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randallsquared

This has a lot of good insight, but I was struck by how differently I experience

> “What’s up?” is one of the most dreadful texts to get; it’s short for “Hello, I’d like you to entertain me now.”

The typical response to "What's up?" from myself and, uh, nearly everyone I know, is some variation on

"Not much! What's up with you?" or

"[trivial recent happening, quickly related] So, what's been going on with you?"

...and that's because "What's up?" is nearly universally a way to prompt someone to ask you that question back, so you can tell them about the thing you really want to say without it seeming sudden or forced.

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This reminds me of the “no hello” proposal for workplace chat messages (e.g. https://nohello.net/). It’s much less of a big deal for personal communication, but I can understand wanting someone to just say what they want to say without a manual SYN/ACK first.

It's a feeler (IMO way more descriptive than "doorknob") that lets you bail if you don't want to talk. Without it you may feel obligated to listen or have to be slightly rude. With it you have a range of options like "swamped on this project, catch up with you later" or such depending on circumstances to avoid straining a relationship.

In async communication it's unnecessary though, people might do it by inertia.

Hey, you wouldn't believe who I just met in the elev

TCP RST

I like the "hello" before someone engages in a chat because this way I can confirm that i) I am available to talk and ii) the message is safe (i.e. I am not displaying in front of 200 people and forgot to switch off IM).

If someone just wants to send me an information, email is great for that.

My personal order of contacts is snail mail → email → IM → phone → in person. Each of the steps is one order of magnitude of urgency greater than the previous one.

There is probably also a cultural component.

If you want to know if the person can chat right now, you can always say "Oh, hello. Do you have time for a short chat right now?"

Every other time when you don't need to know that, you can still not get all the problems of the empty "hello" message.

I always want to know that because I do not want to send messages when it is not a good time for that. Nor I want to receive any.

A "hello" means it is "IM urgent" so it can wait for the moment I am OK to exchange.

Like I said, this is also cultural - some cultures allow people to interrupt others, some not.

I don't want to wait there and stare in typing icon while you are typing and retyping and figuring out what you want to send.

That is why hello is annoying. People are capable to talk immediately, but take forever to finish writing.

The solution here would be for Microsoft to add a "hello will be ignored" option to Teams so I can just check that and have it look like Teams is saying back to them " please write more then just hello "

It does not work that way in my place. You write "hello" and if there is no immediate "hello" back, then you leave this aside until there is. There is no staring at anything.

August 21, 2022

Re: your messages in this thread

Dear BrandoElFollito:

You're rebuilding TCP over UDP. Chat apps are connectionless (or RESTful, if you will). What makes them productive, especially in the workplace, is the fact that they can work without all the handshaking that accompanies more structured communication like in-person, spoken human conversations.

Nothing is stopping you from adding back all your binds, listens, SYNs, and ACKs to a protocol that doesn't need them. But it's a conversational code smell if you do.

Sincerely yours,

sowbug

Dear sowbug - apparently you live in a place where it is fine to send a message and it does not matter if the recipient is ready to receive it or not. Good for you.

Dear sowbug, i only got 100 characters of your message. Could you please send it again?

How would you manage that via telephone?

Sending Hello this way seems like calling somebody and if they answer it's ok to interrupt.

Being responsive doesn't mean you're idle.

The phone is the last but one "urgency" level. It means that if someone calls me on the phone it is really urgent. I would interrupt a lot of things, including a presentation, if I get a call.

If this is to say something minor I will block that person, or never pick up their call again.

I see, however, that you're rudely just communicating here without telling people hello first, and waiting for a reply to know they're available to converse.

Exactly! You may have noticed that this forum is not an IM chat. Glad you noted the difference.

Neither is slack :)

Try: "Oh, hello. Do you have time for a short chat right now about a database schema change?”

I almost always have time to fight fires — unless busy with a larger conflagration. I may or may not have the time to debate the finer points of table naming conventions however.

Without context I might say yes and then have to take it back once I discover the topic.

This. There are many conversations I am happy to have, many not.

Hello without a context is ignored.

Hello with a context empowers me to make a decision about how my day will go.

> i) I am available to talk and ii) the message is safe

If I’m at work, I’m always going to be available to talk, and anyway, nothing is lost by them sending me what they want to say and me responding when I become available.

