
Please Don't Say Just Hello In Chat (2013) - oftenwrong
http://www.nohello.com/
======
tunesmith
Sure, let's squeeze another drop of humanity out of conversing. Maybe it's
because I'm a remote worker, but I don't mind the "hello" and "hey, are you
available for a quick question?" stuff at all. I prefer it, I find it polite
and collegial. I'm honestly surprised this bugs so many people. Maybe it's an
indication that our working environments are asking too much out of us.

~~~
delish
I'm glad this is the top-rated comment--it teaches me that there are people
who are totally different from me! I'm a remote worker who is sharply annoyed
by "Hi" [send] "QQ" [send] [wait 30 seconds] "[question]". I find it impolite,
and I am honestly (honestly, honestly!) surprised anyone feels otherwise. It's
nice to be able to express this here; there's no way I could say it at work!

~~~
tunesmith
Honestly it taught me something too. Before I commented, there were a lot of
comments, all practically unanimously expressing as you believe. So I'm as
surprised as anyone that it's (currently) the top-rated comment. It's easy to
forget that lurkers can believe quite differently than active commenters!

~~~
chronogram
Honestly, what kind of person _comments_ on articles instead of looking at the
page, scoffing, and going about their day. I do consider myself a bit out of
the ordinary for doing that.

Then there’s also the topic of the discussion here. Topic: “don’t say hello”.
Replies can be whole anecdotes of superstar developers who lost 10 seconds of
their precious time, or something more mild, but there’s no anecdote in “I am
okay with people spending a line in Slack/Teams to say hello.”

------
anonytrary
Another rule: Don't ask to ask, just ask. For example, don't do:

    
    
      u1: Hi, can I ask a question?
      u2: Yes.
      u1: <asks question>
      u2: <provides answer>
    

Instead, do:

    
    
      u1: <asks question>
      u2: <provides answer>

~~~
readhn
thats BS. It is common courtesy to ask if its ok to ask a question.

~~~
icebraining
That's fine, but then you must follow through on that courtesy by having the
actual question ready to paste and send when the person says "yes". By taking
more of their time, you're being rude, not courteous.

~~~
romanows
In my darker moments I think people don't want to take the time to type a good
question and only commit to it when they believe I'll be faster than
grep/google. Not sure if they realize that now _I_ have to sit through that
typing time in addition to providing help.

------
caymanjim
I couldn't agree more with this. It's long been a pet peeve of mine, and I get
irrationally infuriated when it happens. It makes me passive-aggressive, too;
I tend to completely ignore messages that are a simple "Hello", or "Can I ask
you a question?" You've now interrupted me and wasted my time, so I'm going to
waste yours by not replying. If it's important, the person will eventually
just ask.

There's a cultural component to this as well. I've worked with people from a
few cultures where their norms dictate that smalltalk and pleasantries be
exchanged before getting down to business, so sometimes it's even worse than
simply "Hello" or "Can I ask a question?" Sometimes they want to go through
the whole rigmarole of "How are you?" as well. Sorry, but in my culture, we
get to the damn point, because the most polite thing to do is to interrupt me
only if necessary and consume as little of my time as is required.

We're not friends, we're coworkers. You're sending me a message because we're
interacting to some business end. The most polite thing to do is to optimize
the transaction and move on. If you want to chit-chat, I'd be happy to join
you for lunch.

~~~
notimetorelax
I see you're adding a fair amount of your own cultural bias, which you do
recognize. You also recognize that there are other cultures where poeple value
small talk. The best solution might be to be inclusive and meet in the middle:

\- Hi

\- Hi, how are you? How can I help?

\- <here they can quickly reply how they are and ask the question>

WDYT?

~~~
GordonS
Firstly, the first "Hi" is a distraction, and pressure to respond without know
the urgency, or anything else about what the issue is.

Secondly, and assuming this is a random co-worker rather than a friend, why is
"how are you?" in the response when you don't actually care, and possibly
don't even know the person?

~~~
notimetorelax
Again, you interpret everything through your prism. Sometimes it’s worth to be
more empathetic and just go with it.

This book taught me to value my cultural norms less and be more accepting of
others: “The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global
Business”

~~~
caymanjim
Why is it that Americans are supposed to bend their cultural norms to accept
others in the workplace, and at the same time, while working abroad, are
supposed to fully adopt the culture norms of someone else's workplace? This is
never a clear-cut, all-or-nothing scenario, but I don't think I should have to
accept all the baggage that someone brings with them. If I'm living or working
overseas (which I've done), I'm happy to adopt local rituals and norms (or go
through the motions when I disagree). I expect others to do the same when they
come to my country.

~~~
notimetorelax
I think all parties should be working towards better understanding of each
other. It's a fallacy to expect others (no matter what side) to behave
completely within the norms of another culture, we will be always tone deaf to
some nuances. E.g. in the chapter on feedback the author writes that it's very
dangerous to try to simulate German or Dutch directness during criticism, so
even when working with Dutch or German it's best to keep within the limits of
your own upbrigning.

This is why I suggested to adapt response depending on the signal, if you see
someone pinging you with "Hi" the most productive thing is to be accepting.
After helping them, you can always educate the other person to ask the
question directly.

P.S. I'm not american, don't leave in US, don't work in US. This is a
universal problem of any multi-cultural or even single-culture multi-
background environment.

