I feel that emails and Outlook style meeting systems should be enough for all day to day activities of a software developer. Rarely, there will be a situation that needs immediate attention. In that case a phone call would be sufficient. There is no need for a chat or instant messaging solution. However I must say that Skype's desktop sharing has come in very useful at times, and I don't know of a way to do that without having a chat client.
I find instant communication useful for quick "Am I doing this right?" problems people have. Sending something like "I'm getting ssh connection refused while trying to connect to this host. Can someone else try?". That can quickly be answered by multiple people and people can chime in their quick thoughts for what is likely the problem. Trying to communicate a bunch of people with one line question/answers would be super annoying with the latency that email has.
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I feel that emails and Outlook style meeting systems should be enough for all day to day activities of a software developer. Rarely, there will be a situation that needs immediate attention. In that case a phone call would be sufficient. There is no need for a chat or instant messaging solution. However I must say that Skype's desktop sharing has come in very useful at times, and I don't know of a way to do that without having a chat client.
I find instant communication useful for quick "Am I doing this right?" problems people have. Sending something like "I'm getting ssh connection refused while trying to connect to this host. Can someone else try?". That can quickly be answered by multiple people and people can chime in their quick thoughts for what is likely the problem. Trying to communicate a bunch of people with one line question/answers would be super annoying with the latency that email has.