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Comment by Johnny555 | Hacker News Reader

An example might be, "You know, I didn't want to say anything in the meeting, but doesn't Greg's data lake proposal sound exactly like the project that failed two years ago?"

A lot of that seems to happen over Slack already - whether you're in the meeting or at home.

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I am a lot more open in honest in person than I am on Slack, because I know everything I say on Slack is logged and can bite me in the ass years down the line.

We have a very strict Slack retention policy, both DM's and messages in user created private channels self destruct in 7 days with no possibility of retrieval. Public channels and designated private channels can have a longer lifetime. And they really are gone, a VP tried to retrieve some 2 week old messages and was unable to.

So the only fear is someone in IT snooping your private channel during the week that the messages are alive -- probably less than the chance of the person you're talking about standing around the corner.

I am just the opposite. On slack, I can think through what I want to say to make sure I'm conveying what I intend to convey. In person, I can't do that at all.

How would you know? The very nature of that communication is that it’s private.

Maybe nobody talks to you in person, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.

How would you know? The very nature of that communication is that it’s private.

How would I know that these conversations happen over Slack? Because I've participated in them, either in DM's or small private channels. And this was commonplace well before the pandemic and WFH started.

Maybe nobody talks to you in person, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.

It's hard to have a private in-person conversation outside of a meeting room in a typical open-office setup -- breakroom conversations tend to get heard by people that you don't want to hear them.

It’s really not hard to have private convos in an open office setup, I did it for years and years. Nobody cares about you or what you’re saying.

I would find it highly suspicious if someone tried to have a backroom convo with me on a digital platform.

I find it hard to have any conversations at all in an open office setup, just like it's hard to get work done in that environment. Open office setups amplify all of the downsides of working in an office.

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