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Comment by RoadieRoller | Hacker News Reader

I always start the chat conversation in office with a simple "Hi" or a "Hi, Do you have a minute?" This way, I am giving that person a choice if

1) He/she is in a meeting, they have a choice - to or not to reply

2) If their screen is shared, I am not disturbing the meeting attendees making them read what I typed, and what comes in the notification pop-up

3) Gives enough time for the other person to switch context

4) Ignore me for an indefinite amount of time and continue their work

If the other person responds, my second comment would be with full details.

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I don't like this. You're demanding a sync interaction from someone who is probably very busy.

If you have a question, just ask it. If you want to have a 5, 10, or 30 min, discussion, ask for that.

I'd prefer a long form question with all the communication from your side fully expressed, then I can ponder on it and multiplex it between my dozen other things.

As someone who receives lots of questions as a core part of my job, often concurrently via multi async comms channels, my biggest challenge is controlling cognitive load so I can be efficient and effective. Having a spot of politeness in the interaction, as the parent suggests, helps me meter the flow of information in my direction. I much prefer it. Horses for courses I guess.

Reducing the information content of a message, effectively concealing the information that you already plan to send after “Hi”, isn’t being polite to people with this personality, it’s frustrating.

I guess you can feel less obligated if the question hasn't been fully asked yet.

Still.. the question is out there. At least when it's written out, you can know if it's a worthwhile question. Or ask some quick follow-ups that they hadn't thought to nail down first.

I'm sorry, but this is wrong. By including a brief description of your problem you are actually giving them a choice whether or not to respond, rather than just guessing at your intentions. Don't worry about a huge message appearing on screen, almost all popups truncate the message after a certain length.

Obligatory: https://www.nohello.com/

And as a blanket rule of thumb, don't send people chat messages that you wouldn't want to see displayed to an arbitrary meeting full of people. :)

Many people at $TECH_GIANT have www.nohello.com as their Teams status message. I love it.

Agree with this. Perhaps it's my British sensibilities, but I find it rude when people launch straight in.

I absolutely hate it when people send me a question that doesn't have the question. Now I have to pull it out of them, on their time.

I think there’s a middle ground. “Hey, are you free to talk about Project X?” is a perfectly valid entry to something where you know an actual conversation will be needed. Likewise “I’m having trouble with the frobinator, when I run frob -x blah it gives me this error: XXX, are you able to help?” if you just need an answer.

Niceites are, well, nice. They help to make sure everyone remembers we’re all human beings rather than question answering machines, but we are also talking to get a job done. Unless you’re actually a good friend of mine if you drop me a message asking me how my weekend was, I know that you’re just lining up to ask me a question, but now I have to do The Dance to work out what it’s going to be about, whether I have time for it, and if I’m even the right person to ask.

+1000. "Do you have 5 minutes to join this conversation?" is totally fine. The alternative of

> Them: "Hi"

> ...

> Me: "What's up"

> ...

> Them: "Do you have 5 minutes to join this conversation?"

> ...

is awful.

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