[_ea1k]

TBH, I've been on teams where the chat was a constant stream of activity. It works really well and involves a lot of people that might not be involved in decisions otherwise.

I've also seen the room be quiet way too much on some teams. This is always bad, but hard to fix.

[starkparker]

The worst is when the team chat rooms are quiet because each member is in several private rooms or group-chat conversations doing the actual work in there.

Regardless of the reasoning, it's toxic to WFH/remote work, even in the short-term. And it's outright sabotage in the long run when it's time for someone who wasn't invited to the "correct" chats to onboard a new hire who ends up needing some context that exists only in someone else's private chat.

[Yizahi]

In my very limited experience this happens when managers (above team leads) insist on being present in chat rooms. No offense to any manager in this topic, I know that you mean no harm in 99.9% of cases and that you do want to make things better, but honestly your presence creates a chiller effect. Jokes are no go, because who knows, maybe this one will be interpreted badly. Local questions are no go, because you can't ask them during work time (he's slacking!), you can't ask anything which can even remotely be treated as improper. Can't show that you lack knowledge in things which should be obvious, can't banter about colleagues or about work in non-positive way. And the list goes on. We have a chat with 100 people which started as a meme and joke one, a lot of people were posting funny stuff there. Now the last meme picture posted there in mid october, and the second to last was in august. And the only people posting there at all, even sirius stuff, are the 3-4 teamleads very close to the management. Same shit in the chat of immigrants, we have a quite a few semi-permanent relocants on the projects, but manager is not one of them and is still present in that chat room. No one posts there, everyone talks either behind the scenes (because there are a lot of questions for people in new country) or in the independent big chats outside of the company.

And again, it's not like our managers are bad, quite the contrary, they are very good professionally and personally. And we don't have layoffs. But people still won't talk in the presence of even mid level management, it's an instinct of sorts I guess :) .

PS: this is only about informal optional chats. All work chats are never hidden or avoided. We divide them by program, Slack for work and Telegram for fluff.

[Corrado]

We actually have a "watercooler" channel that specifically doesn't include manager people. It's where all the non-work stuff gets posted and it seems to work out pretty well.

[_ea1k]

Do we work at the same company? Don't forget the constant stream of meetings where noone takes meaningful notes, and everything just gets stored in a context-free diagram, or someone's head.

It looks like literal sabotage in the long run. Of course, the ones that have the info in their head are more valuable in such a system.

[vdvsvwvwvwvwv]

I try to move into team chats. If I have a private chat that ends up with useful info I will dump it on Confluence. Keep things searchable!

[Corrado]

In a past life the room all the programmers was in was quiet as a library. Anything above a whisper seemed like yelling. It was terrible for collaboration and communication. We ended up going for walks in order to talk about stuff, which actually helped in multiple ways. Walking seems to stimulate the brain in weird ways and talking freely was very productive.

That said, I would not trade WFH for anything. Those walking times with co-workers was great but it's not worth being forced to go into an office every day.