Kill Instant Messaging

by sewfr • 7 years ago

151 148 7 years ago

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.

giancarlostoro2• 7 years ago

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.

jay_kyburz4• 7 years ago

When you're in a meeting taking notes, you don't need to write everything that was said, you just write the decisions that were made.

When you hear a decision being made you can ask the meeting to stop, reiterate what you just heard, then write that down.

ubercow13• 7 years ago

It's useful to have everything later though, especially if it's a technical discussion.

plorkyeran• 7 years ago

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.

qznc• 7 years ago

There is a difference with note taking between video and face-to-face: with video I can share my screen and have everybody nod off the notes.

mbell2• 7 years ago

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.

jjcm• 7 years ago

In addition to that, I can hold multiple "real time" conversations at once with IM, whereas with video chat I'm glued to a single topic.

These days I check my email about once a week. I do almost everything business oriented over IM.

ehsankia• 7 years ago

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"

jay_kyburz4• 7 years ago

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.

smelendez• 7 years ago

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

cuddlybacon• 7 years ago

What's nice about IM is you can generally get a pretty quick turn around without forcing them to stop what they were doing.

z1mm32m4n3• 7 years ago

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.

mikro2nd• 7 years ago

If it's that important or urgent, why not use the phone?

kristianov• 7 years ago

Pausing for 30s during verbal conversation is also acceptable. Just saying.

thrownblown• 7 years ago

That was when I had them reboot their computer when I was doing tech support in a call center

mbell2• 7 years ago

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.

pjc50• 7 years ago

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.

reificator• 7 years ago

I think you might be underestimating just how long 30 seconds actually is.

newsgremlin2• 7 years ago

I agree that works if you are both engaged in an activity, anything simple as mini-golf or eating dinner.

keithnz• 7 years ago

They are great when done right, its a good way to queue up a tiny request for when someone gets to a logical break.

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.

dijit3• 7 years ago

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.

dclowd9901• 7 years ago

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.

vbezhenar• 7 years ago

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.

taborj2• 7 years ago

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...

gingabriska• 7 years ago

I get anexity attacks when I to attend even a call let alone face to face meeting.

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.

rossdavidh• 7 years ago

While I agree with the message, in the sense that I think IM combines the worst of both worlds, I try not to get too attached to my opinions on how we should communicate. I rarely have any say in that, and I try not to get worked up about things I have no control over.

However, it does seem (and the article doesn't stress this but I think it's important) that there are simply TOO MANY different channels of communication. Figuring out which channel that communication came through on, in order to find it, is a problem. Since getting rid of email seems impractical, as does getting rid of face-to-face, IM seems like the best one to drop.

But again, who care what I think? No one. In this case, I try not even to let me care, and save my energy for battles I might possibly win.

kenneth2• 7 years ago

I've been part of many teams that ban email for internal communication. I have to say I'm quite a fan. Email remains present in external communications for business focused roles, but it's a rather nice separation to have. Slack= internal, email = external.

z1mm32m4n3• 7 years ago

I rarely have any say in that, and I try not to get worked up about things I have no control over.

This hasn't been the case in my experience. I joined a new team about a year ago, and the predominant mode of discussion was Slack + IRL discussions.

Over time, I started writing docs (in Dropbox Paper, but if you want to use Google Docs feel free) and shepherding conversations to happen in those docs. @mention people into a thread to ask for their thoughts. Remind people that you have an ongoing doc to take a look at during standup.

Over time, it's possible to change team norms. But it's a slow process, and it's important to remain receptive to the experience other teammates are having too.

GoodDreams2• 7 years ago

When pairing I’m annoyed when a non-urgent IM or email notification pops up and I lose my pair’s focus. Some folks have their text messages and social media notifications popping up too, preventing concentration for more than a few minutes.

kenneth2• 7 years ago

Do not disturb mode is built just for that.

rorykoehler• 7 years ago

That's a problem with notifications not IM. On my work machine slack notifs are on and all other IMs off. On my phone slack is off and all other IMs on. Email notifs are off everywhere. I process email at the beginning of the day and end of the day (unless it's related to a timeblock in my calendar) . Clear delineation of devices, services and roles they play helps to avoid the issue you describe. Slack also has notification snoozing feature for when I need to focus.

