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Comment by 9dev | Hacker News Reader

The value of written notes really adds up over time, though. Once a meeting is over, it's over; a Slack conversation is preserved for new hires or absentees or yourself when you return to it after your vacation.

I agree though, for a small team to build a shared understanding and move quickly, just having a chat together is definitely more efficient. I don't think the ideas lined out here apply to that organisation size, however.

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I agree in principle, although specifically with slack this is problematic. With emails, wikis, repos, it's easy to index them, or share them with a search engine or LLM. Slack is a moving target; they have the Slack AI, but if you don't enable it, it's hard to just grab all messages from a channel or a thread (and god forbid, you have a channel with multiple relevant threads). A lot of clicks required.

I have found slack all but useless for retrieving knowledge.

People simply don’t read emails, and ignore documents.

I don’t miss emails. Wiki devolves into a mess after a couple of years. Sharepoint has poor accessibility as there’s this constant churning between the app space and the web space.

I really think if you want to get people to take a document seriously you have to present it and walk people through it. If you get feedback and integrate it then it has collective ownership and it’s more interesting than a soliloquy.

But according to the popular glib, and I would say incorrect interpretation of agile principles, documentation is considered wasteful.

One thing. Trusting an external company with your knowledge base is wrought with concern. If you're going to use slack in that regard, export and backup regularly.

If you must hand over key parts of your company's infrastructure to external companies, at least ensure you have control of your data if they go sideways. Don't put backups in someone else's hands.

Keep drives encrypted in a safe deposit box if you have to.

I have never searched old chats for anything but passwords, network folder paths and license keys. Going back to some conversation on some topic and give it to the new guy, does it happen?

It's a bit of a cultural thing how you use chat apps, but we definitely have FAQ-style threads on certain topics, and people often start by searching chats before reaching for other documentation.

in my company we do this a LOT, what helps if having a LOT of slack channels with explicit topic name

* "incident-2025-07-28-CI-not-deploying-disk-full" * "feature-stripe-integration" * "exploration-datadog-or-sentry"

and channel comes and go and people are quite "agressive" about routing discussion to the right channel or converting 10+ message thread into dedicated channel.

>> and channel comes and go and people are quite "agressive" about routing discussion to the right channel or converting 10+ message thread into dedicated channel.

THIS. I had this at my last gig and it was very successful, but have not been able to replicate at the newer place, because the house keeping is not done, so people end up with the logical conclusion, wrong question that living with a few messy channels is better than living with a bunch of messy channels.

I like lighter weight tools that integrate & help like incident management bots, but the vendors will no longer sell you a cheap, useful & focused tool so instead you're faced with convincing your boss to spend a lot of money on an "enterprise-grade", AI-enabled do everything incident/schedule/status/issue/project management system.

Huh? We’re talking work chat, right, with technical content and project specific stuff etc.? I refer to that all the time. I moved work chat from ad-hoc social media onto an internal Mattermost server explicitly for this. And at the time it doesn’t seem that useful, but it’s the long tail of projects where it really saves you. Being able to quickly find that one thing you’re sure you discussed that one time three years ago on a project that was closed out two years ago? Priceless.

I've flipped this around, and now write the "document I want to be handed", which is precisely that condensed into just one or two pages with nothing but network paths, DNS names, service account names, Git repo names, required tooling to install, etc...

No fluff, no descriptions other than simple labels, no ten paragraph intro blurb, no index, nothing that I would normally skip over when reading someone else's document.

I call these "cheat sheets" and send them out to colleagues on their first day on a project. I've heard feedback along the lines of "I got 10x more value from that one page than three weeks of 'handover' from other people."

> Going back to some conversation on some topic and give it to the new guy, does it happen?

Of course it does. Or do you just assume anything you don't personally do must therefore not actually exist/occur?

I have to do it sometimes (as the not new guy) and it is very painful. It's too easy for people to throw stuff over the fence with a cold redirect if you have a culture of Slack/Teams is the source of truth

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