No Hello
(nohello.net)224 points by emreb 2 days ago
224 points by emreb 2 days ago
There’s more than two groups. Some people are just being friendly, behavior which is hard to exhibit when you primarily (or only) interact with someone over chat. Yes, some people are just being nervous around potentially breaching etiquette in an ironic way that happens to be a different breach of etiquette (for some, at least) but I just respond with “hi” strictly because I am interested in getting on with the conversation.
It would be rude to simply link this site (not blaming you) in response to a “hello” coming from a remote co-worker, or even a co-worker across the office who just didn’t want to walk over. They are just being friendly!
I am one who would prefer to just get on with the conversation but I also realize that’s not how everyone is and that’s okay; I should play nice with others if I want others to play nice with me and a simple “hey” in response is such an easy way to play nice.
The context I usually saw this used in is that people would put the link on their online status or profile bio, as a signal and to inform anyone looking to contact them that it's ok and encouraged to just go straight to asking their business. I've never heard of someone sending it to explicitly "chide" someone for violating that etiquette.
> It would be rude to simply link this site (not blaming you) in response to a “hello”
That's why I set it as my status message.
Sometimes you do it because if you just ask the question you get ignored but if you say hello and get a response ppl are less likely to ignore the second question. Thats the bigger reason than any rudeness reason i would think.
The opposite is true as well. If someone pings me hello, I might not answer immediately because I don't know if what follows will be a big or small thing, but after having replied I feel obligated to continue answering. So my decision is to not answer until I'm less busy.
If they however ask a question no hello style, I can quickly gauge if I can answer it immediately, or I should wait until a better time for me.
So the no hello might get an immediate response, the hello will wait until I can handle whatever.
And if they ask the question and I determine I don't have the bandwidth to switch or immediately answer I can kindly reply such information. They're more likely to get a reply faster by skipping the hanging and dangling hello. "If it's important, they'll leave a message."
This. The selfish point (there are other points too) of "hi" is to confirm you have their attention and to remove plausible deniability of "oops I missed your message."
Weird subthread.
> The selfish point (there are other points too) of "hi" is to confirm you have their attention
No one is unsure of the selfish/self-serving motivation behind the lone "hello". The singleminded self-centeredness at the expense of others is the _entire_ basis of the criticism.
This response is like encountering in a thread about lunch theft in the workplace, "Some people take food that isn't theirs because they didn't bring anything for lunch, and they see food that someone else brought sitting there in the fridge." The power of this response to be able to explain something not already understood is nil—and so is its exculpatory power.
> to remove plausible deniability of "oops I missed your message."
I'll dispute this. The overwhelming purpose is so the sender can confirm they have the receiver's attention so the sender knows whether to bother themselves with typing out the rest of their inquiry. They're happy to trade the negative consequences on others for a minor convenience to themselves.
I would be okay with this if the conversation actually demanded a realtime response. But I can't know that until I see the actual first message, and they usually don't.
I've always been fascinated to learn more about cultural differences around this topic.
I've seen arguments in the past that different nationalities may have different norms around this kind of thing, in particular over whether it's polite to launch straight into a request for help without confirming the other person is available and receptive first.
There may be a power dynamics thing here too - if somebody is seen as being more "senior" there may be additional perceived constraints on how a conversation should be conducted.
Since you've been involved in conversations about this for more than 15 years now have you seen any credible evidence of cultural differences that come into play here?
But I find THAT attitude to be quite rude. You are prioritizing your preferences when it's me that you're reaching out to for help. Nobody's saying you have to write a complete and detailed problem description in your first message, but give me something to know what i'm getting into.
BAD: Hey, you there?
GOOD: Hey, you there? I'm trying to do X but I'm running into some issues and I wanted to get your advice.
Once I've responded and you know you have my attention, then you commit to filling me in on the gory details.
Surely it’s more efficient (for both parties) to type and be able to read the whole thing and then respond meaningfully?
E.g. If you’ve just say “hi”, two hours later I get to my DMs and say “hey what’s up?” and you end up not following up with the “actual” message straight away, let’s say another hour later, this all took way longer than necessary.
The no-hello approach just makes sense when dealing with asynchronous messaging platforms such as Slack. IMO, not following the no-hello approach is bad etiquette and there’s a ton of people out there who still don’t really get that.
People either bring email etiquette (Hi, how are you, I need...") or phone etiquette (Hi, how are you?" ...) to chat.
Email etiquette has always seemed natural to me, but a lot of people read chat as a synchronous medium, so.
It's just another place where I need to have multiple modes on hand for different people.