~~~
GordonS
> After helping them, you can always educate the other person to ask the
> question directly

For some reason, I've never actually considered that. I guess it might be
tricky to word without seeming rude, but is totally doable. Only issue (for me
personally) is that I work for a faceless megacorp that employs > 250k people,
so I'd need to do rather a lot of educating :)

------
areyouseriousxx
I think we may want to consider if our hatred of meetings, and now just saying
"hello", has more to do with dealing with unrealistic deadlines and pressure
for what should be a white collar job.

In the example given, there is 1 minute between the "Hi" and the question. If
1 minute makes or breaks getting things done in time, you do not have a white
collar job, you have a fast paced labor job similar to that of a worker on a
factory room floor.

Food for thought.

~~~
mrguyorama
It's not so much that it breaks productivity, it's annoying on a simpler
level.

You are doing productive thing x. Person A sends you a hello message and your
chat app pings you. You go to look at chat and now you are staring at an empty
chat window for the minute or more it takes for person A to actually ask what
they could have sent already.

I honestly think you can treat "conversations" in a chat program as more like
email. Sure, some of the time you can get a conversation going, but if you
don't already have a continuous conversation going then create a fully self
contained message

~~~
ravitation
I honestly do not understand why anyone would just stare at a blank chat
window for a minute (or more) instead of switching back to what they were
doing (or, in most(?) cases, just looking at a different screen).

It's similar one of your sibling comments which compares a chat message to a
person walking up and saying "hello"... They are absolutely not equivalent;
it's perfectly alright to not immediately respond to every message you get (or
even only giving it a bit of your attention), even if they are not emails.

I wonder if this is a generational thing...

~~~
randrews
Well, because the second you look back to the other window and remember what
you were doing, it's just going to ding _again_ with whatever their actual
question was.

~~~
ravitation
I must just be better at multitasking than most... It doesn't really take a
lot of my focus to respond to an arbitrary greeting with an equally arbitrary
greeting... Certainly not to the point where it's going to take minutes for me
to get back to what I was doing.

~~~
gowld
That's great if your work doesn't require concentration.

~~~
ravitation
I certainly don't think devaluing someone's work (especially when you have no
idea what it is) is a useful direction to take this conversation.

I was essentially conceding that clearly others are not as able to switch
contexts easily.

------
pram
I get so many random messages on Slack that I usually just ignore the DM if it
says 'hello' typically because the actual request/question will appear sooner
or later (as they grow impatient)

Hasn't burned me yet but YMMV

~~~
WaxProlix
I'll occasionally end up with people creating tickets or making noise with
managers if they're ignored. The only reason I stopped doing this, really.

~~~
gowld
Tickets are good. They give you tangible credit for your time spent helping
someone. If they are interrupting your manager the same way they interrupted
you, instead of sending a request in an efficient manner, they saved you the
trouble of you going to your manager to ask for help dealing with the person
being a nuisance.

~~~
WaxProlix
In what world do tickets go to managers?

------
mlmartin
My pet peeve is when you get the message "Hey, have you got a minute?"

You type back "Yeh, sure". And then wait... and wait....

Whenever they do actually ask the question almost an hour later, I'm always
tempted to reply "Sorry, the minute is long gone".

------
dmix
The site homepage is not optimized for mobile and is 90% google ads with a
small link to the blog post.

I’d rather not share this.

Too bad because I agree with it.

Edit: it’s also stolen from a Google wiki
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14870907](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14870907)

~~~
kristopolous
maybe that's a business model. go find high ranked content on HN from a couple
years ago, make a site about it, put some ads, and pretend it's something new.

~~~
gowld
The site is 6 years old.

~~~
kristopolous
oh phew, that means my proposed content mill of an offshore team doing
shameless reposts is still an untapped market.

Just think, by this time next year I could be losing thousands each month.
Finally I'll put those Reid Hoffman books to practice.

~~~
dmix
There’s about a million marginally skilled SEO guys working from home you’ll
be competing with. I know you’re joking but it’s an interesting thing to think
about. The countless people scrapping the bottom of the pool of where internet
money is made with endless grey hat trickery.

~~~
kristopolous
Fooling Google is a different game than catering to arrow clickers.

This is really more of a data problem.

I think the strategy is to take the most popular things around this time of
day, day of week, and month of year from say a pool of 5-10 year old data.

Then you filter it looking for evergreen content. This would be an incremental
heuristic model.

