Your example 'hey, are you available for a quick question?' could easily have the question directly after that in the same line. No less polite, no less collegial, but much more efficient.
Of course it bugs people, it causes us to sit and wait for something when it could have been given to us straight up. People don't have infinite amounts of time to devote to mere waiting. Perhaps it is because you work remotely that this isn't so much the case, but for busy IT help desks, dedicating screen space to a conversation with nothing useful in it for any period of time is both a waste of the user's time and the technician's.
Our working environments aren't asking too much of us. There's absolutely nothing strenuous about people learning to adapt their mode of conversation for the medium, especially to meet everybody's efficiency needs. As the website stated, it's altogether possible to keep the polite chit-chat in the same post as the question.
With a very basic policy change to how you receive messages, you can totally avoid all inefficiency.
You also avoid supporting the transparent money grab of a website dedicated to a needless complaint that is 90% ads.
Also, many people seem to want to get a reply to their "Hello" before they type more, so you have to switch over to the chat tab instead of just ignoring the notification.
A cordial greeting before an ask is mostly an empty gesture anyway. If you actually care how someone's day is going, ask in person or via a message with more substance.
I’ll see a “Hi!“ in a notification or followed by _x is typing_ then safely know that I can start slow context-switching out of whatever mode I’m in, start reviewing that block of work for check-in or noting the key takeaways to come back to, and start pre-loading whatever I was talking about with that person last, without the fear of “here’s a big block of text, please respond to it in kind (all right away)”. And more than that, I can also interrupt any incorrect lines of thought or rambling if it’s more rubber-ducking than a request, or turn it into more of a conversation than a message which can read “please do this” and a reply which says “um... let me get back to you”.
I don’t know about you, but a large technical question or “hey can you... X Y Z” generates much more uncertainty than a chat between colleagues, even if the format is only different. Hell, modes of communication are a thing, we’d be as well use each one for its strengths.
About a year or so ago I came up with a solution to this problem: turn off all notifications. I don't revive notifications for emails, chats, texts – anything except phone calls. That's the only thing. I also have a notice in my chat status at work, and wherever else it makes sense: "For urgent matters, please call me at <phone number>."
It's worked wonders. I can choose to respond whenever I choose to check my messages, and for anything truly important people do call. It's happened maybe a half a dozen times over the past year that anyone's actually called, and typically whenever I'm non responsive in chat (because I didn't see it) I'll get an email instead, which generally has more detail in it anyway.
This, along with using mornings to square away most correspondence, has worked wonders for my concentration. My afternoons are now mostly focus time, despite people texting and emailing. I just get back to them later. Maybe tomorrow morning.
For people whose job it is to be notified of things, likely the author the website included, how is this relevant?
Not everybody has the liberty to choose when to check messages or respond to them, especially those who are using a chat system which usually demands an instantaneous response. People collaborating on projects, people working to a deadline, companies which favour Slack or similar systems over email, and in my own example, people on IT helpdesks.
While I'm glad that you've managed to regain control of your routine, I'm not sure I see how it's relevant to the scenarios applicable to those hinted at through the context of the website.
And I do get some blocks of time when I can ignore all interruptions, in which case I just don't even open chat, instead of having it open and disabling notifications.
(My job isn't weird; I'm an SRE on a support rotation. When I'm on support I need to see things urgently; when I'm not I can focus on project work and escalations can take the form of someone finding me and pulling the headphones off my ears if needed.)
More fundamentally, not being around on the medium that most people at your company use in order to focus on project work is a great way to get left behind in terms of being aware of what the business is doing and what it values. People will slowly see you as the person who's great at finishing their own projects but not usefully responsive, and start treating you that way. Including when trying to assign new projects or during performance review season.
Maybe now I'm less available than I was, or want to stop working. This is why the "hi" alone is a waste of time. I do not want to be compelled to check [chat application] more often than I want to.
I could reply "Sort of, depends on your question", but realistically I'll just not reply if they don't ask a real question.
I don't begrudge the person running the site to want to cover their expenses.
Also, their complaint is not needless. It's a perfectly valid complaint. No need to be dismissive just because the site has ads, an issue unrelated from the core message imparted.
As others state, the very fact of switching to the chat application just to see whether or not the other user has sent a message is a block to one's train of thought. The colleague mightn't be finishing typing their message until you respond, they might even engage you in some banter first — so you can't just ignore their lonely 'hi', you have to actually engage with it, wasting both of your time.
The website manages to convey quite succinctly but not rudely a better way to communicate that one day could become a form of netiquette. There's nothing harmful with that.
> With a very basic policy change to how you receive messages, you can totally avoid all inefficiency.
That's nice, but not everybody's attention/focus works the same way.
