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

281–290 of 329 posts

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

#281

Post by thaumasiotes »

xpe wrote: post #275
wpietri wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand the words just fine. It's the motivation I find incomprehensible. In particular: > If you go on vacation [...] Often your only option is to declare chat room bankruptcy which means missing out on important discussions and big decisions. So what? That's what vacations are for. The whole point is to miss things. It's good for both the person and the organization to miss things. "The graveyards are full of…

>> If you go on vacation [...] Often your only option >> is to declare chat room bankruptcy which means missing >> out on important discussions and big decisions. > That's what vacations are for. The whole point is to > miss things. That may be an effect of vacations, but that is not their driving purpose , which may be: to get away, recharge, do something different, travel (remember when that was a thing?), visit fr…

>> That's what vacations are for. The whole point is to miss things.

> That may be an effect of vacations, but that is not their driving purpose

That all depends. A confucian official was apparently required to take a two year mourning period following the death of his father. I have read the theory that one purpose this practice may have served (intentionally or not) was ensuring that no one could usurp too much power.

More recently, I have read that some bank employees are legally required to take a certain amount of vacation, with an explicit justification being the idea that if you are using your position in the bank to engage in a lot of financial fraud, you may find it more difficult to keep the fraud going while on your legally-mandated vacation.

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

#282

Post by _0w8t »

pas wrote: post #259
dsterry wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with chat is the interruptive, thoughtless nature of it. In a large organization, you want durability that you won't get from chat. Internal Q&A, forums, and email all work because you can have long-form conversations on them but an important consideration is discoverability. If a new user wants to find out why X is true for some service, they'd better be able to do that without interrupting someone else.

... why ... not ... just mute it? Also Slack's entire business model builds on storing chat for long and it has a not too bad search. (Though I hate it, because it's slow. But GMail is slow too. Even Thunderbird is, probably because it touches IMAP or whatever for just displaying what I'm currently typing. VSCode is somehow fast despite running a bunch of linters/compilers/language-servers while typing, and similarly…

I have found Slack search at work just sucks. Whenever I tried it gives wrong priority to results. Plus questions and replies are too short and search can not pickup on context.

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

#283

Post by m_eiman »

wpietri wrote: post #192

I find this somewhat incomprehensible. Why the bias for seeing and archiving everything? The implicit model, which is right there in his title, is "talk", which is not naturally archived. I've built products just fine using verbal communication nearly exclusively. [1] We don't need to create some sort of panoptic archive of every conversation ever had to get things done. If people miss things, they miss things. We ca…

In my reading the point of the post is that it's important to have a record of the important things (like why did we decide to do X, or to do it in this specific way), and that putting such discussion in the same context as things that aren't important to record makes it very hard to filter out the important bits later on if needed.

So they advocate for putting the important information in a separate context, that also allows for more thoughtful conversations.

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

#284

Post by extrememota »

mumblemumble wrote: post #46
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 --…

There is really only one fundamental problem with email: its mechanism for managing who takes part in the conversation is all wrong for team communication. The symptoms of this problem are myriad: reply-all storms, cya-by-cc, replying to a 5 month old email rather than starting a new thread, fyi forwards, etc. Which isn't to say that all the advantages you list for email are not true. They are. It's just that most pe…

What's wrong with mailing lists?

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

#285

Post by barbs »

wpietri wrote: post #192

I find this somewhat incomprehensible. Why the bias for seeing and archiving everything? The implicit model, which is right there in his title, is "talk", which is not naturally archived. I've built products just fine using verbal communication nearly exclusively. [1] We don't need to create some sort of panoptic archive of every conversation ever had to get things done. If people miss things, they miss things. We ca…

I think the basis of the article is that a lot of people use Slack as a storage of sorts for things that should be archived. That certainly aligns with my experience - I've worked in teams where I've asked for a document or credentials for something and have been told "It's on Slack, search for it".

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

#286

Post by africanboy »

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.

> Email isn't searchable by people who weren't on the threads

Chats have the same problem: they aren't searchable by people who weren't in them.

meanwhile https://lkml.org/

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

#287

Post by benhurmarcel »

oasisbob wrote: post #74
munchbunny wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like a pathological case. How many companies actually do that?

Many, at least in the US. It's not just companies, government agencies also have similar needs due to sunshine and open-access laws. The alternative to having a document retention policy is to just have employees delete things in an arbitrary manner. It's not just CYA for leaving inconvenient doc lying around, it's also to ensure the proper retention in the event of a preservation order or public records request. Som…

That's weird, my company has the opposite policy. Nothing can be deleted. Employees can delete emails on their side, but the server keeps a copy of every email indefinitely in a "vault". That's for legal purposes apparently.

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

#289

Post by GekkePrutser »

ogre_codes wrote: post #106
GekkePrutser wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, a real paid slack instance doesn't go away. All the public free slacks do.. The whole fact that Slack charges a lot for the privilege of keeping history beyond a couple of months, proves that it's worth a lot to many people.

Yes, but as gmail has illustrated, that just shifts the problem. Where before your problem was "It got deleted". Now the problem is search pulls up too many things. Slack seems to be even worse because unlike email, you don't really have subjects or thread beginnings, just continual flow of chatter.

I don't really have this issue with Gmail. It works a lot better than O365 search with the same amount of mails in it (I recently migrated everything over).

But indeed the lack of organisation of any kind makes it harder for chats.

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

#290

Post by danielovichdk »

To me or seems that the author is more frustrated with how his team communicates during a sprint than the tool being used.

If you need to discuss something in thorough detail in a sprint, which is on the sprint backlog, it is done during refinement.

If a discussion is about a work item/pbi/user story it is discussed not in Slack or Teams, but under the item's discussion board. Jira, base amp and azure DevOps all support this.

The symptoms of poor communication or following a proces cannot be deslt with be changing from Slack to email.

People needs to be educated it seems as where communication must go.

Emails are not for work items under a sprint. Imo. Neither is Slack. You don't discuss wotk items in a chat, you do that in it's appropiate platform where the item livets.

Slack is not email. Should not be used as such. Slack is for "hey, where is that vacation spreadsheet" and not "should this feature be with bootstrap or vanilla HTML?"

The latter is work. It is discussed where work lives. Work does not live in Slack.

Good luck

Post reply on HN