[asvitkine]

> People write docs about stuff they care about but nobody writes docs about the weird error they got once that they needed a workaround for

Google has an internal stackoverflow-style site as well as bug reports and mailing lists that are all preserved for longer than 1-1 chats.

[saagarjha]

Walk me through this interaction. Do I search your team’s chats for that one time the intern found your build was flaky, or do I take to YAQS to discuss my build failure? Because the interaction is going to go like this:

Me: I’m trying to build //big/important/project, but I’m getting this error on my Mac: “GShoe 1.3 required, but not found.” I depend on it here in my BUILD file: cl/42069. Can someone help me?

A: We deprecated GShoe last year, what are you trying to do? This isn’t something we support. Say, who are you? Don’t you work in a completely different org? We do all our builds on Cloudtop anyways…

Me: I was just trying to get acquainted with the code, this GShoe integration is something that I was interested in playing with.

A: Wait, this isn’t even your job? Hang on, why does your CL add butts.txt?

Me: Uh, I’m doing a thing…for Memegen?

A: …

More seriously though, checking your chats is something I can do myself without imposing myself on you, and it includes basically everything you’ve ever talked about rather than just what you see fit to publish and stand behind. I don’t need to have to wait until I’m stuck enough to ask a question, make sure you understand what I want, nor do I have to argue with you whether what I’m doing is appropriate or not. Or, more likely, I’m not going to get anyone spending time to reply anyways, because your promo committee is not going to search you on MOMA to see how many people you made happy online. So I’d really rather just trawl your chats and send you back documentation or questions based on that rather than you taking a moral stance that deleting your chat history means my life is better or easier.

[rwiggins]

Unlike SO, it's common to have very situation-specific questions posted on YAQS. In fact, my team preferred random one-off questions to go through YAQS (our contact golink pointed you to a monitored YAQS queue) precisely because they're much more searchable (and scalable) than point-to-point chats.

So yes, searching for your GShoe error, and (assuming you found nothing) asking about it on YAQS is not a bad way to get help from some random faraway team.

I suppose it's partially because most team chats are locked down (invite-only). In a company with a reasonably open slack, you might be able to ask in #gshoe-team or search it for relevant conversations, but not at Google in my experience - and this is setting aside the issue of message retention.

BTW, I agree 24h retention was truly ridiculous. Most of my colleagues hated it - fortunately (probably as a result of this legal case!) they disabled it and now the default is 30d everywhere.

Regarding promo, community contributions are still very much an expectation. Being active on YAQS counts toward that. True, the promo committee isn't going to go looking for it, so your manager needs to agree YAQS is a level-appropriate community contribution and include that in your promo packet.

Disclosure: I left Google like, a couple weeks ago

[mattlondon]

When someone finds a problem, you raise a bug with reproduction steps, then either fix it or put it in the backlog. Even if it is a document bug. This way anyone - even people not in that chat - can find it.

This is normal operating procedure everywhere: write stuff down. It was how everyone did things before chat was digital, and how they do now too.

If people are relying on searching chat history for how to fix things or get things working, then you are working at a cowboy outfit where quality must suck. I am not saying google the ideal here - I have no insider knowledge there - but fuck dude using chat history to document and maintain your system? Jesus.