A similar guideline has been around on IRC networks for as long as I can remember. Many channels include it in their 'topic' or have a bot that reminds users:
The first startup I worked at used IRC - well before slack etc. I hadn’t touched it since I was a teenager and think I managed to violate just about every internal channel guideline. Took me a minute to understand what “echan” meant.
"Echan" = "empty channel" - IRC slang for joining a channel, seeing no recent activity, and immediately leaving.
It's considered bad etiquette because IRC channels are often quiet but still active - you're supposed to stick around and just ask your question directly rather than bailing when you don't see instant chatter.
The whole "How are you?" ritual is quite possibly the most nonsensical thing about the Anglo cultures. Like, I get that the point is to feign polite interest in the other person. But then by asking this question with the expectation of the same formulaic reply "I'm fine!" (and confusion if the response is something else) - even if the other speaker is emphatically not fine - it literally does the opposite, making it clear that the way they actually feel doesn't matter.
I had a coworker who took this to the extreme. When they'd come up to anyone they'd say, without any pauses in-between: "Hi. How are you? So I wanted to tell you x, y, z [...]", not leaving any time to respond, even with the formulatic "I'm fine.". Really driving home that they're just reciting, without caring one bit how you feel.
Pretty overwhelming to me personally, but I could tell other coworkers were taken aback by it too.
If I'm feeling grumpy I don't respond, but if I have some patience left in the tank I'll use, "Hi, what's up?" which usually short-circuits the salutations.
it does not, some people don't understand it. I tried every trick and one guy was still sending his hello's because it was the way he communicated. I told him twice, literally, that he cannot just say hello and wait for me to reply, and he apologized and still didn't get it.
the only working option is to ignore such people, you cannot teach people with reasoning, it never works
It opens a synchronous channel, setting social expectations for somewhat realtime responses. Most of the time I treat chat like "small email", so this is abhorrent.
> It opens a synchronous channel, setting social expectations for somewhat realtime responses.
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.
> You can always change yourself, while it is so much harder to change others that it is almost futile.
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”.
Lately I've been going with 3. No response, people that have something important eventually follow up their lonely hello with their actual question/issue, the rest just forget about it I guess so the conversation never starts.
And thats why you guys are working with computers and not people, cause that's pretty rude. What they are doing is only rude if they are aware that it annoys people. You response is rude nonetheless since it's a version of "that'll teach them" which is a pretty immature way of handling disagreements or conflicts.
A 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.
> And thats why you guys are working with computers and not people
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.
If I were using email as a realtime chat service, sure. I mean personally I probably wouldn't but it's certainly not unreasonable.
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.
Yep. This is the way I’ve ended up handling it. I believe it has been established now that these interruptions in flow (context switching) have a cost in terms of time taken to refocus on a task. Minutes vs the few seconds it took to have that focus broken and clicking away into a single word DM.
I don't get what this achieves since the whole reason they sent you "hello" is that they want a TCP handshake before they get on with it. So sending hello back just acks the message and they will proceed which is what they wanted.
The annoyance in TFA is that you have to do the handshake at all.
Actually, when you put it like that, sending 'hello' back might be the best thing you could do. They sent you a SYN, you send back and ACK, then the real conversation can begin.
I suddenly no longer agree with TFA. This makes way more sense to me in this light.
The relevance of TFA is that this only works if the initiating party is still connected, and to make matters worse there is no ERR_SOCKET_CLOSED returned by most chat clients if that party got distracted before seeing the ACK. Then minutes or hours later they get back "hey sorry, missed your reply, ${QUERY}"
when they could have just included `${QUERY}` in the initial send, or at least `framing(${QUERY})`.
In what way is that better than "Hello. How do I do x?" If they never reply, that's of no practical difference from just sending "Hello" and not getting a reply.
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).
It's better because X might take a while to write correctly, and you might want some assurance that you have the other person's full attention first before you even send that message. It's a commitment mechanism of sorts.
This doesn’t make sense to me. What does it matter if you have their attention first? It’s asynchronous communication. I find it so damn rude to demand my attention first before you begin typing out a long message. Like do you want me to watch the chat bubble animation while you type or something?
Yes, I do. Sometimes people want (more) synchronous communication despite the asynchronous medium. Among other things that helps guarantee a speedy response. A lot of people use asynchronicity as a way to simply avoid answering in a timely fashion, so framing it like this can make sense if you can't afford that.
