12 ms·

Want quick answers? Ask questions well

218 points by KronisLV 4y ago

KronisLV 4y ago
Working remotely day to day, I've seen some patterns of communication that feel like they could be slightly better for this mode of work. Personally, doing calls with screen sharing when they could have been replaced by a screenshot or a code snippet alongside a text message feels like not the most efficient way to do things. Much like the "this meeting could have been an e-mail joke". And yet, most of the sites that out there that encapsulate some of these ideas feel a bit emotionally charged: https://nohello.net/en/ https://nohello.net/en/ has a facepalm as a reaction to the behavior (though the design is great) https://nohello.club/ https://nohello.club/ calls pleasantries "useless", even if the logo is cool https://no-hello.com/ https://no-hello.com/ seems to be meant for sending to someone in particular So I went ahead and made my own little page that attempts to offer similar suggestions in a slightly more boring manner. Maybe some day I'll get a proper domain for it. Overall, asynchronous communication just feels like one of those things where you can improve how well it works with minimal effort.
- tpolm 4y ago
  http://aka.ms/nohello http://aka.ms/nohello
  - KronisLV 4y ago
    That is an even better link that I missed, thanks! I do think that a lot of these sites date all the way back to 2013, to a blog post that was referenced in one of them: https://www.nohello.com/2013/01/please-dont-say-just-hello-in-chat.html https://www.nohello.com/2013/01/please-dont-say-just-hello-i... I guess it's actually very much like that xkcd about standards: https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/
- burnished 4y ago
  The pleasantries description feels out of alignment with the practice outline as an example. The good message still starts with 'hello', it just doesn't treat it as a statement that requires individual acknowledgement. Which is great, that practice is great, but I think the framing could use some work. But it also has a special badge so that can communicate to other people that you bundle polite greetings in with the payload of the message, which I think is weird, and is probably a clue that the author and I don't share a cultural context here.
mfrw 4y ago
I think a passing mention of: - https://xyproblem.info https://xyproblem.info - http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html might be of some help as well :)
- KronisLV 4y ago
  Thanks, that's a good idea! Added these as "further reading" at the bottom.
- mdaniel 4y ago
  and https://stackoverflow.com/help/how-to-ask https://stackoverflow.com/help/how-to-ask along with its sub-section https://stackoverflow.com/help/minimal-reproducible-example https://stackoverflow.com/help/minimal-reproducible-example While those lean toward SO-specific usage, they also contain some very good guidance IMHO
svnpenn 4y ago
> The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Cunningham#%22Cunningham's_Law%22 https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Cunningham#%22Cunningham's_L...
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  This is true. I think it's frowned upon, here. I won't do it deliberately, but, if I'm unsure of the answer, posting what I think is the answer, in a confident way, tends to get results. ;) I've also learned to ask fairly detailed, well-researched questions, from StackOverflow. They bitch at you, if you ask a "stupid" question (but usually answer it, anyway), but I have found, if I ask a detailed, well-researched question, crickets chirp. I have basically given up on SO for anything useful, these days. I'm sad, because it used to be a great place to learn. If I ask the kinds of questions they'll answer, I get sneered at. If I ask the kinds of questions they say they want, I get ignored.
  - svnpenn 4y ago
    > If I ask the kinds of questions they'll answer, I get sneered at. If I ask the kinds of questions they say they want, I get ignored. Damn that is true. I actually have 94,000 rep on Stack Overflow, but I got banned for no reason. I appealed 9 times with no response, and finally they said someone was upvoting my stuff as a scam. I tried to cooperate to clear my name, but they are just ignoring me now for weeks.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    When you start at SO all your questions are so easy anyone can answer them, and so people feel smart by informing you how you didn’t follow the rules. Soon you are asking moderately complicated questions that some can answer (but probably have been asked before). This is where you can get some help if you’re lucky. But later you’re asking questions so advanced nobody can answer them, and they never get answered unless you remember to come back and answer your own question.
macintux 4y ago
I’d like to come up with a series of interview questions to evaluate whether someone can interpret error messages and ask reasonable questions regarding them. Too many technicians seem to freeze up as soon as they seem an error message.
- mdaniel 4y ago
  And the opposite bank of questions: > given this code, how would you return errors to an internal audience? How would you change the errors if you knew the error was going to be presented to the end user? Because for sure crafting actionable errors is a life-skill I want to rage close PRs that contain throw new Exception("cannot query")
BlargMcLarg 4y ago
It's a little ironic how the field which continuously talks about the importance of communication doesn't understand the basics of communication, and how synchronous communication made them a luxury. Being cooperative, specific and transparent is really all you need to start with. Even synchronous communication benefits from this.
BarryMilo 4y ago
Anyone else notice the corrected version is just the standard format for an email?
- avg_dev 4y ago
  I did not notice that at all but in hindsight it seems obvious. I am a fan of a well crafted email. I find chat can be an excuse for half-baked thinking and I really appreciate it when people put care into their words.
EntropyIsAHoax 4y ago
I work on the Platform team at my company, and so we do a lot of internal tech support. It's a daily struggle to get people to ask good questions, provide details, provide links when possible, etc... Sometimes it's really hard not to get incredibly frustrated with it. The questions can be as vague as "hey we're having trouble authenticating to the artifactory, how do we fix it?" A few people really shine in explaining themselves clearly, giving the context, copy-pasting the error message, etc, and I truly treasure those people. The proper context can really turn an hour of debugging into 5 minutes debugging
