I do use IRC at work daily. I had to learn Qt/QML for my new job and since school I've always thought that IRC was the best place/platform to learn a new technology. And once again in this case it has proven clearly invaluable. A lot of the QT devs are on IRC daily and help newcomers. Also just hearing about bugs, new patches, ideas and discussion help greatly to increase my knowledge of the platform. I'm pretty sure it would have taken me a lot more time without IRC to be up and ready at the start of this job.