You take the candidate content, use some trivial grammar model to rewrite it
so it's not completely identical and then automatically put it on different
styled templated sites.

Register a few domains that suggest they are tech information sites

Make sure your Twitter cards and url naming system is reasonable, then have a
bot to post it from a handful of puppet accounts

Have a much larger pool of about 250 or so puppet accounts and use a different
5% subset to seed them with upvotes over Tor in order to confuse any
clustering algorithm and then keep the profits.

Affiliated ad revenue is total complete shit though. Even if this all worked
beautifully you're looking at what? $20/day? I mean who cares...

The truly dishonest and devious thing you could do is freemium it and have a
generous paywall like NYT.

That's an incredibly dishonest way to make money though. It'd probably work
great.

~~~
dmix
1) You'd need 100k+ visitors to make _any_ money off Google (1+ thousand a
month).

2) Just having visitors is not enough, they have to be "niche" to an ad
category and ideally looking for something to buy (not just information). The
only thing that pays out is high-quality PPC traffiic or even better lead-gen
for high-value products (health, debt, education, etc) with conversion-based
pricing.

3) Google ads on content sites with CPM (impressions) pays pennies out.

4) Targeted blogspam sounds like it involves lots of humans beyond just
mechanical turk, with some text parsing and rewriting which is a big overhead

5) This is basically the business model of Buzzfeed and other cancerous sites
plus countless "niche" sites you've never heard of with high quality domains +
foreign content mills + partner networks+cross domain advertising systems to
convert in bulk.

If you want my personal opinion there's almost no low hanging fruit left in
the content + high volume + conversion game unless you get lucky with a few
niches (but the advertisers find those niches for you).

There are communities like [http://www.leadscon.com](http://www.leadscon.com)
and similar who do this stuff. It's really unstable business with constantly
changing market + technology trends, unless you have a unique product and are
developing marketing channels. Otherwise you're constantly fishing for got
lead buyers and new traffic sources. Which is a constant grind and probably
not a great business to get into, unless you have the heart for that stuff -
then you could easily become middle class off of it. At least temporarily.

~~~
kristopolous
I don't really make dishonest dollars so this is unfamiliar to me but I was
under the impression content mills made easily detectable formulaic clickbait
"What happened next will surprise you" "a local housemom discovered something"
"7 worst celebrity hairstyles" etc...

This is decidedly different. Here's some examples:

[http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1941206](http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1941206)

[http://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brief-incomplete-
and-m...](http://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-mostly-
wrong.html)

[https://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2198700&cid=3629362...](https://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2198700&cid=36293622)

These are all at least 6 years old ... the key here is to make it look like
it's legit and above board all the while you're just content farming from
archives.

I've had people repackage articles I've written on their own site and
presented them as conference papers as just one-offs (I don't really care,
whatever). This is a proposal for an automated plagerization engine,
shamelessly lifting old content and repackaging it in a way suggesting it's
exclusive.

I've had top articles and projects on reddit, slashdot, and hn ... I tried
amassing a portfolio recently and it's really hard to find the old references,
blogs, and articles talking about it. The web is more of a moving river than a
library. That's why I think this would work.

It's incredibly dishonest but I don't think I've seen it done.

------
voidhorse
I understand the point of this is efficiency, though I feel it's necessary to
give voice to the other persuasion: are we really going to pursue maximum
efficiency in trivial matters to the point that it no longer sounds like it's
human beings communicating?

There are such things as rudeness, crudity, boorishness--and in my opinion,
those don't go out the window in the workplace. Keeping your interactions
civil and pleasant is important, just like getting to the point can be
important too. Saying "hello" before asking someone a question is polite
because you're treating them like a human being, not some question-answer bot.
Being too aggressive in eliminating these "pointless" social signals can have
a cumulative effect of making you look like a real jerk that only values
people for their utility in a given situation, in other terms, treats others
like objects.

I shall remain a staunch defender of manners and etiquette and pepper all of
my conversations with so-called needless pleasantries.

All that said, I of course don't promote saying _only_ hello and then waiting
for a reply before proceeding. That's just silly.

~~~
kelnos
Not sure what you're disagreeing with here. The article doesn't advocate being
rude, boorish, or robotic, and explicitly points out that if you want to keep
up with social niceties, to prefix your question (in the same message), with
something like "hi, if you have time for a question, i was wondering,
[question]?"

That's perfectly polite and friendly, and also respects your colleague's time.

------
ravitation
If I receive a message that says "Hi", I'll respond with something like
"Hello", but I'm not going to sit there staring at the chat window watching
them type a message... I'll swap back to what I was doing until I see whatever
their next message is... I also probably won't make a website to try to change
an otherwise ubiquitous social practice because it slightly hurts my
productivity...

