The Green Dot That Used to Be
A meditation on endings, presence, and the Slack ghosts we never talk about
If you work in a modern-day tech company, you're probably familiar with Slack. It's a chat platform, or collaboration platform depending on how you spin it, where most of your day-to-day work happens. Sure, there are meetings, but Slack is where the real pulse of the company lives. Conversations. Decisions. Announcements. Meltdowns. Memes. It all happens there.
Every time I join a new company, I find myself oddly drawn to deactivated Slack accounts.
Yes, I know they simply mean someone has left the company. Their account is gone, their name grayed out. But these quiet remnants always fascinate me.
What brought them here? What did they hope for? Did they leave with a smile or a bruise?
Slack doesn't tell you that. It just leaves behind the ghost of a name, frozen in time. Maybe a kind message in a long-abandoned channel. A thumbs-up emoji from a forgotten thread. A reaction on your first announcement. That's all. No farewell. No context. Just silence where there was once presence.
And I can't help but think: every deactivated account is a modern-day allegory. Someone who once believed. Who maybe worked late. Who tried. Who laughed at inside jokes in #random. Who once dreamed that this job would be the right next step. And maybe it was until it wasn't.
We don't talk about this much. Tech is obsessed with beginnings: onboarding, orientation, welcome lunches. But endings? They're quiet. Sanitized. Often wrapped in "wishing them the best in their next adventure," even when that next adventure wasn't a choice.
I've worked long enough to know that the stories behind deactivation are rarely simple. Layoffs. Burnout. Managerial friction. Misalignment. Or just life happening. Some were treated unfairly. Some simply outgrew the place. Some left before they broke. Some left after.
And yet, the traces remain in old threads, shared files, forgotten channels. Digital sediment layered over time.
Sometimes I scroll back through channels and stumble on a deactivated account's message. It's strangely moving. As if time paused mid-sentence.
It reminds me that work is, at its core, made of people. Not org charts. Not KPIs. Not dashboards. But people: messy, brilliant, hopeful, flawed. People who leave marks, even when they're no longer around.
So here's to the grayed-out names.
To those who came before us.
To the ones who paved, pushed, stumbled, or carried the weight so we didn't have to.
To the ones who left silently, whose stories are unknown, but whose impact lingers.
Because every deactivated Slack account was once just like ours: active, green, typing.
And one day, ours will be too, and that somebody new will look at our grayed-out names and wonder the same thing.