- jon-wood 4y ago
  I see way too many questions in the Slack channels for teams that manage common services at work which are just “Is there a problem with [service]?” Clearly there is, at least from your perspective, otherwise you wouldn’t be asking. Come out with it and state what the issue you’re seeing so someone can either tell you it’s known and point you at the ticket tracking an open incident, or do what needs to be done to resolve your issue.
NovemberWhiskey 4y ago
I own a platform with several thousand unique monthly users within the company where I work. In order to get to the point where you can raise a support ticket, we gently usher people through a flow that asks them whether they've checked our FAQs (that cover 90% of all tickets raised) and then provide them with examples of the kind of additional information that will help the support team to provide quick and useful responses. Some ridiculously high proportion (half?) of tickets still come out looking like "it doesn't work when I do X" with no attempt to report what (if any) error was experienced or what parameters were supplied or what indeed their expectation for "work" was or whether this was "working" before etc. I'm sort of coming to the conclusion that for some fraction of users, there is nothing that can be done to get them to think at all before raising a trouble ticket. Another theory: that for some people, hitting a problem is an excuse to stop working entirely and claim to be waiting on another team for support.
- galdosdi 4y ago
  > Another theory: that for some people, hitting a problem is an excuse to stop working entirely and claim to be waiting on another team for support. You can move this one out of the theory column and into the fact column. It is very real. :-) Not only is this common but I once even had the misfortune to be in an environment that was so high pressure and under-resourced that the only way to meet ticket quotas was "by any means necessary" I learned this and a bunch of other sketchy tricks to buy time there, such as the reverse of this, which is when the support person asks a question to the customer that is not actually relevant or they already know the answer to, just to buy time till the ticket queue is less overloaded.
  - tomcam 4y ago
    Neither of those strategies ever occurred to me. That is… Not encouraging
  - nicbou 4y ago
    "My code's compiling" https://xkcd.com/303/ https://xkcd.com/303/
- 4y ago
valenterry 4y ago
I thought the right way to get answers quickly is to ask them and post a wrong answer (under a different name) which will then cause people to correct you quickly :^)
elicash 4y ago
Person 1 wanted to have a video call and was using messaging as a way to facilitate that call. For situations where it's a complicated problem, this can be reasonable. That said, there's little excuse for "isn't working" or being vague about the error message.
coldblues 4y ago
https://dontasktoask.com/ https://dontasktoask.com/ https://nohello.net/en/ https://nohello.net/en/
bena 4y ago
I like to ask "Do you have a problem or do you have a complaint?" A problem has three distinct parts: 1) What you tried. 2) What you expected. 3) What you got instead. Anything else is just complaining and I don't deal with complaints. Usually there's enough information in the triad to begin troubleshooting. I will roughly know the steps to reproduce, what that reproduction returns, and what the user thinks they should have got. If I get told "Hey, the calculation is wrong." I'm going to check the calculation. And if the math is solid, and passes all of the cases I can send it, that's the information I will give back. Usually while also asking why they think it is wrong. Sometimes, the only thing that is wrong is user expectation.
karaterobot 4y ago
My ideal interaction is more like: Teammate: hey can we hop on a call real quick, I need some help Me: yep, give me like 2 minutes and I'll send you a zoom link There is almost always value in seeing what happens right before the problem, and I almost always have questions I want to ask them about it, and it's so much faster just to do it with screensharing and voice. A lot of the time anyway.
- KronisLV 4y ago
  > There is almost always value in seeing what happens right before the problem, and I almost always have questions I want to ask them about it, and it's so much faster just to do it with screensharing and voice. This is a pretty good counterpoint to my site! I think that for some, voice is just the preferred medium of communication and that should also be taken into account when possible. Of course, I'd argue that a little bit of context of what the problem is related to could still be helpful, not to have to waste a bunch of time trying to find some Jira ticket that had some relevant info from like 2 weeks back during the call. For others, text will probably reign supreme, though I also enjoy things like huddles that Slack introduced, to make informal "meetings" a bit more organic: https://slack.com/help/articles/4402059015315-Use-huddles-in-Slack https://slack.com/help/articles/4402059015315-Use-huddles-in...
wizofaus 4y ago
Strangely I've found at my current workplace no matter how much time I put into preparing the initial message with detailed info, screenshots etc., it just gets ignored and we end up doing a call anyway. And to be fair it usually is quicker to resolve issues with a live/screen-sharing session, but obviously it relies on the other party's availability.
- WastingMyTime89 4y ago
  That’s because talking to someone is always nicer than perusing error message. Plus it’s a nice break. I am always a bit baffled by people who are full remote and want even less social interaction like if it wasn’t already hard enough to somewhat get to know people when you never see them.
  - wizofaus 4y ago
    Actually I do agree with that, but...it's still annoying when you think you've done the right thing by providing all the information upfront and placing no expectation that you need the problem solved immediately, just to have it ignored.
  - chihuahua 4y ago
