[skohan]

I find it has utility in the fact that it's a searchable record of technical conversations I have had with my colleagues where I can go to recover details I might not remember from a month ago. Then again email also does this just fine, and doesn't cost as much.

[grogenaut]

Search is one of slacks worst features and I resort to scrolling which is also majorly painful. I can count on one hand the number of times I've found what I needed via slack search in 4 years with it. I've had it be unable to find the exact text of a message on screen in a channel I'm searching in a day later (tested).

[alehul]

Search is one of my favorite parts of Slack.

It assumes that I want to search within a certain channel or messages with a certain person when that's where I'm clicking the search bar from, but I can quickly erase that if desired. Files, messages, and people, are all searchable. It's pretty powerful and extremely user-friendly (most non-techies would have trouble with the syntax for specifying who a message should be from while searching).

Meanwhile, with Gmail, I discovered yesterday that when I'm part of a mailing list attached to an email address (let's say [e-mail]), and I search an email address that was cc'd on the [e-mail] email, nothing comes up. Resulted in a lot of wasted time.

[jasonlotito]

I'm gonna also have to disagree. Slack search works. I can rely on it to save the information needed, and my ability to recover it.

[strokirk]

I've got to disagree completely - my search experience with Slack has been really great, even surpassing Gmail, which I also like. There are a lot of tools to dig in to results bit by bit, and they're cached so returning to the search screen is fast after you've investigated a hit.

[tanseydavid]

I will have to agree, the search feature in Slack is nearly useless. Or, perhaps 'I am using it wrong' to join in the chorus.

[jbay808]

Email doesn't do this just fine. If a new employee joins your group, how are they going to search your inbox for records of technical discussions that they never were part of?

[retzkek]

Email lists and newsgroups have been around for a very long time, and are often archived. My organization still runs a listerv for this very purpose.

[icedchai]

Put that stuff in a Wiki. Or pull requests.

[jbay808]

By "that stuff", do you mean "technical communications you have had with colleagues", such as what Slack or email might otherwise be used for? That is what the GP was referring to.

It's hard to imagine using a wiki for that, but if that's how you do things I guess it's fine. As long as it doesn't rely on people copying their email discussions to wikis manually. Not sure how you'd be alerted by an important wiki update that you need to respond to, though.

[icedchai]

Let's use a concrete example. A new engineer joins your company and needs to set up a dev environment. This environment has changed many times over the years. Do you point them to Slack, Email, a Wiki, or a shared Google doc? In any sane company, it is one of the latter.

[jbay808]

Replying a little late, but we are discussing

"technical conversations I have had with my colleagues where I can go to recover details I might not remember from a month ago. Then again email also does this just fine, and doesn't cost as much."

For static instructions like setting up a dev environment? Sure a wiki is perfect. But I don't use a wiki for technical conversations like "Hey icedchai, I'm getting an error message that the COM port is not detected and I remember you said something about solving it in yesterday's standup. Can you point me to where the fix was?"

That message is better suited for slack or email than a wiki. (Your solution might be in the wiki but I'm contacting you because it wasn't easy to find, or searching for the error message didn't turn it up).

But if I use email, then when we hire a new employee a month later who gets the same error, your answer will be in my records but not theirs.

Another poster suggested a mailing list, that is a good option that makes email viable for this.

[mikewhy]

So search multiple places instead of just the one?

[icedchai]

If you use a Wiki for everything, no. However, that is unlikely. You'll have to search more than one place anyway. Making Slack your primary store of institutional knowledge is unwise. Chats are full of garbage, random discussions, old / bad decisions, etc.

[skohan]

And there's no guarantee that slack will exist forever.

[kemitche]

No guarantee that Atlassian Wikis will last forever either, but I'm certain that's the wiki 90% will be thinking of when "use a wiki" is suggested.

Backing up your knowledge store is a very separate task from your day-to-day use of it. It's just as possible to back-up your company's slack messages as it is to back-up the company's wiki.

[dajohnson89]

there's a hidden danger of using slack as a record of technical conversations: people start to rely on it, and less formal/rigorous specifications fall by the wayside.

but as i'm starting to learn: nobody really documents things anyways.

[icedchai]

Nobody really documents things because that's not "agile." Agile is do it now, break it later, fix it in the next sprint.