> wait, that problem happened like 3 or 4 times in the last couple week
I don’t disagree that Slack _can_ be a knowledge base, but it’s not by default. For something like you mentioned, and I’m not kidding, I would have immediately written it down in a doc for environment troubleshooting. Something like Guru can actually help you do this automatically in Slack. That way you can add it to your existing knowledge base. This helps employees transition from “hey let me ask Bob” to “hey I’ll just check the wiki”. When the default is to check the docs, instead of asking “Bob” you know you’re on the right track.
Funny you mention that. We do have Stackoverflow (check it out if you like this sort of thing. You can have your own private section basically) but I personally don't find it useful. We basically only use it like a troubleshooting section to document longer lasting information.
For proper persistent documentation we have README.mds in the source code. For transient problems (like the above, it's actually something buggy in our code but nobody has been able to figure it out yet), there's slack and I don't think it warrants spending time to write it down somewhere else. Let's say you are a SaaS company with one product. You use kubernetes. Let's say one day you have a problem with minikube on your dev machine because of an OS upgrade (say MacOS Big Sur effs something up). Does it make sense to document this specifically somewhere (takes time i.e. money) vs. the next time someone upgrades their machine they search slack for the error message that someone posted, figure out all they need to do is upgrade their minikube version. After some time, all your devs have upgraded to Big Sur and upgraded. The information will automatically age out of slack.
I find this is actually pretty neat and the most efficient way of doing it. Especially because 90% if not more of your developers will always "ask Bob" before searching anyway, so putting effort into the wiki (or any other doc) is wasted effort anyhow. That's because sending them a link to an old slack convo vs. the wiki or an SO thread or whatever you use is really not that different.
I don’t disagree that Slack _can_ be a knowledge base, but it’s not by default. For something like you mentioned, and I’m not kidding, I would have immediately written it down in a doc for environment troubleshooting. Something like Guru can actually help you do this automatically in Slack. That way you can add it to your existing knowledge base. This helps employees transition from “hey let me ask Bob” to “hey I’ll just check the wiki”. When the default is to check the docs, instead of asking “Bob” you know you’re on the right track.