> IMs occupy this weird spot between face to face conversation and a nice well-written email.
IM is great; It occupies the perfect spot where the conversation is real time but the parties don't have to immediately answer. Having 30 seconds to think in between each interaction sounds trivial but it has a _massive_ impact on the quality of the interaction.
Exactly. I can't imagine providing intra-company support over either email or IRL.
IM lets me take a second to understand someone's question, maybe run some command or look up some docs, and then get back. When answering IRL, there's always the pressure to definitively answer the question, because they went through all the effort to actually take up time together. It's hard to say, "I don't know; I'll have to dig in deeper."
And turn around time on email for questions like "Why doesn't this thing work" sounds like an easy way to get blocked for half a day.
I find video chat to be the worst business communication tool, unless you need screen sharing.
It's still a mystery to me why people so often prefer it over the traditional phone, which has better audio and reliability and doesn't force everyone to regulate their posture, get in a professional looking location, etc
Absolutely, being able re-read and take the time to digest the message is great in IM, especially for a non-native speaker. As mentioned else where, you can also do quick searches if there's something in there you didn't understand or want to double-check.
It's not an "awkward middle ground", it's the "perfect middle ground"
Great for you, but I'm sitting around waiting for you to finish chatting with somebody else. I'd rather just call you and get your 100% attention, or if its not important, email you, and let you respond in your own time.
It seems like different people prefer different communication styles. I don't like IM and I never use them for real-time communication. I'm picking up phone once or twice a day and respond when necessary and that's about it. Similar to e-mail.
I have some folks that I work with on projects that are like this. I'm very much an email or IM guy, since 90% of the discussion is technical. But occasionally I have to work with someone who would rather pick up the phone to respond to my technical question. It's mildly infuriating, since the phone is the wrong medium for that particular conversation, and usually leads to delays even if I do pick up the call to answer the question, because the nature of the conversation doesn't lend itself well to a voice discussion.
And that doesn't even take into account the fact that I'm not going to answer the phone if I'm on another call already, or deep into a technical problem. An IM or email, on the other hand, let's me answer their question without having to totally disengage from my current task.
Obviously these are scenario-specific, and my work environment isn't yours. But things get tricky when our two work environments have to cross...
I agree. In an especially technical conversation, I can dive deep in my knowledge before someone steam rolls me with their side (especially useful if someone broad sides me with a question). If it were an email, than the exchange would be far too slow to get anything meaningful done. I rarely come away from an IM exchange not having my problem solved. I nearly always come away from face to face and email communication either without my problem solved or it taking far longer to solve. Granted, this may be symptomatic of how people prefer IM over email but that seems to make the whole argument moot: people will self organize around the most efficient processes.
I wonder how many people share your opinion of searchable history, given that it’s the number one selling point for many people for slack over other IM systems. Or, at least it’s the one I hear most often.
Short pauses to collect your thoughts? Sure. Routinely placing 30s pauses between statements? No, it's not acceptable to most people. 30s is a really long time in verbal communication. Grab a stopwatch and try letting 30s run out between statements.
Not really - pauses are uncomfortable and most people will start speaking again within a few seconds just to fill it. Unless you've interrupted eye contact and are visibly doing something else, in which case to avoid rudeness you need to ask them to wait while you do it.
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.
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.
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.
I understand the sentiment here, but I disagree with the author, mostly the fact that video/face-to-face requires note taking to refer back to what was said. The author mentions this offhandedly, but I believe it's one of the greatest strengths of IM over a video call.
I despise note taking in meetings, it's stressful when people rely on me to take notes for them, and I end up missing out on the conversation because I'm trying to condense what was said into notes. Maybe I'm just a bad note taker.
The author seems to be intimidated by "whole team" IM rooms because they're hard to manage. I agree, they are hard to manage, and I refer to them as the wild west. But that's the beauty- they're unmanaged, open, anyone can read any thread (at my employer we use an IM client that supports threading).