There's another reason for 'hello' ... it's a way to make sure you have the other person's attention before launching into a topic or question.
That’s exactly what’s rude about it. Don’t make sure you have their attention. Just send the actual message.
If it’s urgent enough that the actual message isn’t enough, “Hello” isn’t going to cut it either.
>That’s exactly what’s rude about it.
By the way, I also hate the "hello"-only message. I am, however, guilty of writing "Hey. Do you have a second to chat" - typically in cases where either through chat or video conference I want to go through something that is more involved, and I also want some confirmation of understanding and acknowledgement.
I didn't make a value judgment on the practice, but it is a reason why you may get a "hello" message.
That's only rude sometimes. We don't typically talk to other people in real life without confirming their attention (e.g. via eye contact) first.
That’s a poor reason; I just say “hi” back and tab out until there is another message. They capture my attention with details.
My wife, god bless her, is really good with people. I try very hard to mimic her, but this multi-round interaction has completely permeated how she interacts over tech, even with tech. I cannot manage it.
Her: "Alexa, add to shopping list". "OK, what should I add for you". "Peanut butter". "OK, peanut butter added, what else?". <long pause while the house has to be quiet until alexa times out>.
Me: "Alexa add peanut butter to shopping list". "Peanut butter added".
Some people are TCP. Some are UDP.
“Alexa add peanut butter to shopping list" <silence>
“Alexa add peanut butter to shopping list" <silence>
“Alexa add peanut butter to shopping list". “Peanut butter added. Peanut butter added. Peanut butter added.”
"Some people are TCP. Some are UDP."
Nailed it! This is going up on the wall in my office.
And some people, like me, are... what do you call TCP but without initial handshake? Like:
----
Other person: Hi, what time was that thing?
Me: Hey, 14:00.
...
...
Me: Hey, 14:00!
...
...
Me: walks in their face Hey you, the thing you asked, it's at 14:00.
Other person: Yes yes, I heard you first time!
Me: boils internally, muttering to themselves so why the fsck didn't you say so?
----
Please don't hang on "Hello", but for $deity's sake, confirm reception of messages, especially in analog communication.
Weirdly I really enjoyed MrBeast's line on this in his leaked internal production memo:
"Since we are on the topic of communication, written communication also does not constitute communication unless they confirm they read it."
https://simonwillison.net/2024/Sep/15/how-to-succeed-in-mrbe...
This is why emoji responses on Slack are so useful. You can ask others to affirmatively confirm that they have read a message and they can make the confirmation without clogging up the channel with tons of text messages.
And no “read receipt” as it is usually implemented would not cut it, because it only means “this message showed up on the recipient’s screen once” not that they have actually read it.
See, if you had Siri you'd be forced into the first anyway:
"Alexa add peanut butter to shopping list" "OK, what should list should I add to?" "shopping list" "Ok, what should I add for you" "Peanut butter" "Ok, playing Peanut Butter by the Royal Guardsmen on a HomePod you forgot you had"
My whole family uses Siri—both through our phones and through the HomePod mini in the kitchen—to add items to the shopping list.
Siri occasionally misunderstands the name of the item, or needs to ask who's speaking (when on the HomePod), or has trouble because the phone of the person asking has briefly dropped off the Wifi, but in the ~5 years we've had it, I can count on one hand the number of times adding has just failed with any pattern remotely like what you describe.
This is not the first time I see this here and to be honest, I was in total agreement a few years ago. In principle, I still am.
Then I became a manager, I had to start dealing with more people, to navigate the enterprise environment and I understood that one of my strengths is to be understand people and to accommodate their ways of working. In this context, being hard with people that just say hello just doesn't make much sense to me anymore. People have busy schedules, they start conversations and are interrupted, they receive hundreds of notifications and have other meetings going on.
If the worst they do to me is to say hello and never talk to me again, I'm ok with accommodating this in my daily workflow.
>they start conversations and are interrupted
It's not about interruption really, it's about a style of using chat apps that wastes peoples' attention and is easily avoided.
> they receive hundreds of notifications
okay, so this nohello thing is good advice to help reduce the noise.
not to mention that if someone is supposed to be a professional coordinator, they would benefit from being a good communicator. starting a discussion with "hi" and disappearing for minutes is absolutely disrespectful and shitty, not to mention the opposite of efficient.
they need to work on their time management.
I mean, maybe I’m rude but if someone just messages me Hi on slack I simply ignore it until they send something more substantial.
