13 ms·
No Hello (2013)
- tapvt 5y agoThis is among my primary frustrations, but I cannot find a polite way to address it, especially with overseas employees. I don’t want to come off as rude.
- beardyw 5y agoIt's like the old: Can I ask you one question? Yes, but that was it!
- temp12913231 5y ago
- temp12913231 5y ago
- iansowinski 5y agoHi!
- IggleSniggle 5y agoHey what’s up?
- tomstuart 5y agoI don’t want to take sides, but https://nohello.net/ https://nohello.net/ is good too.
- EconoBen 5y agoYeah this seems like a copy
- makeworld 5y agoIt is. > Based on the wonderful nohello.com.
- sakarisson 5y ago.net has way better UI, IMO
- asimpletune 5y agoIt is! the .com asks for me to accept cookies for some strange reason.
- stbtrax 5y agoSometimes it's a trick to see if you're there so if you don't respond to the following question with similar speed, the sender (incorrectly?) assumes something's up
- teekert 5y agoIndeed! I say hello to our helpdesk all the time to make sure someone is there to answer before it times out :p
- sdflhasjd 5y agoPrecisely why I never respond to the initial "Hello" :p It's particularly annoying when non-technical managers will ask "quick" questions that actually take a long time to answer.
- d--b 5y agoNot sure it's worth the domain name. OP should make a slack bot at least.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- junon 5y agoOr perhaps you can stop asking others to adjust to your behaviors and not sit idly by waiting for someone else to type something to you? Isn't that how async communication is supposed to work?
- idontwantthis 5y agoI can’t easily switch contexts while waiting for something else to happen at an unknown, but likely soon time.
- junon 5y agoThat's nobody's problem but your own.
- idontwantthis 5y agoAll right, buddy.
- hobs 5y agoPING Hi ... wait two minutes... PING How ya doing? ... wait two minutes PING Hey do you have a minute? How much attention do you have to be reading brain farts all day?
- chefgoldbluum 5y ago
- dt3ft 5y agoThis was very common when working with teams from India. I see this merely as a cultural difference, a courtesy. You don't start talking until pleasantries have been exchanged. But I may be wrong, feel free to chime in.
- andrew_ 5y agoSame experience. I always reply with Mr. Burns Ahoy Hoy https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=q8UUrL0C4so https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=q8UUrL0C4so.
- novok 5y agoPeople do it in the USA too, they're more likely to have learned not to although.
- santa_boy 5y agoI am from India and this was reasonably true for my vintage 80s (-1) :-) (BPO wave) The next question was whatsup? how is it going? how was your weekend? Our reaction was that the recipient (typically an overpaid US guy) actually wanted an answer. It took me a couple of years that they didn't really give a damn. It was actually a hallmark to ignore and move on to the objective topic. (It somewhat impressed those guys!)
- dakial1 5y agoThat is what I was going to comment. This might be ok in the US where people are more "transactional" at work and go directly to the point. In other countries the "social dance" is sometimes expected and by going directly to the point you will start getting a bad rep (as a rude/cold person). So you need to have some personal interactions ("How's your son?" "Did you have nice vacations", etc...) before asking the "serious stuff". Of course, you can keep things faster by putting the social dance right at the first message "Hello, how are you? Great game by your team last night congrats!", but it is still expected to lose some time on that... Another great example is the "Thank you" email after someone does something for you. I know many countries where this is frown upon (because is an unnecessary email), but there are many where the inverse is true, people expect you to acknowledge gratitude (with the risk of being known as a rude/cold person if not). To sum it up, be aware of the culture you're working with
- asow92 5y agoThis is so smug.
- jhoechtl 5y agoTimes change. Communication got so much quicker than it used to be. As the chatosphere is much more crowded than it used to be, you message has to go through quickly. It used to be rude to greet and immediately start demanding.
- mbg721 5y agoSheriff Andy Taylor would say hello first; Deputy Barney Fife wouldn't.
- jordanpg 5y agoWhile we're at it, let's also drop greetings and sign-offs from emails. Not just for wasted time, but also because they're pointless, awkward, and anachronistic.
- TheFreim 5y agoI disagree. I use the salutation and the "sign-offs" to indicate different levels of seriousness. If somethings not urgent or as serious I will, along with a suitable title of course, use a more casual greeting. I appreciate when others do the same for me.
- nihilius 5y agohttps://dontasktoask.com/ https://dontasktoask.com/ Don't ask to ask, just ask Every now and then, in online chat rooms I hang around in, someone pops in and says something in the lines of, Foobar123: Any Java experts around? This is bad form, for several reasons. What the person is actually asking here is, Foobar123: Any Java experts around who are willing to commit into looking into my problem, whatever that may turn out to be, even if it's not actually related to Java or if someone who doesn't know anything about Java could actually answer my question?
- YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo 5y agoAnd if you want a fast response, you write something like this "I coded XYZ in Java and Java is absolute shit because ABC is bad."
- dgritsko 5y agoCunningham's Law! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Cunningham#%22Cunningham's_Law%22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Cunningham#%22Cunningham'...
- kodablah 5y agoCould have saved me a click by naming the domain donotsayhelloinchatitwastestime.com. But no, the site owner didn't care about wasting my time. (Who cares? Just adapt to who you're talking to and stop whining about their preferred salutations)
- Zak 5y agoSimilarly, https://dontasktoask.com/ https://dontasktoask.com/
- joebergeron 5y agoI strongly disagree. Long, unbroken chains of "hi" have been a fixture of my IRC experience for as long as I can remember.
- TonyTrapp 5y agohi
- soneca 5y agoAs a developer, I mostly agree with this. But I was talking about that with a friend that works in finance and he thinks just saying “hello” is ok in his context. The difference in context is the length of the subsequent conversation. If it is a quick question, with a quick answer, just saying “hello” to start a conversation is a waste of time. But if it is the start of lengthy conversation that is technically async, but actually would be more productive if both parts are online to reply in minutes, just saying hello is useful. Also, polite, since this is closer to a real life conversation. It is the short version of ”Hello, let me know when you are free for a async-but-not-so-much conversation”
- Zak 5y agoI'd prefer the long version in that case: "Hi, do you have a few minutes to chat about X?" I might have the capacity to talk about X now, but Y would have to wait.
- jmkim 5y ago+999999999
- petercooper 5y agoI'm on team 'no hello' but I've been intrigued to learn over the years how some people interpret it as rude. I've had to reassure employees who complained about (potential) customers being rude where it turned out to merely be folks being direct and to the point. I've also seen people selling things on Facebook groups and the like complain about direct questions too, like they want to make some chitchat first. Different strokes, etc. so it pays to take context into account! :-)
- tarkin2 5y agoChit chat shows you’re at least trying to show interest in the other person, and is thus seen as polite by many.
- petercooper 5y agoThe older I get the more I notice a lot of dichotomies where both sides have opposite qualitative judgments. Another recent one I learnt about was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aizuchi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aizuchi in Japanese where people sort of talk/interject over each other and it's seen as more polite than listening to someone in total silence. Again, all down to context, because if I tried that sort of conversational technique with my partner it would not go down well(!)
- Fnoord 5y agoThat reads like a bunch of equivalents to TCP ACK. Marvelous! In political debate on TV here in NL, I noticed nodding is often used to indicate a listener is listening. It doesn't mean they agree. Its essentially a way to shut/calm down the active talker, akin to 'yeah yeah, get on with it, let me reply...'
- jasode 5y agoThe blog post misunderstand that many people that do that are simply using "hello" as a "ping" to see if someone's really there for immediate synchronous communication. They want to type just 1 word first ... and then wait for a human-style-TCP-ACKnowledgement ... before typing a bunch of extra words of the real question they had in mind. For receivers, it's annoying but I tried to explain in the previous thread that many deliberately avoid indeterminant async communication if possible: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25883095 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25883095
- dundarious 5y agoThe whole issue is that with "hi", the intent is entirely unknown to the recipient. The sender should signal their intent such that anyone responding knows roughly what they're getting into. It can be as simple as "hi, free to chat for ~N mins about X?" but anything more that just a greeting is better than none. That's the "educational" value of the post as far as I see it, and I totally agree with it.
- GoblinSlayer 5y agoIt takes the sender a lot of time to type the question, so the communication is not immediate synchronous. What actually happens is that I go elsewhere after 5 seconds of waiting, then in 20 more seconds arrives the question, but I already switched to a different task and don't bother what another stupid hello I received there. The site provides a chat log with timestamps to better understand delays in communication.
- kevincox 5y agoTCP Fast Open was created for a reason.
- josephd79 5y agoAsync communication, unless an emergency or maybe a project meeting... everything else can wait.
- ChicagoBoy11 5y agoOften I think the hello is actually a way to bait you into revealing that you are available. Sometimes the request that is about to come is something the requester knows you are likely to either ignore or at least putting off responding until later; the hello is innocuous enough that if you reply, then it has been established that you are present and so ignoring subsequent messages becomes a bigger challenge.
- alexk7 5y agoThis is ignoring the fact that there are people who actually enjoy exchanging pleasantries. Make a list with 2 columns: 1) people that enjoy small talk 2) people that dislike small talk. Act accordingly.