GoodDreams2• 7 years ago

To clarify, I manage my notifications. I was referring to when pairing with people on their computer.

toomuchequate• 7 years ago

What are all levels of communication?

Urgent- Phone call/in person/contact boss
Need response within 1 day - IM
Beyond 1 day- Email

Just a thought, curious if there are any better systems for communication?

roland35• 7 years ago

I agree with the author on one on one IMs, but I disagree about chat rooms like slack. Slack isn't always the best place to save knowledge (I would love to know what other teams find works!), But I do think it works great for asking the kind of questions that you aren't sure who may currently have time/know how to answer! Especially as a new comer on a team.

briandear2• 7 years ago

The problems with “places that save knowledge” is that they are chronically out of date. A cool Slack feature would be to create digests from starred and tagged posts that everyone can access.

sys_64738• 7 years ago

As with all tech, they all have their strengths. Working remotely with a colleague then it’s great for short queries but that should be no more than a couple of messages. If you have a conversation that requires half an hour back and forth on IM, then you should have lifted the phone and gave them a ring.

thrower123• 7 years ago

A good IM system is automatically archived and end-user searchable, so right off the bat it is superior to in-person conversations or meetings.

z1mm32m4n3• 7 years ago

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.

ares2012• 7 years ago

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.

dheera3• 7 years ago

Except when the people you work with IM you, and if they don't get a response within 60 seconds they get impatient, visit your desk and bother you.

msh• 7 years ago

Then the problem is not the tools but the people and culture. A tool change won't fix that.

tomjen3• 7 years ago

At least then they have to get up and do something physical, ie. the cost for them goes up.

Funes-2• 7 years ago

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.

JumpCrisscross• 7 years ago

As a manager in finance, I hate IM. Lots of persistence around everything you don’t want recorded (e.g. a banker venting about a difficult client) and none around what you need. Noisy, messy, informal and an encouragement of muddied thinking. Given everyone in our industry should be comfortable picking up the phone and drafting documentation, I usually move to ban IM as soon as I take the helm of a team.

(It can be okay on the engineering side. But I agree with OP. E-mails force us to think through our communications, a process which has other benefits. Voice is instant, effortless and delivers an emotional payload to boot. IM is cruft in between.)

toastal• 7 years ago

I've grown accustomed to switching on my exploding/disappearing messages when these topics come up. Every platform needs this for some semblance of privacy.

vageli• 7 years ago

I've grown accustomed to switching on my exploding/disappearing messages when these topics come up. Every platform needs this for some semblance of privacy.

In banking in particular, that is a no go (in the US at least).

rocky1138• 7 years ago

I love the idea of going back before IMs more than I'd like the reality, I think. Actually, I like the idea of no IMs at work (if there is only one small office) but it would suck to lose long distance friends or nevermet online-only friends.

Secondarily, the author writes:

Searching through the history of a Slack room is difficult, and rarely useful.

I'm no fan of Slack (IRC uber alles) but I have to hand it to them: their search, in my experience, has been as good (read: magical) or better than google. Even for piss poor search terms it comes back with what I was thinking, not what I was typing. It's really perfect.

giancarlostoro2• 7 years ago

I agree, the Slack search functionality has saved me a number of times from missing out on things. I also kind of cheat and message myself things of interest over time.

war10252• 7 years ago

Must be somewhat dependent on what type of things people talk about. I've found their search feature cumbersome and hard to use.

I listened to a "How I Built This" podcast about Slack maybe six months ago and I remember finding it very amusing and unexpected that they view their "search" feature as one of the main draws for people switching from other chat apps to Slack. For me, it's always been like trying to find a needle in a haystack. Maybe because we have a single product and lots of bugs and features are pretty similar to each other.

briandear2• 7 years ago

Those coming from HipChat will vastly understand how good Slack search is.

quacker• 7 years ago

Yep. It's so hard getting back up to speed after being out a few days when info is lost to meeting minutes. When most discussion occurs in slack where you have history and search, it's so easy and quick to catch up. Just read the scrollback, dive into threads you care about, and you're done.

hprotagonist2• 7 years ago

At this point the primary advantages of IM is that it is possible to use securely. Email just isn’t.

dheera3• 7 years ago

They aren't that different for most people. Both Gmail and Slack are

* NOT end-to-end encryption

* encrypted from server to client

* full logs hosted on server

They're essentially equally secure.

hprotagonist2• 7 years ago

I was thinking more along the lines of signal/imessage/whatsapp/other e2e messaging applications.

contra email: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/06/e-mail_vulner...