I've always liked the band Kraftwerk's [past] strategy for dealing with interruptions, from their Wiki page[1]:
"... anyone trying to contact the band for collaboration would be told the studio telephone did not have a ringer since, while recording, the band did not like to hear any kind of noise pollution. Instead, callers were instructed to phone the studio precisely at a certain time, whereupon the phone would be answered by Ralf Hütter, despite never hearing the phone ring."
You’re not helping people by neglecting to point out errant use of messaging platforms. It harms productivity and is something that a manager should be treating. You don’t need to be “hard” about it, but not guiding people is arguably more harmful than maybe a couple of hurt feelings. Make things better.
On the efforts to guide people, I added small things like this to the rules of engagement. But there's just so many more things to frame in the context of team management that this becomes just a foot note.
What really harms productivity is lack of leadership, vision and organization. I try to avoid micromanaging this sort of thing.
> Then I became a manager
So it bothered you when you had actual work to do, but once you moved to a position where everyone else was doing the actual work and you just sat around benefiting from their labor, you didn't mind minor interruptions and time wasters anymore? Shocking.
Being a manager is not benefiting from other people's work, is to try my best to eliminate barriers so they can do their best work. That includes making them comfortable in the work environment. When you reach a point where you work with many people from different backgrounds, you really have to learn to adapt to people and accommodate to their ways of working.
If that means that I don't get triggered when they leave me a "hi" and never come back, that's fine by me.
> being hard with people that just say hello just doesn't make much sense to me anymore
This is the problem I run into, I want to just reply to any "Hey" message with a link to this page, but then I'm the one being rude. We just need a better way to let other people know that this isn't a good way to do async chat. I've heard of other people making their status message this site, so then people see it when they go to message you and it doesn't have to be explicitly brought up
> If the worst they do to me is to say hello and never talk to me again, I'm ok with accommodating this in my daily workflow
This I can't really get behind, because if they just send a hello it's implied that I then need to follow-up and find out what they were asking about
A similar guideline has been around on IRC networks for as long as I can remember. Many channels include it in their 'topic' or have a bot that reminds users:
Don't ask to ask, just ask.
See also <https://netsplit.de/channels/?chat=don%27t+ask+to+ask>.
For the rest of us, what does “echan” mean? Searching online for “irc echan” wasn’t much good.
edit: some wider-range searching suggests it might be Spanish for “kicked”.
"Echan" = "empty channel" - IRC slang for joining a channel, seeing no recent activity, and immediately leaving.
It's considered bad etiquette because IRC channels are often quiet but still active - you're supposed to stick around and just ask your question directly rather than bailing when you don't see instant chatter.
My life hack for this kind of situation is to say “hello” back. Works every time.
Yep. This is the way I’ve ended up handling it. I believe it has been established now that these interruptions in flow (context switching) have a cost in terms of time taken to refocus on a task. Minutes vs the few seconds it took to have that focus broken and clicking away into a single word DM.
That’s what I do. There’s been plenty of times where the conversation never actually begins
I don't get what this achieves since the whole reason they sent you "hello" is that they want a TCP handshake before they get on with it. So sending hello back just acks the message and they will proceed which is what they wanted.
The annoyance in TFA is that you have to do the handshake at all.
Actually, when you put it like that, sending 'hello' back might be the best thing you could do. They sent you a SYN, you send back and ACK, then the real conversation can begin.
I suddenly no longer agree with TFA. This makes way more sense to me in this light.
In what way is that better than "Hello. How do I do x?" If they never reply, that's of no practical difference from just sending "Hello" and not getting a reply.
In TCP, it's useful because it happens in a different layer of abstraction. Even then, QUIC was developed (partly) because it was realised there's no point waiting for the full SYN / SYN ACK / ACK before starting some of the higher-level exchange (although the early data transfer in QUIC is used for TLS initiation rather than application-level data).
The relevance of TFA is that this only works if the initiating party is still connected, and to make matters worse there is no ERR_SOCKET_CLOSED returned by most chat clients if that party got distracted before seeing the ACK. Then minutes or hours later they get back "hey sorry, missed your reply, ${QUERY}"
when they could have just included `${QUERY}` in the initial send, or at least `framing(${QUERY})`.
It opens a synchronous channel, setting social expectations for somewhat realtime responses. Most of the time I treat chat like "small email", so this is abhorrent.
> It opens a synchronous channel, setting social expectations for somewhat realtime responses.
But do you see how that is your choice? You can just type "hello", or a longer form of the same, and then go back to work. You can then check back in about an hour to see if they managed to describe what they are looking for.
You can always change yourself, while it is so much harder to change others that it is almost futile. The true source of your distress is not them saying hello, but your understanding of that social expectation of realtime responses.
