Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

If it will matter after today, don't talk about it in a chat room

critter.blog

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 329 posts

Re: If it will matter after today, don't talk about it in a chat room

#91

Post by Footkerchief »

NationalPark wrote: post #34
legerdemain wrote: post #25

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.

Mailing lists (aka Google Groups if you're on GSuite) allow retroactive access.

That said, none of my employers have ever made effective use of this. I don't think open communication is an instinct that most people have.

Re: If it will matter after today, don't talk about it in a chat room

#92

Post by dpcx »

Footkerchief wrote: post #17

Slack has fantastic search. It has good filtering, sorting, and pagination, and has the right degree of fuzziness. I use it on a daily basis to discover the reasoning for things that happened before my time. I've never known anyone else who does this, and I've never understood why.

I have struggled for years to find things that I know exist within Slack. I specifically (as a test) set up my email to forward all mail to a specific address in to Slack (https://slack.com/slack-tips/send-email-to-slack) and found more often than not that Slack could not find something when searching for it.

YMMV, of course. But my mileage was pretty terrible.

Re: If it will matter after today, don't talk about it in a chat room

#93

Post by indymike »

jcrawfordor wrote: post #85
nobody9999 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. Install Thunderbird[0] and use it for a week. You'll be able to tell the difference very quickly. [0] https://www.thunderbird.net

I'm a Thunderbird user, but I don't really think that there's a clear winner in that comparison. Outlook has features that Thunderbird has been missing for over a decade, like reliable send-in-background (and other database operations in background unlike Thunderbird that likes to interrupt you to ask permission) and a far more mature calendar product.

Not to mention replies listed in threads. You have to move sent messages to the inbox to get this to behave correctly in TB.

Re: If it will matter after today, don't talk about it in a chat room

#94

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

mumblemumble wrote: post #88
fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of these are solved by things like a corporate NNTP server or mailing lists, right?

Not really, because it still doesn't give people sufficiently fine-grained control over demands on their attention. I think the ideal is the approach you get with discussion forums: Create a set of boards organized around topics, and place named, threaded conversations within those boards. People can join a board, in which case they will be able to get a list of new conversations related to that board's topic. They c…

What’s the difference between that sort of topics and news groups or mailing lists (with archives)? If I want information on something, subscribe; if I don’t want information, unsubscribe: I can always follow/search the archive (or read digests)

Re: If it will matter after today, don't talk about it in a chat room

#95

Post by Minor49er »

Footkerchief wrote: post #17

Slack has fantastic search. It has good filtering, sorting, and pagination, and has the right degree of fuzziness. I use it on a daily basis to discover the reasoning for things that happened before my time. I've never known anyone else who does this, and I've never understood why.

I would do this at my last job, which was very Slack-heavy. I would even bring up any weird dev issues or bits of info that I came across that sometimes only mattered to me at the time, but it turned out to be helpful when I would search for those things months (or even years) later.

My current job has both Basecamp and Slack. Most of the work discussion happens in Basecamp, which is fine. However, the search is pretty awful, so it's hard to get a quick and relevant response back when trying to find out more info about a given setting, feature, piece of code, or whatever else. There's a lot of extra digging involved with Basecamp's search results.

Re: If it will matter after today, don't talk about it in a chat room

#96

Post by notacoward »

This is one of the things that drove me nuts at my last company. I had been remote all along, which meant I was left out of many discussions. Chat was my lifeline, because it was the only thing both I and others on the team used. When everyone went remote, we had an opportunity to make a change for the better, but instead nothing at all changed. Meetings were done via video chat instead of in person, but they were just as un-findable and ephemeral as before. If you mapped out the lines of communication before and after, there'd be no difference. In person vs. online matters far less IMO than ephemeral and closed vs. open and permanent.

The irony is that the company happens to be the world's largest platform for easily findable/joinable permanently archived conversations. Go figure.

Re: If it will matter after today, don't talk about it in a chat room

#97

Post by x86_64Ubuntu »

Raphmedia wrote: post #7

I don't know, it is quite easy to search a well indexed chat for keywords in order to find important information.

Sounds like people are trying to asymptotically approach email functionality without actually using email. I do agree that chat stuff has a place, but it seems like the new functionality is just being copy-and-pasted from current email functionality.

Re: If it will matter after today, don't talk about it in a chat room

#98

Post by [deleted] »

ogre_codes wrote: post #61
legerdemain wrote: post #25

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 --…

> just fucking use email. I get you. But also: - Email doesn't retain context very well. If I dig back through my email I might have all of the emails in a thread, or maybe not. - Likewise, I can't send someone a link to a previous emailed conversation so it makes for poor documentation. I can forward an individual email, but not the comment in context. - Email is not easy to index or post up for reference. You can't…

[deleted]

Re: If it will matter after today, don't talk about it in a chat room

#99

Post by bluGill »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #40
emidln wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Outlook takes to long to start up in the morning. If it could start instantly I'd walk into the conference room on-time, but instead I'm several minutes late. Now that I'm working from home it needs to get the chat client started instead, but the the end result is the same, if I'm not running early I'll be late to important early morning meetings. (my early morning meetings are with India, so they will quickly assume I'm not joining at all and head to their supper - timezones are such that the best time for everyone is my breakfast and their supper)

Outlook also has been chasing the flat look fad which is against usability. Most of the others are too so it is hard to fault them, but I still wish they would have the guts to say this fad is wrong...

Once they are all running and you are used to the ui quirks they all work well enough.

Re: If it will matter after today, don't talk about it in a chat room

#100

Post by ogre_codes »

jshier wrote: post #84
ogre_codes wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> just fucking use email. I get you. But also: - Email doesn't retain context very well. If I dig back through my email I might have all of the emails in a thread, or maybe not. - Likewise, I can't send someone a link to a previous emailed conversation so it makes for poor documentation. I can forward an individual email, but not the comment in context. - Email is not easy to index or post up for reference. You can't…

Basecamp does this well, especially version 2, which integrated with email. With version 2 you could have topics in Basecamp which you could post directly do or email and it was searchable and linkable. It was even possible to post messages which were optionally emailed to clients, with their response becoming part of the thread history. Really the best of both worlds. Unfortunately they removed the email feature in…

Yeah, basecamp is pretty good at this. It is a pretty solid tool for building projects where having communications and documentation is intermixed is important.

I didn't realized they removed the email piece... seems like a downgrade. Particularly for projects where you have fairly casual participants.

Post reply on HN