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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

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.

carlosdp 7y ago
I think it's more about context switching than time. I might be on a roll writing something and then have to change context for a few minutes to wait for someone to ask a question, and by then I lost my train of thought.
- ryanSrich 7y ago
  Why are you even getting notified of someone messaging you? I’ve had my notifications for computer and phone muted for the last 1.5 years. It has changed the way I work. If someone needs an answer right now, they know how to call me. If not, I’ll see it when I check slack again.
  - eridius 7y ago
    Why are you asking your coworkers to place a phone call just to get ahold of you? That seems like an incredibly high barrier to having a conversation with you.
    - ryanSrich 7y ago
      For immediate conversation? I work remotely. It’s either wait until I check slack or call me. That doesn’t seem reasonable?
readhn 7y ago
i think its just most people cant communicate effectively and respectfully.
pushtheenvelope 7y ago
It’s not about the raw time wasted, but more about the interruption. When people are concentrating on some creative task, having this one-minute gap between “hello” and actual-question can really break one’s “flow”. Much better for the question to be directly asked, so that the person can respond asynchronously when at a convenient stopping point. Also note that asking directly doesn’t preclude being polite with “hello - mind if I ask you a question? <insert question>. Thanks in advance!”
mrguyorama 7y ago
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
- ergothus 7y ago
  > now you are staring at an empty chat window for the minute or more it takes Worse, you're trying to figure out if it's worth refilling your short term memory with the things you just dropped when you checked on the chat. It's not a minute of boredom, it's a minute of having too much in your brain but you're uncertain if it's worth it to stop the effort or not.
- voidhorse 7y ago
  This critique doesn't really make sense. No matter how the person asks their question your flow is going to be interrupted the moment you open your chat apps. If the person says hello then asks a question a minute later your flow is broken. If the person asks the question right away now you're answering the question and your flow is, just as likely, broken. As far as flow interruptions are concerned, it's not the fault of the person asking a question but rather the invasive design or reliance on chat, or your own patterns of chat consumption. The real solution to this problem isn't to impose some kind of rule that people should stop spending an extra minute to be polite, but rather that we should all adopt conscious consumption patterns around chat, i.e. setting aside time each day when you focus strictly on work and ignore chats for x hours (your role permitting). Rather than letting the chat notifications dictate when you attend to them, you should dictate when you attend to chat notifications, and if it means breaking some important flow you have going the chat can probably wait. Edit: I suppose the only exception to this is when the question is something that requires a one word answer and can be answered instantaneously, but if that's the case that's probably a sign you have larger communication problems in that things that are easily answerable are in the heads of workers and not stored in some uniformly accessible place.
enraged_camel 7y ago
Nah, waiting for one minute is sufficient to kick most people out of their “zone”. And the problem in this scenario is that you have no way of telling in advance whether the incoming question is within your area of expertise, or something you want to spend time responding to.
superhuzza 7y ago
For me it's more about the break in concentration than the hello. If I get a full question, I can ignore, respond, whatever. If I get a 'hello', now I don't know what the situation is, and it might go a few different ways. More distracting.
dsjoerg 7y ago
You're missing something very important. Imagine we are co-workers, and I come up to you and say "hello" and then stand there saying nothing further for an entire 60 seconds. While you stand there and wonder why I'm there and what I'd like to talk about. It would be weird and rude of me. It is rightfully expected that one gets on with it and says what one has further to say, and in less than sixty seconds from the initial "hello".
master-litty 7y ago
For me personally it's a context switching issue, not a time issue -- It's more of a mental inconvenience to have nothing to switch to. When someone grabs my attention to ask a question but leaves me idle for a moment, I'm left to wait. I don't get back to what I'm doing because I'll be pulled away from it shortly. The back and forth is very mentally taxing. I'd love for it to be different but in my experience it's a physical limitation, just the way I am.
president 7y ago
We are all just machines and we work and work until one day we break or are no longer efficient at what we do. And then we are replaced.
the8472 7y ago
Speech is bidirectional, synchronous streams, so you can process it while it's being emitted. Text chat on the other hand commonly is asynchronous and packet-based, i.e. you only get completely formed sentences. That means with text there's an idle period between the "hello" packet and the followup. Just seeing the greeting and having to decide whether to wait, respond or ignore it is an annoyance that does not exist in spoken conversation. It's not about the time itself, it's about the uncertain, possibly unbounded latency and the context-switching. In fact text is not just higher-latency, it also has a lower bandwidth. It's really important to use it efficiently. For a bit reduced latency and higher throughput they could implement liveposting as some imageboards do[0]. [0] https://imgur.com/HQKEwXE https://imgur.com/HQKEwXE
- ehsankia 7y ago
  Imagine the same interaction happening in real life. If I came up to your desk, said Hi, then didn't say anything for 60 seconds, and then asked you a question. Anyone would reasonably be annoyed by that. It has nothing to do with deadlines and being overworked. It's just annoying.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
wutbrodo 7y ago
> 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. Um, if you think there's a connection between a job being "white collar" and not caring whether or how long one's focus is broken, you may want to look into getting a better job. I'm fortunate enough to have made and saved a lot more money than I need, so a big part of what motivates my career drive and keeps ending my sabbaticals is that getting sufficiently difficult intellectual challenges in front of me is a lot easier in a corporate environment. It turns out that most of these require sustained concentration: interrupt-based communication destroys the ability to do this work, and drawing out the length of the interrupt exacerbates it. In fact, you have your example precisely backwards: if I worked on a factory floor and someone interrupted me, the cost of the interruption is going to be a lot closer equal to the length of the interrupt (with no second-order effects), since one's time is a lot more fungible.
davemp 7y ago
To be fair, people could just be annoyed about losing valuable HN browsing time!
hawski 7y ago
That's a bit what I'm thinking about lately. I'm wondering what could I do instead. I like programming as a hobby, but not necessarily as a job. How could I go into a think tank for example? Or whatever that needs problem solving, but does not equate with sitting on my ass in front of a screen for hours. For now I'm saving money to try building multitenent CLT housing. Grass is greener...?