Spooky23• 7 years ago

Good points, but it ends with the prima-donna “my time is more valuable than yours” attitude that some technical people adopt.

Email and IM share the issue of poorly transmitting tone and context. If your rant against IM presents email as the best medium, with in-person/voice as a secondary if necessary channel, the rant is highlighting a bigger problem and difficulty to communicate. Modern business is awful at communication.

StanislavPetrov3• 7 years ago

I'm completely the opposite of this guy. I have friends of 25+ years that I have never had a phone conversation or an email with, but we instant message all the time (and hang out in person once in a blue moon). He also says:

In theory, IMs are supposed to be fast (“instant”), but in practice typing takes enough time, to make instant messages much slower than simply talking.

I'm astonished when I come across anyone in the computer industry that actually types more slowly than they speak. If anything, speaking is marginally slower.

sjy3• 7 years ago

If anything, speaking is marginally slower.

I disagree – typing at 100 wpm is exceptionally fast even for tech workers, and speaking at 150 wpm is normal. Have you ever tried to transcribe a conversation in real time? It's hard, which is why stenotype machines were invented to allow trained users to type at over 200 wpm.

StanislavPetrov3• 7 years ago

Typing was quite a bit different when stenotype machines were invented. As an old(er) person who learned to type on a manual typewriter with paper you had to insert, sheet by sheet, by hand, and use white out to cover up your mistakes, typing was a whole different ball of wax. Typing back then when you had to firmly strike each key with the same force to make sure the letter would print clearly was much slower and more tiring. It would have been virtually impossible to type as fast as you speak with that equipment. With modern keyboards and computer its easily attainable.

dpc_pw3• 7 years ago

Sorry, but I don't believe you. I touch type very fast. I practically live in Vim and the command line. Still I talk waaaay faster. Unless your typing consists of "LOL, GR8 M8!" or you're really slow talker, I don't buy that you're typing faster then you're talking.

Not to mention all the precision, articulation, nuance, gesticulation, interactive feedback, non-verbal clues etc. that IMs are simply missing.

paxys• 7 years ago

Depends on office culture I guess. To me IM is easily the best of both worlds rather than worst. I couldn't imagine a productive team without it.

fastball• 7 years ago

My issue with this is that most of the emails I get are not thoughtful, verbose, well-reasoned responses. They're "great thanks" or "next monday at 5pm?". This is where IM shines – when you need to communicate something that should be brief.

irjustin• 7 years ago

I agree with the author probably to the 75% mark, but not to the full 100% kill.

One key benefit of IM is being able to be the "next available interrupt". i.e. if team members have headphones on, we are only allowed to bother each other through IM which we say, "when you're available..." allowing the other party to effectively keep their current train of thought until it's complete.

Personally, I actively push conversations either to personal or to email depending on the situation.

IM is great and fills a particular space, but it's when people hold onto it too long it becomes a problem.

This can be said for email chains that are too long or face-to-face conversations that lack notes. Each has their problems, but also their place and is still useful.

martamorena• 7 years ago

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.

wildrhythms2• 7 years ago

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.

nomadluap• 7 years ago

Not to mention those, "This email is confidential..." footers that get auto-inserted at the bottom of every message.

Yizahi2• 7 years ago

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? :)

jay_kyburz4• 7 years ago

It's not really instant massager if your not replying instantly. If your replying in your own time, then it's just a nicely formatted forum.

reshie• 7 years ago

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.

jrootabega• 7 years ago

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

kenhwang3• 7 years ago

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.

Pokepokalypse• 7 years ago

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.

kenhwang3• 7 years ago

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.

tasty_freeze• 7 years ago

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.

barrkel2• 7 years ago

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.

jay_kyburz4• 7 years ago

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.