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.
Right, but the problem is that with async communication, you don't need a synchronous ack handshake.
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.
The problem is that a lone "hi" isn't universally used that way, and doesn't provide enough detail even when it is. I have no problem with messages like "Hi, are you free for a quick chat? I'll be around for the next 20 minutes."
I’ll do the same - when I get around to it, which might be an hour or two after it was sent.
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.
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.
My life hack is to ignore it completely and have several unread "hello" Teams messages from Indian dudes I never heard of. If I'm lucky they just never follow up.
Mine is to respond immediately with a question that requires a long and technical answer that by the time they've finished writing has completely erased their question from their mind.
wat. No, it isn't. I see it almost 100% from young people who live in India. And that probably isn't the right criteria either - it is probably different people within each organization. This is a cultural thing, not generational.
Not just Indian teens, but Indians in general. Whenever my India based colleague reaches out they always starts the conversation with “hello <first name>”, and then nothing else. If I leave them on read and their patience times out, they’ll then call, irregardless of your status.
I am in no way qualified on this, but my assumption was that this comes from cultures that consider getting straight to business rude.
So while I do find it annoying, I also try to be polite back and I certainly won't be putting some "No Hello" link.
If it is a cultural thing and coming from a place of politeness, then I'll engage in a quick round of pleasantries. Once people are familiar, I've noticed this stops.
Exactly. I just reply back when I'm ready. Forcing them into our cultural habits shows a complete misunderstanding and lack of respect of other people. Even better, I like to get my teams to talk about communication early on in projects, so everyone understands how people want to communicate over messaging, expectations on response times, etc. A 15 minute meeting can resolve so many annoyances.
It definitely is cultural, but I've never viewed it from the perspective of getting straight to business being rude. A bit like in the UK, "weather chat" is a very standard point of conversation at the start of a meeting with people you aren't too familiar with, as a reflexive ice breaker.
For me personally, whilst I understand all the reasoning and logic behind it, it does ultimately come across as fake and unnecessary - everyone knows it's fake and unnecessary, but we ritualistically do it anyway, because the alternative is too jarring "we're here for work, lets do the work, and we're done"
I agree it is a non-issue. But the non-issue is a social one and thus the solution is not technology but giving feedback. A simple "Hi Greg, I noticed you opened our conversation with salutations and only send the salient topic after I replied. In the future, please send me the topic in the first message, too. I won't be offended. Thank you. Bob" usually suffices.
These topics are so important for junior engineers to grasp, because not only is it helpful for interacting with humans, providing the additional context to LLM's will get you much, much better answers.
I wish there was a good source of this information from a less polarizing figure.
People can choose not to be polarized by figures, especially where the controversies are firmly offtopic.
That being said I do find the tone of this guide somewhat annoying and condescending at times. It could use some editing to make it more impersonal and to the point. Justifications and explanations could be attached separately and most people won't read them anyway. When people ask poor questions, it's often precisely because they don't read longform text for some reason.
The scenario described there would be considered harassment under modern Codes of Conduct. Describing the reaction as behaving like a "loser" is likely offensive itself.
While you're likely right in describing the status quo, it's unfortunate that it has come to that.
The one thing that's really objectionable in that section is the last part about people who attack or flame without apparent reason. Such people should be called out by other community members in the same way ESR describes for newcomers in the first part of the section.
Agreed. The excessive, unprovoked flaming is IMO a case in which people should intervene, as per earlier paragraph, "Community standards do not maintain themselves: They're maintained by people actively applying them, visibly, in public." Other than that, spot on.
That's because that was not a required reading and the on-line communities (particularly around OSS) got overrun by people exhibiting the behavior in question.
It's related, certainly, as are mine, Charles Cazabon's, and Mark-Jason Dominus's. But it's not addressing what the headlined page is, which is largely a thing that is a behavioural issue on interactive real-time chat fora.
I wonder how this comes across to younger members of the hacker or scientific dev communities today. The tone, while perhaps aligned with older norms of bluntness, might now be seen as needlessly harsh or even toxic by some. It raises the question of how values around communication and community have shifted over time.
I'm 27, and it resonates. Doesn't seem like he's encouraging rude responses to bad online discourse etiquette, he's just saying those responses are likely to happen unless you follow this very reasonable set of rules.
