My life hack for this kind of situation is to say “hello” back. Works every time.
1. Respond with, "Hello. How can I help?", or
2. Wait until 5:30pm then respond, "Hello" and close my laptop for the dayA more mature way would be for "first offenders" to politely reply hi and help them with whatever they need and then when everything is done politely point out that asking directly would be better next time, perhaps with a link to some version of nohello.net. With "repeat offenders" sure, go ahead with what you are doing.
In my experience, even the comically over the top people-persons will be curt to chatty people if they're swamped with a task that doesn't revolve around verbal ability.
They'll also bounce back to "they won't put down <tool> and talk to me" gossip about the nerds once their deadline pressure is released. But whateves, that's life.
Intentionally ignoring people or otherwise being difficult out of spite is immature and disrespectful. That said, I see no reason to sit and wait for a response. Wait until I'm free (if it was urgent he should have specified that), reply "hi", tab out, and the thread goes back on the stack with all the others. No special treatment one way or the other.
Is tab-h-i-CR-tab really so onerous? Personally it doesn't even interrupt my line of thought.
The annoyance in TFA is that you have to do the handshake at all.
I suddenly no longer agree with TFA. This makes way more sense to me in this light.
when they could have just included `${QUERY}` in the initial send, or at least `framing(${QUERY})`.
In TCP, it's useful because it happens in a different layer of abstraction. Even then, QUIC was developed (partly) because it was realised there's no point waiting for the full SYN / SYN ACK / ACK before starting some of the higher-level exchange (although the early data transfer in QUIC is used for TLS initiation rather than application-level data).
In addition, seeing the chat bubbles appear moments after you finish your round is a good sign the other person isn't multitasking and letting their own attention get fractured.
I never found it rude to begin with, just not using the medium to its strengths. But this has me realizing maybe it's a deliberate way to eschew those strengths, for some purpose or another.
Instead you can pipeline both messages: `[hello][are you coming to lunch with us?]`, and that's more convenient and efficient for the receiver and sender.
The problem that TFA is referring to is that context switching is very expensive for the receiver, so without pipelining, the receiver pays a huge cost just to send back the ack and then again to finally reply to the payload once it is sent. The receiver is asking that you send all messages; it prefers to buffer them.
although these days I sometimes respond "how was your weekend" to continue the pleasantries :D
But do you see how that is your choice? You can just type "hello", or a longer form of the same, and then go back to work. You can then check back in about an hour to see if they managed to describe what they are looking for.
You can always change yourself, while it is so much harder to change others that it is almost futile. The true source of your distress is not them saying hello, but your understanding of that social expectation of realtime responses.
This is a defeatist attitude.
Sure, there are some people who will refuse to change no matter what. But many—probably even most—people, if you explain that this is your preferred method of communication when they have a question for you to answer, will at least try to operate that way.
It is not a defeatist attitude. It is a winning attitude.
You told people how you operate and you simply stick to it.
The thing you change about yourself is that you stop caring about the supposed “social expectation” that by writing “hello” they “opened a a synchronous channel“ with “expectations for somewhat realtime responses”.
Now imagine that someone heard that you use messaging asyncronously and yet they still send you a simple “hello” with nothing else. You have two choices here. You can play their game, write a “hello” back and patiently wait as they type out what they need from you. OR you can type to them “hello. long time no see, how can I help you today?” And then immediately forget about them and return back to your work. In due time when you check again your messages (maybe in an hour, maybe in half an hour) you will see if they messaged you. Maybe they will say what they want by then, maybe not.
My point is that while you can tell politely to people the benefits of getting to the point you can’t force them to do so. On the other hand you have full control over your reaction to them not following your prefered communication style.
You can get angry, and waste your time waiting for them. Or you can stay cool, keep on working, and answer them on your schedule and on your terms politely and to the best of your abilities.
If you think what i say is defeatist attitude then probably you are misunderstanding my point. It is not about changing how you communicate, but changing about how much you care about the “expectation of realtime responses”.
If the person on the other end then decides to draw out the small talk with “how are you” etc, it might take a few days for them to get an answer to their actual question, but that’s on them, it doesn’t bother me. I get to messages when I get to them. If they aren’t of substance I don’t care.
the only working option is to ignore such people, you cannot teach people with reasoning, it never works
I hope this message finds you well.
I have a question.
-------
It’s simply not a game I want to play. My mind recommends answering »state your business«, but my polite-mind tells me not to.
I reply in kind with "hello".
There can then be many hours to sometimes days.
Either they then reply AGAIN with "hello" (arghhh), or even worse, there is no reply, and I break asking what they want, and _maybe_ get a reply of "never mind, got it sorted" so I NEVER KNOW.
Pretty overwhelming to me personally, but I could tell other coworkers were taken aback by it too.