51Cards• 7 years ago

I manage a medium sized team of developers, many of whom often work from home. IM is our communication lifeline. I couldn't imagine having to phone or email them 100 times a day, what a nightmare.

el_memorioso• 7 years ago

I can't imagine working at a place where my manager feels it is necessary to interrupt a developer 100 times a day. When do you expect them to be able and concentrate for more than a few minutes and actually get something done?

makecheck• 7 years ago

A big issue with IM is that you rely on the passive “status” string, and:

- This feature sadly is buggy as hell in some popular implementations. People can appear “Online” one minute and “Away 2 hours” the next (!?!?), presumably from bad syncing code.

- I’ve seen that colleagues vary greatly in their interpretation of status strings. Some people will ask detailed questions using an IM when I am clearly “in conference call” or “in meeting” (or some other “of COURSE I’m busy, damn it!!!” statuses).

Ultimately, the problem with IM is that the “importance” of any given issue between Person 1 and Person 2 is not the same. This means, if I am really busy, I would rather be marked “Away” because frankly nothing else (short of signing off completely) is going to give me the tranquility required to finish a critical task.

sjy3• 7 years ago

I'm inclined to agree with the author, but sadly I think that getting a "little bit of software help" and "maintaining a culture of mindful and efficient communication" is simply not viable in large enterprises that run on Outlook. There are plenty of technical projects that have successfully used mailing lists for decades, and those searchable lists are now valuable historical records, but I have never seen this implemented successfully in a team that did not consist primarily of software developers. At every job I've had, I've built up an organised, searchable and valuable mail archive, and I know many of my colleagues have done the same thing, only for the archive to disappear when I change jobs because there is no way of filtering out personal and confidential material before sharing the archive. At least with Slack you know that group chats are not implicitly private, and the tools and culture allow you to send messages that are visible to everyone without expecting them all to read and respond.

_57jb• 7 years ago

This person clearly never worked in a remote or distributed team.

Different modes of communication for different purposes. Now if you're using Microsoft teams or Jabber just stop. That's cruel and unusual punishment

dpc_pw3• 7 years ago

This person clearly never worked in a remote or distributed team.

I actually worked 3 years in a 100% remote, international startup, later to acquired by Nvidia. :P

kgwxd• 7 years ago

When given the right to interrupt someones life (pop-in, phone call, text, IM, Twitter, Facebook, etc), the sender should have an unrelenting expectation of being denied without any sense of rejection. That access is a privilege which should never be abused.

muppetman• 7 years ago

IM wouldn't be very popular if we agreed with what the author states.

yakattak2• 7 years ago

While I agree that email is great for asynchronous communication and that asynchronous communication is a fabulous tool, the author completely ignores the benefits of IM.

If I have a question for my teammate and they happen to be in a meeting so I can’t ask them directly, I could email them. Let’s say they’re someone who checks email maybe once an hour or twice a day... not exactly going to get a quick response. IM allows me to message them, ask the question, get a response and move on. Something that needs a quick response doesn’t work great in either email or a meeting.

That’s one example of a possible benefit to IM. That being said, I think the issues with IM are cultural. We expect an instantaneous response so it’s “bad” to leave a message unread for a few hours. I think it comes down to coaching your teammates what situation warrants what type of communication.

It will never be perfect, we’ll always have these debates but we can educate each other on the most efficient ways for each other.

barrkel2• 7 years ago

This benefit to you is a corresponding disadvantage to the person you're messaging.

yakattak2• 7 years ago

Sometimes, but not exclusively. If I message someone, I don’t expect them to respond instantly and would be okay if they didn’t. That being said, the cultural norm is to respond instantly.

I try to let people know that I won’t respond if I’m busy and that I would expect the same from them. It’s not foolproof but setting that expectation helps both parties.

koenigdavidmj• 7 years ago

The IM system I would like to see would be intended to be used like a very lightweight bug tracker. It would be very thread-heavy, and a toplevel would correspond one-to-one with a task/bug/question. Obviously you can do all that with Slack today; the difference is that when a conversation is done, it can be marked closed and not show up in the view that you see. (Obviously you would be able to reopen it or find it again with search.)

In other words, the default view is a list of every conversation still relevant to you and your team, rather than an infinite-scrolling history.

EDIT: Hey, Zulip sounds much like what I want!

dpc_pw3• 7 years ago

Ha. I'm on Hacker News again! :D

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. :)

djmips• 7 years ago

Partly because of your flame bait headline.

dheera3• 7 years ago

A long time ago I used to have several long-distance friends who I e-mailed back and forth on a regular basis to update each other of various interesting things in our lives.