- nmeofthestate 5y agoDear Sir, Hello. I keenly await your reply. Yours, etc
- Mordisquitos 5y agoIt's funny, I was just thinking the other day about a habit that I have when initiating an instant message conversation out of the blue, generally in the context of either work or an acquaintance that I rarely contact. I find myself typing out the whole message, greeting included. However, as that might look a bit too much like a wall of text on WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack or the like, I tend to cut the question just before sending the greeting, and paste and send the question (or conversation context) immediately after. So, my messages will look something like this: - Mordisquitos is typing - # Ctrl-X [20:12] Mordisquitos: Hi ${oldAquaintance}! How's it going? # Ctrl-V [20:12] Mordisquitos: Are you in ${homeTown} these days? I'm here till Sunday, so if you're here we could meet if you want! Or like this: - Mordisquitos is typing - # Ctrl-X [10:03] Mordisquitos: Good morning ${coworkerName}! # Ctrl-V [10:03] Mordisquitos: Regarding the issue with cranking the widgets, I had some questions about the timing - Mordisquitos is typing - # The specifics of the question, may take a while I think the reason I do it is out of empathy, assuming that other people might feel like I myself do. Be it out of social anxiety or ADHD, I really hate receiving unexpected contextless greetings and being expected to greet back before knowing what the hell you're writing to me about. Neither am I very happy about seeing an unexpected greeting followed by minutes of a "user is typing", during which my mind is already hopelessly hyperfocused on wondering what it will be. I am well aware though that the time that I'm (perfectionistically) typing my initial message that I will later cut and send, if the user has the application open they may already be seeing the "Mordisquitos is typing" notification before I sent the initial hello, which could be even worse. I think sometimes I've even gone as far as typing out my greeting+message on a text editor beforehand.
- jancsika 5y agoOMG I hate this reasoning so much. If you're brilliant enough that you think you can teach this piece of "netiquette" to non techies, then you are almost certainly smart enough to write a script to obsolete the need for the netiquette in this instance. Make a damn bot that waits random(1, 3) seconds before responding, "Hi, what's up?" This is one of the few social problems that is trivially solved by technology. To not solve it, and to then pretend we must do work to teach the world how to type chats to each other is to be the opposite of a hacker. Seriously, where is the newbie_responder.pl module that passes the Turing test for introductory social pleasantries? Shame on you, Perl community. In my imagined alternate reality, some Perlite got tired of multiple bot responses to the newbie and didn't want to do the boring work of electing a leader bot. And in their hacking fervor they accidentally created a novel solution to the Byzantine Generals problem. Back in reality we get million dollar NFT monkey jpegs and a brilliant scheme to optimize out the word "Hello." Hacker news? More like "hawker" news. Hello! ./laughtrack.pl
- robofanatic 5y agoWhat about questions like “what’s up” “how’s it going?” “How you doing” etc in day to day conversation. Aren't they waste of time? As a person of Indian origin I always struggled to answer these questions when I was new in the US. Now after so many years I have learned that the answer to all these questions is "good" or the question itself. because most of the time the person asking it is actually least interested in knowing the real answer! I honestly feel starting any conversation with these questions is waste of time!
- WesolyKubeczek 5y agoSometimes I think that in timezone-distributed corporations it’s a not so subtle way to procrastinate at scale. You start with “Hello” when the other person has 4AM. When they answer with a hello of their own, it’s past working hours for you. Then you follow with “can I ask you a quick question”, and by the time you receive your answer it’s already weekend. With skill, you can have not one but several concurrent conversations, each just like this one. All the time you’re working hard and waiting for answers, of course, dreading to think just how difficult would the life be if all this got condensed into 15 minutes as it ought to.
- csw-001 5y agoPrior to COVID my opinion on this was more or less that of the author's, but now I regularly chat "hello" to folks just to literally say "Hi"... as in - "I am a human working today, and you are a person working today, so Hello!". I've opted sometimes for the "Happy Monday!", but this often is received (not shockingly) as sarcasm... I think the shift for me was (1) not being in the office physically, and realizing I was missing the simple "hello" conversations to acknowledge folks, and (2) I just care a lot less about productivity these days. Or rather, maybe, I've come to appreciate more how much productivity depends on healthy human interactions. I'm not a work robot, and I don't really need to "optimize my life" to the point of being one. My time isn't so valuable that replying with a "Hello back! How was your weekend?" kills me - and for an colleague who needs or wants to talk, a simple chat "hello" might be the open door they need. That endless todo list can, and will wait... And it will be as full on the day I wake for the last time as it was this morning.
- ossusermivami 5y agoI just reply by a Yo and get on with my life!! it's annoying but people are like that.... they would always start by a Hi, specially by juniors to your role
- tpoacher 5y agohi