
Please Don't Say Just Hello in Chat - myth17
http://www.nohello.com/
======
dfboyd
I originally wrote this text on an internal wiki page at Google. It was short-
linked to "go/nohello" and sparked a fair bit of discussion, including another
page with exactly the opposite viewpoint. I have no idea who Brandon High is,
but he must have copied it from inside Google and posted it publicly.

~~~
parent5446
Was going to say. He could have at least stole the other counter-articles as
well.

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kartan
2010-07-19 12:00:00 co-worker: Hi

2010-07-19 12:00:30 me: Hello

2010-07-19 12:10:00 co-worker: I have a question about Facebook. Are you the
right person to ask?

2010-07-19 12:10:25 me: May be. What's your question?

2010-07-19 12:20:25 co-worker: I want to know ...

2010-07-19 12:21:10 me: No, sorry. For that, you need to contact ...

Fast version:

2010-07-19 12:00:00 co-worker: Hi. I don't know if you are the right question,
I want to know ...

2010-07-19 12:01:10 me: Hello. No, sorry. For that, you need to contact ...

~~~
pvinis
So basically just skip hitting Enter..

~~~
zamalek
As well as sitting there waiting for the person to type their next message.

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hprotagonist
IRC rules are still quite relevant, and "don't ask to ask just ask" is also
still true.

~~~
seanp2k2
Freenode can be like :

    
    
      Hi
      I have a question
      Is someone around to help me
      I already tried restarting but that didn't help
      [5 people quit]

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strictnein
I kind of disagree with this. If you post your problem to someone without
asking if they have the time, it interrupts their flow to a much greater
degree, because it's simply not possible to read that question without your
mind engaging with it.

Posting just "Hey" is kind of dumb, but starting with "Hey, do you have a
minute? I have an issue" is fine. It's easy to respond to with "no, sorry" and
keep working.

~~~
gdubs
"Hey, do you have a minute? I have an issue"

Except a lot of people are going to read that and then wonder – for what feels
like an eternity – what's the 'issue' and how serious is it?

~~~
seanp2k2
This. If I don't have time, I'll say "I can look at this at [time]" or just
not answer if I'm e.g. presenting or something. It makes my life a lot easier
when someone just gives me the facts, and it gets them to done faster as well.
Pleasantries are fine and great, but in work chat, I don't consider it rude to
just ask a question to someone directly. Ideally, a channel can answer, but
sometimes you're working with someone specific on a thing. I also don't have a
problem referring people to channels when I don't have time or don't want to
get into the habit of answering that type of thing myself 100% of the time.

TL;DR help the person you want help from by doing the legwork of figuring out
the exact error, and get to the point where you're asking an answerable
question. Give them all the relevant details, and try to take as little of
their time as possible. This, to me, is a sign of professional politeness and
respect. It also tends to get you an answer quickly, and a high likelihood of
that person helping you again in the future.

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juancampa
Seems like a problem that a scriptable chat client should solve: if it's the
first message in a long time and it's short, debounce notifications for
30sec~1min.

Not a silver bullet but it might solve it in many cases

It reminds me of my old mIRC scripting days

~~~
nmstoker
Snap! Great suggestion there

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alexandercrohde
So this is one way to do it. But it has its downsides too [and thus I find the
webpage slightly pedantic for ignoring the tradeoffs]. I think the "Hello" is
like "Syn." Cases where you may want to use hello are

1\. You need an immediate response, if they are afk then you don't want to ask
them the question at all because you'll ask somebody else.

2\. You want to signal that you'd like to talk to them when they're free, but
that your message is low priority. Generally I'd take a "hey" off-hours to
mean "don't answer this unless you're on slack at your computer. Pong me back
when you're in the office"

3\. Some people care more about the communication being natural and human
interaction than they do responding to the maximal number of things in a day.
If we have to sacrifice our ability to enjoy our intercations with other
people for our job, I'd ask that we don't sacrifice without a fight.

