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Comment by throwaway598 | Hacker News Reader

> It's as if you called someone on the phone and said "Hi!" and then put them on hold!

Typically you both say a greeting then a conversation starts.

> Instead of being polite, you are just making the other person wait for you to phrase your question, which is lost productivity.

Please don't count every second of your life in productivity lost to someone else.

The root of the problem might be frustration with not getting something done, and that needs your reflection.

Or just wake up 3 seconds earlier, and if worried about lost sleep, get to sleep 3 seconds earlier or in the words of Arnold Schwarzenegger "sleep faster."

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The difference is absolutely not 3 seconds. That's just the lower bound.

In the case that both people are present and available in the chat at the same time, sure, it's 3 seconds. If not, that extra "hi" can add latency of hours or more. Days if schedules and availability line up badly enough.

In the delay introduced by "hi", you've created uncertainty and ambiguity for your counterpart. They have no idea whether your "hi" is the prelude to something trivial, or something important, or whether it might might be relevant to work they were about to start.

"Asking to ask" is far from the biggest communication issue in the workplace, but it is bad etiquette and a very easy behavior to correct - so why not just make the barest effort to adjust the way you communicate to better fit the medium? Save the "Hi"s and "How are you"s for synchronous communication like calls or meetings. Chat has a different set of pleasantries.

My sister has this annoying behaviour on chats, she will send a "hi, how are you?" and wait for a reply to then proceed with the conversation. I don't reply messages promptly, usually leave it to be replied when I have idle time to get in the context of it, it's not a productivity thing but just something that eases me.

Sometimes it will go days with just that message lingering "hi, how are you?" until I reply to then after a few hours/a day I finally get what she wanted to ask. It's just annoying, I've told her I much rather receive a "hey, how are you? I need some help with X" or whatever else it is the conversation to be. It's just easier and effective async communication (we live in different timezones).

It’s not the same on the phone. It’s async in the chat, whereas on the phone, the picking up is already accepting the conversation start.

It doesn’t take the sender any more time to write “hi”<soft return>”my question is: xyz”.

Maybe the soft return is the key here. When I ask a question via slack it’s a single carefully formatted message, while my most irritating correspondents send multiple messages to convey a single question.

Oh, and don’t paste 80k log files in a message. make it easy for me to respond

No. I need to prioritize every task I do. If you just say "hi", I am unable to determine whether your inquiry is high or low priority for me. State immediately what you want from me. Then explain afterwards.

> It's as if you called someone on the phone and said "Hi!" and then put them on hold!

I called an australian government phone line recently, i was queued, then informed i could press 1 to register for a callback. I pressed 1. Then I was prompted to say my name, I did that. Then I hung up.

Some time later, I was indeed called back - by a robot. The robot greeted me, informed me it was calling back, and requested that I pass the phone to <my name recorded from earlier>. The robot then queued me and prompted me to press 1 when <my name recorded from earlier> was on the line. Since that was me, I pressed 1. After a bit more time being queued, I was transferred to a human operator.

edit: this seems quite bemusing / irritating, but to give the designer of this callback mechanism a little more credit, it was a phone line that businesses would call -- it would not be uncommon for person A to call from a business phone line, with the callback to the company line being answered by some other person B.

If people followed up immediately after they said "Hi", "nohello" would not exist, or it wouldn't be relevant. Saying just hi is a problem because often, people interrupt each other by "hi", followed by several literal minutes of "Typing..." on the bottom of the screen, or nothing at all.

How do you know it takes three seconds for the other party to continue the conversation they started?

It can just as well go like this:

- Bob writes "Hi" and I get a notification

- I enter the chat and wait for Bob

- 30 seconds later the indicator shows he's typing something

- 30 seconds later, still nothing

- 30 seconds later the typing indicator goes away

- I go away. Eventually Bob follows up with the actual content.

That was frustrating for me, not because of some issues I need to work with, but because Bob kept me on hold while he's trying to figure out what to say.

While I agree that's frustrating, you can be doing something else in that 90 seconds, can't you? Normally chats give a notification of some sort when there's a response. And by taking that long, Bob can't be expecting an immediate reply.

> you can be doing something else in that 90 seconds, can't you?

If I get distracted from my task, not really, or at least not as focused as I was before the "hi". Except if it is something like the beginning of the day, where it does not matter much.

Absolutely - immediately getting upset that folks that didn't spend their teenage years on IRC (I did, but still) don't know the etiquette is just as annoying as not knowing the etiquette.

asl?

It's "asl pls"

Honestly, the example given in your first quote is a bad one, because a synchronous medium (like a telephone call) is fundamentally different from an asynchronous one (like a chat—or email).

It's actually much more like sending someone an email that just says, "Hi!"

You'd find that weird and off-putting, wouldn't you? Not putting at least some part of the point of the conversation in the initial email completely violates the expectations for how email works.

Chat works fundamentally the same way. Yes, you can treat it as being synchronous—but until you have established an active synchronous conversation (ie, until you and the other person are clearly online at the same time, talking in real time), proper etiquette should be to treat it as asynchronous, like email, and plan one's opening communications accordingly.

I always say: "They're Instant Messages, not Instant Answers". Your recipient might not be immediately available to interact, so the polite choice is not pressuring them to greet back before you continue.

If you just write “hi” I can’t tell at a glance if this is something I need to respond to as soon as I notice it, or if it can wait a few minutes while I finish something else. I can’t tell if it’ll probably take 20 seconds to sort out, or if I’m likely to be derailed for an hour, which may also affect how and when I respond.

That’s why it’s a shitty thing to do.

So if I don't respond, then the conversation never starts?

Are you ok with not having the conversation?

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