I work at a small company (<10 employees) and we use HipChat all day. Since we are geographically dispersed, it helps to maintain the inter-team communication that is hard to do remotely. We probably only use it for 40% "work." The rest is random news items and discussions about sports.
We're a sports company and everyone is usually involved with most of the discussions. I catch your point, but it's pretty easy to ignore if you are heads down coding. You can get someone's attention (for important stuff) but addressing them directly (@username).
> Which probably means that you have a coworker or two that's passively annoyed at you and/or actively ignores the channel.
I don't see how that's all that different from people having a discussion in a physical office. Someone might be annoyed people are chatting about sports, some might put headphones in so they don't hear.
> The rest is random news items and discussions about sports
Out of curiosity: how do you manage to get any work done with IM on? I get like 40-50 _emails_ a day (very low number by the industry standards) and if I don't close my Gmail tab it's a huge distractor during periods when I do long stretches of coding.
I have the audio notifications turned off. All it does is bounce the icon when someone addresses me directly in chat. It's pretty easy to ignore if I'm head down.
We don't do much email in our company, so that's not a distraction (it's <10 people in the company).