~~~
kelnos
I guess it just doesn't bother you as much as it does others. I absolutely
hate needless interruption, and every time I get a "hello" without anything
else substantive, it means an extra interruption that wastes my time.

I often _won 't_ switch back to what I was doing after replying to the
"hello", because my brain is doing a little wager, hoping that the question is
short and quick to type out, because doing two mini context switches back and
forth is tiring. And if my brain loses that wager, I end up sitting there idle
for longer than I'd like.

It's funny how there's so much attention being paid to social niceties in this
thread when a simple social nicety is learning how to best communicate with
people on an individual basis. And I think that's even more important when the
purpose of sending a message to someone is to ask for their help with
something. If you're asking someone to take time out of their day to help you,
doesn't it make sense to do your best to respect their time, on _their_ terms?

~~~
ravitation
It certainly is important to respect others time, but I wonder if at a certain
point people will stop asking the person who is annoyed by "hello" questions.

------
hirundo
When time isn't of the essence, I prefer to use email for the same reason.
With email it isn't expected to follow the face to face round trip greeting
convention, but to greet and then get to the meat. And compared to any kind of
chat there's a much lower expectation of immediate response so it's more
conducive to a considered rather than an off-the-cuff response. But mostly,
becaause it's a more considerate way to address people who depend on being in
a flow state and how I prefer to be treated.

I prefer to keep chat questions to occasions when there is actual time
sensitivity, or I already know that the recipient is not heads down or is
currently chatty.

------
piqufoh
Another non-obvious, but good reason for doing this;

Often I get as far as typing out my actual question and I work out what the
answer is before hitting send. Sometimes forcing yourself to layout the
problem in a structured way helps you understand it and solve it - rubber
ducking. If you've not hit send, you can save yourself the embarrassment of

"Hi!", "Hello", "... Oh - never mind, sorry to bother you!"

------
scarejunba
It's not about efficiency or anything for me. It's about courtesy. For
instance, if you're moving and you want to ask a friend to help you out, the
right way to do so is "Hey, man, I'm moving this Saturday to the Mission. Can
you help me out?"

The wrong way is "Hey, can you do me a favour?" or "Hey, what are you doing
this weekend? Oh you're free?" And then going with things.

It's the same way with everything else. If you have a question, give them a
chance to not answer it. "Can I ask you a question?" is a trap on question
complexity because the answer is always "depends".

It's okay if they can't answer the question you have. You can just copy-paste
it. Also, always ask in public channels unless it's sensitive. That way
everyone learns.

If you priorize your conversation partners this behaviour is easy and natural.
If you're prioritizing yourself (don't want to repeat the question, don't want
to be seen as not knowing the answer, etc.) this behaviour doesn't seem
obvious.

------
phlakaton
If you are making a request of someone with whom you are not in regular
contact, it is good etiquette to start with a salutation. Therefore, "no
hello" is bad advice. "Inline hello," as the article suggests, is better
advice.

But even there, the mechanics of whether the request comes in one long message
or broken up is just not that important in the grand scheme of things...

~~~
kelnos
> the mechanics of whether the request comes in one long message or broken up
> is just not that important

Yes, it is. If you put "hello" in one message, and then follow up with a
question some time later, you've possibly interrupted someone twice. If you
put both in the same message, you've interrupted them once.

This may not bother you if you're on the receiving end of it, and that's fine.
But it _does_ bother _me_ , and I wish people -- especially people who are
asking for a bit of my time -- would get this and do me the courtesy of being
respectful of my time.

Because that's what we're talking about, right? Being respectful and socially-
aware when initiating communication with someone? There is no one-size-fits-
all approach to communicating with different people.

------
jeffbarr
This works for me! Far too many IMs seem to go like this:

Them: Hey Jeff ... Them: Can I ask you a quick question ...... Them: I am sure
that you are really really busy with re:Invent ......... Them: And I could
look this up, but you have been here forever and I figured you would know
.................. Them: Where can I find X?

I am happy to help, but would prefer:

Them: Hey Jeff, hope all is well. Where can I find X?

------
tyingq
Also, don't pollute your advice by surrounding it with giant adverts :)

------
rc_kas
I've always heard it as "don't ask to ask, just ask."

------
mr_tristan
After reading _Deep Work_ by Cal Newport, I realize that this "hi" message is
just yet another way we are distracted in the modern workplace. (I heartily
recommend that book.)

What I've adopted is a structured "offline" timeframe, where I answer _no_
communication over the period of about 1-2 hours. When I come "online", I take
the time to really answer questions very completely.

I've noticed a few things:

1\. This has reduced stress a _lot_ 2\. Nobody cares I don't answer
immediately 3\. People do appreciate that when I do answer them, I've taken
the time to really research the response

(Now, "offline" isn't really offline, it's more "no distractions or
notifications".)

The funny thing I've noticed, is that the people that just want you to be
online when they say "Hi" are often very distracted people themselves.

