There no polite way of expressing it: Hangouts Chat is a shitty product. We moved to Chat when Hipchat was closed. Because we’re using G-suite it seem sensible to go with Chat, but everyone hates it.

The UI is useless, Google try to be clever about “conversation” and tries to group them together, but now people miss most conversations that happen when they aren’t looking. Notification is broken, you can only get to many or not enough.

Chat seems to be designed by the same incompetent team of interns that did Google Groups. Using the two products feel oddly similar.

Our team was in exact same situation. Chat is still missing some features, but I definitely prefer it over HipChat already. Still a compromise in comparison to Flowdock or even Slack, but it gets the job done.

Maybe that personal preference, but the HipChat UI made more sense to me and it was MUCH faster.

Again it's personal, but I feel that Chat is a prototype. The interface is butt ugly, almost like it's something that's just slapped together to the if the backend actually works.

To be fair, in Slack I also miss important conversations when they happen in threads while I'm not looking.

Threads are a terrible feature they should never have added to Slack. Threads take one conversation and fork into multiple, which is just awful.

Unfortunately its a tricky UX problem that I haven't seen anyone master. Threads work well in Slack when you have a team culture that uses them consistently -- the channel sets the topic and threads keep individual discussions focused.But that requires a lot of effort in culture building which most people won't or can't do. And its still not a silver bullet, just an improvement. Taste's vary of course.

I like Slack's threads. I'm in a couple of Slacks which use them quite effectively.

I'm not quite sure how though, it just happened.

A small sidenote: chats are shitty concept in general. They have had a reason in a past era when voice coms are expensive and limited, they have a reason in terminals to broadcast few messages, no more.

For real communication we have letter so in digital world mails or we have phone calls so in digital world VoIP one's extended with eventually video/screen sharing and conferencing capabilities, no more.

Discord, Slack, ... are all only a mean to keep abandonware live for business purpose and, unfortunately, many companies fell in the grave. People who want productivity should rediscover classic software, modernized to actual "graphic style" but nothing more so:

- good desktop MUA (I can, unfortunately, only list notmuch-emacs, mu4e, mutt, pine) instead of limited and limiting webmails. Of course we have to add few things to the mix like having our mails in a local maildir and a good filtering/autorefile/autotagging solution (alot, IMAPFilter);

- good VoIP desk/softphones, something like old sip-communicator (now Jitsy);

- decent software to share screen as needed (actually I know only proprietary one's like bomgar, anydesk or teamviewer, xpra etc are simply too limited);

- local, well integrated, productivity suite. Mine is Emacs, not easy to convince office guys to learn it, but even ancient plain office suite can do the business with a decent DMS that enforce good taxonomy and have decent full-text search (YaCy for search, nothing for DMS in my list... They are all crap)...

I couldn't possibly disagree more. Voice comms are _hideously_ inefficient and limited compared to chats and virtually always an inferior option in a group context, in a professional context, and especially for a professional team. They always interrupt one person, and every additional person involved is a decision about how much more time and attention to take and how many more interruptions to make balanced against who to leave out of communication. They are slower for groups over around 4 people, they are more likely to produce misunderstandings, more likely to omit details. They make it harder to refer back to things, they leave less of a window for people to gather their thoughts and word things clearly. They are far more likely to be rushed through because the communication is fully synchronous. They cannot divert into simultaneous side conversations. I struggle to think of situations where I'd rather have a voice call than a text conversation.

If a potential employer told me they relied on VoIP phones over Slack/Discord I would consider that a _major_ point against them.

As someone who hires and employees remote developers, it’s a massive red flag when a new developer wants to have a voice call.

> Try the two with a chess timer

Of course voice will be faster--eight out of ten times at least one involved party's main goal is just to get off the phone.

Optimizing for time is a mistake. Optimize for disruption (I can switch back to other work while waiting for a chat reply--there's context-switching overhead there, but not nearly as much as a phone call), retention (I can refer back to what someone said in chat, rather than "hey, Jane, what was that hostname again?", waiting for an atrocious speech-to-text conversion, or manually seeking around in a call recording), and mutual investment in communication (professional or not, a synchronous call usually has at least one participant that wants to be there less than the other[s]--in chat, people can participate when they're most interested in doing so, meaning that their contributions are less half-assed).

There are situations where sync is best (trying to pitch something or persuade colleagues of something is a big one--it's just easier to reject/be reluctant without engaging critically via chat for some reason). But a lot of the time chat is more efficient.

I've found that many people I've worked with who strongly dislike chat are not practiced or comfortable writers in general, and, after some training (if such folks are willing, I've had them take documentation, presentation-building, or RFC/RFO writing tasks as practice), they tend to be much, much happier about (and better at!) textual communication.

When you time a voice chat, are you also including the time to document what was said and share it with the team?

I consider ITIL, Kanban and all other managerial erotic bureaucracy harmful. If I need to document something said by voice I have only to push a button on my deskphone and an mp3 of the conversation with reasonably good audio quality will be created and sent to my mail when I end the call, also I use to have a small portable recorder with a good mic in my pocket, while it's not legally valid it I do not tell others that I'm recording it turn out really useful in few cases.

Fortunately I'm in EU (France) so I have still a bit of choice (less and less, unfortunately) to avoid certain bureaucratic companies too much common in modern English world (and I evidence modern because when UK was a real power and USA was a really strong economy they do NOT have such modern mania or at least it was far far far less developed).

What I simply measure is how much I can do with single tasking concentrated operation vs how much I can do and how bad the resulting quality is when I multitask. The result are simple: the more I try to be quick the more error and time I waste, the more I go calm the best result I achieve.

And while I do not have real consistent data I can see result of a certain kind of work paradigm everyday in any aspect of our society.

> A small sidenote: chats are shitty concept in general. They have had a reason in a past era when voice coms are expensive and limited, they have a reason in terminals to broadcast few messages, no more.

Not at all. Voice chat is synchronous - you must stop whatever you're doing and listen or talk in real time. And people nearby will overhear.

Chat is asynchronous and private. I can chat and consult a colleague while I'm in a meeting with a client. I can keep a chat open while coding and read/respond when I'm not most concentrated. I can go offline and answer a question the next day.

Text chat isn't literally "chatting through text". It's email with a different UX, more suited for quick communication.

I still have to find something LESS productive than "chat while doing different things", perhaps even less than having an opposite (same, depending on personal orientation) sex beauty, naked, dancing winking at you...

Many have thought and still think that multitasking and quick things are productive, I see the exact opposite. And we can see it at another level in mean per capita hourly productivity: in the past (so before business model substantially merge around the world) French hourly productivity was the highest in the world, and they are still one of the less-working in term of hours and holidays. USA, Japan and Germany are the opposite, they work far more and have a far lower hourly productivity. To the over extreme try the difference between a lover vs a prostitute...

Open spaces are another TOTALLY unproductive things, born only to push more economic constructions sold as a higher price and facilitate reorganization. The letter also is one of the less productive thing we have if done constantly because any change, if positive, demand time to start pay back, doing constantly means NEVER get paid back, only suffer the change itself.

That is almost exactly what Microsoft did with Skype.

I guess Google really is turning into Microsoft!

> half-baked business product called Hangouts Chat.

So, to compete with Skype for Business?