Twitter shut off its internal Slack, and now ‘everyone is barely working’
Author: Casey Newton & Zoe Schiffer – The Verge
...That same day, Jira — a tool Twitter uses to track everything from progress on feature updates to regulatory compliance — also stopped working. With no way to chat and no code to ship, most engineers took the day off.
...For Twitter employees, Slack is more than a way to message colleagues: it’s also a store of institutional memory, preserved in documents that workers have had to rely on more and more since Musk purged thousands of employees since taking over.
...“After everyone was gone, I had no one to ask questions when stuck,” an employee who stayed on past the first round of layoffs wrote in Blind. “I used to search for the error [messages] on Slack and got help 99 percent of the time.”
Time after time I have had client’s tell me that Yammer, Slack, Teams Chat, etc. are ‘not records’ and should have a minimal retention period. As a consultant, I can highlight the knowledge lost and quickly show them that their employees are using these platforms to get approvals, make decisions and communicate orders in contradiction of policies. In the end, the business managers need to advocate for their teams and the platforms have to provide practical classification, retention and governance features to differentiate between lunch plans and actual business decisions. See Google’s failure to preserve chat messages for context.