I recently started a new job that communicates on Slack instead of email. This may seem like a small difference, but in fact it is a paradigm shift. Put simply: email encourages private conversations, and Slack encourages public ones .
Most Slack conversations happen in public channels , while most emails happen in limited groups. Even when a Slack channel has just a few members, it is still public to the entire company. Emails, on the other hand, are usually totally private or restricted to groups that are technically public but not easily discoverable. (Note that making Slack channels private and emailing everyone all the time are both possible but atypical workflows.)
This openness actually improves engineering quality because it steers discussions towards convergence on the correct or most reasonable outcome. In any engineering organization, folks regularly examine and question past decisions. Discussions sometimes invalidate existing beliefs or designs, and that often means that someone had a misunderstanding. Even though good engineering cultures do not punish people for honest mistakes, it still isn’t fun to be wrong. So when the truth is ambiguous, even the best of