Hacker News Reader

Comment by beesperester | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

> „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 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.

You might appreciate nohello.net .

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

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com