> You can always change yourself, while it is so much harder to change others that it is almost futile.
This is a defeatist attitude.
Sure, there are some people who will refuse to change no matter what. But many—probably even most—people, if you explain that this is your preferred method of communication when they have a question for you to answer, will at least try to operate that way.
> This is a defeatist attitude.
It is not a defeatist attitude. It is a winning attitude.
You told people how you operate and you simply stick to it.
The thing you change about yourself is that you stop caring about the supposed “social expectation” that by writing “hello” they “opened a a synchronous channel“ with “expectations for somewhat realtime responses”.
Now imagine that someone heard that you use messaging asyncronously and yet they still send you a simple “hello” with nothing else. You have two choices here. You can play their game, write a “hello” back and patiently wait as they type out what they need from you. OR you can type to them “hello. long time no see, how can I help you today?” And then immediately forget about them and return back to your work. In due time when you check again your messages (maybe in an hour, maybe in half an hour) you will see if they messaged you. Maybe they will say what they want by then, maybe not.
My point is that while you can tell politely to people the benefits of getting to the point you can’t force them to do so. On the other hand you have full control over your reaction to them not following your prefered communication style.
You can get angry, and waste your time waiting for them. Or you can stay cool, keep on working, and answer them on your schedule and on your terms politely and to the best of your abilities.
If you think what i say is defeatist attitude then probably you are misunderstanding my point. It is not about changing how you communicate, but changing about how much you care about the “expectation of realtime responses”.
I’ll do the same - when I get around to it, which might be an hour or two after it was sent.
If the person on the other end then decides to draw out the small talk with “how are you” etc, it might take a few days for them to get an answer to their actual question, but that’s on them, it doesn’t bother me. I get to messages when I get to them. If they aren’t of substance I don’t care.
it does not, some people don't understand it. I tried every trick and one guy was still sending his hello's because it was the way he communicated. I told him twice, literally, that he cannot just say hello and wait for me to reply, and he apologized and still didn't get it.
the only working option is to ignore such people, you cannot teach people with reasoning, it never works
My life hack is to ignore it completely and have several unread "hello" Teams messages from Indian dudes I never heard of. If I'm lucky they just never follow up.
That's what they want and expect. Then they'll ask you their question. I don't get your point.
This backfires on me, almost every time.
I reply in kind with "hello".
There can then be many hours to sometimes days.
Either they then reply AGAIN with "hello" (arghhh), or even worse, there is no reply, and I break asking what they want, and _maybe_ get a reply of "never mind, got it sorted" so I NEVER KNOW.
The whole "How are you?" ritual is quite possibly the most nonsensical thing about the Anglo cultures. Like, I get that the point is to feign polite interest in the other person. But then by asking this question with the expectation of the same formulaic reply "I'm fine!" (and confusion if the response is something else) - even if the other speaker is emphatically not fine - it literally does the opposite, making it clear that the way they actually feel doesn't matter.
I had a coworker who took this to the extreme. When they'd come up to anyone they'd say, without any pauses in-between: "Hi. How are you? So I wanted to tell you x, y, z [...]", not leaving any time to respond, even with the formulatic "I'm fine.". Really driving home that they're just reciting, without caring one bit how you feel.
Pretty overwhelming to me personally, but I could tell other coworkers were taken aback by it too.
I don't understand why messaging apps send repeated notifications for multiple messages instead of staying silent for a time. You've notified once of the first message, it's enough for the next 30s.
How To Ask Questions The Smart Way Eric Steven Raymond
It's related, certainly, as are mine, Charles Cazabon's, and Mark-Jason Dominus's. But it's not addressing what the headlined page is, which is largely a thing that is a behavioural issue on interactive real-time chat fora.
* https://jdebp.uk/FGA/problem-report-standard-litany.html
* https://jdebp.uk/FGA/questions-with-yes-or-no-answers.html
* https://pyropus.ca./personal/writings/12-steps-to-qmail-list...
* https://jdebp.uk/FGA/put-down-the-chocolate-covered-banana.h...
* https://perl.plover.com/Questions4.html
None of us really cover the case where someone is employing a human version of the Nagle slow start algorithm. (-:
This section should be required reading to get on the internet http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html#not_losin...
While you're likely right in describing the status quo, it's unfortunate that it has come to that.
The one thing that's really objectionable in that section is the last part about people who attack or flame without apparent reason. Such people should be called out by other community members in the same way ESR describes for newcomers in the first part of the section.
Agreed. The excessive, unprovoked flaming is IMO a case in which people should intervene, as per earlier paragraph, "Community standards do not maintain themselves: They're maintained by people actively applying them, visibly, in public." Other than that, spot on.