I’m of the opinion that you shouldn’t ever send messages that are unsafe for 200 of your colleagues to see.

I guarantee you are annoying people with this. “Hello” conveys no information, you might as well say “tag”.

“Hello, could we set a time to chat about xyz” lets the reader give a meaningful response when available (and maybe thats immediate)

I simply ignore hellos but happily respond to questions.

And I guarantee that others are annoyed when folks leap in with no lead in. And I am annoyed at people who ignore messages, even a basic “hello”. Seems pretty rude.

You can add the 'hello' to the message. Just don't press send in between!

Yes exactly this!

It's possible to be polite while being mindful of how many interrupts you are causing another person.

> And I am annoyed at people who ignore messages, even a basic “hello”. Seems pretty rude.

Good! If you went up to someone in person who is in flow state and say HELLO! you'll probably get a rude response too.

I had colleague that was 10x developer but 0/10 communicator, if he didn't receive separate first message with "Hi, how is it going?" without me waiting for his answer before requesting something, he wouldn't reply.

It was such a dead end for getting things done (he was productive on his things, but blocker for everybody else.

I once worked with someone who got visibly frustrated when people didn't stop in the hallways to listen to her lengthy response to the phatic "how are you?" expression. She treated it as a genuine question.

It was a weird hill to die on.

That can be cultural. In some places that phrase was typically only asked, if a truthful and lengthier response was desired.

If that wasn’t desired, the greeting would be more like “Good day” or “Hello”.

As a developer who occasionally gets pulled in to help with urgent support issues, I dread bare hello messages. It gives me too much time to imagine a down site or some other critical event. Asking the question up front spares me a lot of stress.

"hello" is impossible to triage.

You should essentially never do syn/ack IRL. If you don't know precisely what the recipient is doing, you do not know what they are doing, it could be important. Always lead with info to help them prioritize things. Ideally in the first ~5 words, because that's all they may see in the notification.

(this is also IMO why phone calls are terrible. they're the equivalent of "hello" over a channel that has no other message, so everything must be assumed to be maximum urgency or you might miss something truly critical)

I practice BLUF (Bottom line up front)[0] for that very reason, and never send bare hello messages.

[0] https://www.animalz.co/blog/bottom-line-up-front/

Just wait for the next message. 9/10 times I just don't respond until I get the actual request, then I say hello back and continue with helping.

I’ll add too that it’s better to end a work convo with pleasantries than to begin one.

“Hey I’m blocked on xyz, thanks anyways how was your weekend?”

Is far more pleasant than

“Hey how’s the weekend? anyway I’m blocked on xyz”

Completely agree. I think it's polite to greet others properly but it's rude to wait for a reply before moving the conversation forward. So I just write my greetings and then write what I need to say on the following lines, old school letter style. Works really well in my experience.

We have a no "Thank You's" policy because it re-opens the ticket which is really annoying.

The argument might be made, that this is a problem with many (most?) ticket management systems.

How difficult would it be to design a mechanism that facilitates humans being nice to each other, rather than making humans emulate emotionless robots?

Even for other reasons, why should a comment automatically reopen a ticket? Maybe you just found some addtional details you want to record for future reference but which don't need any additional action right now.

I'd think that the "thank you" gives finality that both parties agree it's closed.

I don’t mind people saying hello, but also would prefer they then go ahead and state their need. I don’t always respond right away, and often times by the time I get around to answering the need is gone or the person is unavailable. I definitely don’t mind interrupting my work flow, especially to route somebody to the actual correct person who can help them with their problem, but I don’t like the expectation of a synchronous conversation, so a “hello” with nothing else will usually fall to the bottom of my list of actual concrete problems to address for that minute/hour/day.

Bob, Mon 4pm: hey

(I'm picking up kids)

Me, Mon 5pm: hey

(He's gone for the day)

Bob, Tue 9am: can you check the logs for xyz...

The number of times that this has happened, with certain colleagues of mine, over Slack. Ugh.

Dude, if you had just skipped the really-actually-not-required-on-slack pleasantries, I could have already given you the information you needed, 16 hours ago.

