I've noticed the people who dislike IM tend to be weaker communicators in general.
Compared to email, IMs tend to have less context and are generally short and to the point but otherwise unstructured. There's a pressure to respond quickly, and part of responding quickly is typing less words. Condensing thoughts to a minimum number of words is a harder skill than it seems; people tend to compensate for low quality communication with more words. Then there's still all the drawbacks of email: typing proficiency, spelling, grammar, and asynchrony.
Compared to mouth words conversations, IM doesn't have inflection or body language to help with tone. It's also not as fast as live conversations so it's easier losing context and easier to get overwhelmed with multiple conversations happening concurrently.
I personally love IM because it's easier to have multiple simultaneous conversations with more throughput and less latency than email normally achieves. I think of IM like async programming, when one conversation gets blocked, I can work on another. Mouth-to-mouth communication is like a singled threaded I/O, you're wasting resources (time) when you're blocked, but if you're not blocked you're more efficient since there's no context switching (so a heavily one sided conversation/lecture). Email is like multithreading, context switches are more expensive and the amount of work done per context switch needs to be big enough for it to be worthwhile. They all have merits and use cases.
I don't agree at all. I don't like IM because I'm in either of two states while in a conversation:
* Distracted from my work that requires concentration while someone slowly asks me questions
* Blocked in my work until someone slowly answers my questions
(Yes, these are two sides of the same coin.)
If my work mostly consisted of conversations, it wouldn't be a problem. But my work doesn't.
IM is slightly better than email for getting people to answer all points, but an email thread with inline replies would be my overall preference, like in newsgroups back in the day. However most people nowadays treat email as an inefficient IM, and only answer the first or last points.
A Google Doc with collaboration in comments is a viable alternative, especially for something where there's a product (e.g. design or decision) from the conversation.
This. We use slack at work, but not really as an IM, its more like an easy to use message board. I have slack closed most of the time and only check in a few times a day. If somebody has a problem they need an answer too right now, they can call me.
We've actually just built what you're using at work: Slack, but async. It's an extension of the message board idea, using Reddit-like threads within a Slack context in place of live chat. The free version is live (it's used as a P2P message boards): https://getaether.net.
I think you guys solved it pretty well, but in the case you want a dedicated tool for your workflow, we're currently piloting the private version, happy to give you access if interesting. (email in profile)
Teams has separate chat and the "Teams" functionality you describe - personally I think I'd prefer these to be more similar so that chats were, in effect, a team of 2 - but I guess that wouldn't be practical given everything else that is associated with a Team (groups, SharePoint site etc.).
Teams has separate chat and the "Teams" functionality you describe - personally I think I'd prefer these to be more similar so that chats were, in effect, a team of 2 - but I guess that wouldn't be practical given everything else that is associated with a Team (group, SharePoint site etc.).
Aether’s private version is (attempts to) better able to handle detailed, multi-branch conversations (like Reddit, with n-level comment trees) than Teams, which looks similar to Facebook with only one level, though I have to admit I haven’t used Teams myself.
IM's also great for keeping a whole team or group in-sync with a current team activity or sprint.
If everybody on the team is aware of how to properly use IM, (and when to use an alternate means) - then most of the bad effects talked about in the ranticle are easily overcome.
I'm not even sure it's possible to do remote work without IM.
> I'm not even sure it's possible to do remote work without IM.
As someone who has been working from home for 15 years, I'm here to say it only takes one counter example (me!) to say of course it is possible to work remotely without it.
Recently I was forced to adopt slack on top of all the other communication channels in use (phone, webex, email). Perhaps it is a generational thing (I'm in my 50s), but I greatly prefer to talk or use email for both my personal and professional life. The two modes of communication are different enough that they fill different purposes. IM seems to be an awkward in-between mode of operation. I HATE getting a slack message, with the expectation that I'm always ready to be interrupted, and I owe a prompt reply.