I wonder how this comes across to younger members of the hacker or scientific dev communities today. The tone, while perhaps aligned with older norms of bluntness, might now be seen as needlessly harsh or even toxic by some. It raises the question of how values around communication and community have shifted over time.
I'm 27, and it resonates. Doesn't seem like he's encouraging rude responses to bad online discourse etiquette, he's just saying those responses are likely to happen unless you follow this very reasonable set of rules.
These topics are so important for junior engineers to grasp, because not only is it helpful for interacting with humans, providing the additional context to LLM's will get you much, much better answers.
I wish there was a good source of this information from a less polarizing figure.
People can choose not to be polarized by figures, especially where the controversies are firmly offtopic.
That being said I do find the tone of this guide somewhat annoying and condescending at times. It could use some editing to make it more impersonal and to the point. Justifications and explanations could be attached separately and most people won't read them anyway. When people ask poor questions, it's often precisely because they don't read longform text for some reason.
Good morning can be nice for that but if you actually have something to say make it the first part of the same message as the content.
Saying Hello or good morning and then spending multiple minutes composing your actual message while I'm attending you is extremely annoying.
Quite frankly though I don't think it makes sense to do any of that outside a group chat. Just say what you want to say and get out.
The converses already going over a TCP handshake. There is no reason to add another 5 layers down the application stack all the way out into meatspace.
My wife does not find this guidance helpful. But, when her mother started doing it to her she went off the rails, so there is some small consolation to be had there.
There is a similar one:
which redirects(?) to
Arthur Clarke made this point in a story about high latency communication half a century or more ago. He made the point that one should simply keep talking rather than wait for questions and answers to ping pong back and forth. While one is providing an answer you can be asking the next question. I can't remember the name of the story though. The solution was expressed in slightly sexist terms: speak like to women having a telephone conversation exchanging news.
Now you have me wondering too. I'm still inclined to think it was Clarke because he was much more concerned with scientific and technical plausibility.
But now I'll have to dig into it to find out for sure.
This is a cultural thing as far as I can tell. My American coworkers always just ask their question in the first message, but I worked in an office in Portugal for a bit and every single chat would start with "hello". Drove me absolutely nuts but I knew they just thought it was polite.
Yep I work with a fair amount of people from India and I can definitely concur anecdotally that this is something my Indian colleagues do more often. It’s a global thing in my experience but definitely more predominant in some cultures than others
do we have a version for this to people who call you out of blue? they have a single question and could type it out or email you, instead than ring to you
if you don't have the power to tell people to f- off, the only option left is to accept it and either play their game or ignore a type of behavior you don't want to reward
I see this more often when someone desires synchronous, multi-turn interaction, not simply "when is that thing starting again?". Things where they aren't exactly sure how to ask the question so they want to rely on you asking questions back and then together zeroing in on the solution of some issue.
If I need that, I send a message like "hey, you got time for a quick call to talk about x?". It's normally better to just figure out what you want to say and send it as a dm though, a call is a heavyweight escalation for rare and complex issues. It's also normally not a "question" per se, more a request for collaborative design or debugging.
They probably need handholding to go through the issue and aren't good at putting into words explicitly what their issue is. Especially nontechnical and nonprogrammer people have problems around structuring and breaking down an issue into explicit parts, with a clearly formulated goal and required inputs and expected outputs etc. Most people's problem-solving relies on a collaborative thinking process where short sentences are exchanged and you rely on the other person actively steering as well, not like an empty chat box.
I don't tend to see this "hello" issue with people who are competent in programming or troubleshooting things themselves.
> They probably need handholding to go through the issue and aren't good at putting into words explicitly what their issue is.
I expect that from students and children, sure. But professionals?
> Especially nontechnical and nonprogrammer people have problems around structuring and breaking down an issue into explicit parts, with a clearly formulated goal and required inputs and expected outputs etc.
Ah, they were failed by their school system. I remember being taught to think this way in my math and writing classes as a child.
Some of this can be taught, some not.
But anyway, my main point was, simply sending them a link like this will be perceived as baffling and rude, and I doubt that it can have a positive causal effect because it's not merely that they don't know about this rule of how to write messages, but that they require handholding. You can ask why they got hired then, but sometimes people can be confident and charming and that's often enough especially in non-programming interviews, or there might be also other reasons.
Or just trying to trap you into a synchronous interaction on their terms, pressuring you to give them your full attention and respond immediately.
