Why public chats are better than direct messages

They aren't.

When I know who I'm talking to, I can tailor my message for them. If I talk to another embedded C++ coder about memory management, I can make my request short and concise by assuming that the recipient already knows what the placement new operator is, how it works, and what using it implies. That means I send a quick 10s chat message to ask for one thing.

If I had to include all that background information to make the discussion accessible to people who have different strengths, for example to the front-end Ruby developers, then my 10s one-liner would likely turn into a 30 minute 2 pages email. But the contained information for my target recipient is still the same. So I have just wasted my time and his/her time.

Also, there's the increasing issue of people taking internal work discussions and sharing them publicly. I wouldn't want some of the new hires in the social media team to read our internal discussions about CLV and CAQ, because discussing clients in a purely financial and/or mathematical way would rub more emotionally skilled people the wrong way. There was a huge scandal when word got out that some companies called their Dallas office the "discount" location, even though it had been blatantly obvious to everyone before that SF employees earned much more.

So the simple act of sharing a chat message to a wider audience requires:

1. additional explanations, thereby making things longer and slower

2. additional safety checks, thereby making things slower

This is why, when a colleague has a question about a pull request, or my feedback on THEIR pull request, I push us to have the discussion in the PR comments, instead of the pernicious "I just have a few questions, it will only take a few minutes" that always adds up to more time and attention than people claim. There ARE often situations where opening a synchronous communication channel is necessary, but even then, you need to capture your discussion and agreements publicly. Commit messages and PR discussions are "hyperdocumentation".

Some people get it. But overall in the cultures I've done it in, it mostly gets me branded as difficult.

> Some people get it. But overall in the cultures I've done it in, it mostly gets me branded as difficult.

Sorry to hear that. Getting the right balance of sync and async, and knowing when to use one or the other makes a big difference. In my current team we went through multiple iterations to come to a mix that works for us. If it's too much sync, the constant sync conversations drain you; if it's too much async, coming to a concensus becomes grindingly slow.

This is internal to a company - everyone able to access the chat better have and account and use it - you need to be sure who said what.

And setting up search on the chat is not difficult, we had search on chat 25 years ago.

I hate that idea. If I criticise an idea in public, and I'm wrong in my criticism, then five other people will immediately correct me. Or provide nuance and perspective I miss.

Also with private criticism, any decision tends to gravitate toward the opinion of the highest paid person. If the debate happens in public, everyone has more of an equal chance to be heard.

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Edit: almost forgot! Private criticism also leads to an air of suspicion, in my experience. When everything public is upbeat and positive you start to wonder what terriblenesses people are hiding. It might be nothing, but that's the thing -- you just don't know.

Being able to publically discuss both the good and the bad is a prerequisite for a smooth operation, and the hallmark of a mature organisation.