The unfortunate paradox is that the people who should understand and apply this won't bother reading it. For the rest of us, this is just common sense. So I don't think this document serves any purpose.
I see this more often when someone desires synchronous, multi-turn interaction, not simply "when is that thing starting again?". Things where they aren't exactly sure how to ask the question so they want to rely on you asking questions back and then together zeroing in on the solution of some issue.
They probably need handholding to go through the issue and aren't good at putting into words explicitly what their issue is. Especially nontechnical and nonprogrammer people have problems around structuring and breaking down an issue into explicit parts, with a clearly formulated goal and required inputs and expected outputs etc. Most people's problem-solving relies on a collaborative thinking process where short sentences are exchanged and you rely on the other person actively steering as well, not like an empty chat box.
I don't tend to see this "hello" issue with people who are competent in programming or troubleshooting things themselves.
> They probably need handholding to go through the issue and aren't good at putting into words explicitly what their issue is.
I expect that from students and children, sure. But professionals?
> Especially nontechnical and nonprogrammer people have problems around structuring and breaking down an issue into explicit parts, with a clearly formulated goal and required inputs and expected outputs etc.
Ah, they were failed by their school system. I remember being taught to think this way in my math and writing classes as a child.
But anyway, my main point was, simply sending them a link like this will be perceived as baffling and rude, and I doubt that it can have a positive causal effect because it's not merely that they don't know about this rule of how to write messages, but that they require handholding. You can ask why they got hired then, but sometimes people can be confident and charming and that's often enough especially in non-programming interviews, or there might be also other reasons.
Hmm you're actually selling we on why this can be useful. They are gaining information in the exchange, like how available you are, how willing to help etc.
Or just trying to trap you into a synchronous interaction on their terms, pressuring you to give them your full attention and respond immediately.
They send their "Hi", and go do other stuff. You eventually respond with "hi", and they immediately reply with the request. At this point, they know you're around and saw their message - you just replied to their "hi". And you know they know, and also they know you know they know, which was the entire point.
They got to ask you the thing directly, so ignoring it now feel like walking away, which is rude.
That kind of thing tends not to work on me, because if I do reply "hi", I usually then get distracted, and don't reply to the next message for many hours. So they quickly learn it's better to just ask the question straight up.
If I need that, I send a message like "hey, you got time for a quick call to talk about x?". It's normally better to just figure out what you want to say and send it as a dm though, a call is a heavyweight escalation for rare and complex issues. It's also normally not a "question" per se, more a request for collaborative design or debugging.
This is actually an area I've been informally studying for several years. Both the "Hi" and the "How are you?" are phatic.
Phatic communication is about establishing social connection rather than conveying explicit information.
Both "Hi" and "How are you?" serve in these cases* to eatablish "this is a friendly, casual interaction" by way of social ritual. If you fail to signal non-aggression in this way then, at least neurotypical people, will be more likely to consider you an aggressor.
I don't struggle or feel bothered by "Hi" or "How are you?". But I do struggle with threading enough phatic praise and appreciation into conversation to maintain the "friendly, casual" status and can get easily start being treated as an aggressor.
* America in particular has "How are you?" as one of these phatic rituals. Different parts of the world have different rituals in different areas of interaction. This can be a cause of friction when moving to a new country and you interpret an unfamiliar ritual literally instead of phatically or misunderstand another's intent because a ritual you expect was missing.
You can still say hi, with the first message of the day, that's a nice human touch, and not the point here: say hi + what you need to say, that's the point
It's 2025, we should be able to use LLMs to adapt between communication styles.
If someone I don't know "hello"s me, my LLM should detect that, suppress the notification, and reply automatically - and then resume notifications and defer to me once non-greeting conversation has started.
Back in the day of early IMs, some unofficial ICQ clients had anti-spam measures which let you set your own question and answer. Being edgy teenagers, we set "leet" questions, which filtered out the unwantables automatically.
Regex is enough of a language model to deal with this, no need for LLMs. On a sane operating system you would be able to suppress notifications with a regex match but most consumer operating systems are no longer sane.
counterpoint - Sometimes I do this for myself to prompt myself into a reply when I'm finding it hard to compose the message. Once I've said something, no matter how small, I know I have to follow up within in a couple of minutes. It's like a kind of short-term Ulysses pact.
