If you need a specific list of people engaged in a conversation, you can either:
1) Schedule something in a time slot that works for everyone. Everyone arrives prepared to focus on the conversation and reach a conclusion before returning to work.
2) Ping them in Slack or @channel and try to pry them away from whatever they're working on. Get a mix of half-attention and hurried responses and force your devs to choose whether to continue focusing on their work and risk missing out, or to drop everything and alt-tab over to Slack and try to catch up on the backlog as quick as possible.
Using synchronous comms or e-mail for everything is a mistake, but trying to force everything into asynchronous commons or Slack is just as bad. Know when to use the right tool for each job.
You can get away with a lot of Slack sins in small teams or companies, but try to scale Slack-only communication up to company scale and it's a nightmare. I worked at a company where I would accumulate upwards of 200 (not a typo) Slack notifications every single day because it became a battle ground of people competing for attention and trying to give drive-by input as they rushed on to the next Slack thread. Moving to e-mails forces people to put some minimal thought and prep into organizing their thoughts, which makes all the difference.
> Having multiple different communication buses seems like a problem as well. Possibly a worse one IMO
You have different types of communication. Why would you want to try to force them all into the lowest common denominator medium?
Trying to force everything into Slack is a disaster. Slack is great for real-time, interactive communication. Information has a very short half-life in Slack, though. Once something requires a longer half-life than Slack supports or a more careful handling, you move it to a better medium.
Meetings are expensive, and often a waste of a number of people's time. And sometimes figuring out _who_ should be there is a problem (and cause also burn time).
Having broader discussions in a Slack thread has the benefits of:
a) it fosters transparency -- others are able to see the discussion, and chime in or move on
b) it's asynchronous -- others can chime in when they're able to, vs. having to drop what they're doing and join a meeting
c) it's self-documenting -- others that may not have been able to attend the meeting, or may just want to know the context/takeaways can just review the discussion
Of course, it has the downside of blocking a decision, where a meeting can help arrive at a decision more quickly. But -- at least, in our experience -- most decisions aren't urgent, and the turnaround time a Slack thread yields is typically sufficient. When it's not, we'll jump on a call.
Email, to me, is the worst of both worlds. You mention below that it forces more thought, and I agree with that as an upside. But typically (again, in our experience), people are pretty put together pretty well-thought-out discussions together, so it's not really an issue for us. We _never_ use email, and I'm perfectly happy with that.
Chat and e-mail have entirely different dynamics. Most people use chat as rapid-fire communication. Most people write e-mail with at least some thought and structure before hitting send. Think sentences versus paragraphs.
You also pick the audience from the start when you fill out the "To" field. With Slack, it can be hard to narrow the audience of a conversation unless you go to private messages (which will be lost to search) or go to threads and only ping the people who need to see it (which is what this article is proposing as their solution)
Because email is a snapshot in time. Slack on the other hand can get overwhelmed by noise and most people, myself included, don't go back very far when opening a channel. Emails, on the other, I make sure to read each thread.
Right, because people definitely read each thread in emails and definitely don't read each message in a thread. It's incredibly easy to link to a specific point in time in Slack, where you can contextually read the discussion from there. Quoting email replies is not the same.
> most people
Based on what number of people in what context?
To put it another way, I don't go back very far when opening an email. Slack, on the other hand, I make sure to read each message.
Why? Having multiple different communication buses seems like a problem as well. Possibly a worse one IMO