A regular pattern I noticed is that as soon as I added the IM account of any of them (usually by their request) those well-written long e-mails degenerated into

"Hey what's up"

"Not much you"

"Not much"

tqi• 7 years ago

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.

tmaly• 7 years ago

At my company we have not had IM, but we might get MS teams. I have been thankful we have not had it for the purpose of focus.

I hate email as much as the author likes it. I prefer to use systems like Confluence and work asynchronous on a cloud based document.

mmanfrin• 7 years ago

Man do I ever fucking disagree. I do not want to have a face to face meeting or a video call when a 20 second IM chat will suffice. Stop wasting my fucking time because you want to push your extroversion on everyone.

vinay_ys• 7 years ago

For software developers (engineering+product) these days, most of the deep communication happens over document review comments (say, in google docs, UX design tools) or code review comments (in your fav code review tool). Usually, a meeting is called via a calendar invite which may come via e-mail (but you never have to actually see the invite email as the invite shows up automatically in the calendar along with invite message/note - very important). The meeting itself can be in person or on remote video call. In between these two, for any casual business (of status update, coordinating meeting etc) or casual seeking/providing help we have chat in your fav 1-1 or group messaging app (slack, hangout etc).

I think e-mail is a poor replacement rich authoring and reviewing environments made for any specific type of document (PRD, Design document, code, UX design etc) needed in the SDLC workflows.

But nevertheless, writing good e-mail is an important skill – whenever you have to engage with someone outside of your team or immediately neighboring team, you cannot just cold call or message them (too intrusive) you will have to write a formal intro mail and set the context etc. and then bridge into your more richer workflows.

nikisweeting• 7 years ago

Have you tried Zulip? I feel like it fixes most of the critiques you have towards IM as it's designed to be primarily used asynchronously.

Pistos2• 7 years ago

(I'm not OP) Zulip is good in theory, but I had two problems with it:

1) they had no [simple] means to install it on an existing server (VPS, what-have-you). It assumed (required!) that Zulip would be the only thing on whatever you installed it on. That is, it seemed to assume a container environment (docker, etc.)

B) The public Zulip instance exposed everyone's email address in plain text, ready for easy harvesting.

iii) It's hard to alter the inertia of a team or organization of sufficient size that is already using Slack.

vishnu_ks• 7 years ago

2) This is fixed. If you are running on-prem you can upgrade from master or wait till the next stable release. https://zulipchat.com/help/restrict-visibility-of-email-addr....

3) Zulip do support importing from Slack. https://zulipchat.com/help/import-from-slack. I don't think there is anything else we can do about this issue.

jasonkester2• 7 years ago

It's worth pointing out that email is a form of instant message.

It's one that comes with some sensible expectations of response time. But there's nothing stopping you from seeing it immediately or replying to it quickly.

One could build a corporate culture around email usage that was just as insane as the current Slack distraction culture. Or you could have anything in between where the two sit now. It's very similar technology. But it comes with a big advantage of nobody needing to install anything or keep some random website open 24/7.

Personally, I tend to treat Slack as though it was a poor substitute for email. I'll check it every once in a while when I have some down time, and I make sure it can never send me a notification of any description.

Unless, of course, (as I mentioned elsewhere) the current gig is at a shop that is willing to pay the productivity cost of being able to distract its developers whenever it wants. In that case, let it bingle away non-stop. Just don't expect me to get things done very quickly.

osdiab• 7 years ago

There are other mediums of digital communication than IM and video chat. Old school forums are one, more modern things like Twist are another. I really liked the latter for corporate talk - good balance between organization of information but more presence than email.

josefrichter• 7 years ago

Number of channels set up on day 1 = number of users * 10. Seems to be the classic case of social (over)engineering in most teams, doesn't it? :-)

maitredusoi• 7 years ago

Ah ah ah ! How can one says that in 2019, and even get listed on HN ?

Couldn't laught so much ...

IM is as useful as any other tools, just in right place (how on earth would like to have an inbox full of smalltalks ?

I mean you always need a hammer, but not to use with screws ;)

Funes-2• 7 years ago

TL;DR: Offline messaging is incompatible with non-intrusive synchronous communication.

