Ask HN: How do you feel about backchannel communications for engineering teams?

Hi!

On the teams I've worked on, I've usually always been part of a public Slack channel (with managers, product, designers, various stakeholders) and a private slack channel which is only engineers.

1.) I think the private channel makes people more likely to ask the "dumb questions", be more frank, and generally more communicative: do you agree?

2.) Should engineering managers be part of the private channel?

In general, I'm curious what HN thinks about this paradigm!