Do you chat online for work purposes?

Question

I've worked with folks who are chatting online with their peers, constantly batting around ideas. I've also worked with folks who adamantly refuse and think it's a waste of time.

Are online live chatting forums of particular use to you? Why or why not? Internal to your company, or external and world-wide? Does your employer encourage or discourage their use?

Update: I see some people are voting this question down, yet so far all the answers have been positive, if with some reservations. If someone has a strong negative opinion (I hate online chatting and think it should be banned etc.) I'd really like to hear why.

Answer 1

If you have telecommuters, not chatting online will be the death of you.

Without chat, there is no interaction.

Without interaction, there is no problem solving.

Without problem solving, the code will suck.

The chatting part does waste a lot of time and I often wish I could just pull them out and just WriteSomeCode, but yeah, trade off scenario.

There's an additional benefit to using online converstations, in that it doesn't /have/ to be an interruption. If your working on something you can ignore them till you're done and they just have to deal with it. In real life you have a talking face to try get rid of. ( And the cool thing here is you can ignore them and they still get heard, have your cake and eat it too! )