carlosdp 7y ago

I think it's more about context switching than time. I might be on a roll writing something and then have to change context for a few minutes to wait for someone to ask a question, and by then I lost my train of thought.

ryanSrich 7y ago
Why are you even getting notified of someone messaging you? I’ve had my notifications for computer and phone muted for the last 1.5 years. It has changed the way I work. If someone needs an answer right now, they know how to call me. If not, I’ll see it when I check slack again.
- eridius 7y ago
  Why are you asking your coworkers to place a phone call just to get ahold of you? That seems like an incredibly high barrier to having a conversation with you.
  - ryanSrich 7y ago
    For immediate conversation? I work remotely. It’s either wait until I check slack or call me. That doesn’t seem reasonable?

readhn 7y ago

i think its just most people cant communicate effectively and respectfully.

pushtheenvelope 7y ago

It’s not about the raw time wasted, but more about the interruption. When people are concentrating on some creative task, having this one-minute gap between “hello” and actual-question can really break one’s “flow”. Much better for the question to be directly asked, so that the person can respond asynchronously when at a convenient stopping point. Also note that asking directly doesn’t preclude being polite with “hello - mind if I ask you a question? <insert question>. Thanks in advance!”

mrguyorama 7y ago

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

ergothus 7y ago
> now you are staring at an empty chat window for the minute or more it takes Worse, you're trying to figure out if it's worth refilling your short term memory with the things you just dropped when you checked on the chat. It's not a minute of boredom, it's a minute of having too much in your brain but you're uncertain if it's worth it to stop the effort or not.
voidhorse 7y ago
This critique doesn't really make sense. No matter how the person asks their question your flow is going to be interrupted the moment you open your chat apps. If the person says hello then asks a question a minute later your flow is broken. If the person asks the question right away now you're answering the question and your flow is, just as likely, broken. As far as flow interruptions are concerned, it's not the fault of the person asking a question but rather the invasive design or reliance on chat, or your own patterns of chat consumption. The real solution to this problem isn't to impose some kind of rule that people should stop spending an extra minute to be polite, but rather that we should all adopt conscious consumption patterns around chat, i.e. setting aside time each day when you focus strictly on work and ignore chats for x hours (your role permitting). Rather than letting the chat notifications dictate when you attend to them, you should dictate when you attend to chat notifications, and if it means breaking some important flow you have going the chat can probably wait. Edit: I suppose the only exception to this is when the question is something that requires a one word answer and can be answered instantaneously, but if that's the case that's probably a sign you have larger communication problems in that things that are easily answerable are in the heads of workers and not stored in some uniformly accessible place.

