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Comment by wonder_er | Hacker News Reader

I wrote a similar guide (less concise/maybe more detailed) a few years back: https://josh.works/better-questions

In another post, I make a case for never, ever asking "are you there?" in Slack[0]. It's been popular for my friends who work on remote teams inside of larger non-remote companies.

Both are relevant, both try to encourage us to be respectful of the time and effort others might give us.

https://josh.works/whole-messages-in-slack#you-there-and-oth...

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I once checked my Slack to find that, an hour previously, a coworker had sent me a message: "Hello jbay808". So I wrote back: "Hello coworker."

An hour after that, I got a reply from him: "lol. Anyway I just wanted to let you know that there's a bug in SW version 0.3..."

And I was wondering, why not open with "Hello jbay808, I just wanted to let you know..."? It was a perfectly good asynchronous discussion after that.

Yep. A 1:1 transfer from "normal conversation" to "slack conversation" can be really annoying.

If I barged into your office for help and before you'd even made eye contacted started with "hey jbay808 I'm trying to run this database migration but keep getting validation errors..."

and that was the first thing I'd said to you in three days? no good.

Doing this in slack? :chef-kiss:

Yup. Lay out the whole problem so that it can be addressed in the next message and the whole thing can be done. I try to approach slack as less instant messaging, more email writing with better history.

A previous HR executive used to open every slack conversation with "yt?" Which stood for "You There?". I never understood why you would say that and nothing else, and if the answer was "no", why you wouldn't just say what you were going to say so the person would read it when they WERE there.

hahaha. yep.

A senior executive at my company would sometimes ping me with "got a minute?"

And whenever I saw it, I'd always think

> I'm about to get a raise or i'm about to get fired

When it's HR, or someone where the person sending the message is significantly more powerful than the person receiving it should consider that their "ping" might be interpreted as negatively as possible, unless they specifically indicate that everything is fine.

(Turns out the VP was reaching out with some question about how we logged data to a 3rd party tool, not to fire me. :phew:)

This was particularly challenging when a meeting would be scheduled.

> VP: Hey wonder_er, I just put a meeting on your calendar to chat tomorrow

spends 24 hours wondering if I'm going to be fired

turns out the call was to say "good work, here's your annual performance bonus".

Yes. This HR exec was always guilty of putting unmarked calendar invites on people's calendars because she didn't understand/know how to do private/restricted invites. So you'd show up to work and find a 2pm "HR Sync" on your calendar with no description. Really great times.

My team lead pings me with "got a minute?" and I reply with "I'm fired? Sweet Freedom!"

We have fun.

> A senior executive at my company would sometimes ping me with "got a minute?"

OK, this must be it.

FROM CUSTOMERS DELETE *

Ah, you just wanted to ask a question? Oops.

Maybe share https://www.nohello.com/ with them?

I've been on two teams in a row at my current company where the culture is to just say hello and nothing more in beginning a conversation in Jabber. Drives me nuts. I always go with hello, do you know XXX? when interacting, but I've not succeeded in spreading the practice yet.

Several influential members of our team have nohello.com as their status message in Teams that prints as soon as you start typing a message to them.

> It was a perfectly good asynchronous discussion after that.

Yes but if someone asks you if you are there, they most likely want an actual conversation. It's the closest you can get to ringing your phone or droping by your office to see if you are available.

If it made sense to have an asynchronous discussion, most people would probably just send you an email.

> In another post, I make a case for never, ever asking "are you there?" in Slack[0]. It's been popular for my friends who work on remote teams inside of larger non-remote companies.

Working in management, I hated this strategy so much.

1. if i reply and the other person then writes their question right away, a reply from me is expected immediately, as we already in a "conversation" (but I might have other things to do)

2. if i somehow don't see it or see it much later, some potentially important information or question did not get conveyed - and it could take equally long for the person to see my reply and finally write out what they want

At some point I had to turn off slack notifications completely as I couldn't get anything done without getting super distracted by them (to the point that I was feeling phantom vibrations from my phone) and anyone who asked if i was there would hit case 2. I did try to explain to people that this kind of question didn't really make sense but I guess many see slack is a social chat tool like any other where such practices are common - and not a tool to distribute information in a company to the relevant recipients in an informal and instant yet often asynchronous way.

Every excellent suggestion there seems to make Slack more like good, old-fashioned email. That would have been difficult to market, so one can see why Slack themselves haven't made these suggestions.

Exactly. People are rediscovering that async conversation is more efficient and respectful of time than synchronous chat. There are very few work circumstances where chat is more efficient (e.g. incident response).

We avoid slack at the place I work for this reason - email, public boards and other async methods work fine for managers and makers.

We have people in my company that do that in slack. They usually do it because they are canvassing for someone to respond (they ping different people and wait a few minutes between each - under some pecking order).

If the first person responds the real question is typed out to get the help they need.

If it's someone less useful in the domain the next question is usually - hey do you know anything about the email system. Instead of the real question.

I think it's just a conversation style that translates from real-life problem solving.

I've certainly done something similar, but with some very minor tweaks, this can be done in a respectful way.

I'll usually write up my question and post it in a public channel. Then, depending on the situation, I might `@` one (or more) of the people who's insight I'm primarily seeking, but because it's public, others can take a look.

If my primary person doesn't reach out, I'll copy the URL of the message as a DM to the next best person, and ask if they've got advice/thoughts.

Either I or the person who looked into it will add a comment to the thread like "resolved" or "ok, {so-and-so} helped me figure out the problem, which was..."

Another reason, incidentally, is that there are many people who may be qualified to answer your Java question who may be too humble to step up as a "Java expert".

your blog post assumes that the participants all engage in the communication with collegiality and those questions are just an unfortunate misunderstanding.

guess what - if somebody asks "are you there?" it's often deliberate power play with the intention to get from you a verbal commitment to be fully available as soon as you answer affirmative.

I ask "are you there" all the time, but it's usually after I sent a question via e-mail and am not sure if the person I'm talking to is on vacation or sick or whatever.

I humbly propose that you append something like

  {quick reason}, {urgency_level}

If I received a message like this, even if I were on vacation, I would spend brain cycles determining if I should reply.

Trusted coworker who's had some challenging interactions with a manager? I'll interrupt my vacation/being sick to hear/help.

PM wondering why I've not responded to a jira comment from yesterday? I'll just keep on keepin' on with my vacation.

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