I can't do this, for instance. If I get a "hello" message, I can try and return to the task at hand, but the anticipation that I'm going to get another notification any random time now completely ruins my concentration. Trying to regain my focus and continue work takes me at least a minute or two of active effort ignoring that nagging feeling until it's quieter. During that time, of course, comes the second notification with the actual question. Replying to that will of course require my full attention anyway. So I don't usually spend the futile effort to regain focus and rather just zone out for a bit until the other person gets to their point, I can answer, and everything is over.
And like everybody says, you can just put your "Hi!" in the same message as the question. I do that always. In fact I would feel I was being purposefully irritating if I sent a "Hello" first, wait for a reply, and only then get to my point.
It's a bit different if they expect it to be a longer chat or complex question. Then asking "Hey, do you have time"[1] is fine, because it's a genuine question that I could answer with either "sure" or "be with you in 10 mins". Then I am in control again and can focus finishing up until I get to them. I think that's the key here, being without control in that limbo zone between "hello" before finding out what the other person actually wants from you.
[1] personally I will always write "Hey do you have time to chat about <3-5 word summary of the thing>" because again it's the polite thing to do, not wasting the other person's time. Also it's easy enough, and helps me formulate the point concisely for myself. It allows the other person to decide whether chatting about <the thing> is something they have time for instead of just having time in general.
If you can't politely ask people how to address you on chat, it's a problem with either you, or the team / workplace.
You should be able to talk about things effecting your productivity, or switch job.
Then there’s also the topic of the discussion here. Topic: “don’t say hello”. Replies can be whole anecdotes of superstar developers who lost 10 seconds of their precious time, or something more mild, but there’s no anecdote in “I am okay with people spending a line in Slack/Teams to say hello.”
Please, just put it all in with the message: "Hi. I have a quick question if you're available. Let me describe it as best I can here to start: ..."
This way even if I was not available to respond immediately, at least I have some actionable information when I do reply.
I worked for a company on the other side of the world and they'd often message me "hey, you around?" at like 5am in the morning my time. I'd get up later by that time many of them had gone home, meaning i'd have to wait for tomorrow to find out what they wanted. Which, as well as well as having to wait every interaction, also left the issue hanging over my head, fuelling anxieties.
I don't think that's the takeaway.
The message is more about treating chat as a lightweight email rather than treating it like face to face or phone calls.
You'd never send an email that said hi, wait for the person to respond, and then respond to that with a question you wanted to ask them from the start. Chat should be the same way.
That doesn't mean no pleasantries, it means bundle them up into your message.
"Short link to this page: http://nohello.com/. (If you see that as someone's status, please be prepared to be ignored if you only say "Hello!".)"
Is just a new way of being an asshole. Don't do that.
I agree fully with the message behind the page. Put your greetings in the same message as the question. A lot of people seem to think it's rude, but I'm convinced that it's the only polite option and not doing so is rude.
That said, I agree with you as well. Don't just set that as your status and ignore people. That's about the worst of all worlds.
And certainly not as bad as the folks who ask me to "please consider the environment before printing their email." Maybe even with some weird text-based tree art.
I dislike most email footer text.
Those privacy policy things are the worst.
I'd love to see some annual award for most ridiculous email boilerplate text actually in use.
It could prove to be a fairly useful “Brown M&Ms” test.
- You're in the flow of working on your thing.
- Now, you see a notification. But you decided to continue working but now you have a thing at the back of your head that you have to respond to the message.
- Finally you take a break and decide to look at the pending messages, and you see just a hello. So now you have to respond with hello and know that you are going to be interrupted once again, because very likely, the other person is not looking at their slack at this time so they will respond later when you are busy again.
It doesn't say, "Don't say hello". It says, "Don't say just hello". Say your greetings but also give a brief overview of the question. Saves everyone time and it isn't any less courteous.
If the question is just 5 words or 100 words you can type them in 10 sec then sure I’ll wait. But that’s not how it usually works. You see it’s the people who are least used to chat and so both type the slowest that also misunderstand the greeting protocol. Greeting is fine. Greeting and then typing for 5 minutes is not.
Also as a remote worker something that really annoys me is when someone goes “hi, got time for a question?” and then 20 minutes later “sorry someone just walked in”. Don’t do that. If you sent a hello, always pay attention at least 15 seconds and be ready to interact. Don’t ping and then go for coffee. And please ask people who walk in to wait while we finish chatting, or just tell me someone walked in you need to talk to so I can go on with work.
1) Notifications are enabled, and visible/audible to me. If I'm working, I will likely be set back by multiple minutes by the interruption. I respond back asking what they need and it takes them a few minutes to formulate their question, at which point I've possibly managed to refocus and begin working again. There is a desperate struggle to switch context without losing the mental model I have been building of the problem at hand, before I have the chance to record it by writing some code, a comment or personal notes.
