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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

That's still small picture thinking. Dropping efficiency by 50% is the equivalent of spending 4+ hours in a meeting every day.

If your team needs that kind of overhead then something massive is broken and a chat room is not going to fix it.

As a general rule, on large teams informal communication is vastly less efficient than formal communication. A major goal should be avoiding having the same conversation repeatedly.

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I wholly agree. If you measure efficiency by code production and feature/bugfix turnaround time, I guarantee you can lose a huge percentage of your efficiency very easily. How about a 15 second interruption every 10 minutes? The amount of useful work you got done that day might be well below 50% of an "undistracted" day.

The overhead of constant context switching has a high price. If this is happening on your team, no tool can fix it. You have to fix the culture, and that's much harder.

But no one is saying you should use instant messaging or informal communication for everything. It's a tool, and it's good at certain roles, for example, a log that includes context for investigations into incidents.

For design docs, formal notifications, etc., there's still email and services like Quip. They are not mutually exclusive.

Having day to day discussions in informal channels and consolidating them into a more formal form of communication is a workflow I enjoy working with.

You need to consider that a coder most oftne self evaluates performance as time spent writing code. If he spends 50% of his time planing, learning, comunicating, and 50% coding he will consider it a 50% performance drop.

My productivity is measured on

1) me understanding the domain

2) finding a well factored solution to the problems in that domain

These things are incredibly hard. Using chat is like skipping a meal or a nap. Communication isn't valuable in and of itself.

I like 1) a lot. It is too often neglected, but understanding the domain, actually understanding what the customer really wants are very difficult tasks.

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