IMO slack is a poor medium for in depth questions and answers. It’s a chat application made for short text. A better tool would be something like an internal stackoverflow…which would have more durability and findability.
I haven't read too far into those, but if one has an integration or feature to automatically send a message to the team's Slack channel with a link to every new Local SO post, it could really light the fire on that new system. Then all the replies would be easier to capture on the SO post, AND eyes would be on the new posts, AND it wouldn't be cluttering inboxes.
I’m in the process of identifying communication gaps in my org and possible tooling and process solutions. Stack Overflow for Teams is high on my list of tools to evaluate and it feels like a Slack integration would be important so your comment finally prompted me to look into it.
Unfortunately, I've seen an internal stackoverflow fail right out the gate because of clout chasing. For example, people asking questions only to answer it themselves immediately.
Yeah that sounds like a positive pattern to me: it means people are contributing to an internal persistent knowledge base. Sounds like it should be actively encouraged.
Perhaps it's a solution that does better at a large scale than at a smaller scale.
At a smaller company, it becomes much more evident that the contributions are being made more for self-promotion than for anyone's benefit. Either because you know the person making them and their personality, because the volume:quality is out of alignment, or because the person posting the question/answer wasn't actually having the problem and were just posting it for points.
Also the volume of organic questions is on the lower side, and could get easily drown out by what amounts to astroturfing. So in my experience, it never really gained adoption, and withered shortly after it's introduction.
Were their answers wrong, or were the questions completely unnecessary? How do you know it's "not for everyone's benefit"? I don't announce to the world when I consult the documentation. Are you measuring the reach of these answers or is it just a gut feeling?
I really fail to see how this is a negative thing. If anything, it's the people not doing it that caused the whole project to fail.
As I recall, largely unnecessary. I can't divine someone's intent, but I can surmise based on having worked with them for multiple years.
Measuring reach? certainly not. It was just setup as a confluence plugin by the corpit team and left as a free-for-all with no direction.
> I really fail to see how this is a negative thing
It discouraged engagement. You can argue until you're blue in the face if it should have or not.
If there's something to take away here, I imagine that it's not "internal stackoverflows are doomed to fail", and more "unstructured adoption of internal stackoverflows don't go as smoothly as one fantasizes"
Had we made some set of individuals as having been responsible for the adoption and moderation of it, it may have gone better.
Even if question seems unnecessary at the time, more often than not some junior dev will find it helpful once your company grows. It’s about preserving knowledge and no question is dumb at that point.
Yeah, sorry but I’m not buying. It all seems to me like projection, a lot of speculation and a bit of pent up anger for people getting reputation for doing documentation work.
“People doing a lot discourage people who don’t do anything” isn’t a very compelling narrative.
Really can’t see a problem here. I wonder what you’ll say when you find out those people are working for money.
Your proposal is a cool idea, and there are even self-hostable FOSS clones available.
See: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2267/are-there-any-...