~~~
sebbean
staring a slack window after receiving "hey" and not doing the work i was
doing before receiving said "hey" is very very aggrivating.

~~~
alexandercrohde
And I'm not trying to discount your experience, rather I'm trying to show that
there are other people who have contradictory preferences... and raise the
discussion from a "my way is objectively best!" to a conversation.

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upofadown
If it bugs you just don't respond to the hello. If someone complains just say
you were waiting for the actual content (no one just says hello on chat for no
reason). You assumed that the hello was just to warn you that something longer
was being typed and that you shouldn't immediately leave.

The nice feature of this approach is that you _can_ immediately leave if you
know that you really don't want to deal with whatever it is that is coming and
can legitimately say you never saw it.

~~~
Jach
Yup. I ignore a lot of "hey"s, if you respond then it just incentivizes more
later. No one has complained but I'd just complain back about their
inefficiency. If it's an emergency, they can call me twice.

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throwaway2016a
While I question the need to make this an entire website. I completely agree.

I have people who do that all the time on Skype. Say hello first then I need
to say hi back and wait for them to actually ask their question. It is such an
absurd waste of time.

Just include your question in your first message! Please.

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whack
I've personally found that I get _much_ better results when I say hello first,
as opposed to including everything in a single message.

My hypothesis: When you ask someone a full detailed question, the other person
sees the whole thing at once, as one big daunting block of text, and they
decide to ignore it for a while. Conversely, when you message someone saying
"hi", it builds suspense. They start to wonder what you're going to message
them about. They pause what they were doing for the few seconds while waiting
for you to type out your full comment. Often times, they even reply saying
something like "hello" or "what's up". All this increases their buy-in into
the conversation, and makes them feel more invested. As a result, when they
finally get your actual question 20 seconds later, they are a lot more willing
to reply immediately.

Is it time inefficient for the other person to have to sit around for 20
seconds while you're typing in your actual question? Yes, sorry for wasting 20
seconds of your time. But that's a trivial tradeoff in comparison to me
getting the information I need so I can be unblocked and productive.

If and when people start to reply promptly to messages, I'd be perfectly
willing to stop using these tricks and hacks. But until then... hi.

~~~
anotherevan
But writing a daunting block of text will often take more than 20 seconds.
What you wrote comes off as an incredibly self-centred point of view.

If you're writing big paragraphs right off the bat, then perhaps you need to
think about what your typing and refine things a bit more before you break
someone's attention from what they are doing.

As Mark Twain wrote, “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a
long one instead.” You shouldn't do this, even with instant messaging.

> If and when people start to reply promptly to messages…

And there's that air of entitlement again. There seems to be two wrong
assumptions: First, that everyone is in front of their instant message client
all the time; and second, that they're that invested in dropping everything
they are doing to sink ten or twenty minutes of chat messages back and forth
with you.

~~~
whack
Since you've made a number of assumptions about me, let me make one about you
as well. You sound exactly like the colleagues I've worked with who think that
their time is more valuable than everyone else's. In reality, most research
shows that helping others in an organizational context is strongly correlated
with business success.

[https://hbr.org/2013/04/in-the-company-of-givers-and-
takers](https://hbr.org/2013/04/in-the-company-of-givers-and-takers)

I am extremely selfless in helping colleagues who ask me for help, and I would
like others to do unto me as I would do unto them. To me, that sounds
perfectly fair, and well aligned with the greater organization's goals.

