If you aren't using instant messaging for fast communications you are too old to be working in tech.
The meme is about this exact mentality. Fuck instant messaging.
And good luck searching teams, slack, whatever crap that is out there after 6 weeks or so. Or after parent company rebrands/migrates it to something else.
E-mail is the best modern day communication platform. It's agnostic about your OS, client, or service provider. It's not a fucking walled garden where both parties need to have exact same setup to communicate. I can have Thunderbird client working with Gmail and I can send and receive e-mails from people who use neither.
Yeah count me among the "too old" crowd because I like email. If I haven't met you in person and personally given you my phone number, I don't want you texting me. Ever. For any reason. At any time. If a company texts me, I think less of them and will search for an alternative the next time. 98% of the time I get a phone call I let it go to voicemail.
If you want me to see something, email it. With smartphones it takes a literally identical amount of effort to read an email as it does to read a text, with the added benefits that email was designed to send more than 12 characters at a time, can be searched, and can have attachments added to it.
It's also extremely easy to keep your inbox from overflowing with crap. Just don't sign up for the crap in the first place, and when you get an unsolicited email, unsubscribe and/or mark as spam. That does require the bare minimum of computer literacy, which appears to have died out. In a few years the technologically illiterate will say they don't read their texts anymore since they're overflowing with spam that they can't be arsed to avoid signing up for.
I say pick the medium that's going to work best for your situation and use it. Doesn't matter what it is if it works. What I really hate is duplication. Having to send one email to one group, then another email with a special attachment with the SAME INFORMATION to another. Also sending an email out with current update information, and then getting people who I just emailed call me on the phone: "I saw your email, is that estimate accurate?" YESSS! Fuck.
I'm not going to IM someone outside my organization with Teams. F that. Read the freaking e-mail and reply. If you don't answer timely, and I need an answer, I'll call if possible, otherwise escalate.
I work with a guy who is too old for tech....he doesn't like sending Teams messages....nor does he like emails. He calls. He calls without warning to ask things like "hey are there two wires at this location?" that can always be answered by looking at the damn wiring diagram i provided.
Carrying a laptop is too hard and opening a PDF on your phone is even harder, I guess. Better call the engineer to make it his problem
Do what I do. Tell them to hold on while I look it up. Put the phone down for 10 mins. Then after 10 minutes tell them the answer. Make it longer and longer until they bug someone else.
Or hold his hand through looking at the reference material. The first time, be very nice about it, being sure to conceal any impatience. As time goes on, hint more and more that he should know how to RTFM.
Hence the need for slipping in a passive aggressive reminder here and there that they are perfectly capable of looking this up. The art of being just a little bit of an asshole.
Exactly. My work email is like 95% BS corporate emails, and I just don't check it anymore. I felt bad for the first few months, but there were zero repercussions because actual communication happens on Slack or we mention it in team meetings. Email exists to be searched or to be referenced in another chat system (e.g. hey, I sent you an email with those attachments, forward it as needed).
I felt bad as well but I don't anymore. At this point if you want a prompt response and you choose email that's on you. Specially if we're 10-20 steps from each other in the office.
Exactly. We work in-office 2x/week, and we're an open plan office. If it can wait a couple days, I'll be in anyway, so why send an email?
We have Slack channels for announcements for various groups, and in-person for anything that needs a response right now. Email is almost never the right medium.