What do you think has caused that expectation in your mind? Do you wish that for the people you’re chatting with? Have you worked with people who do expect that? Honestly curious.

I wonder how my growing up with it, and in chat rooms with mostly tech-savvy folks, has affected my use and expectations of it, too.

> Have you worked with people who do expect that?

Yes. Manager expects it to be like talking to you across the room. You answer there and then. If you slack him though he doesn't expect to reply immediately and gets annoyed if you interrupt him to say you really need an answer.

> Do you wish that for the people you’re chatting with? Yes, saves making a telephone call.

There again, if I Slack someone, it'd better be important not time-wasting.

OK, maybe not literally staring at the screen.

> What do you think has caused that expectation in your mind?

I think the structural analogue and communication style — even the name! — of chat is a verbal conversation. In a conversation, you say as little as needed and then pause for the other person to take their turn. Each utterance is pretty short so that you give the other party a chance to respond.

If you do that asynchronously, it takes forever to work through a sizeable quantity of content.

In email, the analogue is written letters. The expected asynchrony is high and in return the writing style accommodates that: each email is usually a roughly complete though with possibly some paragraphs. Since you know the person replying to you can reply to individual sections, it's OK to put out a complete thought. You don't have to shorten it to give them a chance to interject.

Phones reduced that price point - but it still has a cost to me.

Now IM / Slack has flipped it on its head - the cost to the interruptor is negligible but the cost for the interruptee is their mental derailment - and no ability to judge the overall benefit of helping until it is too late

Plus I don't really see the win - for real time co-ordination it's hard to beat a mass phone conference ( we are doing a complex release with phased rollouts and devops watching the traffic - then get your headsets on, and everyone must hurry up and wait)

Slack is just secondary for that - useful for spelling out what has been said but otherwise ...

For letting others know what has happened - that's called an after the fact report or "email".

So really i don't see the use case except it means that when like the phone, i reach you i am confident of a reply in a given time period - that may well be defining facto