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Comment by another-dave | Hacker News Reader

I think you're responding particularly to the pointless "hi copple", first message?

I know some people find that annoying, but personally, I thin k that's fine. If I _am_ interruptible & I do respond to the initial ping it's nice to have some human interaction before the "down to business" part. Esp when we're all remote. If not, I just get the first & second message at the same time and respond to the query.

I think the author is also calling out "doing nothing" even for the meat & bones of the real request — e.g. in his example, even if the collegue did BLUF ("Live Client Issue: Strip integration missing from Xero") the issue still "went away" by itself without his attention if he left it 5min.

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I hate those pointless messages, to the point I developed a stress reaction to them.

In business contexts[0], you don't have to choose between being impolite to some people and annoying others. There's a solution that satisfies everyone: just follow your pleasantry with the thing you really wanted to say. Do it immediately. Start typing your request immediately after sending "Hi $name", so that the other side sees the typing indicator. Or better yet, use the magic of Shift+Enter, supported by most IMs out there. Send a single message containing a bunch of pleasantries, followed by a newline (Shift+Enter), followed by the real payload.

[0] - This is slightly different in personal space. When a long-forgotten acquaintance reaches out to me, I already know they want something, and I wouldn't be offended if they skipped the useless pleasantries - but apparently enough people demand to be taken through the "how are you and your kids?" dance first, that it's unsafe to state the actual purpose up front. But in business conversation, you're not supposed to go deeply personal like this, so there's no ambiguity - the reason for communication is business-related, by definition.

It is better to put the salutation and the request in the same comm. Then it is perfectly appropriate and even professional to address your recipient in a cordial way.

This!

I even put https://www.nohello.com/2013/01/please-dont-say-just-hello-i... in my status.

I still think adding the name after the hi goes a long way.

I completely agree with you about saying hello or anything similar . If we don't start an interaction with something like that, it just looks like we are zombie robots that have had all the humanity sucked out of their bodies.

I not only say hello, but also ask how they are doing, and I actually want to know if they are ok, sometimes I even go on a tangent about their day or anything they want to talk about, only after all that is when I ask what I wanted.

We are human and we should behave like such, or else we'll just die little by little while we're working.

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