>explicitly tell co-workers stuff like "brb, afk 5 min."
I guess it depends. I don't do development but none of the people I work with have any expectation that if they send me a chat message/SMS/email that I'll respond to them this very second.
Yep, it's very context-dependent. I was just pulling an example from a hat. Point being that, in general, you learn to communicate a lot more and a lot more explicitly than people are generally used to doing.
