel, the informal moderators used to coordinate sending flowers to people who were having a particularly tough day or week. If you have a couple of good people in this host or moderator role in your chat, you are #blessed. They usually make a world of difference in the health of a backchannel.

If you find yourself wearing this hat and it’s become a burden, you can… just take it off. Really. Running a backchannel is almost never your job; don’t let it ruin your actual job for you. Conversely, if you see a promising space and wish it were more active or you knew the members better, you may be able to try jumping in and playing this role yourself — it’s often enough just to be welcoming and ready with some spare emotional energy.

Rules are good — if they’re real

While I love a good code of conduct (CoC) like the one used in the Engineering Managers slack, I have seen bad CoCs out there too: vague CoCs, CoCs with no enforcement mechanism, or CoCs that haven’t been fully ratified by members. When nobody is empowered to enforce a CoC, it’s not clear who will enforce it, or it’s only partially adopted, it probably isn’t better than no CoC. It sets the expectation for a particular level of safety that isn’t really there. I’d take a short set of rules and expectations any day (e.g. for one memorable slack, “no snitches, no screenshots”) over a bad CoC.

There’s something like a Dunbar’s number for channels

Dunbar’s number, the proposed cognitive limit to the number of people one can maintain active social relationships with, is often estimated to be about ~150. There is some smaller subset of that number that can be effectively stuffed into a channel at once. In my experience, channels only really maintain a stable culture and set of norms when they’re below about 50 people and have a high rate of active participation, where a majority of people in the channel participate during any given week. Otherwise speaking in a room starts to feel like performing on live TV: it’s high-pressure and you have no idea how the audience is reacting. While larger channels or ones with many silent participants may still work well for light socializing and sharing resources, I’ve seen them be far less effective for problem solving — it’s hard to have a substantive discussion without knowing your audience.

Sub-channels and splintering are fine

People sometimes worry that the splintering of sub-channels is a problem or an anti-pattern, especially when the sub-channel is intended for a marginalized group (e.g. if a #nonbinary-people-of-color channel is created as a new channel by someone in the existing #nonbinary channel). Your organization might have problems and anti-patterns galore, but this isn’t one of them, just as the presence of the original backchannel didn’t necessarily mean that your company was fundamentally hostile to this group.

At my current company, if you are a product engineer, you probably report to a woman director (me) who reports to a woman CTO who reports to a woman CEO. There is no general woman’s chat backchannel at this company. Women are the majority of execs; they are half the board. To create a “women” backchannel with all those execs and managers would probably be an unfair exclusion of non-women at the company from important discussions. But none of this means that the organization lacks any of the common problems for women or other gender minorities (especially those who also belong to other marginalized groups) that come from the larger, male-dominated tech culture — we come from it, we exist in it, most of us have learned our strongest habits there. So I imagine (and hope) that women engineering ICs, women of color, etc. have their own backchannels — these channels are still useful for day-to-day problem-solving and resource sharing regardless of what leadership looks like.

You can leave them

If a particular channel isn’t serving your needs, you really can just leave. Like nearly everything, it gets more complicated if you’re in an official leadership position (e.g. if you are the only manager in the LGBTQ+ employees slack, it may send a negative message for you to pull the parachute cord, and you’ll have to think that through). But for most of us, if you aren’t an official moderator or in a position of power, vote with your feet and go form or find a channel you’d rather spend your time in.

You can get rid of them

You can shut down a channel or chat entirely, and you absolutely should, if one has proven unreliable or unsafe in a way that can’t be quickly resolved. For example, if a channel is a consistent source of misinformation, or it’s clear that trust has been breached, it may be doing more harm than good. I had never considered that this was an option until I saw a colleague at a past company do it when she found out about a breach of confidentiality, and it’s something I continue to admire that person for to this day. A bad backchannel can be worse than no backchannel, if it gives members an unwarranted sense of security and brings harm to members. If you are the formal or informal host of one of these, please remember it’s within your power to shut ’em down. People can always start a channel up again later if they want to try their hand at creating a better channel culture another time.

So that’s the whole sad love song. In conclusion, backchannels are powerful; wield them wisely, save up those good animated gifs, escalate problems out quickly, and don’t forget to thank your moderators.