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Comment by aesthesia | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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) 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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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 :)

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”

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 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.

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”.

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.

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! :)

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?

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