I have never searched old chats for anything but passwords, network folder paths and license keys. Going back to some conversation on some topic and give it to the new guy, does it happen?

▲

jiggawatts 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

I've flipped this around, and now write the "document I want to be handed", which is precisely that condensed into just one or two pages with nothing but network paths, DNS names, service account names, Git repo names, required tooling to install, etc...

No fluff, no descriptions other than simple labels, no ten paragraph intro blurb, no index, nothing that I would normally skip over when reading someone else's document.

I call these "cheat sheets" and send them out to colleagues on their first day on a project. I've heard feedback along the lines of "I got 10x more value from that one page than three weeks of 'handover' from other people."

▲

9dev 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's a bit of a cultural thing how you use chat apps, but we definitely have FAQ-style threads on certain topics, and people often start by searching chats before reaching for other documentation.

▲

allan_s 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

in my company we do this a LOT, what helps if having a LOT of slack channels with explicit topic name

* "incident-2025-07-28-CI-not-deploying-disk-full" * "feature-stripe-integration" * "exploration-datadog-or-sentry"

and channel comes and go and people are quite "agressive" about routing discussion to the right channel or converting 10+ message thread into dedicated channel.

	▲	skeeter2020 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		>> and channel comes and go and people are quite "agressive" about routing discussion to the right channel or converting 10+ message thread into dedicated channel. THIS. I had this at my last gig and it was very successful, but have not been able to replicate at the newer place, because the house keeping is not done, so people end up with the logical conclusion, wrong question that living with a few messy channels is better than living with a bunch of messy channels. I like lighter weight tools that integrate & help like incident management bots, but the vendors will no longer sell you a cheap, useful & focused tool so instead you're faced with convincing your boss to spend a lot of money on an "enterprise-grade", AI-enabled do everything incident/schedule/status/issue/project management system.

▲

theshackleford 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Going back to some conversation on some topic and give it to the new guy, does it happen?

Of course it does. Or do you just assume anything you don't personally do must therefore not actually exist/occur?

▲

taneq 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Huh? We’re talking work chat, right, with technical content and project specific stuff etc.? I refer to that all the time. I moved work chat from ad-hoc social media onto an internal Mattermost server explicitly for this. And at the time it doesn’t seem that useful, but it’s the long tail of projects where it really saves you. Being able to quickly find that one thing you’re sure you discussed that one time three years ago on a project that was closed out two years ago? Priceless.

▲

skeeter2020 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I have to do it sometimes (as the not new guy) and it is very painful. It's too easy for people to throw stuff over the fence with a cold redirect if you have a culture of Slack/Teams is the source of truth