Hutch

I talked to a number of other engineers at Redfin before I e-mailed you; we were all kind-of afraid of Yammer, not for the social reasons you describe, but because it seemed risky to give a lot of information about our day-to-day development work to a third party.

While I don’t think we have a lot of secret information here to steal, (mostly because we’re all pretty staunchly committed to openness and transparency) it seems like corporate espionage could also be a profitable business model for Yammer, if they decided to swing that way!

More realistically, I fear the day when microblogging at work becomes mandatory. I think there’s a huge opportunity for micromanagement here, in a bad way.

In addition I think it’s a morale booster. Tech workers love to play with the latest and greatest, say no because it may be a productivity hit, albeit small, and you’re going to breed resentment.

And I agree that sometimes it’s nice to be asynchronous, but IM isn’t quite that — it’s hard to ignore. Anyway, every tool seems worthwhile in its own right — I use IM, email, even the Godforsaken Twitter for a reason — but I just tend to discount the true cost of each distraction.

If I am working on something that requires serious thought, especially if it’s complex and requires a lot of data to be loaded into consciousness — it probably takes me five or ten minutes to pick up where I left off. I’ve noticed younger people can do that faster; I get better at it every year too.

As for whether IM is faster, it probably isn’t faster than an office phone (if you’re in a large office) or calling out to the other person in a small office — most people can talk faster than type — but I think it’s more popular because you can do it while listening to music via headphones.

If someone walked into an office from the year 1985, he would find it deeply weird that we were all wearing headphones. But it really changes how people communicate. It’s probably why you and i talk twice a week via IM and almost never over the phone.

Even though I don’t have to leave my desk to have a conversation with another engineer, it’s often far less distracting to just ask my quick question in the chat room or over IM. If it’s not something urgent, the person on the other end can respond when it’s most convenient for them and responding to any of the above mentioned medium requires far less effort than responding to email. I know it’s counterintuitive, but if used correctly, IM can actually reduce distractions during the day.

There’s obviously still a need for face to face communication. None of these tools could replace a good session in front of a whiteboard, but these tools supplement face to face interactions and reduce the number of face to face meetings necessary to achieve the same goal.

Obviously Yammer can be useful in the same way that daily stand ups are useful. It’s great to check in at the beginning of the day, listen to what people tried to finish yesterday, and discuss what we’re going to work on today. The problem with Yammer is that people can update too often with information that’s unnecessary (think Twitter). The same thing happens in daily standups, but there’s a little more peer pressure to get on with it and say something useful. Perhaps Yammer can achieve the sort of pressure if you know that your boss is reading your updates.