They send their "Hi", and go do other stuff. You eventually respond with "hi", and they immediately reply with the request. At this point, they know you're around and saw their message - you just replied to their "hi". And you know they know, and also they know you know they know, which was the entire point.
They got to ask you the thing directly, so ignoring it now feel like walking away, which is rude.
This can be okay if it's not every day, especially if they are new.
It could be a symptom that on-boarding is broken and nobody does any one on one mentoring and the person feels lost.
Of course it can also be that they just want you to do their job instead of them because they don't want to think or work.
Why are we playing a game of informational asymmetry? Are we at war? Do they want to seize my oil?
"The Initech account is totally on fire, can you look at it?"
Yes let us save the day in jolly cooperation.
"Did you see that ludicrous display last night?"
You can wait until im done with my current thing.
"hey."
If I respond, they will wrongly believe I am available and willing. It is morally correct to ghost them.
When I use IM at work, I basically end up using it like email half the time. Write "hello" at the top, then all what I want to know, all in a single message, so then it gets lengthy, so at the bottom I write something like "great, many thanks", and sign off for good measure.
Even when the convo turns interactive, half the time either me or the other guy has to drop off, often without warning. So after some waiting around, I'll write down, in async mode, all I want.
It always then feels like basically a different GUI/ API onto email. With more emojis and reactions and stickers and scented candles or whatnot.
If someone grabs my Slack attention by starting with "Hello" or "Hey <Name>", and he/she doesn't immediately continues typing, a "Permission to speak" is always fun :)
I don't understand why, if the recipient of the initial detached "hello" is annoyed at the communication tax of having to acknowledge it before the querier gets to the real point of the convo, why in the "preferred" example, he/she responds to their gratitude ("ta") with a "np"? That seems like just as much pointless communication noise, only at the other end of the chat. When I say thanks to anyone in real-life verbal communication, their (usually a grunt) "no problem" adds nothing.
It's mostly about flow, you are already interrupted by the hello, and may have to wait some time before their response to your reply (as they then have to type out their actual question.
Thanks/No problem is closing off the interruption so there's no future expectation.
The example on the page don't really do it justice, because both of them are O(4), and the time delay is arbitrary.
The "" example should only consist of 3 operations: Dawn: REQUEST, Tim: RESPOND, Dawn: CLOSE. For example: "Hiya! What time was that thing?", "hey, 3:30", "Ta - seeya then!". Or even just 2, Dawn: REQUEST, Tim: RESPOND (auto close), this could imply that Dawn and Tim are really close, or really not close.
BTW: We are not designing reliable messaging protocols here folks. The chat software should tell if any message was lost.
Even in Japanese you don't need to split the question and the pleasantries into separate messages.
It's like a protocol handshake, of course. Why transmit information until you've established that the connection works? Consider it a text modem :)
Remember to ask "are you still there?" before sending the answer to their problems, and wait for a response, to make sure the connection is still established. You don't want them to miss the answer to their problem!
My rules: if it's a person I interact everyday, private hello (hi, hey) is ok, and answered with equivalent. If we don't interact usually or have never, if I'm the one starting, then it's "Hi, I'm ..., the one responsible for ... We have this case ... etc etc.". I accept anything.
But, anyways, it's just life, don't know why people (even from my generation) are nervous these days.
Yknow what? This doesn't bother me. I've had coworkers who do this. You just respond "hello!" and maybe they just ask their question, or maybe they ask about your day, or whatever else. God forbid I spend an extra 4 seconds per day thinking about a person I work with. Do "hello" messages waste time? Yes. Am I happy to field them anyway? Yes!
It's not about the time it takes to say "hello" back. It's about synchronization steps. What if I don't see the first message right away (i might not see the notification, or I was busy with something else, or I was AFK, etc etc)? Then I reply 20 minutes after with just a "hello" because I don't know what they wanted at all, so I can't reply with any information. Then they might take 20 minutes to respond because they aren't going to sit for an answer, etc etc.
It's a waste of interruptions. And for some types of work, like programming (we're in HN after all), interruptions can be more costly than just the "4 seconds" it takes to reply. Them saying "hello" and then without waiting for a reply explaining what they want in a short way, is more efficient and respectful of your time (and theirs, to be honest).
It's good to communicate with others while putting an effort into keeping the other party as comfortable as possible. That's a sign of respect, but it also goes both ways.
Both ways. It can't be just one side always bending backwards while the other doesn't, without even any intention to meet in the middle.
It's funny to see this here. I manage a large team and just the other day had to deal with irate employees who are arguing over whether they should be saying "Good morning" to each other when they come into the office.