The author didn't touch on that, and it's my favorite thing about "whole team" IM rooms: As opposed to small group emails and meetings, "whole team" IM rooms are a place where anyone and everyone can benefit from the discussion.
> I despise note taking in meetings, it's stressful when people rely on me to take notes for them, and I end up missing out on the conversation because I'm trying to condense what was said into notes. Maybe I'm just a bad note taker.
I've tried doing live translations from English to Spanish, it sucks. I'm trying to digest the spirit of what you just said, and sometimes get lost in my own mind thinking of other ideas as a result. Note taking is just as bad, and without those side ideas I'm just a robot, beep beep. I am not a robot, I just want a reasonable paper trail.
If you want us all to remember a meeting, what we do is if they're related to tickets, we update tickets while the meeting occurs. We post comments and tag specific people to update specific tickets.
My meeting notes are not the best, but I try to do bullet points of what I need to do in condensed verbiage if someone's talking too much about the goals.
The discussion leading to a decision is often way more valuable than the actual decision. Remembering what we decided to do is easy. Remembering why we went with that decision is much harder sometimes.
One of the appeals of email is asynchronicity—I can compose a well-reasoned proposal, and give my team time to compose a well reasoned counter-proposal.
But after more than a handful of rounds of this, it breaks down. Long email threads are impossible, especially ones that I wasn't originally participating in, but then got cc'd into. There's no easy way to skim and get a summary of the current state and where the heated bits of the proposal are.
That's why I like Dropbox Paper instead of email for these kinds of discussions. Threads spin off of a highlighted snippet, so there's always context to the discussion. Discussion in threads gets resolved, and the doc gets updated to reflect the decision—this means the doc is always canonical when someone new first reads it.
Email will never die because it’s so universally versatile. But specifically for intra-team discussions and decision-making, I'm convinced we can find (and already have found) better solutions.
Not sure what exactly the author does, but IM is the absolute life saver in every developers world. E-Mails are spammy, include too many people, are too long, take too long to write, get drowned in a sea of useless crap, etc... Everyone working in a bigger corporation, knows that emails are a major time sink.
Video calls? Sure, if there is a meeting. But video calls, not matter what software you use, is a nightmare. The quality is crap, the connection lags and it never feels anything close to real life interaction...
But most importantly, IM let's you respond on your own time. There is nothing worse that people talking to you or calling you with a video call while you are trying to figure out why that statemachine recursed into the 20th method call and then jumping this way and that way, suddenly jumped the wrong way and then still produced the correct result while thinking about how it got into the 20th call in the first place when it should have branche din the 10th call... You get the picture.
This reminds me of the worst part of email: signatures. 5-6 line signatures, where the signature takes up more space than the actual message. They are a pollutant of email threads.
Now that you mention it - in my company for some reason most people dropped this crap and just sign with first name only or no signature at all (of course some people still use multiline sigs with pictures). I don't know the reason, but maybe in one of the ms office upgrades they were lost and nobody bothered to fill them again? :)
But why? Write short, one on one emails, and apply filters to focus on the colleagues you care about talking with. All mail suites should support this. People just ignorantly think email is archaic. It's the equivalent of teenagers rolling their eyes when their mom uses the phone instead of texting. Then it became texting vs Facebook. Then it became Instagram vs Facebook. It never ends. People just want to hate on established technologies to feel like tech gurus
it is possibly to respond in your own time but not really practical in the flow. im is pretty much the same thing as chat now days. the flow of conversation can go fast.
This reminds me of a Tina Fay quote: “It is an impressively arrogant move to conclude that just because you don’t like something, it is empirically not good. I don’t like Chinese food, but I don’t write articles trying to prove it doesn’t exist.”
None of the arguments presented are particularly compelling. In particular, I find the paragraph describing why "IMs don't scale" kind of hilarious, as someone who has been on too many email threads where a seemingly endless stream of people are "cc-ed" in. Ultimately, I think every channel has its strengths and weaknesses, and teams need to figure out for themselves what the right mix is for their combination of size/personality/needs.
