Eh. Private chats are the equivalent of walking over to someone's desk and asking them about something. Posting in the team chat is the equivalent of standing up and asking something out loud so that everyone in the vicinity can watch and listen. The latter IS expensive and distracting.

That being said, it is important to recognize which conversations would benefit the whole team. Asking about changing something in the architecture should probably take team input, but asking why something is broken to the engineer who made that change is fine to do in a private chat.

The author makes some interesting points, but admits in another post that chat itself is distracting and sucks productivity (to the point where he had to invent "Pomodoro for chat" to break free). It feels like "group chat by default" would be even harder to break away from, especially if you're concerned about missing that serendipitous moment he talks about.

I have to say I do like his Chatodoro concept, however, so perhaps that's the key.

So what's missing is a "don't notify" flag when posting to a channel ?