Ironically at google's scale(size and global timezone footprint) the inefficiency this default setting creates likely burns millions every day from work that gets blocked or knowledge that isn't discoverable.
Organize the world's information, except if it might make us look bad.
This is the pennywise pound foolish leadership that has taken over.
It changes the expectation of the team though. Since teams know they expire in 24 hours they are forced to extract the important information and document them somewhere else. I've been on remote teams where they explicitly do it so members are forced to document in a structured way.
Conversations in real life get deleted after 0s! The trick is to not use chat as documentation. Documentation as documentation is way more useful. The process of creating it is valuable to
clear thinking too.
Sure, maybe in some ideal world where everyone has unlimited time to write documentation.
Sometimes it's just nice just to be like "Oh what exactly did that person say/link a few days ago? Seemed relevant to what I'm working on, let me search the chat history..."
It is the opposite, you need unlimited time play he said/she said yoyo driven development if you don't document things. The compression ration might be 1000 words said to 20 words written, so it is no big deal. A 2% tax that is well worth it (assuming speaking and typing speeds are similar).
YMMV if the team is very small, very smart and everyone has a great memory or the problem domain is tidy.
I have lost maybe a dozen hours of work to Chrome's hard-coded 90 day history limit. Frustrating if you remember this internal tool from a year ago, but can't find it again.
I wonder why they chose not to make it configurable.
Organize the world's information, except if it might make us look bad.
This is the pennywise pound foolish leadership that has taken over.