How many people have ramped up quickly by reading the chat history of a channel? That’s not documentation—instead it’s like a really bad screenplay. I hate digging through channel history as I join and kinda resent the expectation that I’m supposed to do that.
> in:@<channel> <error>
You would be amazed at how much unofficially documented stuff is sitting in Slack. It is unfortunate but paying attention to the right Slack channels at work can be very important in understanding company strategies and decision making, as well as random tidbits on architecture decisions.
Of course I would prefer official documentation but sometimes you gotta make do.
I specifically make efforts, and encourage others to do the same, to keep most documentation outside of slack. Do you have a question about a ticket? Ask it in a comment not slack. Do you have a question about how our system works? Ask it in the private Stack Overflow. Want to advertise a cool new internal service we can use? Great tell everyone in slack, but also add it to swaggerhub.