    It depends on how many interruptions those people receive during the day. If there's a question once or twice a day, the call could be a pleasant break. If it happens every 15 minutes, the person being interrupted may not be able to get any work done at all. What I find baffling is that when someone is working from home, they can answer a call any time. When someone is working in the office, they have to find a meeting room before getting on a call. And yet, the office is officially declared to be more conducive to collaboration. When Microsoft still had individual offices with walls and doors, the open plan offices were called "more collaborative" which is 100% incorrect.
  - jon-wood 4y ago
    I work remote, and also have anything up to a full eight hours a day scheduled as meetings. Another video call really isn’t a break for me, and I’m not suffering from a lack of social interaction at work. Throw an error message, nine times out of ten I’ll be able to point you in the right direction after a quick glance at it, and by not insisting on getting on a call to talk about it you also get to avoid an exciting game of 20 questions about comparative availability of meeting times.
bananamerica 4y ago
It is regretable that a lot people takes these kinds of "questions manuals" as an incentive or an excuse to feel justified for being a total asshole.
- sacrosancty 4y ago
  Yep. In general, advice on how to treat people better is often used as an excuse to be an asshole to people who aren't following it. Which is kind of ironic, really. A case I personally encountered was somebody who wanted to have better relationships with people and read the book "How To Win Friends And Influence People". Unfortunately, that book is just full of advice on how to make others feel good about themselves, which wasn't their aim, and it really backfired into blaming others for not following the book's advice.
MarkLowenstein 4y ago
Great article. Hits the best points without wasting time on minutia. That is the other heuristic when describing a problem and reporting what you already learned, that makes the whole process an art: keep it short!
SilasX 4y ago
Great stuff. One related hack I have for oral communication: if you mishear/aren't sure about part of what someone said, repeat back everything you did hear as part of your question, so they only have to repeat that one part. (Bonus: It validates that you were listening!) Examples: "We saw <garbled> and so we left." 'You left because you saw what?' "I collect samples with <garbled> at the beach." 'You used what to collect samples at the beach?' Otherwise, they will repeat the whole thing, or rephrase it, or even worse, start by appending detail that assumes you heard the original part correctly.
hankchinaski 4y ago
I see this often with very junior engineers. They just haggle around before getting to the point. But something that rarely see in more seasoned people.
thenerdhead 4y ago
I am more than willing to help if someone has shown the due diligence or curiosity. Otherwise these asks are nothing more than asking for attention, which isn't just given away freely. That doesn't make someone an asshole, this makes someone who values their time. “A problem well-articulated is a problem half solved.” -Charles Kettering https://jondouglas.dev/problems-vs-solutions/ https://jondouglas.dev/problems-vs-solutions/ Aside: If direct messages and email doesn't scale for you, try doing an office hours type deal.
- nomel 4y ago
  I pushed all of my support to an issue tracker, at work. The only requirement is to put a basic description of what's going on, the version that they're using, and include the error text, in full. This immediately cut the time I spent, with support, by half. Some people realized the solution its almost always in the error text. Others spend hours trying to figure out the problem themselves, just to avoid submitting a ticket. People are strange.
  - thenerdhead 4y ago
    I've been there. I don't like barriers personally, but I do understand they can deter people to the point of the problem solving itself or at least the urgency of the problem. People will go through hell and back to not fill out a quick form for help.
lxe 4y ago
I don't care if you say hello as long as you follow up with a detailed question. What grinds my gears is developers not linking to tickets or error logs, or not pasting the error messages into the question. I'm not going to play detective and investigate your failing CI logs -- provide me with the exact line where the error occurred.
avg_dev 4y ago
I've been working from home for most of the past 15 years, and I've worked at some companies that had remote-first development teams and some where development started in-the-office and then branched off into remote. I believe in the former there was more understanding of: 1. Providing useful context up-front 2. No "hello" message sent while waiting for further input to be typed in 3. More emphasis on written communication 4. Less of a need to jump on a video conference 5. Use of headsets for video conferences In some of the latter cases, the "office-first teams" still had management working out of the office and I believe that remote employees are kind of second-class citizens in these cases, and I found it less enjoyable and less productive to be a remote dev in that sort of situation. I believe also that headsets for video conferences allows for full-duplex conversations where one or more people can talk at once and be heard, but I've not seen anybody else talk about this and may be wrong.
- silisili 4y ago
  > In some of the latter cases, the "office-first teams" still had management working out of the office and I believe that remote employees are kind of second-class citizens in these cases 100% agreed. For a long time, I think I was the only remote employee, and always felt forgotten unless I bothered people. Even after it became more balanced after COVID, it became clear to me that in office people were given far preferential treatment. Ultimately, it's that that caused me to leave for a remote first company.
- guelo 4y ago
  > headsets for video conferences allows for full-duplex conversations That makes since most video conferencing services have complex audio feedback canceling algorithms. If the mic can't hear the speakers then there is no feedback to cancel.
overthemoon 4y ago
Nothing makes me more fucking annoyed than the singular "hey". I will always, always ignore it. If it's important, fill in more detail, we're not on a phone call.
gumby 4y ago
Sharing what you’ve tried already helps in two ways. The respondent can tell if you’re barking up the wrong tree or not and give a better, sometimes briefer answer. Second, the respondent can tell if you’re really trying to fix the problem and are stuck, or if you aren’t bothering and are instead simply asking. I,e, if you’re worth helping.
