If you had 5 teams of people standing around you all demanding your attention, would you say the problem is people speaking? No, the problem is how he deals with requests for his attention.

While I agree that Slack has problems (the “have to be present to have input into insta-decisions” is definitely one), Samuel has to take responsibility for his side of the issue. Self-discipline is required in the work world no matter the tools we use.

It’s also true that social conventions haven’t fully caught up with tools like Slack; in real life, few would tolerate 5 teams standing around them all talking at once! Just as conventions grew up around email, so they will do so with “asyncronish” tools like Slack.