enraged_camel 7y ago

Nah, waiting for one minute is sufficient to kick most people out of their “zone”. And the problem in this scenario is that you have no way of telling in advance whether the incoming question is within your area of expertise, or something you want to spend time responding to.

superhuzza 7y ago

For me it's more about the break in concentration than the hello. If I get a full question, I can ignore, respond, whatever. If I get a 'hello', now I don't know what the situation is, and it might go a few different ways. More distracting.

dsjoerg 7y ago

You're missing something very important. Imagine we are co-workers, and I come up to you and say "hello" and then stand there saying nothing further for an entire 60 seconds. While you stand there and wonder why I'm there and what I'd like to talk about. It would be weird and rude of me. It is rightfully expected that one gets on with it and says what one has further to say, and in less than sixty seconds from the initial "hello".

master-litty 7y ago

For me personally it's a context switching issue, not a time issue -- It's more of a mental inconvenience to have nothing to switch to. When someone grabs my attention to ask a question but leaves me idle for a moment, I'm left to wait. I don't get back to what I'm doing because I'll be pulled away from it shortly. The back and forth is very mentally taxing. I'd love for it to be different but in my experience it's a physical limitation, just the way I am.

president 7y ago

We are all just machines and we work and work until one day we break or are no longer efficient at what we do. And then we are replaced.

the8472 7y ago

Speech is bidirectional, synchronous streams, so you can process it while it's being emitted. Text chat on the other hand commonly is asynchronous and packet-based, i.e. you only get completely formed sentences. That means with text there's an idle period between the "hello" packet and the followup. Just seeing the greeting and having to decide whether to wait, respond or ignore it is an annoyance that does not exist in spoken conversation. It's not about the time itself, it's about the uncertain, possibly unbounded latency and the context-switching. In fact text is not just higher-latency, it also has a lower bandwidth. It's really important to use it efficiently. For a bit reduced latency and higher throughput they could implement liveposting as some imageboards do[0]. [0] https://imgur.com/HQKEwXE https://imgur.com/HQKEwXE

ehsankia 7y ago
Imagine the same interaction happening in real life. If I came up to your desk, said Hi, then didn't say anything for 60 seconds, and then asked you a question. Anyone would reasonably be annoyed by that. It has nothing to do with deadlines and being overworked. It's just annoying.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

wutbrodo 7y ago

> 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. Um, if you think there's a connection between a job being "white collar" and not caring whether or how long one's focus is broken, you may want to look into getting a better job. I'm fortunate enough to have made and saved a lot more money than I need, so a big part of what motivates my career drive and keeps ending my sabbaticals is that getting sufficiently difficult intellectual challenges in front of me is a lot easier in a corporate environment. It turns out that most of these require sustained concentration: interrupt-based communication destroys the ability to do this work, and drawing out the length of the interrupt exacerbates it. In fact, you have your example precisely backwards: if I worked on a factory floor and someone interrupted me, the cost of the interruption is going to be a lot closer equal to the length of the interrupt (with no second-order effects), since one's time is a lot more fungible.

davemp 7y ago

To be fair, people could just be annoyed about losing valuable HN browsing time!

hawski 7y ago

That's a bit what I'm thinking about lately. I'm wondering what could I do instead. I like programming as a hobby, but not necessarily as a job. How could I go into a think tank for example? Or whatever that needs problem solving, but does not equate with sitting on my ass in front of a screen for hours. For now I'm saving money to try building multitenent CLT housing. Grass is greener...?