sacrosancty 4y ago
I help people with tech problem all the time and I don't like it when they tell me what they tried in too much detail. It means I have to read through it all and be sure I'm considering everything they said even when the likely problem and solution is already obvious. I'd rather they just say "I did this and then that happened." and if my obvious answer is wrong, then we can dig into the details. Perhaps that serves my interests more than theirs, but if you're trying to help the tech support guy, then why not?
- jimkleiber 4y ago
  I've noticed how much I write tends to depend on how long I think it will take to get a response. If I think it will be a live chat, I'll say just a sentence or two. If I think it'll be maybe a few hours to reply, maybe a paragraph or two. If a day or more, then often multiple paragraphs. If it's a day or more, do you still prefer they share just a little info or would you also prefer more info if a longer response time?
  - sacrosancty 4y ago
    It's mostly over email with a day turnaround and I don't mind it dragging on. But I worry the customer won't like that!
    - jimkleiber 4y ago
      Ah, yes, I can imagine in such a customer service interaction the one being paid to do it all the time may not mind it lasting as long, or at least there may be a discrepancy in preference. I've been texting with someone over Whatsapp and she seems to treat it more like email: no read indicators, no set response time (sometimes minutes, days, or weeks), longer responses when she does. It can be so hard for me as I associate WhatsApp and texting with relatively real-time chat and the differences in expectations have caused conflict between us quite a few times.
- SilverBirch 4y ago
  Even ignoring the obvious "Users are idiots" chat, if you ever show a problem to someone else "Oh it works now" is almost always the answer.
zasdffaa 4y ago
I try to write good questions for stackoverflow (which I'm certainly not dissing, I think it;s a great resource used properly) and I usually miss something out and have to throw in an edit. Fair enough, but it amazes me the number of people who pile in, clearly without reading what I wrote, seemingly unable to readjust when I point out "no, that's not what asked" A while back I asked a question. Let's say it was about destructors (it wasn't but for example). People started answering about constructors. Repeatedly. One of the SO editors came in and pointed out that there was plenty about constructors on SO already so he was closing the question. I rather lost it at that point, spelt out DEE-STRUCT-ORRS I was asking about. He wiped all the comments (his own included), reopened the question and today it remains unanswered. That was an extreme case of this phenomenon but stone the bladdy crows, it's not rare.
werdnapk 4y ago
I find when I ask questions in public forums and provide a lot of detail about the issue, it seems to get ignored because there's too much information compared to other people who ask more basic questions that require follow up questions. Also with a detailed message, people don't seem to read (or grasp) the entire thing and get fixated on parts that aren't the issue or ask questions that I already answered in my initial question. I guess you need to know your audience and adjust your question style based on that.
- EvanAnderson 4y ago
  What's daunting is when you don't know the audience-- like opening a new tech support case. I could write a thorough narrative with a good description of my environment and details of all the things I tried to do. Then I get dismissed by a technician who says (this actually happened): "Your issue is to complicated to be solved over email. We need to have a call." The call lasted less than 5 minutes. It consisted of me reading my email (verbatim, because I'm an asshole and took being dismissed personally), the technician telling me what I needed to do, and me doing it. I could go with the whole "quick question" route and spend more time than it would take to write having a back-and-forth with a technician who can't let me speak and keeps interrupting with suggestions (for things I've already tried or aren't applicable), repeated questions( because they aren't keeping written notes), or out-right confusion (because they have preconceived ideas about my situation and haven't validated them with questions). I find it easiest to just grind away on a problem myself, reverse engineering, referring to source code, etc. Then I don't have to feel bad or make someone else feel bad. I loathe having to involve an unknown third-party. My confirmation bias says that it'll usually be bad.
- deamanto 4y ago
  Yep I suffer from this too. From my perspective it's trying to "prove" that I at least did some work on my part to figure it out and if someone were to ask me a question I would hope they do the same. I don't want to come off as the person who didn't spend a small amount of time researching myself before using up other people's time. But it's a double edged sword. I am not the most articulate person so sometimes the information ends up becoming more confusing for the reader which doesn't help either.
sneak 4y ago
The reason that so many people ask for calls is because they are slow/bad at typing. Speaking is faster/easier for them because they are not trained.
WastingMyTime89 4y ago
I am going to strongly dissent on that one. I much prefer the first situation where someone says hi and that leads to a discussion on their issue to the second one. All the things the article asks for will come forwards in the discussion anyway and ninety percents of the time the people asking for help have a different problem than the one they thought they had anyway. I am not a robot. I don’t want to be treated like one.
i_like_apis 4y ago
"Don't ask to ask" is also relevant for chatrooms: https://sol.gfxile.net/dontask.html https://sol.gfxile.net/dontask.html
semireg 4y ago
I’ve been looking for “how to ask questions the smart way” for years! I kept googling the wrong title … I love how thorough it is, in the style of a Linux how-to or RFC. I’m a solo developer and receive maybe 10 emails a day from end users. I can answer 90% of the questions with a few characters on my phone via “text replacement” so if I type: lllic it’ll automatically insert https://label.live/faqs/licensing/can-i-use-a-license-on-more-than-one-computer https://label.live/faqs/licensing/can-i-use-a-license-on-mor... You know, as an example… A few other favorites: Llty “Thank you for the email.” Lllmk “Let me know if this helps.” I should really invest in Text Expander or similar. Although, maybe ZenDesk will come out with some wild AI integration that allows me to piece together a response based on my prior responses. Surely that’s coming.
