In company Slack?

Private != personal. At least I never ever imagined one could even assume DMs on work IM are personal private conversations. They're organizationally grouped as chat between to accounts, as opposed to group chat, but they're at work, for work, using work-provided tools...

Or put another way: why would anyone consider work Slack to be different in this regard than company e-mail? Much like with e-mails, the difference between DMs and group chats is whether the number of participants is > 2.

I guess the cognitive dissonance is that I used to be able to say things to a coworker in-person which wasn’t recorded and tracked, using my voice. This was always a normal part of work, and I didn’t give it a second thought until it was gone. Nowadays it feels like someone is constantly standing over your shoulder whenever you’re at work, and there’s never a private moment. This is especially strange during holidays, since personal conversations tend to spontaneously happen around those times.

You’re right of course. I just wish we had something to fill the void that was left by in-person interactions vanishing. I think I’ll be doing WFH pretty much the rest of my life, and I absolutely hate going into an office in general, but there are definitely some aspects I miss. Being able to chat off the record with a coworker is one of them.

Call! Yes, most communication can be done with chats in slack or teams, but take the excuse to call and chit chat a bit before getting down to business.

Unless all calls are transcribed and recorded, it’s pretty “watercoolerish”.

At that point, the bigger risk is that someone repeats something to someone that you wish they hadn't. But I've had that happen with an in-person conversation.

That's funny, because as someone who has worked mostly remotely, I consider the recording of every chat a feature. For example, I have been able to use this to figure out why code I wrote a decade ago is the way it is.