Also I'd say this depends on your existing work culture - I've been in places where the expectation is that everyone has Slack messages muted. If anything was really that time sensitive it's still possible to pick up the phone.
My wife, god bless her, is really good with people. I try very hard to mimic her, but this multi-round interaction has completely permeated how she interacts over tech, even with tech. I cannot manage it.
Her: "Alexa, add to shopping list". "OK, what should I add for you". "Peanut butter". "OK, peanut butter added, what else?". <long pause while the house has to be quiet until alexa times out>.
Especially as it's impossible to tell whether jvanderbot's "people" datagram got dropped by some intermediate hop in the UDP version or was never sent. (-:
Your wife is possibly wondering why you send everything cleartext in one single frame and don't do challenge-response or any sort of state machine resynchronization between client and server. (-:
This is why emoji responses on Slack are so useful. You can ask others to affirmatively confirm that they have read a message and they can make the confirmation without clogging up the channel with tons of text messages.
And no “read receipt” as it is usually implemented would not cut it, because it only means “this message showed up on the recipient’s screen once” not that they have actually read it.
I think both methods are TCP in the sense that you’re getting some form of ACK. Maybe „some people have a larger MTU“ or „some people are jumbo frames“. Hmm, but that doesn’t sound great… „to each its own MTU.“ nah.Ok, I give up =P
See, if you had Siri you'd be forced into the first anyway:
"Alexa add peanut butter to shopping list" "OK, what should list should I add to?" "shopping list" "Ok, what should I add for you" "Peanut butter" "Ok, playing Peanut Butter by the Royal Guardsmen on a HomePod you forgot you had"
My whole family uses Siri—both through our phones and through the HomePod mini in the kitchen—to add items to the shopping list.
Siri occasionally misunderstands the name of the item, or needs to ask who's speaking (when on the HomePod), or has trouble because the phone of the person asking has briefly dropped off the Wifi, but in the ~5 years we've had it, I can count on one hand the number of times adding has just failed with any pattern remotely like what you describe.
Well, mine personally shifts frequently to British—but yes; I can see that that could cause a problem for some people, especially if their accent is not a specific one that Siri's been trained on.
As a Brit, let me tell you, there is no such thing as a British accent. Our accents vary wildly by region, and sometimes those regions can be under ten miles away, let alone the huge differences between the four home nations. My own is basically what Americans imagine an English accent to be, a bit Hugh Grant but not as posh. Siri can do the basics for me, but playing some random song when any of us have asked it to do something completely different has become a running joke in our house. It's great when the kids try to set a timer or something and it suddenly starts blaring out some very sweary hip hop.
Oh, certainly—mine is vaguely East Midlands, as that's where my father comes from. But without knowing that the person one's talking to is British, just saying "British accent" is going to be much clearer.
For me it's 80% accurate (including sometimes I'm entirely surprised it heard above all the screaming and howling) and then 20% it's just hilariously horribly wrong.
do we have a version for this to people who call you out of blue?
they have a single question and could type it out or email you, instead than ring to you
if you don't have the power to tell people to f- off, the only option left is to accept it and either play their game or ignore a type of behavior you don't want to reward
It's always nice to have a (very) little intro, but both of these have a bad subscript.
The first one says I know it won't take you long, but that assumes you know the time it'll take me to handle whatever you are going to say, but the reality is that you likely don't know, and even if the conversation itself lasts less than a minute, the person will likely been cut of what they were doing for more than this.
The second one is even worse as you imply that you know are bothering me, so don't bother me! (even if it is a polite phrase, it's not nice)
In other words, just ask. It's more efficient and doesn't make any assumption: we'll figure out how long it takes and if that bothers me.
This is not the first time I see this here and to be honest, I was in total agreement a few years ago. In principle, I still am.
Then I became a manager, I had to start dealing with more people, to navigate the enterprise environment and I understood that one of my strengths is to be understand people and to accommodate their ways of working. In this context, being hard with people that just say hello just doesn't make much sense to me anymore. People have busy schedules, they start conversations and are interrupted, they receive hundreds of notifications and have other meetings going on.
If the worst they do to me is to say hello and never talk to me again, I'm ok with accommodating this in my daily workflow.
not to mention that if someone is supposed to be a professional coordinator, they would benefit from being a good communicator. starting a discussion with "hi" and disappearing for minutes is absolutely disrespectful and shitty, not to mention the opposite of efficient.
