On Team Chat Channels in Slack

Photo by Pankaj Patel on Unsplash

I had a conversation in a live meeting that triggered a Proustian moment of a team long left in the past. The conversation was specifically in regards to the purpose of Team Channels in Slack. And, the Proustian moment was one of forgotten fortune…

Early in my career I joined a start up, and boy was I lucky to join this start up in particular, because this team was young, motivated, and talented. I credit the experience for advancing my career a decade in three years. The team itself was so gung-ho because, well, we didn’t know any better. We were all at the stage in life where work was the most important thing. Many of us just having finished college (or, in my case, still wrapping it up). The entire team was co-located so we did a large portion of our speaking in the trenches together, however, off hours, as few and far between as they were, brought more communication in the form of IRC and, eventually, Hipchat.

There were many different chat communication styles at that organization ranging from me (at the time) saying very very little in fear of making a mistake (which I made plenty of in due course) to one team member who would, almost literally, stream his consciousness into chat throughout the day. My communication style was bore mostly out of ignorance. Ignorance for good software development and not wanting everyone to know. And, likewise, ignorance of the importance of communication. This team member, who constantly streamed his consciousness into the chat, became an exemplar. At the time, I sort of took for granted that there would be a stream of new messages in the team channel almost as if someone were having a jovial conversation of maximal importance which included questions, opinions, jokes, stories, and rapport with the occasional response to a comment.

If we fast forward today, I now realize that this teammate’s modus operandi was a strong indicator of a good, healthy team culture. One that’s very rarely found nowadays. I miss it very much. There was an entirely different level of connectedness between our teammates because of this one teammate. He brought together our disparate conversations into a cohesive fabric of self conversation for which we all could enjoy and interact with. In thinking about it further, it feels as though there have been many advances in chat communication with the likes of Slack, Mattermost, and Discord but with these advances, came a sense of disconnectedness. Whether it comes from a place of ignorance of the importance of communication or, as was previously the case of myself, feeling like an imposter, the result is the same: near silent channels with everyone trying to guess what everyone else is going to say.

∞∞∞

I guess I’m writing this as a confirmation; that the course to chart forward is one of radical openness – clear albeit sometimes murky – conversation that exposes my internal dialog and thinking. Something everyone can look upon as a collective weaving of their thoughts, comments, opinions, questions, jokes.

I don’t know where this teammate is nowadays but, in some sense, it doesn’t matter. His examples live on through me.