Comment by tablespoon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tablespoon | Hacker News Reader

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> It's no substitute for proper documentation, but it is very useful to be able to find and link to the conversation that led to creating a ticket, considering how often a critical detail gets left out of a ticket description.

It's worse than email, because emails at least almost always have subjects and the latest one usually contains most (if not all) of the thread. Email clients usually have a feature to save a message to some kind of file, and I usually attach that when creating a ticket (or working with one I didn't create).

My experience with Slack/Teams is like team using one email thread with the subject "team stuff" that they constantly reply to with fragmentary messages that are very difficult to decipher without full understanding of the context at that moment. Everything's jumbled together and impossible to piece together later.

IMHO, chat is only for things that are 100% ephemeral, and if there's any chance you will need the information later, you better immediately switch to email and summarize the previous conversation in complete sentences.

I agree that it's worse than email but for different reasons. I've found that when writing an email, people will put more time and effort into giving a complete picture in the initial email. In Slack/Teams, people give very brief descriptions that you have to ask half a dozen questions in chat or call them to figure out what they actually mean.

> I agree that it's worse than email but for different reasons. I've found that when writing an email, people will put more time and effort into giving a complete picture in the initial email. In Slack/Teams, people give very brief descriptions that you have to ask half a dozen questions in chat or call them to figure out what they actually mean.

Yeah, that's a major component of what I was talking about, which you called out more clearly than I did. With email, people tend to compose standalone artifacts that convey a more complete idea, but chat messages are just fragments. Maybe if they were properly organized you understand the conversation later, but the fragments are interrupted by other stuff so it's too hard to even piece together the whole conversation without missing something important.

I find things with search in slack every single work day, and find it exactly as difficult/easy as searching my email, and vastly less painful to organize.

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