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

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

#291

Post by aheckler »

mkr-hn wrote: post #255

I forget which podcast it was on, but Automattic's CEO (Matt Mullenweg) talked about how they use blogs internally for much of their communication, so there's a huge searchable archive of information back to the early days of the company. People occasionally write posts to collect useful information that's fallen too deep. It was probably either in his interview[0] on The Knowledge Project or a recent episode of his…

We call the internal blogs "P2s". You can make one yourself even. :) https://wordpress.com/p2/

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

#292

Post by kingludite »

I don't know what to call it but some kind of training course, a spec or some other conditioning seems needed to get the best out of email. If the participants know 10 basic things like how and where to insert their responses and do not add 100 graphical signatures to each mail it gets 1000 times more wonderful and enjoyable. Long form doesn't become all that desirable that way. (It seems forums played a major role teaching how to quote to and gmail did a good job making it impossible.) Even on HN we rarely see quotation go on for more than one level.

> > > > person 1 original message paragraph 1

> > > person 2 first response to paragraph 1

> > person 1 response to person 2 first response

> person 2 response to 1's response

> > > > person 1 original message paragraph 2

> > > person 2 response to paragraph 2

> > person 1 response to above

> person 3 response to above

> > > person 2 elaborates

> > 1 responds

> 3 responds

<- if it cant fit the 3 previous topics it goes here.

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

#293

Post by bandris »

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 --…

One problem/feature with email is that that new collagues do not see historical conversations. While the typical chatroom is searchable.

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

#294

Post by kingludite »

hn_asker wrote: post #101
mumblemumble wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I hate it when I'm emailing someone with a deliberately long response and by the time I send, the thread has already gone on and I have to re-merge it.

If it is worth the wait, announce your response or make a list of notes from which you can build the long response after things calm down.

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

#295

Post by kevsim »

In my previous job I battled this a lot. While I really like slack in general, no one likes it when things fall through the cracks or important people miss out.

It actually bothered me enough that I quit my job and made Kitemaker (YC W21) which automatically watches slack conversations for mentions of work items and links them together. This linkage lets people working on something that there are discussions going on about it in Slack. You have your persistent place for writing things down (in Kitemaker) and can still use Slack. We have lots of plans for making it even more frictionless. Also works with Discord.

https://kitemaker.co

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

#296

Post by selfhoster11 »

throw14082020 wrote: post #50
mumblemumble wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There are many problems with email, not just one. Sure, we have SPF, DKIM, DMARC and S/MIME, but they're not used by most people. Especially the most important one, S/MIME (to encrypt your messages/ keep them private).

SPF, DKIM and DMARC are mandatory if you want to interact with the big email providers. In practice, you really want to set these up.

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

#297

Post by selfhoster11 »

bluGill wrote: post #99
TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Outlook starts faster for me than Slack.

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

#299

Post by duckmysick »

DoofusOfDeath wrote: post #35
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 --…

> 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.

The legal retention policy itself looks persistent. How is it documented?

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

#300

Post by twobitshifter »

pseudalopex wrote: post #194
gregmac wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I'm saying neither chat nor email solve this issue. Email is far worse, in fact, because: * Everyone has a unique view * Unless there are lots of cc-everyone style emails, you might not even have anything to find. (And cc-everyone sucks for 100 other reasons.) * You can't find anything predating the start of your employment The biggest issue with searching both chat and email is the absence of a result doesn't h…

Mailing lists exist.

Mailing lists are not heavily used outside of free software. In the corporate world I’ve never had a project provide a mailing list to be used for discussions.
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