------
snowmaker
One way to split the difference on this issue is to type out your question in
a separate text editor ahead of time and store it on your clipboard. That way,
when your coworker responds to your "hello", you can immediately reply with
your question, saving them the time of waiting for you to type.

------
alexandercrohde
I'm confused by people admitting they're "irrationally emotional" about this,
as though those two things aren't flaws.

Maybe that 1 minute efficiency is something you're irrationally emotional
about. But you have the privilege of working with hundreds of other people who
have their own, sometimes contradictory, emotional irrationalities.

I think our industry's greatest weakness is the too-accurate perception of
petty emotional battles and tribalism (e.g. Tabs vs Spaces, vim/emacs,
mac/windows, front-end/backend, iphone/droid, sql/nosql, php/python). Why
don't we do ourselves the favor of not leaning in to finding more silly hills
to die on?

------
lisper
This is a reasonable thing to say, but does it really need its very own
domain?

~~~
crooked-v
The part that I find weird is less the domain and more that it's a full
Blogger setup and not using Netlify or Neocities or whatever.

~~~
lisper
That's not so surprising. Blogger makes it easy to point a domain to a blog.
But what _else_ would you ever do with this particular domain other than have
it contain this one post?

(Once upon a time back in the pre-cambrian era of the internet I once got
myself into a situation where I had to register a new domain with Network
Solutions in order to re-activate an account (or something like that, I don't
really recall the details). So I registered
networksolutionssucksbigfathonkingweenies.com. Got myself into a wee bit of
trouble with that one.)

------
shados
Another similar one, even in person, is someone shouting an (often negative)
exclamation and making everyone wait a minute before explaining themselves.

"Oh crap!" <long pause as everyone around is panicking, waiting on what
actually went wrong>

Sometimes something really wrong happened and the person is trying to process
it. That's cool. But more often than not, it's like "Oh shit!" <2 minute pause
as people ask what happened> "I forgot about my cat's birthday!". Thanks for
the dose of anxiety.

~~~
ghostly_s
I think you just have a really weird work culture if this is considered
acceptable.

~~~
shados
Work culture? Im not talking about work, and just in general. And people don't
do it as a joke, thats how they talk. Annoying as hell.

------
js2
The only way to win is not to play.

I had to stop letting Slack interrupt me. Too many of my colleagues had
started using it as an email replacement. So I keep it on a secondary monitor
or desktop and only glance at it when I'm done with a task. I don't let its
icon bounce/beep/bloop/be badged.

I still try to be respectful on my end and go as far as composing everything I
want to say in an editor before pasting it into Slack, gathering links to
screen shots and logs in advance, etc. We can still model good behavior,
right?

~~~
sand500
I agree, there should be no expectation to respond to IM immediately. If it is
super house is on fire urgent, people can call me (phone or chat app calls).

------
minimaxir
In general, if I have to do consecutive message in a Slack channel (not just
direct messages), I try to use Shift+Enter to do a single multiline message so
it only does one ping.

------
johnwheeler
And, if you're sick of your coworkers saying, "Hi"\--tell them directly. Don't
create a domain name and get it front-paged on a site you know they frequent.
;)

------
dredmorbius
The history of business communications since 1800 (and before) has been toward
both increasingly abbreviated and structured communications, largely doing
away with the prolux formalities of earlier ages.

JoAnne Yates and James Beniger have both explored this in what I've found to
be a surprisingly fascinating literature.

For the brief intro:

JoAnne Yates, "The Emergence of the Memo as a Managerial Genre", May 1, 1989.

[http://www.ismlab.usf.edu/dcom/Ch6_YatesMemoMgtCommQtly1989....](http://www.ismlab.usf.edu/dcom/Ch6_YatesMemoMgtCommQtly1989.pdf)

[https://doi.org/10.1177/0893318989002004003](https://doi.org/10.1177/0893318989002004003)

[https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0893318989002004003](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0893318989002004003)

[https://sci-hub.tw/10.1177/0893318989002004003](https://sci-
hub.tw/10.1177/0893318989002004003)

James R Beniger, _The control revolution : technological and economic origins
of the information society_

[https://www.worldcat.org/title/control-revolution-
technologi...](https://www.worldcat.org/title/control-revolution-
technological-and-economic-origins-of-the-information-society/oclc/611061815)

JoAnne Yates, _Control through communication : the rise of system in American
management_

[https://www.worldcat.org/title/control-through-
communication...](https://www.worldcat.org/title/control-through-
communication-the-rise-of-system-in-american-management/oclc/278033068)

JoAnne Yates, _Information technology and organizational transformation :
history, rhetoric, and preface_

[https://www.worldcat.org/title/information-technology-and-
or...](https://www.worldcat.org/title/information-technology-and-
organizational-transformation-history-rhetoric-and-preface/oclc/1042854432)

------
eknkc
We have an intercom widget on our SaaS website. A lot of people just say "hi"
and wait for an ACK. Or go with "I have a question". Then they wait. I guess
they think it is turn based.

Just go ahead and ask your question. We'll have the appropriate person for
you. We'll take a look at the issue before responding you. Or we'll get back
yo you if nobody is available right now. It bugs me a lot.

------
chiefalchemist
Moi? I'd rather say "Hi", get an acknowledgement and then continue. Rather
than Hi + type something out; wait; still nothing; move on; find answer
elsewhere; and have to remember to go back and say "NVM".

I find NVM semi-offensive. It so often seems to come across as "I'm done with
you."

Also, there's the chance the colleague replies for naught, as I've already
sorted myself out.

