This is a conscious culture decision for my workplace. We ping / discuss topics over IRC even though most of my team is within talking distance. This provides

This is a conscious culture decision for my workplace. We ping / discuss topics over IRC even though most of my team is within talking distance. This provides (remote employees|other teams|working from home people) a chance to provide input, logging for reference, and is more multi-tasking friendly (semi-asynchronous communication). However if it feels like a lot of back and forth, we'll discuss in person or via Google Hangouts. You know how engineers complain about being distracted by people asking random questions throughout the day? We have an email / IRC first culture which minimizes distractions as much as possible.