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.

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

Talking on a phone is a terrible medium for helping people. Say you want to give them a link to a resource, or a picture, then you have to IM or email them anyway.

Because using a phone in most offices is pretty disruptive for everyone sitting close by. You also have to consider if the other party is available or just in a meeting, bathroom etc.

IM everyone can get back to you as soon as it suits them without doing another “I’ll call you back” round trip.

I would agree a voice call is useful for a warm hand-off and sometimes easier to convey a message without excess typing. That is where Mumble (murmur server, self hosted) makes sense to me. Clean quality voice plus text chat for links and what-not. [1] There are public servers if you want to try it out first before setting up your private servers.

[1] - https://wiki.mumble.info/wiki/Main_Page

Try their snapshot / rc versions. They are quite stable. Not as happy-clicky as Discord, but more more private and secure.

One of the issues with using the phone is that it's so difficult to record phonecalls and store them in a way that makes them useful for future reference.

With instant messaging, you can usually at least do simple searches for phrases you remembered from the conversation. With recording phone calls, you need to remember the approximate date that you had the chat and then skip through one or more audio files to try and find the information you're after.

It's not great.

It depends on the situation. The phone is useful when both parties have all required information in their heads already and don't have to do much referring to material or action in response to the conversation.

Who the hell uses a phone in this and age? Who ever WANTED to use a phone? It is the most unpleasant method of communication available in this world.

It depends entirely on your personality traits. Some people do genuinely prefer it.

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.

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

For some reason I can easily understand people on video chat even if they have strong accent whereas I can't grok anything on a phone call. I have had my hearing tested, it's not it.

Also I feel that on video chat it is way easier to interject (if the camera is set up properly) than on a audio call with multiple people.

I have exactly opposite experience. On the phone call I lower my head, close my eyes and focus on the sound of what's being said. While on video call when I don't understand someone when I see the person that expects to be understood it has a bit of "deer in the headlights" effect for me. My mind closes and I have no chance of understanding.

Video chat often has better audio quality than phone calls. HD calls are still rare, even on VoIP. POTS is almost guaranteed to cut off at 3.2kHz which cuts out a lot of information.

> Video chat often has better audio quality than phone calls.

That has not been my experience. Generally the audio suffers as the compression algorithm switches to accommodate poor network performance.

This all might be moot if you're on the same LAN, such as in the same office (that is, until you have dozens or hundreds of video chats eating up the bandwidth). But add in folks in another location and/or working remotely, and video chat is just terrible.

It's not that bad normally (I get to do that every day). ADSL 12mbit was enough to handle high quality Google hangouts up and down. More people only impact the centralised service, not your connection (unless you're using a really terrible conference implementation)

>For some reason I can easily understand people on video chat even if they have strong accent whereas I can't grok anything on a phone call.

See the McGurk Effect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-lN8vWm3m0

I wonder how much of that is phone line quality, or visual clues like lip reading.

Probably a mix of both. I also have trouble understanding people in somewhat noisy environments so I think I just suck at cocktail party problems.

Curios! I have the same problem. My wife has the theory that I cannot filter all the other distractions well enough. Good to know I'm not alone ;)

> traditional phone, which has better audio

Now, I'm not sure what video chat tool you're referring to, but POTS audio is awful, even the more modern stuff available for cell-to-cell isn't great unless you happen to have VoLTE - any halfway decent mic and modern audio codec will be much better.

I wonder if the previous poster is actually referring to a perceptual issue around latency — because the video latency is perceptibly greater than a face-to-face conversation, we may perceive unpleasantness in the audio as well, even though a phone call or audio-only Internet call are generally acceptable.

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.

How would that be different from waiting for them to finish their 4th consecutive audio call?

If I send them an e-mail, I can drop the topic from my head, because I dumped all the relevant context into that e-mail, and am done with it for the time being. I can focus on my other work while waiting for them to reply, which can be 10 minutes, 10 hours or 10 days.

Whereas if I have to wait for them to become free to talk to me, I have to keep all the context in my head, which interferes with my work, because my mind has a limited amount of "cache". Also, I now have to be on constant semi-alert waiting for the call because I don't know when they will become free. That makes it impossible to concentrate on any task too much. I am certainly not getting "into the zone" on anything.

Cognitive load is a real thing, do not waste yours or someone else's.

I think you can always send an e-mail when you need a detailed answer to a non time sensitive problem. Just because you can IM someone doesn’t mean that you have to.

To me IM replaces the “I could spend an hour searching for something or just pop up at your desk and ask”. It’s better because I can, like you say, defer answering for a few minutes.

In my previous job we had Slack, with General and Random channels. The discussion often went awry in these. Later we decided to create channels per team and more or less forbidden non work related chat. This basically fixed all of our problems with lost productivity and random pokes. Since people were not constantly on chat for random reasons, they did not use it for trivial work related stuff either.

Sure, I fully agree here, in general IM can be useful, if used correctly. We were, however, discussing a particular scenario where the choice is between e-mail or waiting for both parties being free for a phone/video call.

If it's really something critically important or urgent, you can still send an IM and just say some variation of "this is important / time-sensitive". If they don't respond or start typing within a minute or two, then you can try to call.

On the contrary, I would prefer to manage my attention, rather than have you manage it for me. That's where IM shines and phone calls fail.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

> pauses are uncomfortable and most people will start speaking again within a few seconds just to fill it.

Unless they’re Finnish.

The Finns are fully comfortable with silence, I envy that trait.

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

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

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