Slack: Team chat

Retention

Slack is not a source of truth which means it should only be used for ephemeral conversations. To enforce this, only 90 days of Slack activity in public channels is retained. Any important decisions or changes need to be reflected in the source of truth.

Exceptions:

• #distributioneers retains messages indefinitely because a lot of customer context ends up in Slack threads and it is not currently practical to move that to another system of record.
• #customer-updates similarly retains messages for two years because a lot of customer context ends up in Slack threads and it is not currently practical to move that to another system of record.
• #feedback retains messages indefinitely because it provides a good source of user testimonials.
• #engaging-external-engineers retains indefinitely because team chat is the easiest way to solicit advice from our broader team, and the questions are usually one-off, so it wouldn’t make sense to try to make this more organized.
• #sales-prospecting retains indefinitely to support the education of new teammates about how to communicate with customers and prospects.
• #west_sales_news_and_prospecting and #east_sales_news_and_prospecting retain messages indefinitely to serve as libraries of start-up accounts that the sales team can target as AE and SDR headcount scales.
• #sales-resources retains messages indefinitely to serve as a library of quickly evolving sales collateral and tools.
• All channels that we share with customers or prospects (typically containing the prefixes #trial- or #support-) retain messages indefinitely to preserve context for support or audit-related purposes.
• #marketintel retains messages indefinitely to keep a long term overview of market information around the field of developer tools.
• #seo retains messages indefinitely to keep a record of historical SEO efforts, numbers & screenshots, etc.

Historical archive of Slack messages prior to 2019-11-09: unzip and open sourcegraph-slack-archive-to-20191109/index.html to view. If you consult this, please be sure to add whatever information you learn to a source of truth so we reduce our reliance on this archive.

Avoid private messages

1. When using Slack for work-related purposes, avoid private messages. Private messages discourage collaboration. You might actually be contacting the wrong person, and they cannot easily redirect you to the right person. If the person is unavailable at the moment, it is less efficient because other people can’t jump in and help. Use a public channel and mention the person or group you want to reach. This ensures it is easy for other people to chime in, involve other people if needed, and learn from whatever is discussed.
2. If someone sends you a work-related private message, it is OK to let them know you’d like to take the conversation to a public channel, linking to this section of the handbook. The process might look something like:
   • In the private message:

     Thanks for reaching out. That’s a great question/idea that I think the rest of the team could benefit from. I’m going to move this to #public-channel based on our desire to avoid private messages.

   • In the appropriate public channel:

     @person asked “question” in a DM, pulling that out here if anyone else has input.

   • Answer the question in a thread on that channel message, allowing others to benefit.
3. If you must send a work-related private message, don’t start a conversation with “Hi” or “Hey” because that interrupts their work without communicating anything. If you have a quick question, just ask the question directly, and the person will respond asynchronously. If you truly need to have a synchronous communication, then start by asking for that explicitly, while mentioning the subject. For example: “I’m having trouble understanding issue XYZ. Can we talk about it quickly?“.

If you are a new member of the engineering team, you’ll most likely want to join all of the channels in the engineering section below.

Use of private channels

By default all Slack channels are public. This is inline with our company value to be open and transparent and facilitates collaboration and async learning. Any member of the Sourcegraph workspace (but not guests) can view and join a public channel, giving everyone access to the same shared information. Messages or files posted in a public channel can be searched by other team members.

However, we understand that not everything discussed between team members should be public and there is a need for private channels. Private channels are for conversations that should not be open to all members. People must be added to a private channel by someone who’s already a member of the channel. Messages or files posted in a private channel can only be searched by members of that channel.

Private channels will automatically be created for the following categories of conversations:

• Recruiting: Channels used for discussing specific positions where private candidate feedback and details will be discussed.
• Management: Channels where managers can communicate about specific private or sensitive team situations.
• Legal: Channels with legally sensitive information, such as acquisition discussions or communication with outside parties where we have a legal requirement to keep information sharing limited.
• Affinity groups: Channels for affinity groups that prefer a private space.
• Internal: While we strongly encourage that every team keep these public by default and to use our {$TEAMNAME}-internal naming convention to help other teams understand that it is an internal chat, if a team is feeling pressured or uncomfortable they can ask to make the channel private.

If you would like a channel to be made private, and it does not fit in the categories above, please acquire pre-approval from your manager before contacting #it-tech-ops to make a channel private. The intention of this additional step is to have one more conversation about why a channel should be made private—ensuring we are doing everything we can to adhere to our company values while respecting individuals’ privacy.

Send (and read) messages any time

Because Sourcegraph is a global, all-remote company with flexible work hours, teammates should feel free to send messages to others at any time, rather than trying to guess what a convenient time would be for the other party (or parties) involved.

However, a corollary to this is that they are free to read your message whenever is convenient for them. There is no expectation that people will be responsive over the weekend/vacation/evening/etc..

Make sure to set up Slack to only send you notifications when you want to see them!

Use threads instead of channel-wide responses

In public channels, we use threads to organize conversations around topics and limit the number of notifications into a channel. That being said, when a thread reaches a point where a result or update would be useful for the entire channel to be aware of, you can check the Also send to #channel to send it into the channel’s main view.

Name

To avoid confusion, set your Slack display name as First Name (or preferred name) Last Name.

Channels

We have many Slack channels. You don’t have to join them all, but here is a good breakdown of the most active ones by category.