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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

#61

Post by ogre_codes »

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 link it from a wiki or other documentation for example.

An internal mailing list with archiving would solve many of these issues and might be the best option, but it's a slightly different solution.

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

#62

Post by flerchin »

legerdemain wrote: post #54
DoofusOfDeath wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I'm willing to bet money that for every company that deletes emails older than some age also deletes Slack messages, and deletes then sooner . I speak as someone who worked for a company where email got archived and then deleted after 6 months, and currently works at a company where everyone only uses Slack, and Slack is purged after 30 days.

Our email has a 90 day retention window, and Slack is permanent. We're the largest in our industry.

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

#63

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

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…

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

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

#64

Post by jadell »

Alternatively, in a tool that allows multiple channels, create a channel for the specific issue and invite the relevant people into it.

The problem in the essay isn't chat rooms, it's having ONE chat room for all discussions. Branch off into another chat/channel and title that channel for the specific issue being discussed.

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

#66

Post by res0nat0r »

munchbunny wrote: post #49
DoofusOfDeath wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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

Most Fortune 500 companies have a document retention policy that every employee needs to read the generic training video/documents on when getting hired and agree to.

This sets a general policy of deleting documents/emails/etc after $X days. This is really a CYA policy to purge old conversations if a big lawsuit comes down asking for document retention in relation to some scandal, and if its older than $X days you're covered since your standard legal process was followed.

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

#67

Post by blakeburch »

When we were first growing our team out remotely, we really tried to emphasize this style of thinking. All decisions and larger discussions would need to be written down so the conversation could be easily referenced for long-term context - we chose Threads for this purpose. Any quick questions or one-off communication could live in Slack. Any documentation needed to live in Notion.

Over time, our usage of Threads quickly decreased. If decisions needed to be made, we had a meeting to cover it. Meetings always had a few days notice with a written agenda and problem context so that everyone could think through their ideas beforehand. The end of a meeting usually resulted in a decision, which would then get documented in Notion for posterity. The documented decisions and reasoning would be circulated for approval by everyone that was a part of that meeting to verify that nothing of importance was missed. Once everyone approved, the decision was locked in.

As our process developed, we found that the need for written back-and-forth on decisions was less necessary. Instead, when we identified that an issue needed to be solved, we identified the key components of the problem, gave everyone some thinking time, and knocked it out over the course of a call. We rarely need to revisit the decisions since we write out the reasoning afterwards.

I still love the concept of having a tool specifically for asynchronous discussion. However, I think these tools assume that the conversation is the important part when in reality, the only part that matters is the decision and the reasoning. If you can get your team to document those, you'll be just fine.

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

#68

Post by ve55 »

I have noticed a similiar issue when I was searching for technical support with some applications, and eventually I had to make a Discord account, join a given server on it, and then search its backlog to find my answer.

The server was 'public' in that anyone could join it, but it will not be indexed by search engines, so I can't imagine how many other people were unable to find the solutions to their problems because they were spoken in a chat room and never posted on the 'public' Internet. Given the scale at which services like this operate (soon to be billions of users), this is a pretty big problem.

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

#69

Post by legerdemain »

flerchin wrote: post #62
legerdemain wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm willing to bet money that for every company that deletes emails older than some age also deletes Slack messages, and deletes then sooner . I speak as someone who worked for a company where email got archived and then deleted after 6 months, and currently works at a company where everyone only uses Slack, and Slack is purged after 30 days.

Our email has a 90 day retention window, and Slack is permanent. We're the largest in our industry.

Cool! Where should I send bet money?

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

#70

Post by GekkePrutser »

I have to agree with this. When we started using MS Teams, it worked really well to replace person to person chats, email etc..

But since it's become commonplace, it's become a crapbucket of stuff that I can't find anything back in. I have too many channels, too many teams (and you can't opt in to channels like you can on Slack, you have to join them all). And the search function is even worse than Outlook's. It's all just too unstructured. Even if I search for someone's name plus a keyword I know it's there it can't find it back for me.

Such an app (not just Teams) is just not the right tool for everything related to communication, even though Microsoft is pushing it as exactly that.

A forum though is too '2000' for me. I would see more in a managed wiki, provided people can stomach working in a structured way. Enforcing that will be an issue but it will result in a beautiful oracle of information. I've seen it happen before (and I've seen it fail many more times, sadly).

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