EvanAnderson 4y ago
Different people have a different "style" for this. I prefer to work people whose style is similar to mine. I think most people are the same way. That's all this comes down to, sadly. There's no formula to that will ever solve this mismatch. Be tolerant of others and gently suggest they can help themselves, in the future, by helping you. Be thankful for the times you get to work with people who share a common style with you.
RoadieRoller 4y ago
I always start the chat conversation in office with a simple "Hi" or a "Hi, Do you have a minute?" This way, I am giving that person a choice if 1) He/she is in a meeting, they have a choice - to or not to reply 2) If their screen is shared, I am not disturbing the meeting attendees making them read what I typed, and what comes in the notification pop-up 3) Gives enough time for the other person to switch context 4) Ignore me for an indefinite amount of time and continue their work If the other person responds, my second comment would be with full details.
- james_in_the_uk 4y ago
  Agree with this. Perhaps it's my British sensibilities, but I find it rude when people launch straight in.
  - nql 4y ago
    I absolutely hate it when people send me a question that doesn't have the question. Now I have to pull it out of them, on their time.
  - jon-wood 4y ago
    I think there’s a middle ground. “Hey, are you free to talk about Project X?” is a perfectly valid entry to something where you know an actual conversation will be needed. Likewise “I’m having trouble with the frobinator, when I run frob -x blah it gives me this error: XXX, are you able to help?” if you just need an answer. Niceites are, well, nice. They help to make sure everyone remembers we’re all human beings rather than question answering machines, but we are also talking to get a job done. Unless you’re actually a good friend of mine if you drop me a message asking me how my weekend was, I know that you’re just lining up to ask me a question, but now I have to do The Dance to work out what it’s going to be about, whether I have time for it, and if I’m even the right person to ask.
    - grayclhn 4y ago
      +1000. "Do you have 5 minutes to join this conversation?" is totally fine. The alternative of > Them: "Hi" > ... > Me: "What's up" > ... > Them: "Do you have 5 minutes to join this conversation?" > ... is awful.
sam_lowry_ 4y ago
No one said it better than Robert Sheckley in Ask a Foolish Question: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/33854 https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/33854
chihuahua 4y ago
I found that when I'm about to ask someone a question, in the process of writing down all the details of what I want to do, what I've tried, what happened, which alternatives I've tried, and why it can't possibly be the fault of my own code, at least half the time I find the answer on my own. So these days, I start writing down all this stuff as I'm exploring the problem, and much of the time it helps discover the solution and I don't need to send the message.
- __derek__ 4y ago
  This is commonly known as rubber duck problem solving (or debugging).[1] [1]: https://blog.codinghorror.com/rubber-duck-problem-solving/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/rubber-duck-problem-solving/
chihuahua 4y ago
On the r/bread subreddit, I am greatly irritated by people who post a picture of their failed bread along with the title "what did I do wrong???" Please, tell us what you think is wrong with your bread, as well as the details of the recipe you followed. Why are you expecting us to be mind readers just so we can help you?
anotherevan 4y ago
Also learn to send multiple paragraphs in the one message. (Usually shift+return.) Frustrating watching the description slowly emerge, line by line, like an old teletype machine or something. Get the entirety of what you want to say in one hit in one message. I know then to respond and not sitting there waiting for the next nugget of information.
- dvtrn 4y ago
  I have a few people who send text messages like this. Each stream of thought comes as a separate message which can be incredibly annoying when I’ve turned my brain off for the day because I only have so many spoons for anything other than sitting there with my thoughts (actually very enjoyable) or maybe a book and the phone out of nowhere starts dinging every two seconds because I’m on the receiving end of a disjointed and scattered series of someone’s thoughts. I love my friends. I hate how they communicate over text.
  - SilasX 4y ago
    Haha yes. I have just one friend that does that. I also have a friend on the opposite end (late 50's early 60's I think?) who treats text messages like old-school letters. "Silas, I hope this message reaches you well. The sun is setting and I am optimistic about the future. I am wondering if you are interested in the upcoming conference, where you are sure to find many fans of that course you like. Let me know what you think and get back to me. [his name]" Me: "Oh sure I'm going already got ticket and booked flight."
    - dvtrn 4y ago
      Not gonna lie, I vastly prefer that. Not to say I bombard people with entire encyclopedias when messaging, but…I dunno. I guess, maybe this is the result of being one of those “elder millennials” I send text messages with the kind of intentional and to the point messaging style with the brevity of someone who pays $0.50 per message like it’s 1999 and isn’t running across the house to respond to every blip and beep my phone makes. (Interestingly once I scared off a potential dating partner who is heavily into texting constantly and called me out for my asynchronous messaging habits and I flatly responded “sometimes I just want to put my phone down and do literally anything else”)
landofredwater 4y ago
I find that with friends a slower conversation style works fine, but in any professional context (even if you are otherwise friends) you should try and make your questions snappy. "Hey, you there?" works for a text to your partner "Hey, are you available at 12:00 tomorrow?" works much better for your coworkers.