~~~
kelnos
> I'd rather say "Hi", get an acknowledgement and then continue. Rather than
> Hi + type something out; wait; still nothing; move on; find answer
> elsewhere; and have to remember to go back and say "NVM".

Basically you're just telling us that you are optimizing for your own time and
don't respect your colleague's time, which I think is a nice thing to do,
especially when you're asking someone to take time out of their day to help
you.

> I find NVM semi-offensive. It so often seems to come across as "I'm done
> with you."

Then don't say that. A more-friendly, "hey, i managed to answer my own
question, no need to reply" works equally well.

~~~
chiefalchemist
"Basically you're just telling us that you are optimizing for your own time
and don't respect your colleague's time, "

Huh? How did you draw that conclusion?

As for NVM, your suggestion feels longer than necessary / optimal. That makes
it a waste of my time to type and someone else to read. For someone who is
time sensitive, can you give me something else I can use?

------
HenryBemis
There is an anecdote, but I just cannot remember which major US bank it was.
The anecdote is that they have eliminated the "Hi <name>" on the email. No
greetings are accepted. People were asked to proceed to the task/question and
wrap it up fast. Also no "kind regards" etc. in the end of the message.

I will continue googling and I may update if/when I find more info on this.

------
massivecali
As others here have said, ignoring the 'hello' is the best bet. For those on
the asking end, my advice is to ask your question and if it goes beyond a
simple answer, follow up with 'do you have time to talk about this now?' Most
people assume I have time or desire to answer a flood of questions because I
responded to the first simple one, which isn't usually the case.

------
EamonnMR
I agree with this, but mostly because 'hello' is a demand for synchronous
communication, whereas just dropping your question off means you can walk away
and the recipient can handle it at their convenience. Of course, chat has
mostly supplanted email at companies I've worked at and as a result it is used
for both sync'd and async communication.

------
learc83
I hate this as well. There also seems to be a correlation between people who
do this and people who type slow.

------
timzaman
If you need an answer quickly, you'd end up asking the same question to
multiple people. Then, multiple people will take the time to read and respond.
This takes up a lot more time than just probing for 'Hi'. And, since when does
anyone wait for a response in a chat channel!?

------
anotherevan
This reminds me of a little anecdote. My colleagues in the office all used
Skype, which was particularly handy for me as I was the only person who worked
remotely (about half the time).

However, I always had the habit, when in the office, to eschew Skype and go
see a person directly. It had the advantage of higher fidelity communication,
and about half the time I'd figure out the answer to my own question before I
got there.

After a while, I started turning Skype off when I was in the office (remember
there were no other remotes at this time). This actually became an annoyance
to one of my colleagues as they would have to, get this, walk across the hall
if they wanted to talk to me. My ill concealed amusement at their ire did not
go over well.

In person, face to face: the original instant messaging.

------
sebringj
Yes this makes perfect sense and its something developers for the most part
have adopted minus needing to say hi in the first place as slack is a
different animal and mode of communication.

We've already gotten to the place where "What's up." means "I acknowledge you
exist." and nothing more when in person when it used to be an actual question
of genuine interest. How often have you passed persons in the hallway or on
the street and they act as if you don't exist or don't respond to you if you
give a nod or say "good morning". It's more common these days to be impersonal
which I don't like but it may be due to the greater number of humans existing,
the less interesting and annoying they become.

------
Spooky23
This is stupid. There’s a lot of reasons why one might want to establish that
a person is there without providing more detail.

I deal with reasonably sensitive material all of the time. Spewing information
without context to my laptop when I’m presenting something, for instance is a
bad idea.

~~~
icebraining
Why are you letting your chat program interrupt you in the middle of a
presentation?

------
pikewood
I start chats with a separate "Hey" message solely just for the chance that
the recipient is sharing their screen in a meeting. That way others in the
meeting will only see the "Hey" popup and not any details of the rest of my
message.

~~~
gowld
Anyone who shares their whole screen deserves what they get until they learn
to properly share a window.

------
tonymet
slack (and any chat app) should "absorb " hellos and consolidate them with the
subsequent message, maybe with a 2 min timeout .

------
bondolo
aka "Don't ask to ask, just ask" the mantra of IRC for at least 25 years.

------
human20190310
There's no way the "hello" should make a difference.

If you're getting so many questions that the removed "hellos" add up to an
appreciable amount of time, the real problem is that you're getting too many
questions.

