Don't ask to ask, just ask | Hacker News Reader

Don't ask to ask, just ask

dontasktoask.com

52 pointsRyeCombinator37 comments

It‘s similar to how some people in the company’s chat first initiate a longish back and forth of formal chit-chat before actually coming to the point of asking their question. I know full well from the first „hi“ that there will be coming a question my way at some point later but now I have to stop what I was doing and engage in an unnecessary real-time conversation to enable the other side to ask. Whereas if they just asked the question outright it would not matter if I was AFK at the time. I can simply answer asynchronous.

When I come back after lunch and find a message saying simply „hi“ from 30 minutes ago and now that person is AFK it spreads out the conversation over the whole day.

I am not saying you should drop the formalities, but there is nothing that forces you to split it up into multiple messages. Just write „Hi“ followed by the question in the same message.

You might appreciate nohello.net .

Nice, I will now send out that link (in a polite way of course)

> „hi“

For the record, in English, quotation marks are always above letters: 'like this' or "like this" (or, ‘like thisʼ and “like this”, to use the typographically more correct glyphs, although HN renders all of these pretty badly with Verdana).

Single or double is a matter of style—British English style guides tend to prefer 'single quotation marks', and North American English style guides prefer "double quotation marks". But alternate between the two for nested quotes (or avoid nesting to improve clarity):

Joe said 'Jen said "yes!" when I asked her to marry me!'

„This“ style is strictly German, as far as I can see.

Yes, you are correct, I am using a German keyboard and German autocorrect on my smartphone.

Also Polish. I always found it ugly though and I use the "English" one (which often annoyed my Polish teachers).

Polish and German styles are similar, but not identical:

„hi“ (German; ends with U+201C LEFT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK)

„hi” (Polish; ends with U+201D RIGHT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK)

I just wait for them to explain their problem. If they don't, guess it wasn't that important...

Hmm I totally get where you’re coming from but I have used a “hi” in the past to basically probe and figure out if a friend or colleague is available for real time conversation because I suspect that the conversation will need to be a quick back and forth, lasting only minutes, rather than an extended asynchronous chain lasting multiple days.

Why not simply ask?

"Hi $COLLEAGUE. I'm having a problem with $TASK: I'm trying to accomplish $GOAL but I keep seeing $ERROR. I've tried $WORKAROUNDS, but none of them have fixed the problem. I think it will be fastest if I can demo this for you; do you have 10 minutes so I can walk you through it interactively?"

Exactly. Please stop saying "hi" and waiting for a response, just say what you need in the first message. This is a great template.

You’re not wrong. I think the problem here is that the context of who we’re talking to is missing. I only talk to people in this way who I know well and do the same with me, I have like 3 people in mind. I can understand how it would be frustrating if you did this with someone random at your company.

I work with some teams in India and I am ~12 hours offset time wise. I find that they often will often just send “Hi” in Slack. By the time I see that, they are already offline. If I respond with something like “What can I do for you?”, it will be another 12 hours before they see that and then another 12 hours still before I can see whatever request they make.

I’ve tried to suggest to some of them that they lead with their request, but that has not helped much.

it's like a human version of the tcp protocol

It's actually the opposite. 3-way handshake is the way to check that the communication channel is established and humans do it all the time.

- hey!

- what?

- we need to talk.

In a similar vein, I have a couple coworkers who regularly DM me on Slack to ask “Hey, can I ask you a question?”

First off, you already have.

Second, you know the answer is yes. Why ask?

Thirdly, you’ve wasted my time and made this potentially asynchronous interaction synchronous. After typing “sure” and hitting enter I am basically entirely guaranteed to sit and wait for your second question because you have already interrupted my thought process and whatever I was doing.

I’ve never personally been bothered by the ask-to-ask, the reality is I have a 100 WPM typing speed and “Sure, Whaddya got” is muscle memory at this point in life. Pleasantries and social oddities are just part of being a human after all.

What bothers me is the folks that ask-to-ask then go ghost for 15 minutes or more. You’ve captured my attention, please capitalize on it! If you’ve broken my concentration and walked away, _that_ is rude.

I don't think the point is effort per se, but rather distractions and context-switching.

(Pretty sure most of us can type at or above that speed :)

> You’ve captured my attention, please capitalize on it! If you’ve broken my concentration and walked away, _that_ is rude.

I'd venture to say that's probably caused by a chaotic mess on their end. I don't take this as a judgement of their character unless someone else from their side of the house who is a sibling on the org chart is more disciplined to not do this to me.

Similar: https://nohello.net/en/

I am very tempted to send this to my mom but she would almost certainly take the act as passive aggressive.

She will send me ”Hello” followed by more frantic “Hello?” and “Hello???” ‘s, sometimes even at very odd hours because she’s retired.

This isn’t a telephone. Ask what you are going to ask or tell me what you’re going to tell me. We don’t have to make this a synchronous conversation. If we do, call me.

On Monday, literally after midnight and she had to get my undivided attention just to tell me she was going to rent a room for their anniversary party in June. “Ok” I reply

Enjoy it! You'll miss her when she's gone.

Does this work with medical emergencies?

Don't say presumptious, lazy shit that walls people out like, "Is there a doctor in the house?"

Instead, say, "Help! How do I bleed (so to speak) bubbles of air out of someone's aorta?"

No, you ask for what you want. "Person X has air in their Aorta, I need a doctor quickly, this is an emergency!"

Similarily if the person with the Java question needed an expert to do something for them they could have asked: "Any Java expert here willing to take a job? You can contact me at foo@bar.org"

Your question is valid if you're the doctor yourself and just need a piece of knowledge to fix things yourself (as isn't uncommon in the programming world)

Is this a serious comment?

The question is, is this a serious article? Just let people ask, is there Java expert here. Who cares?

I would say the page explains who might care and why they might care. Could you elaborate on why you disagree with the reasoning?

I have a morbid curiosity to know what kind of person decotes their time to put together a website to make this point.

I mean... something like this can be put up in less than an hour. Certainly worth the (little) effort if it's a point you're constantly making already

I thank them for their service. I have referred this site hundreds of times answering questions in various online communities.

The examples given are more about inexperience talking with skilled people and less about etiquette. Same thing happens when you directly talk to anyone else with deeper knowledge of any kind.

For anyone reading this that is not a dev just ask us what you're trying to accomplish without the formalities. If the dev throws a tantrum, they're still green and you should try to ask up the org chart if possible. Otherwise don't hesitate to ask the dev if there's someone who is a better fit for your question.

I do agree with the general idea behind this post though. We ask for brevity because we know, and you do too, that the conversation is going to be a long slog. We are not reassured by your formalities that this is going to be a clean one. Nobody likes to feel embarrassed or dumb. There's no way around this, just dive in please. I've been doing this for over a decade and I have been humbled many times by the broader business concerns I had no clue about. It happens.

Amusingly, this same topic is on Twitter at the moment, where the dominant opinion seems to be “let people communicate however they want, don’t try to change that.”

It’s Twitter, so I don’t take it particularly seriously, but I also find it ironic how the same people who will say that you must let people be themselves do not want to let me be myself. I despise small talk. My productivity plummets if I have to work in an office, because people keep talking about nothing.

If you have an actual technical question, by all means, hit me up and I’ll be happy to engage you. But otherwise, no, I’d rather just keep focusing on whatever I'm working on.

"Hey atoav, may I ask you something?"

"Yeah, you already did."

Can I ask you another?

You confidently have proven so.

What about now?

What about it?

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