218 points by KronisLV 4y ago

Working remotely day to day, I've seen some patterns of communication that feel like they could be slightly better for this mode of work. Personally, doing calls with screen sharing when they could have been replaced by a screenshot or a code snippet alongside a text message feels like not the most efficient way to do things. Much like the "this meeting could have been an e-mail joke". And yet, most of the sites that out there that encapsulate some of these ideas feel a bit emotionally charged: https://nohello.net/en/ https://nohello.net/en/ has a facepalm as a reaction to the behavior (though the design is great) https://nohello.club/ https://nohello.club/ calls pleasantries "useless", even if the logo is cool https://no-hello.com/ https://no-hello.com/ seems to be meant for sending to someone in particular So I went ahead and made my own little page that attempts to offer similar suggestions in a slightly more boring manner. Maybe some day I'll get a proper domain for it. Overall, asynchronous communication just feels like one of those things where you can improve how well it works with minimal effort.

tpolm 4y ago
http://aka.ms/nohello http://aka.ms/nohello
- KronisLV 4y ago
  That is an even better link that I missed, thanks! I do think that a lot of these sites date all the way back to 2013, to a blog post that was referenced in one of them: https://www.nohello.com/2013/01/please-dont-say-just-hello-in-chat.html https://www.nohello.com/2013/01/please-dont-say-just-hello-i... I guess it's actually very much like that xkcd about standards: https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/
burnished 4y ago
The pleasantries description feels out of alignment with the practice outline as an example. The good message still starts with 'hello', it just doesn't treat it as a statement that requires individual acknowledgement. Which is great, that practice is great, but I think the framing could use some work. But it also has a special badge so that can communicate to other people that you bundle polite greetings in with the payload of the message, which I think is weird, and is probably a clue that the author and I don't share a cultural context here.

mfrw 4y ago

I think a passing mention of: - https://xyproblem.info https://xyproblem.info - http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html might be of some help as well :)

KronisLV 4y ago
Thanks, that's a good idea! Added these as "further reading" at the bottom.
mdaniel 4y ago
and https://stackoverflow.com/help/how-to-ask https://stackoverflow.com/help/how-to-ask along with its sub-section https://stackoverflow.com/help/minimal-reproducible-example https://stackoverflow.com/help/minimal-reproducible-example While those lean toward SO-specific usage, they also contain some very good guidance IMHO

svnpenn 4y ago

> The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Cunningham#%22Cunningham's_Law%22 https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Cunningham#%22Cunningham's_L...

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
This is true. I think it's frowned upon, here. I won't do it deliberately, but, if I'm unsure of the answer, posting what I think is the answer, in a confident way, tends to get results. ;) I've also learned to ask fairly detailed, well-researched questions, from StackOverflow. They bitch at you, if you ask a "stupid" question (but usually answer it, anyway), but I have found, if I ask a detailed, well-researched question, crickets chirp. I have basically given up on SO for anything useful, these days. I'm sad, because it used to be a great place to learn. If I ask the kinds of questions they'll answer, I get sneered at. If I ask the kinds of questions they say they want, I get ignored.
- svnpenn 4y ago
  > If I ask the kinds of questions they'll answer, I get sneered at. If I ask the kinds of questions they say they want, I get ignored. Damn that is true. I actually have 94,000 rep on Stack Overflow, but I got banned for no reason. I appealed 9 times with no response, and finally they said someone was upvoting my stuff as a scam. I tried to cooperate to clear my name, but they are just ignoring me now for weeks.
- bombcar 4y ago
  When you start at SO all your questions are so easy anyone can answer them, and so people feel smart by informing you how you didn’t follow the rules. Soon you are asking moderately complicated questions that some can answer (but probably have been asked before). This is where you can get some help if you’re lucky. But later you’re asking questions so advanced nobody can answer them, and they never get answered unless you remember to come back and answer your own question.

macintux 4y ago

I’d like to come up with a series of interview questions to evaluate whether someone can interpret error messages and ask reasonable questions regarding them. Too many technicians seem to freeze up as soon as they seem an error message.

mdaniel 4y ago
And the opposite bank of questions: > given this code, how would you return errors to an internal audience? How would you change the errors if you knew the error was going to be presented to the end user? Because for sure crafting actionable errors is a life-skill I want to rage close PRs that contain throw new Exception("cannot query")

BlargMcLarg 4y ago

It's a little ironic how the field which continuously talks about the importance of communication doesn't understand the basics of communication, and how synchronous communication made them a luxury. Being cooperative, specific and transparent is really all you need to start with. Even synchronous communication benefits from this.

BarryMilo 4y ago

Anyone else notice the corrected version is just the standard format for an email?

avg_dev 4y ago
I did not notice that at all but in hindsight it seems obvious. I am a fan of a well crafted email. I find chat can be an excuse for half-baked thinking and I really appreciate it when people put care into their words.

EntropyIsAHoax 4y ago

I work on the Platform team at my company, and so we do a lot of internal tech support. It's a daily struggle to get people to ask good questions, provide details, provide links when possible, etc... Sometimes it's really hard not to get incredibly frustrated with it. The questions can be as vague as "hey we're having trouble authenticating to the artifactory, how do we fix it?" A few people really shine in explaining themselves clearly, giving the context, copy-pasting the error message, etc, and I truly treasure those people. The proper context can really turn an hour of debugging into 5 minutes debugging

jon-wood 4y ago
I see way too many questions in the Slack channels for teams that manage common services at work which are just “Is there a problem with [service]?” Clearly there is, at least from your perspective, otherwise you wouldn’t be asking. Come out with it and state what the issue you’re seeing so someone can either tell you it’s known and point you at the ticket tracking an open incident, or do what needs to be done to resolve your issue.

NovemberWhiskey 4y ago

I own a platform with several thousand unique monthly users within the company where I work. In order to get to the point where you can raise a support ticket, we gently usher people through a flow that asks them whether they've checked our FAQs (that cover 90% of all tickets raised) and then provide them with examples of the kind of additional information that will help the support team to provide quick and useful responses. Some ridiculously high proportion (half?) of tickets still come out looking like "it doesn't work when I do X" with no attempt to report what (if any) error was experienced or what parameters were supplied or what indeed their expectation for "work" was or whether this was "working" before etc. I'm sort of coming to the conclusion that for some fraction of users, there is nothing that can be done to get them to think at all before raising a trouble ticket. Another theory: that for some people, hitting a problem is an excuse to stop working entirely and claim to be waiting on another team for support.