I think the main problem with modern IM software resides in letting the user send messages to offline recipients (offline as in "not actively using the application"). For modern IM to be "instant" or "synchronous", every user has to be able of being interrupted at any time by a message sent to them, by means of intrusive notifications; this means that "being offline" is no longer an option in modern synchronous communication, so major IM software designers did away with it altogether--e. g. WhatsApp.

This didn't happen with MSN Messenger pre-2005, for instance. Sending a message was only possible if both parties were connected at the same time; the moment the recipient disconnected, the text box got greyed out and the chat effectively ended. This meant that every user had to deliberately decide to be available for other people to message them; it also meant that IM was truly "instant" at all times--except when people left for a few minutes, which prompted an "away" status on their part; nonetheless, the decision to be connected had to be consciously taken at some point.

A solution could be designing IM software that respects your time and attention. This could be achieved by forcing users to actively use the app in order to receive messages. P2P IM apps like Briar[0] are like that by definition--it's a "technical-limitation-turned-feature" for me.

[0] https://briarproject.org.

tilolebo• 7 years ago

What about a mix between IM and recorded voice messages , like whatsapp does?

I find it really practical for having asynchronous conversations: faster than typing messages, without having to answer right away.

AFAIK Slack & co don't offer this feature.

Yizahi2• 7 years ago

Now that's combining the worst of all worlds - now I need to speak (which is inconvenient by itself) to mute phone, thinking of proper speech in advance, and it also takes more time than typing. And I don't get "instant" response benefit of a phone call. No ability to send any data longer than few characters (no links, no data sets). Disruptive in the office. And if it was sent via anything non-phone then it is highly possible that quality would be garbage.

Grue3• 7 years ago

How about kill face to face conversation and replace it with IM chat? IRL conversations suck. You can't edit what you say, you can't copy paste technical details into them, speaking is slower than typing and listening is slower than reading. It's inferior in every way. Just like these 1 hour conference Youtube videos that can be easily replaced by a convenient PDF presentation.

VvR-Ox• 7 years ago

This can only be said by someone who doesn't use IM "properly".

IM is: - asynchronous (vs. f2f or calls) - multi-format (text, audio, video or files) - searchable (vs. f2f, calls and in my case email which is horrible to archive/search stuff) - phone-centered (vs. email which is computer-centered)

I hate to write mails only with my phone, sometimes (e.g. when driving) I don't want to write a message but speak something instead.

Obviously also the possibility to quickly capture something with your mobile-camera and share it via IM was not considered. How practical is this scenario with a computer? Not much.

E-Mail is old technology and nearly no-one adapted it to our present time (don't know if it's just the protocols used or mainly the apps to interact with it).

Group chats are also much more pleasant with IM's, the feature to @-mention users in itself is something I desperately miss from E-Mail (I am talking about name-suggestions when I type the @ and about notification of that user that I mentioned him).

It could go on like this but I think there's enough on the table to show that E-Mail is not an alternative to IM and IM is not useless.

wruza• 7 years ago

IMs miss one thing badly, for me at least. It is headsup/important signals in a conversation flow. For now you only can mute your crowded chats and read miles of irrelevant texts later. But if a loose discussion turned into something important, there is no mechanism to notify busy participants or highlight parts of the chat for a later review.

In short, IMs should stop dinging on every message and should have two special buttons: 1. mark for reading (visual notification + table of marks), 2. wake everyone up asap (sound). Both should work for past, like “hey, it started with this message”.

I’m waiting for this separation for years, but never seen it in popular messengers (in any really).

newsgremlin2• 7 years ago

IM has its purposes like other forms of communication. It's when it is always the preferred choice of communication for every type and topic of discussion. Having a phone or face to face conversation with a friend feels like a breath of fresh air after long periods without.

majkinetor• 7 years ago

Email is the worst as you can't easily send to 3rd party conversation or attachments etc nor can non CC-ed person silently follow it. I use emails only to send people link to forums, docs, apps etc. and almost never to explain something - anything that needs explaining should be documented on central place so anybody can see it and follow it even 5 years from now.

Forums should be the norm. They do not have all those IM/email problems. They are searchable, URLable, public or private, do not require client infrastructure and so on.

Kill Instant Messaging

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