Open Messaging Improves Engineering Quality | Hacker News Reader

Open Messaging Improves Engineering Quality

mattritter.me

39 pointsritmatter11 comments

Couldn't disagree more with this post. My experience of Slack in a recent 200 person startup is dozens of private groups where information is siloed and not open at all. Slack fosters instant gratification through constant distraction/interruption at the expense of Deep Work. it's a horrible antipattern for effectiveness.

Agreed. It takes effort to establish a culture where people work openly through Slack. The path of least resistance is to message someone privately with a question. Two obvious reasons:

- It reduces embarrassment from looking ignorant, uninformed or in a negative light to your peers. "How could you not have known that?!". This is worse when the channel has anyone in the power hierarchy that's above you.

- It gets a more immediate response. Ask publicly and the chance someone answers is lower than asking directly to a subject matter expert.

So at a systemic level, because we're humans, Slack defaults to being pools of private knowledge or private conversations. There's nothing in the tool itself that encourages open communication. It takes leadership and effort to establish a culture where people feel safe asking things in the open, and it's a default.

It's definitely possible that in my post I conflate openness coming from Slack vs coming from my company's culture. Maybe the openness I'm describing would persist with many different apps, as long as the company fosters that culture.

>This openness actually improves engineering quality because it steers discussions towards convergence on the correct or most reasonable outcome.

Perhaps, but this can be hard to insure. Short form messaging tends to lead to a situation where everyone is in perfect agreement but no one knows that everyone has agreed to something different. Eventually someone has to write up an email with their long form understanding of what was agreed to.

I feel this is a very hard balancing act. I worked for a small team where all members would constantly think "out loud" in a public channel. It felt very nice for everyone involved, no one would criticize and the discourse was at a very pleasing level. Then, someone joined our team, that while smart, has a very intimidating way of stating his opinion.

It took maybe two weeks since this person became active on the channel for private conversations to start popping up.

Sorry, I couldn't get past the first couple paragraphs trying to tell me that the entirely open, federated-for-50-years, global standard is the closed system.

You and the author are conflating two different kinds of "openness". The user is talking about the openness of the default visibility where you're presumably referring to the openness of the implementation.

In fairness, GP may also be envisaging a public (or intranet) 'mailing list archive' which is 'open' in the former sense.

This is exactly right. It is definitely possible that the email protocol could be as open as what I'm describing, but that has not functionally been my experience anywhere.

Public/private is orthogonal to Slack/email. You can communicate by email in open DL/mailing-list style, and many default to using Slack with private group threads.

I do strongly agree with the main premise that open is better than closed. This requires organizational cultural discipline to pull off; someone needs to be pushing and training for an open approach to be used by default.

But you don’t need Slack to implement that open style.

Ehh if you start to get a lot of people messaging in one channel people will start to tune things out due to the sheer amount of messages. Sort of like banner blindness but for chat.

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