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Comment by _huayra_ | Hacker News Reader

I haven't worked at Google, so maybe there are better channels than "chat that's holding everything together", but I can't imagine that being unable to search a chat and look at who said what and when is useful. I use it all the time to look up some random useful command a coworker told me long ago that I neglected to write down, for instance, or to follow up with a long-stale thread to revive it.

I suppose that's what email and design docs are for, but I feel a lot of that "organizational glue" in chat is quite valuable. How do Googlers live without it?

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Everyone bitches about it when they first start and eventually learns a better way. The culture is about creating explicit artifacts of knowledge (design docs, documentation, commit/review messages, etc) rather than trying to dig around in streams of consciousness hoping to find the bits of info you need later.

Exactly this. It's not uncommon to ask a coworker how to do something, get a response, and then send them a follow-up CL adding that information to a playbook or doc somewhere so others can reference it.

Heck, sometimes I responded to questions with a CL adding that info to docs.

The internal search engine helps drive a lot of this, too - if you want to know how to do something, docs (via search) are like the #1 choice. So, everyone's pretty incentivized to make it a good resource.

This is such a Googler comment, because it applies to basically everything at the company. “Everyone hates this when they join, but eventually they’re enlightened of the better way to do things, and it’s all good.” Dude, no. People write docs about stuff they care about but nobody writes docs about the weird error they got once that they needed a workaround for or whether their internal tool is named after a Pokémon or their favorite food. Believe me, I worked there, it was a massive pain. To say nothing of sending your boss something at 4 PM on a Friday and it being as if you never messaged them when they opened their laptop on Monday.

> People write docs about stuff they care about but nobody writes docs about the weird error they got once that they needed a workaround for

Google has an internal stackoverflow-style site as well as bug reports and mailing lists that are all preserved for longer than 1-1 chats.

Walk me through this interaction. Do I search your team’s chats for that one time the intern found your build was flaky, or do I take to YAQS to discuss my build failure? Because the interaction is going to go like this:

Me: I’m trying to build //big/important/project, but I’m getting this error on my Mac: “GShoe 1.3 required, but not found.” I depend on it here in my BUILD file: cl/42069. Can someone help me?

A: We deprecated GShoe last year, what are you trying to do? This isn’t something we support. Say, who are you? Don’t you work in a completely different org? We do all our builds on Cloudtop anyways…

Me: I was just trying to get acquainted with the code, this GShoe integration is something that I was interested in playing with.

A: Wait, this isn’t even your job? Hang on, why does your CL add butts.txt?

Me: Uh, I’m doing a thing…for Memegen?

A: …

More seriously though, checking your chats is something I can do myself without imposing myself on you, and it includes basically everything you’ve ever talked about rather than just what you see fit to publish and stand behind. I don’t need to have to wait until I’m stuck enough to ask a question, make sure you understand what I want, nor do I have to argue with you whether what I’m doing is appropriate or not. Or, more likely, I’m not going to get anyone spending time to reply anyways, because your promo committee is not going to search you on MOMA to see how many people you made happy online. So I’d really rather just trawl your chats and send you back documentation or questions based on that rather than you taking a moral stance that deleting your chat history means my life is better or easier.

When someone finds a problem, you raise a bug with reproduction steps, then either fix it or put it in the backlog. Even if it is a document bug. This way anyone - even people not in that chat - can find it.

This is normal operating procedure everywhere: write stuff down. It was how everyone did things before chat was digital, and how they do now too.

If people are relying on searching chat history for how to fix things or get things working, then you are working at a cowboy outfit where quality must suck. I am not saying google the ideal here - I have no insider knowledge there - but fuck dude using chat history to document and maintain your system? Jesus.

Having joined a company that uses Slack for the first time it was crazy how good it was on searching for issues that other people had. I can quite literally copy and paste the error message above and see other people that had the same issue and how it got solved or not on a thread. I can also bump the thread or go to the channel or reach out to who answered.