galdosdi 4y ago
> Another theory: that for some people, hitting a problem is an excuse to stop working entirely and claim to be waiting on another team for support. You can move this one out of the theory column and into the fact column. It is very real. :-) Not only is this common but I once even had the misfortune to be in an environment that was so high pressure and under-resourced that the only way to meet ticket quotas was "by any means necessary" I learned this and a bunch of other sketchy tricks to buy time there, such as the reverse of this, which is when the support person asks a question to the customer that is not actually relevant or they already know the answer to, just to buy time till the ticket queue is less overloaded.
- tomcam 4y ago
  Neither of those strategies ever occurred to me. That is… Not encouraging
- nicbou 4y ago
  "My code's compiling" https://xkcd.com/303/ https://xkcd.com/303/
4y ago

valenterry 4y ago

I thought the right way to get answers quickly is to ask them and post a wrong answer (under a different name) which will then cause people to correct you quickly :^)

elicash 4y ago

Person 1 wanted to have a video call and was using messaging as a way to facilitate that call. For situations where it's a complicated problem, this can be reasonable. That said, there's little excuse for "isn't working" or being vague about the error message.

coldblues 4y ago

https://dontasktoask.com/ https://dontasktoask.com/ https://nohello.net/en/ https://nohello.net/en/

bena 4y ago

I like to ask "Do you have a problem or do you have a complaint?" A problem has three distinct parts: 1) What you tried. 2) What you expected. 3) What you got instead. Anything else is just complaining and I don't deal with complaints. Usually there's enough information in the triad to begin troubleshooting. I will roughly know the steps to reproduce, what that reproduction returns, and what the user thinks they should have got. If I get told "Hey, the calculation is wrong." I'm going to check the calculation. And if the math is solid, and passes all of the cases I can send it, that's the information I will give back. Usually while also asking why they think it is wrong. Sometimes, the only thing that is wrong is user expectation.

karaterobot 4y ago

My ideal interaction is more like: Teammate: hey can we hop on a call real quick, I need some help Me: yep, give me like 2 minutes and I'll send you a zoom link There is almost always value in seeing what happens right before the problem, and I almost always have questions I want to ask them about it, and it's so much faster just to do it with screensharing and voice. A lot of the time anyway.

KronisLV 4y ago
> There is almost always value in seeing what happens right before the problem, and I almost always have questions I want to ask them about it, and it's so much faster just to do it with screensharing and voice. This is a pretty good counterpoint to my site! I think that for some, voice is just the preferred medium of communication and that should also be taken into account when possible. Of course, I'd argue that a little bit of context of what the problem is related to could still be helpful, not to have to waste a bunch of time trying to find some Jira ticket that had some relevant info from like 2 weeks back during the call. For others, text will probably reign supreme, though I also enjoy things like huddles that Slack introduced, to make informal "meetings" a bit more organic: https://slack.com/help/articles/4402059015315-Use-huddles-in-Slack https://slack.com/help/articles/4402059015315-Use-huddles-in...

wizofaus 4y ago

Strangely I've found at my current workplace no matter how much time I put into preparing the initial message with detailed info, screenshots etc., it just gets ignored and we end up doing a call anyway. And to be fair it usually is quicker to resolve issues with a live/screen-sharing session, but obviously it relies on the other party's availability.

WastingMyTime89 4y ago
That’s because talking to someone is always nicer than perusing error message. Plus it’s a nice break. I am always a bit baffled by people who are full remote and want even less social interaction like if it wasn’t already hard enough to somewhat get to know people when you never see them.
- wizofaus 4y ago
  Actually I do agree with that, but...it's still annoying when you think you've done the right thing by providing all the information upfront and placing no expectation that you need the problem solved immediately, just to have it ignored.
- chihuahua 4y ago
  It depends on how many interruptions those people receive during the day. If there's a question once or twice a day, the call could be a pleasant break. If it happens every 15 minutes, the person being interrupted may not be able to get any work done at all. What I find baffling is that when someone is working from home, they can answer a call any time. When someone is working in the office, they have to find a meeting room before getting on a call. And yet, the office is officially declared to be more conducive to collaboration. When Microsoft still had individual offices with walls and doors, the open plan offices were called "more collaborative" which is 100% incorrect.
- jon-wood 4y ago
  I work remote, and also have anything up to a full eight hours a day scheduled as meetings. Another video call really isn’t a break for me, and I’m not suffering from a lack of social interaction at work. Throw an error message, nine times out of ten I’ll be able to point you in the right direction after a quick glance at it, and by not insisting on getting on a call to talk about it you also get to avoid an exciting game of 20 questions about comparative availability of meeting times.

bananamerica 4y ago

It is regretable that a lot people takes these kinds of "questions manuals" as an incentive or an excuse to feel justified for being a total asshole.

sacrosancty 4y ago
Yep. In general, advice on how to treat people better is often used as an excuse to be an asshole to people who aren't following it. Which is kind of ironic, really. A case I personally encountered was somebody who wanted to have better relationships with people and read the book "How To Win Friends And Influence People". Unfortunately, that book is just full of advice on how to make others feel good about themselves, which wasn't their aim, and it really backfired into blaming others for not following the book's advice.

MarkLowenstein 4y ago

Great article. Hits the best points without wasting time on minutia. That is the other heuristic when describing a problem and reporting what you already learned, that makes the whole process an art: keep it short!

