Despite the “asychronous” claim, you have to keep a steady eye on it and reply in realtime or the conversation will move on without you. Anyone who takes the time to ponder and respond thoughtfully with context and explanation will find that they’re too late. I like the idea of a time-limited channel. You can only reply to it during the meeting, and up to 15 minutes after. Theoretically it would force everyone to com…
There is never any expectation that spoken conversation might be archived/searchable/linkable-to-others.
Additionally in many locations (California), if that conversation is plausibly private (in person, in a hallway that isn't super busy or not in a cafe), it's illegal (albeit not perfectly) for it to be anything but ephemeral.
People can of course reproduce what they think you said in another form, but that is always open for debate and challengeable. For better or worse.
The problem with "trying it with my team for one sprint" is that I now need to have a long conversation with legal. How will the service provider handle the content (discussions, screenshots, code snippets) that my team will upload? Do our current customer contracts contain any clauses that complicate the use of external discussion sites? In the unlikely event that the service offers the option to host it locally --…
Many organizations seem to use Outlook/Exchange and configure Exchange to make it difficult to use other mail clients (not enabling imap, not enabling caldav support so that a separate calendar and email client need to be used unless you use exchange, etc). Outlook is truly awful as a mail client and it would make one want to use anything else.
So you're saying you'd rather lose all the productivity benefits of a solution that's not instant messaging than use Outlook? Powerful stance!
The problem with "trying it with my team for one sprint" is that I now need to have a long conversation with legal. How will the service provider handle the content (discussions, screenshots, code snippets) that my team will upload? Do our current customer contracts contain any clauses that complicate the use of external discussion sites? In the unlikely event that the service offers the option to host it locally --…
Email isn't searchable by people who weren't on the threads. In an org that uses IM well (they exist!) the chat system actually becomes sort of like a wiki, except a lot more helpful.
The problem with "trying it with my team for one sprint" is that I now need to have a long conversation with legal. How will the service provider handle the content (discussions, screenshots, code snippets) that my team will upload? Do our current customer contracts contain any clauses that complicate the use of external discussion sites? In the unlikely event that the service offers the option to host it locally --…
> The real answer is: just fucking use email.
I know of at least one large company that forcibly deletes emails older than N months, as part of their legal retention policy. (I'm assuming it means non-retention to limit exposure to lawsuits.)
That would be problematic for persistent documentation.
It sounds like the author was mostly thinking about INTERNAL discussion, but I think the real tragedy is in using chat like Slack for your public customer community forum.
Think of all the knowledge and employee-time locked away in the scrollback of a chat based community forum.
Better to have chat for informal community discussion, but when someone asks a question that others in your community might find useful in the future, politely direct them to post it in a more permanent (read: accessible via google search) medium.
I agree with the concern author is expressing. Usually, we do not start conversations leading to a decision/important, but it evolves into useful discussion. Onus is on us to move that convo/thread to GitHub issue & socialize it there. May be that is what author is hinting.
Chat will become the primary method of communication and will be where most work gets done. Other systems will exist sure eventually hackers will build tools for them to be interfaced with via chat clients. This has been happening for many years. Old people need to get over it and stop writing blog posts that basically sound like anti-email rants from 1998.
Maybe I am one of those "old people" but I don't understand how discord is better than more traditional forums or mailing lists for technical discussions. With a mailing list, forum thread, or GitHub issue, I can search and find something relevant to me from years ago. By contrast, discord seems so ephemeral: I have to hope I can be in the same place at the same time as the person who has the information I need. And it's a closed platform, so it's not searchable or indexable the same way as content on the open web. And if discord closes their doors, or changes their TOS in the wrong direction some day it might all just be gone from one day to another. I would be happy to understand why you think chat is a better tool for the job.
The problem with "trying it with my team for one sprint" is that I now need to have a long conversation with legal. How will the service provider handle the content (discussions, screenshots, code snippets) that my team will upload? Do our current customer contracts contain any clauses that complicate the use of external discussion sites? In the unlikely event that the service offers the option to host it locally --…
Many organizations seem to use Outlook/Exchange and configure Exchange to make it difficult to use other mail clients (not enabling imap, not enabling caldav support so that a separate calendar and email client need to be used unless you use exchange, etc). Outlook is truly awful as a mail client and it would make one want to use anything else.
Is it really that bad?
I'm just a dumb machine operator that uses Outlook at work, Fastmail for myself, and Gmail because I'm an idiot too, and really can't tell the difference.