One employee thinks it should almost be "mandatory" to greet each other, where the other employee says she isn't in the headspace to be greeting people early in the morning and would rather get settled at her desk. Pretty obvious, but these two employees hate eachother and this is a sign of a bigger problem.
i would hope my manager wouldnt see this as irate employeeS but rather one employee trying to be controlling by forcing another one to bark a response like a trained dog when they've made it clear what their boundaries are for early morning communications. allowing communication boundaries between employees is a pretty basic tenet of treating them with the respect humans deserve
I try to explain to the one employee that is fine to have the expectation that others say Good Morning, but it's also fine that the other employee doesn't want to engage that way. Both things can be true and right at the same time. She doesn't adjust her position and still thinks it's a requirement.
>> the other employee says she isn't in the headspace to be greeting people early in the morning and would rather get settled at her desk
Uh-oh. Sounds like somebody's got a case of the Mondays.
I've seen this a lot from Indian colleagues, some European colleagues, and people from various (not all) Latin American countries too both senior and subordinate to me. I see it occasionally from some older gen X and boomer USA and UK-born people without any obvious correlation to race or gender. In other words it's pretty broad, probably has some cultural aspect to it, but I can't map it to anything obvious.
I don't think it's a failed attempt at politeness actually, partly but not only because it's so obvious how to be courteous ("Hi! Hope you had a great weekend, when you get a sec could you tell me XYZ?" or "Hey - hope your day going well. I'm stuck on ABC and it's quite urgent, please get in touch asap.") and it's even more obviously discourteous. I think it's more that we don't have the same understanding of the medium. Slack/Teams/Chat to me is a lot more like text messaging than email, and it's not at all like walking over to someone's desk or phoning them. Their mental model of it probably differs. (They're wrong of course.)
Most charitable explanation is, they want a realtime chat and don't want to be pushy about it.
NSFW (crude audio), but a similar relevant rant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqxyHOllbNk
counterpoint - Sometimes I do this for myself to prompt myself into a reply when I'm finding it hard to compose the message. Once I've said something, no matter how small, I know I have to follow up within in a couple of minutes. It's like a kind of short-term Ulysses pact.
Also I'd say this depends on your existing work culture - I've been in places where the expectation is that everyone has Slack messages muted. If anything was really that time sensitive it's still possible to pick up the phone.
This is actually an area I've been informally studying for several years. Both the "Hi" and the "How are you?" are phatic.
Phatic communication is about establishing social connection rather than conveying explicit information.
Both "Hi" and "How are you?" serve in these cases* to eatablish "this is a friendly, casual interaction" by way of social ritual. If you fail to signal non-aggression in this way then, at least neurotypical people, will be more likely to consider you an aggressor.
I don't struggle or feel bothered by "Hi" or "How are you?". But I do struggle with threading enough phatic praise and appreciation into conversation to maintain the "friendly, casual" status and can get easily start being treated as an aggressor.
* America in particular has "How are you?" as one of these phatic rituals. Different parts of the world have different rituals in different areas of interaction. This can be a cause of friction when moving to a new country and you interpret an unfamiliar ritual literally instead of phatically or misunderstand another's intent because a ritual you expect was missing.
It's 2025, we should be able to use LLMs to adapt between communication styles.
If someone I don't know "hello"s me, my LLM should detect that, suppress the notification, and reply automatically - and then resume notifications and defer to me once non-greeting conversation has started.
> Please provide the regex you use in your daily communication.
/^[Hh](ello|i|ey)( ${MY_NAME})?[.!]?$/Back in the day of early IMs, some unofficial ICQ clients had anti-spam measures which let you set your own question and answer. Being edgy teenagers, we set "leet" questions, which filtered out the unwantables automatically.
This x1000 when you're working with people in different time zones.
One valid reason I have seen of people just saying "Hello" is to see if they get ghosted after putting their request. There are some people who can't bring themselves to say "no" and want an escape saying "Oh, I have not seen your messages" or something like that. For those people, hitting them up with "hello" and then putting the request helps narrow it down for you that your specific request made them ghost you and not them being busy.
I'm also starting to see this a lot recently:
- im?
I have a friend who would always text me "yo yo", which annoyed me, so I would always responded with a picture of a yo-yo. He finally got the hint and now asks "you around?" so yet again, I state I am in fact not a round anything and the saga continues...
Just ask the mother flipping question ffs!
Consider telling your friend you would prefer different behavior from him, instead of passive aggression that, at this point, you have proven is ineffective and only leaves you more frustrated because you feel like he's ignoring your "request" (when he's done no such thing).
i get the initial frustration of not receiving additional context with a request for attention, but a few years ago, i realized that that was my problem to overcome, not everybody else who exhibits this very-common-and-not-at-all-intentionally-rude behavior.
