This is an article I wrote for LinkedIn in September 2025, published here for posterity.
If you receive a DM asking for support from a coworker, simply helping them right away might not be the best course of action. Let me explain.
One of the most common and damaging organizational antipatterns is the ‘silo’. A silo is a place where knowledge assets go in, where they are used by those who happen to be in the same silo, but never benefit anyone outside, even when doing so would be more valuable for the org as a whole. Organizational silos are found in all sizes, even as small as one person – you know, that one engineer who ends up being the “go-to guy” for an entire component that everyone else is scared to touch.
As a senior engineer you will want to do everything in your power to avoid becoming part of a silo, and as a leader you should try to break them down whenever they are found. This can be an excruciatingly hard task in practice, so let’s start small. A positive practice that almost everyone can exercise is to push conversations from DMs to public channels, in Slack or whatever tool you happen to be using.
The setup is simple and many orgs will already have some variant on this: Every team, project or product has a public “support” channel and it is the default forum for all pertinent communications. If someone DMs me for help, I will push the conversation to the public channel, unless it’s clearly confidential in nature. This has a number of key advantages:
Transparency – Our first instinct when asked a question is often to just provide a straight answer. Someone else might see the question and consider: “Why are they asking this in the first place? How can we solve their problem in a better way?”
Knowledge sharing – If conversations are shared, indexed and searchable, they become a knowledge base that continues to create value even after the conversations are long over. Analyzing them can bring valuable insights.
Better collaboration – Anyone can join the conversation, contributing their knowledge and perspective. If the person you had in mind isn’t immediately available, instead of shotgunning DMs in the hopes of finding someone who is, you need only post once.
I’ve found it quite hard to break down silos in orgs where they’ve become part of the company culture, perhaps for reasons of (often imagined) confidentiality, intra-org competition or politics. But once you start, the benefits will be almost immediately obvious, hopefully driving long-term change.