Ah, no hello! There's a lot of that where I am. Seems... a bit much? Like, I can't spare a second to say hi back again?

Can you write a slack plug-in that automatically replies "Hello, what's up?" back?

That way you'd only be pulled into the conversation once there's actionable information.

I imagine it will be like this:

12.00 - Hello

12.01 - Hello, what's up?

12.02 - (long text explanation with some urgent changes)

(you just returned from another urgent 3-hours meeting)

14.40 - sorry, just read your message?

Thank you for the nohello.net thing, I am usually pretty awkward when it comes to starting conversations and but I guess I never paid attention to why that was the case. The discussion on this thread clears out the impression I had that it is usually rude to directly jumping to the question/task. I got my queue! :)

I think the author was referring to this in the context of improv, not normal conversation. It's bad to do in improv because it contributes nothing to the sketch - it's lazy and puts the entire effort onto the other person. It's much easier to riff off any kind of declarative statement or directed question. For example, "Dude this dog birthday is the weirdest party ever." or "So are you going to forgive my mom for dinner?" gives the other person an immediate context and hook to work with. Keegan-Michael Key explained this very well in a video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coZARWbdNls

When I was younger and more pretentious I used to get annoyed at friends for answering "what's up?" with "nothing much" because in my head by asking that I was obviously fishing for conversation material so you should just bring up something that we can talk about.

Something that happened recently or something that you heard about or something you remembered or something you are looking forward to, just... anything.

Well why are you putting it on them to come up with something to talk about? "Not much, sup with you?" puts it back on you.

I used to only ask "what's up?" after I'd exhausted everything I had to talk about usually. I used to think a lot about dynamics like these lmao.

What's up?

I'm playing with LEGO®.

I'm eating sushi. You?

I'm in spaaaaaaceeeee but I'm separated from my module!!! Halp!

It seems some people might be more comfortable sitting in silence and so they don't feel the need to talk about _anything_ as a way to break it. Maybe it's an introvert/extrovert thing.

I used to be that way too. Now I see that there are depths there that I didn't see. I was blind to my blindness. I try to keep my cool now. Reply with something soft and cool.

> prompt someone to ask you that question back

Huh. I’m glad this is not a thing in my circles. Being direct and exposing some vulnerability seems to work great for us.

I known its just a custom that can’t be analyzed too deeply, but what you describe sounds so timid and shy from the outside.

Rightly or wrongly (probably wrongly), if I picked up that someone was doing this, I’d assume they need a lot of special handling and ceremony to feel comfortable. It would take a lot for me to want to bother.

> "What's up?" is nearly universally a way to prompt someone to ask you that question back, so you can tell them about the thing you really want to say without it seeming sudden or forced.

Maybe in the United States, but I would hardly call it universal.

Like saying “How are you doing?” in Europe is an invitation to tell your life story.

"WHAT'S UP!?". The pre-emptive assault. The demand.

Like he's swinging a club at you. The only reply is to raise your shield.

Or you could do something clever. But either way your attention has been lassoed.

Gotta be cleverer.

"What's up?" is the knock. They could lead with whatever they really want to ask you or push at you, whether it's telling you about their vacation to Ireland or asking you if they can hold a thousand this month, but instead they've given you the opportunity to not respond, or to say "Hey, really busy; talk later?" :)

I mostly agree, and think that In addiction to what you said “what’s up” is basically like pinging someone to see if they are available so that some additional reason planning can occur

> “… so you can tell them about the thing you really want to say without it seeming sudden or forced.”

Yes. And I find myself using this pattern when I want to talk (heck, I started the conversation, so I have something in my mind), but I’m not sure if it’s a convenient time.

If my asking “What’s up” unlocks a conversation, then maybe it’s not a good time to talk about what I was thinking.

While I certainly hate the "what's up" question, questions post kids with friends are related to their kids, jobs, relationship issues and pop culture video games questions.

Honestly, I've had a hard time turning these into interesting discussions. It amounts to, "no time to really reflect. Here are my mundane joys and traumas. Okay, back to the pressing issues at hand..."

Its a greeting that confirms a certain level of intamacy. You don't have to answer with anything more than the same question. Like a modern "how do you do".

Whats up? Your down. (I am in Australia)

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