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Our Slack

Slack is our (virtual) clubhouse where all our members hang our and chat, and where all new jobs are posted.

You can love or hate Slack, but for our community it has proven to be a fantastic "hub", where all threads come together. All new Uplink members automatically receive an invite to our Slack, and most accept it, as this is where almost everything happens, i.e. discussions among members, announcements from the Uplink team, job postings, and much more.

Moreover, we have implemented the entire job application process as a Slack workflow. So if you're planning to apply for a job, get on board! 🤠

In our Slack, you'll find a number of public channels and job channels.

Public channels​

This is where you can talk with other Uplink members!

  • #announcements - Official announcements from the Uplink team. Only admins can post in this channel, but everyone can (and is encouraged to) comment in a thread on the announcements!
  • #business - Chat about everything related to the business side of freelancing - clients, contracts, finances, insurance, freelancer registration, company incorporation, etc. Feel free to ask for help if you’re new to the game!
  • #events - Are you organizing or planning to attend an event, meetup or conference? Let the other Uplink members know!
  • #ideas - Post your side projects or ideas for new services or products here to get feedback!
  • #investing - Talk about investments, banks, stocks, crypto, etc. with your fellow Uplinkers.
  • #uplink - If you’re interested to hear what the Uplink team is working on and give feedback on ideas for new features, join this channel!
  • #lounge - Fun stuff, discussions about life and the universe, screenshots of the most absurd recruiter messages, and everything else non-business related.
  • #lang-rust - Everything about the Rust programming language.
  • #tech-backend, #tech-frontend, #tech-security + 5 more - Channels starting with "tech-" are dedicated to questions, discussions, news, and articles about a certain tech topic.
  • #city-berlin, #city-hamburg + 3 more - Channels starting with "city-" are dedicated to questions and discussions about the local IT scene, events, coworking spaces, companies etc. in a certain city.
  • #marketplace - This is the right channel for buying and selling hardware, software, office equipment, or similar.
  • #fun - This is the place to come to for your daily dose of FUN - ridiculous recruiter messages, client fails, jokes, memes, and everything else that is worth a chuckle!

Guidelines​

Here are a few articles with guidelines for effective online conversations that we recommend everyone to skim:

Job channels​

Each time a new job is published, it is posted to one or (most of the time) multiple job channels, where all members can apply to it. As a member, you can simply join the channels you are interested in (e.g., if you'd only like to hear about direct jobs with React.js, Java, or Kotlin, join #jobs-direct-frontend-react and #jobs-direct-backend-java-kotlin) and you will receive a mobile or desktop notification from Slack each time a new job ist posted.

Direct jobs and recruiter jobs are posted to separate channels. Join the ones that are relevant to you!

All jobs​

Direct jobs by technologies/skills​

If you're interested in direct jobs in a specific skill area, join one of these channels.

Note that the channels #jobs-direct-backend, #jobs-direct-frontend, and #jobs-direct-mobile will receive all job postings from their sub-groups, i.e. every job posted to #jobs-direct-backend-ruby will also be posted to #jobs-direct-backend.

Recruiter jobs by technologies/skills​

Recruiter jobs are grouped by technologies and can be found in the following channels:

Community jobs​

If you'd like to hear about jobs from other members of the Uplink community, join #community-jobs!

Unlike the other job channels, #community-jobs is open for everyone to post. Post your job here if:

  • you have a personal project, but are missing the skills or time to work on it, or
  • you're working on a client project that you could need some help with, or
  • you started a startup and are looking for co-founders or a CTO.

If you post in this channel, please keep a few things in mind:

  • Be prepared to pay a market rate for the skills you're looking for (unless you're looking for a co-founder and offering shares). As a rule of thumb, it shouldn't be much less than what you would accept yourself if you were offered the job.
  • Describe the tasks as detailed as possible to make the job appealing.
  • Mention whether you'd like to meet the other freelancer face-to-face or if they can work completely remotely. Of course, jobs that can be done 100% remotely are much more attractive.
  • Mention how interested freelancers should contact you. The easiest is "PM me for details".
  • Please don't use @channel to notify all members in the channel of your post.

You should not post in this channel if you simply received a job offer from a client (or recruiter) that you don't want to take on. Instead, you should refer the client to us! 😇

Restrictions​

Our Slack workspace has a few restrictions:

90 days limit​

We are on the free Slack plan and have no way to switch to any of the paid plans, since this would mean several thousand Euros per month in fees that we would have to pay to Slack.

On the free plan, only the messages of the last 90 days (before September 2022, the last 10k messages) are accessible in our workspace.

To avoid all the knowledge, that is shared by our members, ending up in the void, we introduced the Community Wiki in June 2020.

No email notifications after a period of inactivity​

Slack wants to make sure that users do not receive email notifications from workspaces that they don't regularly visit.

To that end, users are tagged as 'inactive' if they show no (or only very little) activity in a workspace for 14 days. If another 60 days go by without activity, Slack stops sending the user email notifications for this workspace.

The way that Slack defines 'showing activity' is very specific - sending at least 10 messages in a 7 day period, or at least 9 actions on 3 days within a 7 day period. An action could be reading a message in a channel, changing the channel, or creating a post.

So if you don't receive any email notifications from our workspace anymore, most likely Slack has tagged you as 'inactive'. This can happen even if you log in regularly, read messages, or even post messages yourself, since you might still end up under the 'showing activity' threshold explained before!

The easiest way to make sure that your account is set to 'active' and you're receiving email notifications is to send 10 quick messages to yourself. Yes, this actually works! (confirmed by Slack support)