I don't know if it's character, upbringing or just the modern work environment but it really ought not to cause anyone any concern if someone just wants to check if you're available.
It's entirely reasonable that my brain is just different to yours.
> It's a sad state affairs when people are so anxious that a simple inquiry can cause them distress.
Yes. I would assume that the person posting this would much rather not get distressed about this kind of thing.
I wouldn't say it causes me distress per se, but a blank "Can you talk" can by default launch my brain down a tree of "why, what if it's X or Y, it's this time and they so...". Being able to do this kind of thing makes me good at my job and worse at some social things, and work I've done to focus on "THIS LINE OF ENQUIRY IS NOT IMPORTANT TO PURSUE, BRAIN" make me better at both. It's still a conscious thing that I think other people don't have to deal with.
I don't see it as a character flaw, a failure of upbringing or controlled by my work (since it's not tied to work). It's just who I am and maybe that is a sad thing to you, I'd rather not have the downsides but I'm not sure I'd trade away a full part of how I think just for a bit of peace.
At the end of the day, when it's something as trivial as a Teams ping, the onus is on us to confront the anxiety and to work on our reactions. I sympathize with the author and see myself in him but it's not a part of me that would be good to enable.
Perhaps a clearer example would be someone who is afraid of swimming. It's a good idea for them to fight back against people who needlessly mock them for it. They shouldn't feel lesser for their struggles. But if they find themselves in a body of water, the Universe will not care one iota about the life history and mental world that prevented them from learning.
You don’t seem to realize how productive it is for I and my colleagues to ping each other for short real-time communications. Most people can handle this. I respect that you don’t want to, but don’t make general rules that are only about the comfort of a tiny few.
Colleague: "Hey, do you have a minute to get on a call?"
Me: "Maybe. What is it about?"
Colleague: "I was looking at X and had a question."
Me: "I can meet with ..."
Why not cut the chase here and start with "I was looking at X and had a question, do you have a minute?"
I almost never do have a minute without notice but I'm happy to find a few minutes to give people. I don't like having to play this 21-questions game with people to find out what they need, though. It really irks me.
Some people you can say you have a question and it'll occupy their mind not knowing what it is.
Some people can happily just wait until the actual question comes through, but once it does that's the thing they're thinking of.
"Do you have a minute" and "Do you have a minute, I've an issue with X" have problems, but for different people.
I benefit from quick realtime comms too, and understand people are different (that's the main thrust of my comment). I don't know if others realise just how unproductive it can be for some of these styles of messages though.
I'd be lying if it didn't get me unnecessarily anxious that a coworker died on the way in or literally anything worthy of speedwalking before logging in had occurred. His reasoning? He doesn't like the impersonality of leaving digital messages.
Everything we see around us teaches us that people want to be kind and break bad news in a gentle way. The consequence of that is that when someone seems to be hiding something from us we, quite rationally, think they have bad news - we screwed up, we're getting fired, we're getting a ton of work dumped on us, etc - because they're trying to break it to us without upsetting us. We don't assume it's something good because we're conditioned not to go around thinking we're amazing and do good work all the time. We learn thinking that way is egotistical and self-centred. Our brains think "If it's something innocuous why wouldn't they just say?! It must be something bad."
The anxiety we feel is a learned response to situations we encounter (or see, because we learn this from TV, movies, etc as much as real life.)
That seems a bit subjective. I don't know about you, but > 99% of the time someone at work asks me "Got a sec?", "You busy?", it's because they need me for something that isn't urgent. I think I can count on one hand the number of times someone has asked "Can you talk?" and then chewed me out or given me bad news about my job.
The anxiety I don't feel is a learned response to the situations I've encountered.
- allows someone to gather their thoughts and prepare for the actual answer, without committing someone to answering what is non-critical (critical would be, 'Call. Now.')
- doesn't generate any fear among anxious employees that they're about to hear something discplinary or even worse, something more dramatic like a termination.
- just on a personal level isn't annoying. YMMV with that but I really dislike it when people waste time by asking to ask questions and so on.
If you don't give context, chances are they'll fill in their own.
100% this.
Not just in the workplace, but in all human interaction. If people don't know what's happening, they'll fill in the blanks on their own -- and usually they'll fill them in with a worst-case scenario.
The lack of context is a general problem for communication. If you don't give sufficient context, you might cause anxiety, like in this case, but this is not the only problem. If you lack context your message will often not be understood.
E.g. I was asked if I remember Nick. I didn't know who Nick was, there are many Nicks in the world. I might be bad with names in any case. Then I inquired about some context, I was told it's Anna's friend. I don't know who Anna is either, also a very common name. After a bit of back and forth I find out it's a guy I talked to at a wedding last month. There were hundreds of new names for me. Names I would probably not remember. But if you start with "do you remember Nick, the guy at the wedding we talked to about X", I might stand a chance.
This will also help prime many people, and thereby improve the conversation, so it is probably worth doing even if the person won’t be made anxious.
Ideally you go straight to the point: “hi jack, I need to check in on XXX so we can update the quarterly goals, can you send me Y / can we speak?”. Nothing is gained by checking immediate availability with a greeting message.
It's either:
- out there in public, OR
- clearly sensitive as it's the only bit of communication the other party is masking.
Depending on your environment workers may or may not want open signals about sensitive events being telegraphed.
Of course, I didn't tell people to stop calling me. The problem was my anxiety, not people calling unexpectedly.
"Can we talk?" has only ever come from my managers when someone is leaving. With my family, it is usually because someone has died. Otherwise, there is usually another sentence about what is going to be discussed.
Given that this is an issue for some people (the reasons don't really matter) simply amending the message to 'Hey, are you available to talk *about X* ?' shouldn't be a big deal.
It's not so much anxiety-inducing for me, personally, to get an ambiguous "can you talk?" message, but it is infuriating to be distracted by a content-free message like that in a chat. It's essentially a waste of my attention because the other person is being inconsiderate and lazy to not even bother adding a few words. I always just automatically reply "About what?" at this point. If the other person can't even be bothered to articulate a few words to say what it's about then they deserve nothing more than an automatic reply.
It's better framed as distress if you want to get the manager off your back though :)
It's the last one. Every time I've been laid off, it started with can-we-talk/got-a-minute vagueness. Anyone who's been through that is going to think it's spooky af because its the sound of being 10 minutes from getting frog marched out the door.
I'm rather curious as to whether those anxious about a simple inquiry register on the autism spectrum...... This is a tech news site after all.
EDIT: Down votes for asking a speculative question? This place is turning into another Reddit.
Also: Could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...