Typical slack interaction. I'm head down debugging something when slack clacks at me. I click on the app, and it says: "hey". The person on the other side is just probing to see if I'm really there. So I reply, "I'm here". But I can't go back to my work because I know a single sentence is going to interrupt me again very soon. Slack helpfully tells me "So and so is typing..." and I continue to sit like a dummy, waiting for it. Eventually the message arrives which was important enough to interrupt my flow and which began emptying my the cache of information I had amassed while debugging: "Are you working on bug #1234, or does someone else have it?" So I type, "Yes, I'm working on it right now." I close the window and try to get back in the flow, but 60 seconds later, slack clacks again at me. I open the window. "OK, thanks" it reads.
Boy, that was a real productivity booster.
And before someone snidely says that I'm a grumpy, out of touch programmer -- my reviews would indicate otherwise. Yes, it is nice that IM leaves a paper trail that a phone call doesn't, but typically there is one or two important points that come out of conversation and I can quickly add them in my TODO file.
That's a prime example of poor IM skills. Messaging someone "hey" is a productivity killer, as you said, for the reasons you said, which is why you just shouldn't do it.
Healthy IM communication should go a little more like this:
Working, working... beep
alt-tab
"Hey, are you working on bug #1234, or does someone else have it?"
"I'm working on #415, so someone else has it."
alt-tab
working, working... beep
alt-tab
"Do you happen to know where the Davidson account files went? I can't find them anywhere :/"
"No, sorry. Maybe try the Z: drive?"
alt-tab
And if you don't want to be interrupted by anything except critical things, set "do not disturb" mode.
This exactly. If I'm doing concentration heavy work, I'll mute IM and batch respond when I get water/bathroom. I also have toasts on a side screen so `hey` messages I can quickly read and ignore without losing focus. IM is only as distracting as you let it be, and it's relatively easy to make it no worse than email.
That matches my experience working with shops that use slack.
I’ve made peace with it by telling myself that these companies value my attention more than they do my productivity. It still costs them the same for a day of my work, whether they slow me down or not.
I try to communicate this to them as early and as clearly as possible. After that, if the ceo feels the urge to spend a few hundred dollars to find out “what are you working on right now”, that’s fine with me. I’ll dump the cache then spend an hour or so rebuilding it to get back to where I was.
But I’d never use something like that in a situation where it was me paying the bills.
> It still costs them the same for a day of my work, whether they slow me down or not.
Yes, and they know it too. People often value your attention more than your productivity, and with good reason. Think about how many meetings you've been in and steered somebody clear of a trap just because you were there. Or how some input you give from meeting with the CEO could impact the direction of the company. Your attention is probably more valuable than your productivity more often than you think.
Keeping a group in sync is also possible (and I'd say preferable) via email, since current objectives and sprints don't change very quickly at all relative to the speed of conversation, and both have natural paper trails. But if your current objective is something like triaging a complex outage or live event, IM works beautifully for that.
I've done remote work via long conference calls before and it works for certain types of work; I agree that IM is much more preferable.
Compared to email, IMs tend to have less context and are generally short and to the point but otherwise unstructured. There's a pressure to respond quickly, and part of responding quickly is typing less words. Condensing thoughts to a minimum number of words is a harder skill than it seems; people tend to compensate for low quality communication with more words. Then there's still all the drawbacks of email: typing proficiency, spelling, grammar, and asynchrony.
Compared to mouth words conversations, IM doesn't have inflection or body language to help with tone. It's also not as fast as live conversations so it's easier losing context and easier to get overwhelmed with multiple conversations happening concurrently.
I personally love IM because it's easier to have multiple simultaneous conversations with more throughput and less latency than email normally achieves. I think of IM like async programming, when one conversation gets blocked, I can work on another. Mouth-to-mouth communication is like a singled threaded I/O, you're wasting resources (time) when you're blocked, but if you're not blocked you're more efficient since there's no context switching (so a heavily one sided conversation/lecture). Email is like multithreading, context switches are more expensive and the amount of work done per context switch needs to be big enough for it to be worthwhile. They all have merits and use cases.