Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by cooperadymas 1052 days ago
> There is a reason why we have multiple communication medium.

> Public articles - Pull requests - Issue trackers - Internal Wiki - Emails - Chat - Phone calls - Visio - Face to face

I believe this to be absolutely true.

Yet at the same time, it creates its own set of problems.

If I could only tally up the lost hours I've spent trying to track down whether a comment was made on the wiki, or in chat, or via email, or in the PR.

Even using Github alone has this problem. Does something exist as an issue, a discussion, a wiki, in the code itself, a comment on the PR? What's the right place for something to go? These aren't trivial questions, especially for large orgs.

To a certain degree this is an indexing problem as much as it is a problem with the communication medium, but if you bring together all of your communication into a central hub you solve this issue plus many others.

You just annoy a small, yet outspoken subset of people while doing it.

> So we have hours longs Slack discussions that spare us minutes of reading a wiki page or discussing on a phone call.

I think Slack sees these problems and attempts to address them, even if it isn't perfect. See Huddles for example.

Disclaimer: I hate using Slack too and personally wish it wasn't a part of my day to day.