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 can catch each other up on the parts that truly matter.
Forgetting and repetition can be negative, but they can also be highly positive. We don't have to carry with us the weight of every word ever spoken about a project.
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".
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.
That's a plausible interpretation, but the notion that "important=anything that matters for longer than 1 day" still makes no sense to me. And I also disagree that it's a priori important to have a record of important things. It's nearly tautological, and even if it weren't, there are some strong embedded assumptions about how to build software that at best need close examination.
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 indispensable men."
There's some unstated motivation behind the post. But whatever it is makes no sense to me. The options I can think of fall in a range from absurd to self-defeating.
>> 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 friends, and so on.
A big part of coming back from a vacation is catching up. Vacations can feel a lot better when it is easier to get back in the groove when you get back.
There are chat/messaging systems that make catching up much easier than Slack. I really like Zulip, for example.
>> 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.
You're definitely correct about bank employees. I know people who've been required to take vacations as a matter of policy, and fraud prevention is how they explained it.
No, the purpose is to give people time to do what they think best. For them to no longer have the demands of the organization paramount. That is, to miss things.
Talk was not naturally archived in the past, but I would not assume that today. There is no longer anything that is an intimate object, pretty much anything can have a microphone and some type of wireless connection. Is your desk phone at the office listening to you even though it's on the hook? Technically it can. What about your smart TV?
> 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 can catch each other up on the parts that truly matter.
Forgetting and repetition can be negative, but they can also be highly positive. We don't have to carry with us the weight of every word ever spoken about a project.
[1] The main exception being index cards with a few words on each. https://williampietri.com/writing/2015/the-big-board/