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Comment by jgtor | Hacker News Reader

For exactly the same reasons, Amazon limits message retentions on it's internal Slack platform and aggressively enforces mailbox quotas in it's internal email system. Up to some shady shenanigans, and don't have to hand it over as part of discovery if they don't got the record in the first place. Exactly the same way criminal gangs operate!

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The sudden disappearance of Slack channels is definitely a thing, along with giant sets of trouble tickets. Don't forget the disappearing wikis... Can't have documentation.

It's definitely given me the opinion that the only reliable docs are what's in git.

Links to stories are useless

Links to tickets are better

Links to wikis are awful

Comments are misleading

Code review links are ok, but mostly link to unreliable sources, and older code review links are gone.

Commit history also goes missing, so don't bother leaving too much info in the commit text

Current code is mostly reliable, but might need extra knowledge to actually reason about.

It's crazy how much useful info get deleted or not migrated or gets moved in a way where you'd never find it again, or the search tools stop indexing it

Spent almost 12 years at Amazon till early 2023 and some of this is very surprising to me.

I know the annoying slack retention policy but I had never heard of tickets, issues, or wikis or even git commits being auto deleted.

When I was there I could go back a decade and open up old tickets or wikis.

Has things changed so much in less than two years?

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