One thing that I'd like to make people pay attention to is the end. "I believe this would play well with other ways I'd like to organize the teamwork: with the general focus on agility, asynchronous, independence and ownership. But more on that another time." This post is a part of (to be written) broader series of mutually re-enforcing ideas.
Team culture is being built around the communication. In teams where communication is IM-based, people tend to rely on it, while they consider email to be for "the slow stuff, that I check once a day". I did work in a (small, but successful) fully remote startup where the whole communication was email based. Part of the reason was - everyone were in completely different timezones. And it just makes people learn to limit the need for synchronous communication: write better documentation, work more independently, automate more, etc.
Also - when people don't have to monitor multiple communication channels ... they monitor email better and tend to respond more often. It is actually not unusual to get a response in a matter of "30 seconds". When people expect replies, email is actually as fast as IM - you do realize it is being sent through the same Internet-tubes, right? :)
Another thing is - people switch to video-chat quicker, to talk something over quickly in 2 minutes, instead of spending half an hour being distracted and staring at "Joe is typing ..." back and forth.
BTW. I did work work in a big corp. with tooons and toons of useless emails in Outlook, and a terrible corporate IM system, that a lot of people didn't even bother to use. It was just a matter of setting up email filters right. First and most important was: "if I'm not directly the single person on To field it goes to some sub-folder". It was still better than eg. working in a medium-sized startup and using Slack. At least the configuration was in my own hands, instead of split between arbitrary channels, that often did not make much sense (too broad, or too narrow, not well defined, redundant, etc, etc.)
If you are not willing to mute/ignore IMs while focusing they can be distracting and reduce productivity. However, if you aren't willing to mute/ignore I think the problem is not with instant messaging but your personal focus. Any form of communication can interrupt your workflow if you let it.
If everyone muted or ignored IMs whenever they were trying to focus on something, the whole purpose of instant messaging would fail; it would not be "instant" anymore, so we would all effectively go back to phone calls and e-mail.
Also very important: there is a huge design flaw in any piece of technology that, for it not to disrupt your entire life, you have to deliberately ignore it or find ways to not let it sabotage every action you try to take.
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IM is great; It occupies the perfect spot where the conversation is real time but the parties don't have to immediately answer. Having 30 seconds to think in between each interaction sounds trivial but it has a _massive_ impact on the quality of the interaction.
IM lets me take a second to understand someone's question, maybe run some command or look up some docs, and then get back. When answering IRL, there's always the pressure to definitively answer the question, because they went through all the effort to actually take up time together. It's hard to say, "I don't know; I'll have to dig in deeper."
And turn around time on email for questions like "Why doesn't this thing work" sounds like an easy way to get blocked for half a day.
These days I check my email about once a week. I do almost everything business oriented over IM.
It's still a mystery to me why people so often prefer it over the traditional phone, which has better audio and reliability and doesn't force everyone to regulate their posture, get in a professional looking location, etc
It's not an "awkward middle ground", it's the "perfect middle ground"
Chat has solved my life issues and I've a good paying job now without chat I really doubt I'd be able to keep a job.
And that doesn't even take into account the fact that I'm not going to answer the phone if I'm on another call already, or deep into a technical problem. An IM or email, on the other hand, let's me answer their question without having to totally disengage from my current task.
Obviously these are scenario-specific, and my work environment isn't yours. But things get tricky when our two work environments have to cross...
I agree searching history is mostly useless though, we have only ever used slack as a free service where it deletes the IMs, never missed them.
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.
* 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.
Deleted Comment
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.
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.
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.
I despise note taking in meetings, it's stressful when people rely on me to take notes for them, and I end up missing out on the conversation because I'm trying to condense what was said into notes. Maybe I'm just a bad note taker.
The author seems to be intimidated by "whole team" IM rooms because they're hard to manage. I agree, they are hard to manage, and I refer to them as the wild west. But that's the beauty- they're unmanaged, open, anyone can read any thread (at my employer we use an IM client that supports threading).