Wait until you find out what "poking" was on Facebook.
No hello but time for goodbye? /s
I get it. It’s the same on IRC when people ask if they can ask a question. Just ask the bloody question!
Let people be people for god sake.
If people saying hello on a chat pisses you off, take it as a sign that you need a vacation. I bet when you're back from 2 weeks in the Bahamas, when someone pings you with an empty "hello", you'll reply with a nice "oh hey buddy, what's up?", rather than spending one week building a fancy website to post to HN people who already agree with you.
Yeah doesn’t seem that we need to ACK in slack. It’s a boomer tendency.
> It’s a boomer tendency.
wat. No, it isn't. I see it almost 100% from young people who live in India. And that probably isn't the right criteria either - it is probably different people within each organization. This is a cultural thing, not generational.
I am in no way qualified on this, but my assumption was that this comes from cultures that consider getting straight to business rude.
So while I do find it annoying, I also try to be polite back and I certainly won't be putting some "No Hello" link.
If it is a cultural thing and coming from a place of politeness, then I'll engage in a quick round of pleasantries. Once people are familiar, I've noticed this stops.
It definitely is cultural, but I've never viewed it from the perspective of getting straight to business being rude. A bit like in the UK, "weather chat" is a very standard point of conversation at the start of a meeting with people you aren't too familiar with, as a reflexive ice breaker.
For me personally, whilst I understand all the reasoning and logic behind it, it does ultimately come across as fake and unnecessary - everyone knows it's fake and unnecessary, but we ritualistically do it anyway, because the alternative is too jarring "we're here for work, lets do the work, and we're done"
Exactly. I just reply back when I'm ready. Forcing them into our cultural habits shows a complete misunderstanding and lack of respect of other people. Even better, I like to get my teams to talk about communication early on in projects, so everyone understands how people want to communicate over messaging, expectations on response times, etc. A 15 minute meeting can resolve so many annoyances.
Not just Indian teens, but Indians in general. Whenever my India based colleague reaches out they always starts the conversation with “hello <first name>”, and then nothing else. If I leave them on read and their patience times out, they’ll then call, irregardless of your status.
Boomers never talk like that.
https://www.reddit.com/r/comedyheaven/comments/1l9y56z/smoke...
Wad that up and smoke it kiddo
So you got e-prodded in the head - what's the problem? simply wait for the person to ask their question. (Fingers crossed they don't expect a response before continuing - if it turns out that they do, just spend some time waiting, distracted, and then prod them back to get them moving).
This site is saying "don't poke people in the head and then wait for them to ask you why you did that before continuing. It's detrimental for this mode of communication."
Uh, Yes Hello. My technique is to send an initial 'hello' message when I need to get a quick response or when I don't frequently communicate with the other party. After sending the 'hello' message I immediately plough on by sending my next message(s) which are probably questions or wants. With so many people exhibiting ADD symptoms, myself included, a series of notifications on their device encourages them to respond to me. The cat's out of the bag now for why I do this.
I also like to inject civility and cordiality into messaging because I find it's treated with barbarism by some that send a message like a stone through a window.
What a non issue? If a solution is needed, software should not notify user about mere greetings
I agree it is a non-issue. But the non-issue is a social one and thus the solution is not technology but giving feedback. A simple "Hi Greg, I noticed you opened our conversation with salutations and only send the salient topic after I replied. In the future, please send me the topic in the first message, too. I won't be offended. Thank you. Bob" usually suffices.
I prefer "hey, got a minute?"... or "sorry to bother you, but..." if I know that they're the only one who can fix said issue.
It's always nice to have a (very) little intro, but both of these have a bad subscript.
The first one says I know it won't take you long, but that assumes you know the time it'll take me to handle whatever you are going to say, but the reality is that you likely don't know, and even if the conversation itself lasts less than a minute, the person will likely been cut of what they were doing for more than this.
The second one is even worse as you imply that you know are bothering me, so don't bother me! (even if it is a polite phrase, it's not nice)
In other words, just ask. It's more efficient and doesn't make any assumption: we'll figure out how long it takes and if that bothers me.
I'm the original author of this content. I wrote it on the internal wiki at Google in 2007. Someone copied it and posted it at nohello.(something) after I left Google. It's made the front page of HN multiple times.
The discussions always split between the people who just want to get on with the conversation and the people who can't bring themselves to do that because they consider it unforgivably rude. The second group never seem to take the hint that the first interruption is an imposition in itself.