Regarding some specific points you made:

\- I spend a lot of time thinking about exactly what I'm going to say, even
before I send the first hello

\- It typically takes me only 20-30 seconds to write out the message
immediately following the hello

\- If someone happens to be busy and doesn't respond immediately to my
message, I have no complaints. This is equally true whether or not I start off
my message with a "hello", and is irrelevant to this discussion

~~~
anotherevan
There's a certain irony that your original comment sounded like you think your
time is much more valuable than everyone else's too, which is probably why
it's gotten so downvoted. In any case...

I probably do sound like the colleagues you've worked with. It's not that I
think my time is more valuable than everyone else's, but I do this my time
_is_ valuable. It sucks that your colleagues have treated you this way. I've
worked with colleagues who would interrupt me every ten or twenty minutes,
just when I'm getting back into the flow of concentration needed for
programming which they broke ten or twenty minutes ago, often for what seem
like very simple or trivial things. My frustrations with that probably bled
through in my writing.

I also agree with the principle of treating others as I would like them to
treat me. Looping that back to the original topic: that is exactly why I
strongly prefer not to just receive a, "Hello," with a wait for response in
instant messaging, but an initial message more in line with what the article
suggests. This is also what I do when sending an initial message for the same
reason: I value the other person's time and want to be cognisant of that.

~~~
whack
There's certainly a balance to be struck between valuing your own time, and
valuing that of your colleagues. I just think that most people tend to err far
too much on the side of not helping a colleague in need. This is backed up by
the study that I linked in my previous post as well.

In an ideal world where my colleagues have learned to find that balance, no
such hacks are needed. But given the reality of most teams I've worked with,
if using such hacks and "wasting 20 seconds of their time" is the price I need
to pay, that certainly seems like the lesser of two evils.

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rbinv
Ironically, in my experience, when I immediately ask a question, the
(auto-)response will still be "Hi, I'm <name>, how can I help you today?"

~~~
MichaelDickens
It sounds like you are talking about customer support chat. The "hello"
problem this article talks about is more relevant to chats between coworkers
or friends.

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nmstoker
Perhaps the client could help here? :-)

Other user types any of the common greetings alone (hi/hello/hey)

Client responds with: "this is an automated response - your greeting has been
blocked until you provide a more meaningful reply"

Then filter out some rude/idiotic replies and keep filtering until the
response's entropy is above a threshold and the sentence has some basic
structure or presence of a couple of POS (eg a verb and noun)

~~~
juancampa
Snap! Great suggestion there :)

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Cerium
You can always fill up your copy buffer with a question so as soon as saying
hi, you can send the question.

~~~
ndr
This. I'm always afraid they might be presenting or otherwise showing their
screen to someone who is not supposed to read my question.

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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.

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nsaslideface
I see the logic here, though I would forgive people who didn't grow up on the
internet for treating chat like real life (where no-one says "hello" without a
moment's pause after). I think people are slowly catching on that they can do
what the post describes

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Axsuul
The reason why it's natural to do this is most of us don't want to waste time
typing out a long-winded question if there's no one on the other side.

~~~
sebbean
you can copy and paste that single question to the next person in the chain..
actually makes the workflow a bit easier

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BrandoElFollito
Absolutely DO say hello (or whatever intro, like a firstname) and DO wait for
the other party to respond.

Why? Because I would hate to get "update: our quaterely results will be bad,
we expect a 20% loss on our shares" popping up during a meeting just because I
forgot to switch off the messaging app on my desktop.

I may be someone who is expected to see that but possibly not the other 20
participants.

A "ready for lunch?" can work without an introduction, though.

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seattle_spring
I'll take "things that don't need their own domain name" for $500, Alex.

~~~
sebbean
no it does. perfect tool for me. will use a lot. already pinned in the main
channel

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axiom92
I just wait for the second ping (that usually has the details) before sending
an ACK.

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juanpotato
Don't ask to ask just ask

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w8rbt
I strive to respect other people's time/concentration and I appreciate the
same. So I typically start chats with, "Hey, do you have a minute?" to give
them the chance to say no.

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AjithAntony
You already interrupted them. Whether they have a minute depends on what you
want.

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lovethesuck
This argument has been beaten to death. People are not robots. Stop being
obnoxious.

~~~
sebbean
this helps them understand they are being obnoxious. i don't think they were
aware