It's fine unless the other person is your superior. Too many managers are oblivious to the fact that their authority over other people's futures makes every interaction threatening by default.
I've always liked the band Kraftwerk's [past] strategy for dealing with interruptions, from their Wiki page[1]:
"... anyone trying to contact the band for collaboration would be told the studio telephone did not have a ringer since, while recording, the band did not like to hear any kind of noise pollution. Instead, callers were instructed to phone the studio precisely at a certain time, whereupon the phone would be answered by Ralf Hütter, despite never hearing the phone ring."
> being hard with people that just say hello just doesn't make much sense to me anymore
This is the problem I run into, I want to just reply to any "Hey" message with a link to this page, but then I'm the one being rude. We just need a better way to let other people know that this isn't a good way to do async chat. I've heard of other people making their status message this site, so then people see it when they go to message you and it doesn't have to be explicitly brought up
> If the worst they do to me is to say hello and never talk to me again, I'm ok with accommodating this in my daily workflow
This I can't really get behind, because if they just send a hello it's implied that I then need to follow-up and find out what they were asking about
So it bothered you when you had actual work to do, but once you moved to a position where everyone else was doing the actual work and you just sat around benefiting from their labor, you didn't mind minor interruptions and time wasters anymore? Shocking.
Being a manager is not benefiting from other people's work, is to try my best to eliminate barriers so they can do their best work. That includes making them comfortable in the work environment. When you reach a point where you work with many people from different backgrounds, you really have to learn to adapt to people and accommodate to their ways of working.
If that means that I don't get triggered when they leave me a "hi" and never come back, that's fine by me.
You’re not helping people by neglecting to point out errant use of messaging platforms. It harms productivity and is something that a manager should be treating. You don’t need to be “hard” about it, but not guiding people is arguably more harmful than maybe a couple of hurt feelings. Make things better.
On the efforts to guide people, I added small things like this to the rules of engagement. But there's just so many more things to frame in the context of team management that this becomes just a foot note.
What really harms productivity is lack of leadership, vision and organization. I try to avoid micromanaging this sort of thing.
Remember to ask "are you still there?" before sending the answer to their problems, and wait for a response, to make sure the connection is still established. You don't want them to miss the answer to their problem!
So you got e-prodded in the head - what's the problem? simply wait for the person to ask their question. (Fingers crossed they don't expect a response before continuing - if it turns out that they do, just spend some time waiting, distracted, and then prod them back to get them moving).
This site is saying "don't poke people in the head and then wait for them to ask you why you did that before continuing. It's detrimental for this mode of communication."
255 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 236 ms ] threadDon't ask to ask, just ask.
See also <https://netsplit.de/channels/?chat=don%27t+ask+to+ask>.
edit: some wider-range searching suggests it might be Spanish for “kicked”.
It's considered bad etiquette because IRC channels are often quiet but still active - you're supposed to stick around and just ask your question directly rather than bailing when you don't see instant chatter.
https://aka.ms/nohello
which redirects(?) to
https://sbmueller.github.io/nohello/
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.
Pretty overwhelming to me personally, but I could tell other coworkers were taken aback by it too.
the only working option is to ignore such people, you cannot teach people with reasoning, it never works
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”.
although these days I sometimes respond "how was your weekend" to continue the pleasantries :D
A 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.
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.
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.
wat. No, it isn't. I see it almost 100% from young people who live in India. And that probably isn't the right criteria either - it is probably different people within each organization. This is a cultural thing, not generational.
Boomers never talk like that.
So while I do find it annoying, I also try to be polite back and I certainly won't be putting some "No Hello" link.
If it is a cultural thing and coming from a place of politeness, then I'll engage in a quick round of pleasantries. Once people are familiar, I've noticed this stops.
For me personally, whilst I understand all the reasoning and logic behind it, it does ultimately come across as fake and unnecessary - everyone knows it's fake and unnecessary, but we ritualistically do it anyway, because the alternative is too jarring "we're here for work, lets do the work, and we're done"
Wad that up and smoke it kiddo
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
I wish there was a good source of this information from a less polarizing figure.
That being said I do find the tone of this guide somewhat annoying and condescending at times. It could use some editing to make it more impersonal and to the point. Justifications and explanations could be attached separately and most people won't read them anyway. When people ask poor questions, it's often precisely because they don't read longform text for some reason.
