> The days when people were trained on newsgroup netiquette are long gone.
That is why it is hard to do decisions by email. Also, poor thread representation by email clients doesn't help.
Chat has the potential of being used efficiently, where arguments are stripped of their emotion and converge faster to a point without rambling. To your point, chat can be made high-bandwidth, with multi-sentence points made in a single message, or they can be a verbose rambling that consumes time and focus.
It really comes down to the professionalism of the team you're working with. Some people are a lot more cognizant about minimizing the waste of other people's time, and get to the point instantly. Others just type whatever is going through their mind—and I should point out that they are equally good at wasting time in in-person meetings.
So then it's not about the communication medium or whether people are physically present; it's about how we use each other's time.
Full disclosure: I work in the BU that makes Cisco Spark, a chat/collab tool. :)
PS: I agree with your other points about home/work context separation. We solve that by explicitely "checking in" / "checking out" of chats. There's an expectation that people are NOT always-on (except for a few rare operations chats). Notifications are adjusted accordingly, so as to not be disturbed during family time.
Chat (both video and text) also suffers from not having a easily usable whiteboard. And if you want to talk to someone about some code, hopping around between different bits, that needs screen sharing including remote access, so either person can hop around, highlight code, etc. It's all just fiddly.
We've had the same realization, so here's a shameless plug about how we are solving it. It will improve but it's already a big leap from what was previously available.
We don't use it as much as we ought to, but the times we have remembered that this feature exists, it's worked pretty well with Lync/Skype for Business. The screen sharing is actually pretty good, in my experience, and the whiteboarding is about as good as you can get, trying to draw stuff freeform with a mouse.
> Chat has the potential of being used efficiently, where arguments are stripped of their emotion and converge faster to a point without rambling.
So does face-to-face conversation. If your coworkers manage to put away all personal feelings, emotions and opinions when behind a keyboard, I salute you - mine, myself included, do not, and instead of actually making your feelings clear through signals our brains have been optimized to understand for millennia, we either have to explicitly specify things, or just guess what the other person means beyond the ascii.
That is why it is hard to do decisions by email. Also, poor thread representation by email clients doesn't help.
Chat has the potential of being used efficiently, where arguments are stripped of their emotion and converge faster to a point without rambling. To your point, chat can be made high-bandwidth, with multi-sentence points made in a single message, or they can be a verbose rambling that consumes time and focus.
It really comes down to the professionalism of the team you're working with. Some people are a lot more cognizant about minimizing the waste of other people's time, and get to the point instantly. Others just type whatever is going through their mind—and I should point out that they are equally good at wasting time in in-person meetings.
So then it's not about the communication medium or whether people are physically present; it's about how we use each other's time.
Full disclosure: I work in the BU that makes Cisco Spark, a chat/collab tool. :)
PS: I agree with your other points about home/work context separation. We solve that by explicitely "checking in" / "checking out" of chats. There's an expectation that people are NOT always-on (except for a few rare operations chats). Notifications are adjusted accordingly, so as to not be disturbed during family time.