2) Notifications are disabled. I see the "hello" an hour later. I respond "hi, what's up?" and my coworker is now in a meeting or something and takes an hour to get back to me. They respond with "I was wondering if you could help me with something" and the cycle begins anew.
And by the way, I actually really like helping people with technical problems. I would sit around all day doing just that if I didn't have other work to do.
And we are all very polite about it, we do say things like: "Hi, if you have a minute, how do I get this code working?"
And, we also have a "water cooler" room/flow, where we talk anything that isn't work related, weather, music, etc, and there sure, you can just say hi and nothing else.
In my case, it is not that I'm on a tight deadline, we make sure to have almost no tight deadline, my case is, I'm probably playing with my kids, or about to have breakfast with my wife, so if you need me, and post your question along with "hi", I can answer before I step away from the computer.
Hope this gives you an alternative view.
So you take a moment to consider the other, and you put your preferred greeting first, and add the question in the very same message. Bam! Best of worlds! Polite, nice, collegial and not making people wait and lose focus and switch context (which clearly is less of a deal to some people, but when it is, it's a big deal for some others).
Reading the comments in this thread from the people defending to split the "Hi" and the question into two messages, I really wonder what is their reluctance to just type everything in one go? Because I'm not buying that saying "Hi" in a separate message and then waiting is somehow more polite than saying the very same things but in one single message.
See, it sounds to me that it is them who don't like waiting. Sending a "Hi" first makes it more likely you have the other's (waiting) attention by the time you finished typing the question, so that you get an answer right away, not wasting any of your precious time. If you were to type your "Hi" and the actual question in one message, you spend your time and effort typing that question but the other person only gets the notification as you press <send>, and now it's you who has to wait in idleness. Much easier too, to quickly fire off a "Hi" first and only then start thinking about actually formulating your question.
...
In all seriousness, imagine if every response to your comment did that, and you had to reply and say Yes before they actually typed up their comment.
I get the "hello" message quite a bit on Slack, and I find it pretty reasonable, since the person hello-ing me is really asking "are you there? Because I expect you might not be, and I want your help with something."
I think "hello" is a polite way to check for presence. If I reply (and the asker is still online) then it's a green light for the conversation. If I'm not online then fine.
(I usually send messages like "Hi @coworker, can you please check the smoke alarm in the server room?" -- but the questions the coworkers have for me usually involve more Q&A than a one-liner would cover.)
It is. But typing a long question for say 5 minutes isn’t really “conversation” it’s just keeping someone waiting. That’s what the usual problem is. Not someone saying “hello” and then when greeted back they ask a 5 word question. In that situation it obviously makes no difference.
I haven't used Slack for some time now, but I presume it's like every other I'm service in that it displays your current status, such as" Available", "Away" etc?
Where I work we use Skype for Business, and it automatically changes to away if their is no interaction for some time or I lock my workstation. Skype also has Outlook integration, so automatically switches status to Busy if it knows I'm in a meeting. I presume other IM software does the same kind of thing.
That's not what's happening. If there is a selfish reason (generally there's not), it's their handshaking protocol to discover if you're available to answer immediately.
Usefully, in my experience, nobody opens an IM session where they need my help on a production outage with just 'Hi'. :)
(I suspect I'm in a minority, but it's also why I hate answering the phone. An incoming phonecall is just a way for another person to unilaterally decide that they need my attention right now, which is often both disruptive and not true).
How about, just ask the question? Like "Can I get your attention today to help me figure out xxx?"
Maybe the intention is that I don’t have to respond. But every now and then, it’s about something important.
So I have to stop what I’m doing every time, respond, wait for the actual message to be typed out, and realize it’s something unimportant that doesn’t need to be discussed on a Saturday afternoon. Maybe this is humane, but it’s also annoying.
Just reply "Hi" or "Here" or even "Not here" (if your manager understands jokes and you are ready to leave).
You do not need to wait for the answer after that. Especially if it is not your work day.
Please understand, that your manager is trying to solve a problem, and getting your help -- is not the only option for your manager. That is why he may not want to spend his time explaining the problem to you if you are not available anyway.
It's even worse on telephone, Skype and IM, where any semblance of "personalism" is lost - someone starts a new conversation with "Hi, how are you?", and I have to respond to that before you'll just tell me why you're actually starting a conversation! How am I meant to respond? I invariably just say "yeah, fine, you?" - but I don't care, the other person doesn't care. It's just... awkward and pointless. I don't get what either party is meant to get our of this.
Just interpret "how are you?" as "Hi" and reply "Hi" or "Hi. What's up?" back.
Somebody just saying "Hi", without followup, is saying "I expect you have nothing else to do, except wait for me". That's not "humanity", that's entitlement.
