Comment by nunorbatista

Comment by nunorbatista 2 days ago

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.

nmeofthestate 2 days ago

>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.

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pas 2 days ago

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.

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- SOLAR_FIELDS 2 days ago
  
  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.
  
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  TeMPOraL 2 days ago
  
  It's fine unless the other person is your superior. Too many managers are oblivious to the fact that their authority over other people's futures makes every interaction threatening by default.
  
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ryandrake 2 days ago

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."
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kraftwerk

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newdee 2 days ago

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.

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nunorbatista a day ago

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.

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feoren 2 days ago

> 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.

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nunorbatista 2 days ago

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.

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e_i_pi_2 2 days ago

> 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

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gbalduzzi 2 days ago

I think that for this kind of minor things it can just be a simple note in the company policy, without being too pedantic about it

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