The one thing that's really objectionable in that section is the last part about people who attack or flame without apparent reason. Such people should be called out by other community members in the same way ESR describes for newcomers in the first part of the section.
* https://jdebp.uk/FGA/problem-report-standard-litany.html
* https://jdebp.uk/FGA/questions-with-yes-or-no-answers.html
* https://pyropus.ca./personal/writings/12-steps-to-qmail-list...
* https://jdebp.uk/FGA/put-down-the-chocolate-covered-banana.h...
* https://perl.plover.com/Questions4.html
None of us really cover the case where someone is employing a human version of the Nagle slow start algorithm. (-:
“Hey, I’m having some trouble figuring this thing out, here’s where I’m confused: … <details about problem and questions>.
It’s absurd to expect someone to play 20 questions with you to figure out what your problem is.
I don't tend to see this "hello" issue with people who are competent in programming or troubleshooting things themselves.
I expect that from students and children, sure. But professionals?
> Especially nontechnical and nonprogrammer people have problems around structuring and breaking down an issue into explicit parts, with a clearly formulated goal and required inputs and expected outputs etc.
Ah, they were failed by their school system. I remember being taught to think this way in my math and writing classes as a child.
But anyway, my main point was, simply sending them a link like this will be perceived as baffling and rude, and I doubt that it can have a positive causal effect because it's not merely that they don't know about this rule of how to write messages, but that they require handholding. You can ask why they got hired then, but sometimes people can be confident and charming and that's often enough especially in non-programming interviews, or there might be also other reasons.
They send their "Hi", and go do other stuff. You eventually respond with "hi", and they immediately reply with the request. At this point, they know you're around and saw their message - you just replied to their "hi". And you know they know, and also they know you know they know, which was the entire point.
They got to ask you the thing directly, so ignoring it now feel like walking away, which is rude.
It could be a symptom that on-boarding is broken and nobody does any one on one mentoring and the person feels lost.
Of course it can also be that they just want you to do their job instead of them because they don't want to think or work.
"The Initech account is totally on fire, can you look at it?"
Yes let us save the day in jolly cooperation.
"Did you see that ludicrous display last night?"
You can wait until im done with my current thing.
"hey."
If I respond, they will wrongly believe I am available and willing. It is morally correct to ghost them.
I agree with the website. It's even worse when you have to do the "how are you?" back and forth before getting to the actual request.
Phatic communication is about establishing social connection rather than conveying explicit information.
Both "Hi" and "How are you?" serve in these cases* to eatablish "this is a friendly, casual interaction" by way of social ritual. If you fail to signal non-aggression in this way then, at least neurotypical people, will be more likely to consider you an aggressor.
I don't struggle or feel bothered by "Hi" or "How are you?". But I do struggle with threading enough phatic praise and appreciation into conversation to maintain the "friendly, casual" status and can get easily start being treated as an aggressor.
* America in particular has "How are you?" as one of these phatic rituals. Different parts of the world have different rituals in different areas of interaction. This can be a cause of friction when moving to a new country and you interpret an unfamiliar ritual literally instead of phatically or misunderstand another's intent because a ritual you expect was missing.
Saying Hello or good morning and then spending multiple minutes composing your actual message while I'm attending you is extremely annoying.
Quite frankly though I don't think it makes sense to do any of that outside a group chat. Just say what you want to say and get out.
Hi [Name],
[Message content]
If someone I don't know "hello"s me, my LLM should detect that, suppress the notification, and reply automatically - and then resume notifications and defer to me once non-greeting conversation has started.
What's next - "press 1 for a question about FOO, press 2 for.." and level 1 AI support bots?
Dropbox comment vibes. Please provide the regex you use in your daily communication.
My work computer is a mac though so as I said, it's insane and I get to just suffer.
Also I'd say this depends on your existing work culture - I've been in places where the expectation is that everyone has Slack messages muted. If anything was really that time sensitive it's still possible to pick up the phone.
Her: "Alexa, add to shopping list". "OK, what should I add for you". "Peanut butter". "OK, peanut butter added, what else?". <long pause while the house has to be quiet until alexa times out>.
Me: "Alexa add peanut butter to shopping list". "Peanut butter added".
Some people are TCP. Some are UDP.
Nailed it! This is going up on the wall in my office.
