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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>Shutting off Slack before you have a new 'internal chat system' as you've said is insanity. How can you not recognize that and immediately jump to some 4d chess defense?

No need for any "4d chess defense". There was a lot of cheap checkers cheating in the article though.

For god's sake, he didn't cut the electricity in the data center (which would actually fit the "sky is falling" narrative), he just cut access to a glorified enterprise chat app.

They can always use email, bug trackers, task management, their enterprise intranet collaboration and discussion tools, and several other things besides, or, god forbid, have teleconferences, pick up the phone, or discuss it face to face in the office.

If they can't work with those, then lack of Slack isn't the problem...

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You do realize the article quotes exactly why losing slack is a problem, yeah? Slack is a store of information. People will have long threads on solving bugs, ops issues, error logs and more because that's where you talk about things. It also stores history and has history from people that worked at Twitter before they were laid off.

Do you actually do software development? Have you worked with Slack before? Because at almost every place I've worked at it serves as a large store of easily indexable information around a variety of issues. If an issue occurred 10 months ago and is occurring again but the engineer that solved the issue is gone because of Musk firing a bunch of people you can't just email someone that doesn't exist anymore.

>Because at almost every place I've worked at it serves as a large store of easily indexable information around a variety of issues.

Those places have a big documentation, organization, and knowledge retention problem then...

Yes, and? At the end of the day the knowledge is on Slack, whether you like it or not. Twitter lost more than 50% of their engineers in less than 3 months, of course they have a knowledge retention problem.

Now it's shut down, where do you get that info? It's gone, just gone.

Please explain to us how it's a good idea to shut down Slack before an alternative has come up.

Yup, they can use Jira for task management…oh…

That same day, Jira — a tool Twitter uses to track everything from progress on feature updates to regulatory compliance — also stopped working.

>he just cut access to a glorified enterprise chat app

And a glorified enterprise issue tracker.

I can only imagine how much information was unavailable because they couldn't access Jira or Slack.

>pick up the phone, or discuss it face to face in the office

Except you can't if that person was fired. But you can still search their Slack messages to find information on systems that they've helped to build.

I can only come to the conclusion that this is Elon Musk’s HN account.

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