[toddmorey]

“New people coming into a project can readily access a project’s archive, allowing them to ramp up swiftly.”

How many people have ramped up quickly by reading the chat history of a channel? That’s not documentation—instead it’s like a really bad screenplay. I hate digging through channel history as I join and kinda resent the expectation that I’m supposed to do that.

[vinceguidry]

Slack history was invaluable to me when I was ramping up at my current role. You get a real sense for the struggles the teams are dealing with.

[cfors]

Unfortunately Slack is where documentation goes to die. When I face a weird internal issue the first thing I do is search:

> in:@<channel> <error>

You would be amazed at how much unofficially documented stuff is sitting in Slack. It is unfortunate but paying attention to the right Slack channels at work can be very important in understanding company strategies and decision making, as well as random tidbits on architecture decisions.

Of course I would prefer official documentation but sometimes you gotta make do.

[xenadu02]

The alternative in most cases is _no documentation at all_. It's not like people would go spend two hours writing up documentation if Slack didn't exist.

[tim58]

In large teams it's worth the reduction in 'code velocity' to have engineers document what they are building.

I specifically make efforts, and encourage others to do the same, to keep most documentation outside of slack. Do you have a question about a ticket? Ask it in a comment not slack. Do you have a question about how our system works? Ask it in the private Stack Overflow. Want to advertise a cool new internal service we can use? Great tell everyone in slack, but also add it to swaggerhub.

[simtel20]

However, simply having important pinned items, and the ability for colleagues to provide stable links to backchat is a useful part of making history of a company accessible.