Unlike SO, it's common to have very situation-specific questions posted on YAQS. In fact, my team preferred random one-off questions to go through YAQS (our contact golink pointed you to a monitored YAQS queue) precisely because they're much more searchable (and scalable) than point-to-point chats.
So yes, searching for your GShoe error, and (assuming you found nothing) asking about it on YAQS is not a bad way to get help from some random faraway team.
I suppose it's partially because most team chats are locked down (invite-only). In a company with a reasonably open slack, you might be able to ask in #gshoe-team or search it for relevant conversations, but not at Google in my experience - and this is setting aside the issue of message retention.
BTW, I agree 24h retention was truly ridiculous. Most of my colleagues hated it - fortunately (probably as a result of this legal case!) they disabled it and now the default is 30d everywhere.
Regarding promo, community contributions are still very much an expectation. Being active on YAQS counts toward that. True, the promo committee isn't going to go looking for it, so your manager needs to agree YAQS is a level-appropriate community contribution and include that in your promo packet.
Disclosure: I left Google like, a couple weeks ago
So yes, searching for your GShoe error, and (assuming you found nothing) asking about it on YAQS is not a bad way to get help from some random faraway team.
I suppose it's partially because most team chats are locked down (invite-only). In a company with a reasonably open slack, you might be able to ask in #gshoe-team or search it for relevant conversations, but not at Google in my experience - and this is setting aside the issue of message retention.
BTW, I agree 24h retention was truly ridiculous. Most of my colleagues hated it - fortunately (probably as a result of this legal case!) they disabled it and now the default is 30d everywhere.
Regarding promo, community contributions are still very much an expectation. Being active on YAQS counts toward that. True, the promo committee isn't going to go looking for it, so your manager needs to agree YAQS is a level-appropriate community contribution and include that in your promo packet.
Disclosure: I left Google like, a couple weeks ago