~~~
kelnos
It's a "death by a thousand cuts" sort of thing. As a maker, every little
interruption hurts. And an interruption that's entirely unnecessary and wastes
my time makes me annoyed. Not "I'm going to go throw something out a window"
annoyed, but annoyed nonetheless. These things add up.

If this sort of thing doesn't bother you on the receiving end of it, that's
great for you. But please recognize that other people have different
communication styles and respond to things differently. If you're going to ask
someone for help with something, it's a nice thing to do to try to be aware of
their communication style and work with it if possible.

------
nyx_
At my workplace we use Skype for Business. I often get "IM?" or "OK to IM?"

Starting the conversation that way requires me to greet them and request that
they continue.

Why ask if it's OK to IM, if you're using an IM to do it? Ostensibly it's to
prevent, like, notification sounds going off from my laptop if I'm in a
meeting, or to avoid disrupting me while I work... but sending the "Permission
to communicate?" message is already a disruption.

Also, S4B has available/away/busy/meeting/call status indicators. Why not use
those if you can't decide if it's OK to IM?

~~~
viraptor
I know there are exceptions, but I think the idea of the IM status is
generally dead these days. It's hard to micromanage it, and the only general
status for a work day is "busy". People leave it by default on available and
that's a new normal.

------
code_duck
First off, this is a fairly confrontational and antisocial way to make a point
about social graces. Also I’m puzzled that someone made an entire website
based on one assumption.

If someone says hello to me and doesn’t continue immediately, or even if they
do… I’ve already switched to another window. The initial “hello” is perfectly
fine for getting attention and informing someone that you wish to speak with
them in the near future. There’s no reason to assume they are staring at the
chat window, immobilized, twiddling their thumbs and waiting for you to
continue.

------
rococode
I feel this deeply from building online games that have chat communities.
Often random people I don't know will message me, or more frustratingly, write
a message in a group chat directed at me, along the lines of "hey rococo can I
ask you a question" or "hey i have a suggestion". I see these messages so
frequently that I just don't have the energy to respond to every one of them
with "yeah what's up". People who directly post their ideas or feedback are
much more likely to get a response from me.

------
karolsputo
Aren’t single word or short messages like “Hi”, “Sure” simple ACKs in our
human protocol? I’ve observed (at work) that people feel more comfortable and
respected when I use these words while writing.

~~~
dredmorbius
Yes, but they're distracting, unnecessary, and grating in an async
memorialised medium such as IRC or Slack.

------
dgzl
The first example given seems incorrect. The author says that if you combine
your greeting/request then you can get your answer sooner, but that's not
calculated right. In the first interaction, the time user1 spends on writing
out the problem is accounted for, but in the second interaction it's not. The
"time savings" the author is referring to assumes that user1 can combine
greeting/request without needing to combine the time it takes to write the
request. That's ridiculous.

~~~
kelnos
Yeah, I noticed that too and was a bit disappointed.

But I think the point still holds, even if the math is wrong. If I get a
context-free "hello", and it wastes my time, I'm going to be less inclined to
immediately switch back to the chat when the next message comes in.

~~~
dgzl
That's where you and I differ. I wouldn't consider the ~1s of time used to
read "hello" as time wasted any more than I'd consider a person saying "hello"
in person as time wasted. On the contrary, I'd be happy for the greeting.

~~~
kelnos
Perhaps you're not a programmer, but the context switch often wastes a _lot_
more than 1 second.

------
keithnz
This doesn't worry me, I don't sit there waiting I just carry on until
something more substantial turns up. Or I completely ignore it if I'm in the
middle of something.

------
wutbrodo
Haha I remember at Google, we had an escalating series of go/ links for
people's chat preferences: nohello, yeshello, notonlyhello, etc etc.

This always just seemed like common sense to me, and I say that as someone
whose in-person manner of speech is substantially more polite and flowery than
most people. There doesn't seem to me to be a big difference in politeness or
friendliness between "hello <new IM> [content]" and "hello, [content]".