It’s pretty great and one of the amazing things on having a lot as chat, it also allows you to easily reach out to anyone very quickly and feels more personal than a ticket in some archaic bug system that becomes a black hole after it gets introduced.

Be careful with your assumptions - it’s not like Google has created much of value in the past N years with its current culture, its original culture (book how Google works) seems much more like the cowboy you criticize

Unlike SO, it's common to have very situation-specific questions posted on YAQS. In fact, my team preferred random one-off questions to go through YAQS (our contact golink pointed you to a monitored YAQS queue) precisely because they're much more searchable (and scalable) than point-to-point chats.

So yes, searching for your GShoe error, and (assuming you found nothing) asking about it on YAQS is not a bad way to get help from some random faraway team.

I suppose it's partially because most team chats are locked down (invite-only). In a company with a reasonably open slack, you might be able to ask in #gshoe-team or search it for relevant conversations, but not at Google in my experience - and this is setting aside the issue of message retention.

BTW, I agree 24h retention was truly ridiculous. Most of my colleagues hated it - fortunately (probably as a result of this legal case!) they disabled it and now the default is 30d everywhere.

Regarding promo, community contributions are still very much an expectation. Being active on YAQS counts toward that. True, the promo committee isn't going to go looking for it, so your manager needs to agree YAQS is a level-appropriate community contribution and include that in your promo packet.

Disclosure: I left Google like, a couple weeks ago

> The culture is about creating explicit artifacts of knowledge

In the case of Google, the culture was, explicitly, about destroying potential evidence of wrongdoing [1].

[1]: https://ia601707.us.archive.org/28/items/gov.uscourts.cand.3...

You're still losing a ton of info, including who said what to who.

It happens a ton that an exchange is misunderstood and the wrong action is taken. I can't image having only some resume of the whole thing and no logs of who participated, who said what at what time, and replay it all to get back on track from where it went off the rails.

Sure you can just have the same discussion again, but that's such a waste of time IMHO.

The culture is about creating explicit artifacts of knowledge

That's a poor culture, then. The company's original ethos -- organizing existing, organic knowledge in ways that make it searchable, accessible, and useful -- was much better for everyone, both inside Google and outside.

Or at least it was better for everyone inside Google until they started breaking the law. Then it became a liability, which is why you were told that the culture was about "creating artifacts."

Chat isn't a good way to store information.

I agree. It's about as bad as relying on shell history (which I don't keep either).

If you do something to solve a problem, that should go into a ticket or into a note file or even into a paper notebook.

I'm older, maybe this is partly generational. I find chat to be almost uniformly annoying, and I use it very rarely. I sometimes go days without even launching my chat client. I prefer email which doesn't have the expectation of "drop what you're doing an pay attention to ME!!" that chat does.

While I clearly agree, what I've experienced in my career (including other non-G FAANG / MAGAM / whatever it's called now companies) is that one will get some help over chat to fix some issue, but think "this is such a small issue that will only happen once" or just get too busy with other stuff and neglect to properly write up documentation or put it in one's PKM effectively.

Having chat history and being able to type "chat:"Bob Joe" mitigation jitter identity server" or whatever search query to dredge up the single useful command that slipped through the PKM cracks is so useful.

I guess one is forced to be disciplined about it, but I wonder if Google knows whether this chat-curtailment policy is basically costing them millions in wasted dev time because they have to re-ask for help and bother people. However, in my current company (using Teams), I still get re-asked for help all the time and usually quote reply my prior message saying "please search for this before asking. I found it easily".

> I can't imagine that being unable to search a chat and look at who said what and when is useful

It might be the bright side of a dystopia, but this is actually pretty useful in practice. If you can't reference previous chats, you don't have to spend time doing it. Instead, you rememeber you had a chat about how to do X, and then do X however you like, because there's nothing to say that's not how to do it. When someone asks you a question on chat, you don't have to be sure about the answer, unless they're going to use it right away, because they'll just do whatever they wanted after the chat expires anyway. This is freeing, in the same way that an autoclosing bug tracker is freeing.

It's annoying. I just copy anything important from chat messages into a big text file

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