The author didn't touch on that, and it's my favorite thing about "whole team" IM rooms: As opposed to small group emails and meetings, "whole team" IM rooms are a place where anyone and everyone can benefit from the discussion.
I've tried doing live translations from English to Spanish, it sucks. I'm trying to digest the spirit of what you just said, and sometimes get lost in my own mind thinking of other ideas as a result. Note taking is just as bad, and without those side ideas I'm just a robot, beep beep. I am not a robot, I just want a reasonable paper trail.
If you want us all to remember a meeting, what we do is if they're related to tickets, we update tickets while the meeting occurs. We post comments and tag specific people to update specific tickets.
My meeting notes are not the best, but I try to do bullet points of what I need to do in condensed verbiage if someone's talking too much about the goals.
When you hear a decision being made you can ask the meeting to stop, reiterate what you just heard, then write that down.
But after more than a handful of rounds of this, it breaks down. Long email threads are impossible, especially ones that I wasn't originally participating in, but then got cc'd into. There's no easy way to skim and get a summary of the current state and where the heated bits of the proposal are.
That's why I like Dropbox Paper instead of email for these kinds of discussions. Threads spin off of a highlighted snippet, so there's always context to the discussion. Discussion in threads gets resolved, and the doc gets updated to reflect the decision—this means the doc is always canonical when someone new first reads it.
Email will never die because it’s so universally versatile. But specifically for intra-team discussions and decision-making, I'm convinced we can find (and already have found) better solutions.
Video calls? Sure, if there is a meeting. But video calls, not matter what software you use, is a nightmare. The quality is crap, the connection lags and it never feels anything close to real life interaction...
But most importantly, IM let's you respond on your own time. There is nothing worse that people talking to you or calling you with a video call while you are trying to figure out why that statemachine recursed into the 20th method call and then jumping this way and that way, suddenly jumped the wrong way and then still produced the correct result while thinking about how it got into the 20th call in the first place when it should have branche din the 10th call... You get the picture.
None of the arguments presented are particularly compelling. In particular, I find the paragraph describing why "IMs don't scale" kind of hilarious, as someone who has been on too many email threads where a seemingly endless stream of people are "cc-ed" in. Ultimately, I think every channel has its strengths and weaknesses, and teams need to figure out for themselves what the right mix is for their combination of size/personality/needs.
One thing that I'd like to make people pay attention to is the end. "I believe this would play well with other ways I'd like to organize the teamwork: with the general focus on agility, asynchronous, independence and ownership. But more on that another time." This post is a part of (to be written) broader series of mutually re-enforcing ideas.
Team culture is being built around the communication. In teams where communication is IM-based, people tend to rely on it, while they consider email to be for "the slow stuff, that I check once a day". I did work in a (small, but successful) fully remote startup where the whole communication was email based. Part of the reason was - everyone were in completely different timezones. And it just makes people learn to limit the need for synchronous communication: write better documentation, work more independently, automate more, etc.
Also - when people don't have to monitor multiple communication channels ... they monitor email better and tend to respond more often. It is actually not unusual to get a response in a matter of "30 seconds". When people expect replies, email is actually as fast as IM - you do realize it is being sent through the same Internet-tubes, right? :)
Another thing is - people switch to video-chat quicker, to talk something over quickly in 2 minutes, instead of spending half an hour being distracted and staring at "Joe is typing ..." back and forth.
BTW. I did work work in a big corp. with tooons and toons of useless emails in Outlook, and a terrible corporate IM system, that a lot of people didn't even bother to use. It was just a matter of setting up email filters right. First and most important was: "if I'm not directly the single person on To field it goes to some sub-folder". It was still better than eg. working in a medium-sized startup and using Slack. At least the configuration was in my own hands, instead of split between arbitrary channels, that often did not make much sense (too broad, or too narrow, not well defined, redundant, etc, etc.)
Anyway, thanks for all the comments. :)
Also very important: there is a huge design flaw in any piece of technology that, for it not to disrupt your entire life, you have to deliberately ignore it or find ways to not let it sabotage every action you try to take.