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 us sometimes cling to our bogus theories to save face.
With email, resisting a changing situation or new facts can create a long and painful thread. The engineer who discovers a discrepancy and the original owner will go in circles without hearing each other, especially if the inquirer has less organizational power than the owner. The thread will continue looping in the shadows unless someone escalates. And since escalation can feel uncomfortable or confrontational, it often doesn’t happen. The conversation dissolves into the digital ether.
With an open messaging tool (usually Slack), engineers communicate in a town square, which incentivizes correctness over defensiveness. Critically, the town square contains the company’s most distinguished members. Folks with organizational power peruse the channels and take a moment to lend their privilege when they notice something important. While privilege-lending is usually discussed in the context of diversity, it also applies when those with organizational power (title, subject matter expertise, or tenure) put their influence behind someone who lacks those credentials.
This example (which is fabricated, please follow established migration patterns!) shows how a nudge from an organizational leader lends credibility to a newcomer. If leaders do this a few times, then the focus on merit persists even without explicit input, since their presence in the public square is enough.
Lastly, I’ll say that some readers may feel that this is more about big vs small tech rather than public vs private messaging. My hunch is that size and openness are inversely correlated, since companies face legal and compliance pressure to reduce their transparency as they grow. So, the exciting startups of today will need to navigate this tradeoff as they grow into the establishment of tomorrow. Hopefully they will consider the subtle benefits of embracing openness.