Couldn't disagree more with this post. My experience of Slack in a recent 200 person startup is dozens of private groups where information is siloed and not open at all. Slack fosters instant gratification through constant distraction/interruption at the expense of Deep Work. it's a horrible antipattern for effectiveness.

>This openness actually improves engineering quality because it steers discussions towards convergence on the correct or most reasonable outcome.

Perhaps, but this can be hard to insure. Short form messaging tends to lead to a situation where everyone is in perfect agreement but no one knows that everyone has agreed to something different. Eventually someone has to write up an email with their long form understanding of what was agreed to.

I feel this is a very hard balancing act. I worked for a small team where all members would constantly think "out loud" in a public channel. It felt very nice for everyone involved, no one would criticize and the discourse was at a very pleasing level. Then, someone joined our team, that while smart, has a very intimidating way of stating his opinion.

It took maybe two weeks since this person became active on the channel for private conversations to start popping up.

Sorry, I couldn't get past the first couple paragraphs trying to tell me that the entirely open, federated-for-50-years, global standard is the closed system.

Public/private is orthogonal to Slack/email. You can communicate by email in open DL/mailing-list style, and many default to using Slack with private group threads.

I do strongly agree with the main premise that open is better than closed. This requires organizational cultural discipline to pull off; someone needs to be pushing and training for an open approach to be used by default.

But you don’t need Slack to implement that open style.

Ehh if you start to get a lot of people messaging in one channel people will start to tune things out due to the sheer amount of messages. Sort of like banner blindness but for chat.