I do draw a distinction to "hey, available for a quick question", because that is stating a request - the person sending it asks for a chunk of our attention. It's a deliberate request to move to synchronous mode.
And to forestall the "but isn't chat just like talking to each other" - no, no it isn't. Talking is 150 words per minute, and it's delivered as a continuous stream. Chatting is (if we're lucky) 50 wpm, and it's delivered bursty.
I bet that it's likewise true that when you ask someone a question, it will usually be the case that that person answers more questions than you do (again, for most values of "you").
I think the distribution of how many questions a person is asked is very nonlinear. Someone who answers five questions a week is going to have a very different experience, and want very different social norms, than someone who answers fifty, or a hundred and fifty.
You don't put phone call on hold and reply next day. You don't use text chat to expect realtime communication.
Interestingly, people don't have this trouble with e-mail. No one sends an email with single line "hello" and expect a reply, because instinctively people expect email work like real paper mail.
With chat they expect it to work like phone, although it's pretty much works on the same principles as email.
People often, and I would say usually, want to have a synchronous -ish connection when they engage in chat. They want a person-to-person session. It's like synchronous with a generous timeout, or to stretch it, maybe it's like asynchronous -ish but with a very limited thread pool.
But the point is it is mostly used to discuss as you would on the phone, except slightly slower so you can take advantage of other abilities, like the pasting of a code snippet or a log output or a screenshot, and so you can maintain the connection while you are doing some light multi-tasking or virtual pairing at the same time, or even just so you can avoid whatever minor social anxiety you might have.
But if you're in a work conversation with someone on chat, and then they disappear for twenty minutes with no explanation or transition, that's usually not the etiquette and it's usually annoying. More common is they'll say "brb" or "ok, gotta do this other thing" or whatever.
And even if you do have a question, it usually doesn't work to just drop the question in their chat, and then blithely expect an answer "whenever". They might have a followup question or a clarification when you aren't available, and then this simple exchange can stretch on for hours or days.
So it's not like this totally asynchronous thing where people drop singular notes into each other's mailboxes and then go on about their days. It's more often a very efficient and low-friction alternative to scheduling fifteen-minute one-on-one meetings with someone or going and interrupting them at their desk.
The annoying part is that they will wait until you reply to the "hi" before asking the question, which is a waste of time.
It's not impolite to say "Hi. If you have a moment, can you tell me why I am getting this error in my JS on line 20?". Saves hassle.
I work for myself and am not at all overworked. Still annoyed by it.
You wouldn't send an email saying "hi" (usually).
I now passively aggressively handle this by posting lyrics of songs that feature their greeting in, like "Hey Jude". It usually gets a laugh but also makes a subtle point that their "Hey" follow up comment was a little pointless.
I don't mind if people post something like this though:
<13:00:00> Hi, hows things?
<13:00:30> Did you manage to get that report sent?
If you say "<small chat> <actual question>", I'm perfectly capable of responding "<small chat> <actual question || delaying response>". There's no need to decouple the questions and making one contingent on receiving a response from the preceding question.
The downside to slamming a person with multiple questions is obviously aligning their responses to the questions asked. So there's obviously some thought that must go into formulating your questions. But I don't see any issue with opening your line of communication with small chat and your actual question as the responses would be easily distinguished.
I just wait for 10 minutes before I engage in that chat (wishing I could turn off notifications for individual people in Slack), let the person say "Hi spurgu", followed by "Hope you are doing well" (and whatever else they come up with), after which they finally type out what they actually wanted to say. When they're done going through this horribly inefficient, annoying and time-wasting procedure I just directly respond to their question, without any added social bs.
Then again I come from Finland.
Let’s converse during non work hours.
Keep the humanity alive!
We are not robots – yet.
Perhaps some kinds of work are more sensitive to interruptions than others.
I can see being more impatient with this if I were in Ops and everything was an urgent fire all the time. Sometimes you just need the information as quickly as possible and that's what you need to optimize for.
But for me, if someone asks, "Hey, you there?" I'm sort of thankful for the opportunity to say, "Hey! How's it going, what's up?" rather than think, "Just ask me the question already!" As a remote worker it's often more important to optimize for the relationship because that's how you stay connected to what's going on.
You sure you're not overreacting a little?
When I answer tech support questions, the first thing out of my mouth is "Hi I'm SlowRobotAhead, what is the problem you're having?"
Not what can I do for you today, not tell me the setup, not what it is I do here. Tell me the problem have - and we'll see from there. That's not rude or removing humanity. It's polite by acknowledging we're not going to waste each other's time because of a mutual respect we start off with.
Hehe... no. I wrote the comment, took it out, then decided it didn't really express what I was trying to put across, so put it back in. So I was clearly on the fence anyway! A fine line between pithiness and rudeness sometimes, I regret when I fall over into the latter.