~~~
sand500
This is from 2013, I wonder if this came first?

~~~
wutbrodo
That's roughly in the middle of my time at Google, so it's possible. I'm
inclined to say that I first came across it at Google around '12 but I could
easily be off by a year.

------
azhenley
Discussion from 2017:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14868294](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14868294)

------
alan5
co-worker: @here

co-worker is typing...

co-worker is typing...

co-worker is typing...

co-worker: Could you help me with $x?

Nothing more annoying than grabbing everyone's attention with the first
message and _then_ spending time to compose the question.

------
duxup
At a previous employer received a ton of "Hello" and I would respond
immediately....and they would not say anything. I don't understand that.

------
PorterDuff
Not a bad point. It's like how talk show callers often ask how the host is
doing instead of cranking right up. It hurts the flow.

------
codegeek
Funny how this resonates with so many of us that it is #1 post on HN within
minutes. We have been telling our team members to not just say "hi" or "hello"
and instead ask the question straight away. Imagine the amount of hi and hello
texts that are stored on tools like skype/slack :)

------
eibrahim
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. This BUGS the s __ __out of me and I have to
tell all my remote developers to do that. The worst is when they are in a
different time zone and say “I have a question” and wait for me to respond
before they ask it. VERY FRUSTRATING.

------
warp_factor
That's the issue with Slack and other hype trends that will eventually go away
as fads.

Slack doesn't you make you more productive, it makes you spend more time on
smalltalks and constant distractions.

I almost never had a constructive discussion on Slack. In contrast, I used to
have them way more over email.

------
nine_k
The title as it currently stands, "No Hello", does a poor job conveying the
(imho correct) idea.

It should be "No Hello Without The Actual Message in an IM Conversation".
(That would also obviate the need to read the article for like 90% of people
who actually use IMs.)

------
mcqueenjordan
As someone who used to get directly pinged by hundreds of teams for questions,
if all I got was "hey", I used to simply reply with
[https://nohello.com](https://nohello.com). People appreciated the feedback.
:)

------
angry_octet
If you like this you might want to investiage email as a method of
communication.

------
shoes_for_thee
Oh god, yes. At my previous job this would happen constantly. Super annoying.

------
noja
If I am talking to a person, I will say hello first.

(and if someone was to send me a link to a website telling me not to say
hello, then I would think that person might have some issues)

------
turbinerneiter
I regularly have people sending me "hellos" \- and then nothing until I
answer.

If you want a synchronous conversation, call me or catch me in person.
Messages are asynchronous.

------
randylahey
At my old work we used to call this PWP: Ping with Payload.

------
vzaliva
While I agree with the sentiment of the site, the form they suggest "Hi --
...." looks ungrammatical. Disclaimer: I am not a native English speaker.

------
Chunkyated
I just pretend I haven't seen the "hi".

------
crazygringo
This is ridiculous.

You say "hi" or "hello" to _check if the person is there_.

And if they are, it's worth spending 2 minutes typing out the question. If
they're not, you're not going to waste those 2 minutes.

It's just simple efficiency.

If they're not there, you might walk over to someone else's desk and ask
them... why would you bother wasting the time to type something out if they're
not there? And waste _their_ time because by the time they see it and answer
it, you already got an answer from someone else?

------
jrootabega
And its sister site, emailhasasubjectforareason.org

~~~
lucb1e
To prevent spam (very successfully, so far), I have users fill in _their_
email address instead of displaying mine on my website. They get an email like
this:

    
    
        From: lucb1e-$randomcode@example.com
        Subject: Email address for lucb1e
        Content: To contact me, just reply to this email!
    

People use this, but _not a single person_ changed the subject from "Email
address for $me" to the actual subject of the message. Not one.

~~~
dredmorbius
You could programmatically vary the subject. Either by time/sender, or by
lifting the first (or first statistically improbable) phrase from the message.

~~~
lucb1e
I don't mind that much that I'd bother writing a script to take content from
their email or something, I'm just surprised nobody uses subject lines.

~~~
dredmorbius
People are _very_ lazy.

------
mozillas
A Slack bot could reply to solitary "Hello" messages with a link to this URL.
Although that might come abrasive to some people.

------
dorgo
I also like following chat style. Especially when I try to concentrate on
something else.

colleague: Hello

5 seconds later

colleague: I have a question

5 seconds later

colleague: I work on problem X

5 seconds later

colleague: .. and can't do Y

5 seconds later

colleague: are you there?

------
ada1981
Also, tech support folks.. please don't say "Hello, how are you today?"

Instead say "Hello, how may I help you?"

------
dennisgorelik
I use brief "Hi" message when I want to voice talk.

If person on another end is not available - I may send a brief email.

------
dsalzman
I love this. When I worked at Qualcomm we had a page just like this on an
internal wiki.

------
nurettin
Ahhh, reminds me of the early 2000s IRC. Which is pretty much the same right
now.

~~~
dredmorbius
Slack is IRC's corporate successor, FBOW.

------
pteraspidomorph
Can I open with SYN?

------
ir193
tldr: use udp rather than three-way handshake tcp when you want to ask a
question.

------
smlacy
Fuck this gatekeeping

------
api
This needed a domain.

------
peterwwillis
While we're telling people how to talk: please don't tell people how to talk.

------
sexyflanders
No. Close the chat app if you don't want to be interrupted.

Don’t impose your personal communication preferences to others.

There are far to many languages, cultures and personalities to think that you
know better how to chat than someone else. Be nice and take time to
communicate with your colleagues.