:P
----
Other person: Hi, what time was that thing?
Me: Hey, 14:00.
...
...
Me: Hey, 14:00!
...
...
Me: walks in their face Hey you, the thing you asked, it's at 14:00.
Other person: Yes yes, I heard you first time!
Me: boils internally, muttering to themselves so why the fsck didn't you say so?
----
Please don't hang on "Hello", but for $deity's sake, confirm reception of messages, especially in analog communication.
"Since we are on the topic of communication, written communication also does not constitute communication unless they confirm they read it."
https://simonwillison.net/2024/Sep/15/how-to-succeed-in-mrbe...
And no “read receipt” as it is usually implemented would not cut it, because it only means “this message showed up on the recipient’s screen once” not that they have actually read it.
"Alexa add peanut butter to shopping list" "OK, what should list should I add to?" "shopping list" "Ok, what should I add for you" "Peanut butter" "Ok, playing Peanut Butter by the Royal Guardsmen on a HomePod you forgot you had"
Siri occasionally misunderstands the name of the item, or needs to ask who's speaking (when on the HomePod), or has trouble because the phone of the person asking has briefly dropped off the Wifi, but in the ~5 years we've had it, I can count on one hand the number of times adding has just failed with any pattern remotely like what you describe.
“Alexa add peanut butter to shopping list" <silence>
“Alexa add peanut butter to shopping list". “Peanut butter added. Peanut butter added. Peanut butter added.”
"It's currently raining would you like to see the forecast for tomorrow also I found this routine you might like would you like me to enable it"
writes peanut butter on a piece of paper
if you don't have the power to tell people to f- off, the only option left is to accept it and either play their game or ignore a type of behavior you don't want to reward
Don't feel bad for not answering, just put your phone away for a couple hours.
I get it. It’s the same on IRC when people ask if they can ask a question. Just ask the bloody question!
The first one says I know it won't take you long, but that assumes you know the time it'll take me to handle whatever you are going to say, but the reality is that you likely don't know, and even if the conversation itself lasts less than a minute, the person will likely been cut of what they were doing for more than this.
The second one is even worse as you imply that you know are bothering me, so don't bother me! (even if it is a polite phrase, it's not nice)
In other words, just ask. It's more efficient and doesn't make any assumption: we'll figure out how long it takes and if that bothers me.
Then I became a manager, I had to start dealing with more people, to navigate the enterprise environment and I understood that one of my strengths is to be understand people and to accommodate their ways of working. In this context, being hard with people that just say hello just doesn't make much sense to me anymore. People have busy schedules, they start conversations and are interrupted, they receive hundreds of notifications and have other meetings going on.
If the worst they do to me is to say hello and never talk to me again, I'm ok with accommodating this in my daily workflow.
It's not about interruption really, it's about a style of using chat apps that wastes peoples' attention and is easily avoided.
> they receive hundreds of notifications
okay, so this nohello thing is good advice to help reduce the noise.
they need to work on their time management.
"... anyone trying to contact the band for collaboration would be told the studio telephone did not have a ringer since, while recording, the band did not like to hear any kind of noise pollution. Instead, callers were instructed to phone the studio precisely at a certain time, whereupon the phone would be answered by Ralf Hütter, despite never hearing the phone ring."
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kraftwerk
This is the problem I run into, I want to just reply to any "Hey" message with a link to this page, but then I'm the one being rude. We just need a better way to let other people know that this isn't a good way to do async chat. I've heard of other people making their status message this site, so then people see it when they go to message you and it doesn't have to be explicitly brought up
> If the worst they do to me is to say hello and never talk to me again, I'm ok with accommodating this in my daily workflow
This I can't really get behind, because if they just send a hello it's implied that I then need to follow-up and find out what they were asking about
So it bothered you when you had actual work to do, but once you moved to a position where everyone else was doing the actual work and you just sat around benefiting from their labor, you didn't mind minor interruptions and time wasters anymore? Shocking.
If that means that I don't get triggered when they leave me a "hi" and never come back, that's fine by me.
What really harms productivity is lack of leadership, vision and organization. I try to avoid micromanaging this sort of thing.
Where is the problem? Just do what you did until the question pops up?
It’s not a phone call, remember ?
This site is saying "don't poke people in the head and then wait for them to ask you why you did that before continuing. It's detrimental for this mode of communication."