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Comment by steelframe | Hacker News Reader

My friend works at a company that -- on orders from legal -- has set a 5-day "disappearing messages" policy for all of the corp Slack. Unfortunately nearly all technical discussions happen on Slack. He tells me that it's not unusual for messages to start disappearing before the issue being worked on has even been resolved, and everyone has to re-ask the same questions and re-post the answers at that point, and sometimes things slip through the cracks. Then there's no way for people joining the company to get answers to already-asked-and-answered questions, and they end up spamming everyone on various channels with frequently-asked questions that often go ignored because people are tired of re-posting the same answers over and over again.

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This seems like a very simple problem to solve - the issue owner should move important discussions to somewhere that isn't Slack. Writing a summary (or just cut and paste from the Slack messages) into a Jira or Github issue comment isn't much effort, and reading a summary of a problem is a lot easier for new people.

This actually highlights a problem of Slack. Reading an old Slack conversation is massively inefficient, especially if people have chimed in with irrevelevant stuff. Taking what you learn from a Slack conversation and using it to update proper docs or an issue is far better for anyone who isn't part of that conversation at the time.

The problem here isn’t Slack. Clearly the participants prefer discussing things like this in Slack over doing it in issues or Jira or whatever (which I understand, it’s a much nicer medium for discussion, IMHO), otherwise they would already be doing that. Your suggestion is essentially “just subvert the IT/legal policies by discussing it elsewhere, in a less efficient way”.

Clearly the problem here is the policy.

> move important discussions to somewhere that isn't Slack

At first I read this as having the discussion on a different medium in the first place, which seems a bit extreme. But from the rest of your comment I think mean just copy the discussion rather than move it, by copying and pasting (or manually re-summarising) elsewhere. I definitely agree with that. As you say at the end, that's a good idea even if Slack messages aren't auto-destroyed. (But there are definitely cases where it seems like you'll never need some scrap of information again and then it turns out you do.)

> Then there's no way for people joining the company to get answers to already-asked-and-answered questions, and they end up spamming everyone on various channels with frequently-asked questions that often go ignored because people are tired of re-posting the same answers over and over again.

In my office, Slack messages that live forever don't stop people from asking questions that have already been answered. The search tool is an afterthought.

I think the search tool could have been broken on purpose. It was somewhat-working in the previous, less "smart", version.

I'm struggle to understand a situation where that would ever be justifiable.

If they have a good reason for deleting messages, that's bad. If their legal team is overzealous and that power is unchecked, that's also bad.

A situation where the corporation is engaged in embarrassing or illegal shit and they're using Slack so they can do all the above-board, non-embarassing stuff via email that would show up in discovery.

5 day retention is so wildly impractical, it's a tacit admission the corp is up to something. Gives legal time to drag anything out in court until it's all gone. By the time the other party learns they have the 5-day retention, it's too late.

>By the time the other party learns they have the 5-day retention, it's too late.

Anyone hoping to use this trick to pull off the perfect caper will be dismayed to discover that not only is the other party allowed to talk to your employees, human testimony is admissible.

The idea of trying to make the past go away after five days, by deleting the digital records, reminds me of https://xkcd.com/1494/.

I'd also like to point out that this thread - where we're discussing the pros and cons of a technique for getting rid of inconvenient records, is itself the kind of awkward talk that, if found in a Slack channel during discovery, would turn in to something else entirely in the hands of some other company's lawyers. That sheds an interesting light on these retention policies.

If it wasn't for HN, I don't think that XKCD would have been anything more to me than a joke about programmers enjoying coming up with "cool hacks". But in the comments here I far too often find people trying to come up with legal loopholes that assume the system is perfectly rigid.

I was at a similar company. It's a bad sign when companies prioritize hiding errors over enabling success.

Has legal decreed you can't have a wiki as well?

I would guess that since wiki is less of an impulsive stream-of-consciousness type of a medium and more of a "sit down and write things in an organized manner after thinking things through" type, people are much less likely to put something that could create a problem for legal there (as opposed to Slack).

Not sure how factually true this is, but that rationale makes perfect sense in my head for why legal would make that rule for Slack/messaging while being totally cool with persistent wikis.

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