Comment by martamorena | Hacker News Reader

Comment by martamorena | Hacker News Reader

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Not sure what exactly the author does, but IM is the absolute life saver in every developers world. E-Mails are spammy, include too many people, are too long, take too long to write, get drowned in a sea of useless crap, etc... Everyone working in a bigger corporation, knows that emails are a major time sink.

Video calls? Sure, if there is a meeting. But video calls, not matter what software you use, is a nightmare. The quality is crap, the connection lags and it never feels anything close to real life interaction...

But most importantly, IM let's you respond on your own time. There is nothing worse that people talking to you or calling you with a video call while you are trying to figure out why that statemachine recursed into the 20th method call and then jumping this way and that way, suddenly jumped the wrong way and then still produced the correct result while thinking about how it got into the 20th call in the first place when it should have branche din the 10th call... You get the picture.

This reminds me of the worst part of email: signatures. 5-6 line signatures, where the signature takes up more space than the actual message. They are a pollutant of email threads.

Not to mention those, "This email is confidential..." footers that get auto-inserted at the bottom of every message.

Now that you mention it - in my company for some reason most people dropped this crap and just sign with first name only or no signature at all (of course some people still use multiline sigs with pictures). I don't know the reason, but maybe in one of the ms office upgrades they were lost and nobody bothered to fill them again? :)

But why? Write short, one on one emails, and apply filters to focus on the colleagues you care about talking with. All mail suites should support this. People just ignorantly think email is archaic. It's the equivalent of teenagers rolling their eyes when their mom uses the phone instead of texting. Then it became texting vs Facebook. Then it became Instagram vs Facebook. It never ends. People just want to hate on established technologies to feel like tech gurus

It's not really instant massager if your not replying instantly. If your replying in your own time, then it's just a nicely formatted forum.

it is possibly to respond in your own time but not really practical in the flow. im is pretty much the same thing as chat now days. the flow of conversation can go fast.

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