SilasX 4y ago

Great stuff. One related hack I have for oral communication: if you mishear/aren't sure about part of what someone said, repeat back everything you did hear as part of your question, so they only have to repeat that one part. (Bonus: It validates that you were listening!) Examples: "We saw <garbled> and so we left." 'You left because you saw what?' "I collect samples with <garbled> at the beach." 'You used what to collect samples at the beach?' Otherwise, they will repeat the whole thing, or rephrase it, or even worse, start by appending detail that assumes you heard the original part correctly.

hankchinaski 4y ago

I see this often with very junior engineers. They just haggle around before getting to the point. But something that rarely see in more seasoned people.

thenerdhead 4y ago

I am more than willing to help if someone has shown the due diligence or curiosity. Otherwise these asks are nothing more than asking for attention, which isn't just given away freely. That doesn't make someone an asshole, this makes someone who values their time. “A problem well-articulated is a problem half solved.” -Charles Kettering https://jondouglas.dev/problems-vs-solutions/ https://jondouglas.dev/problems-vs-solutions/ Aside: If direct messages and email doesn't scale for you, try doing an office hours type deal.

nomel 4y ago
I pushed all of my support to an issue tracker, at work. The only requirement is to put a basic description of what's going on, the version that they're using, and include the error text, in full. This immediately cut the time I spent, with support, by half. Some people realized the solution its almost always in the error text. Others spend hours trying to figure out the problem themselves, just to avoid submitting a ticket. People are strange.
- thenerdhead 4y ago
  I've been there. I don't like barriers personally, but I do understand they can deter people to the point of the problem solving itself or at least the urgency of the problem. People will go through hell and back to not fill out a quick form for help.

lxe 4y ago

I don't care if you say hello as long as you follow up with a detailed question. What grinds my gears is developers not linking to tickets or error logs, or not pasting the error messages into the question. I'm not going to play detective and investigate your failing CI logs -- provide me with the exact line where the error occurred.

avg_dev 4y ago

I've been working from home for most of the past 15 years, and I've worked at some companies that had remote-first development teams and some where development started in-the-office and then branched off into remote. I believe in the former there was more understanding of: 1. Providing useful context up-front 2. No "hello" message sent while waiting for further input to be typed in 3. More emphasis on written communication 4. Less of a need to jump on a video conference 5. Use of headsets for video conferences In some of the latter cases, the "office-first teams" still had management working out of the office and I believe that remote employees are kind of second-class citizens in these cases, and I found it less enjoyable and less productive to be a remote dev in that sort of situation. I believe also that headsets for video conferences allows for full-duplex conversations where one or more people can talk at once and be heard, but I've not seen anybody else talk about this and may be wrong.

silisili 4y ago
> In some of the latter cases, the "office-first teams" still had management working out of the office and I believe that remote employees are kind of second-class citizens in these cases 100% agreed. For a long time, I think I was the only remote employee, and always felt forgotten unless I bothered people. Even after it became more balanced after COVID, it became clear to me that in office people were given far preferential treatment. Ultimately, it's that that caused me to leave for a remote first company.
guelo 4y ago
> headsets for video conferences allows for full-duplex conversations That makes since most video conferencing services have complex audio feedback canceling algorithms. If the mic can't hear the speakers then there is no feedback to cancel.

overthemoon 4y ago

Nothing makes me more fucking annoyed than the singular "hey". I will always, always ignore it. If it's important, fill in more detail, we're not on a phone call.

gumby 4y ago

Sharing what you’ve tried already helps in two ways. The respondent can tell if you’re barking up the wrong tree or not and give a better, sometimes briefer answer. Second, the respondent can tell if you’re really trying to fix the problem and are stuck, or if you aren’t bothering and are instead simply asking. I,e, if you’re worth helping.

sacrosancty 4y ago

I help people with tech problem all the time and I don't like it when they tell me what they tried in too much detail. It means I have to read through it all and be sure I'm considering everything they said even when the likely problem and solution is already obvious. I'd rather they just say "I did this and then that happened." and if my obvious answer is wrong, then we can dig into the details. Perhaps that serves my interests more than theirs, but if you're trying to help the tech support guy, then why not?

jimkleiber 4y ago
I've noticed how much I write tends to depend on how long I think it will take to get a response. If I think it will be a live chat, I'll say just a sentence or two. If I think it'll be maybe a few hours to reply, maybe a paragraph or two. If a day or more, then often multiple paragraphs. If it's a day or more, do you still prefer they share just a little info or would you also prefer more info if a longer response time?
- sacrosancty 4y ago
  It's mostly over email with a day turnaround and I don't mind it dragging on. But I worry the customer won't like that!
  - jimkleiber 4y ago
    Ah, yes, I can imagine in such a customer service interaction the one being paid to do it all the time may not mind it lasting as long, or at least there may be a discrepancy in preference. I've been texting with someone over Whatsapp and she seems to treat it more like email: no read indicators, no set response time (sometimes minutes, days, or weeks), longer responses when she does. It can be so hard for me as I associate WhatsApp and texting with relatively real-time chat and the differences in expectations have caused conflict between us quite a few times.
SilverBirch 4y ago
Even ignoring the obvious "Users are idiots" chat, if you ever show a problem to someone else "Oh it works now" is almost always the answer.

zasdffaa 4y ago

I try to write good questions for stackoverflow (which I'm certainly not dissing, I think it;s a great resource used properly) and I usually miss something out and have to throw in an edit. Fair enough, but it amazes me the number of people who pile in, clearly without reading what I wrote, seemingly unable to readjust when I point out "no, that's not what asked" A while back I asked a question. Let's say it was about destructors (it wasn't but for example). People started answering about constructors. Repeatedly. One of the SO editors came in and pointed out that there was plenty about constructors on SO already so he was closing the question. I rather lost it at that point, spelt out DEE-STRUCT-ORRS I was asking about. He wiped all the comments (his own included), reopened the question and today it remains unanswered. That was an extreme case of this phenomenon but stone the bladdy crows, it's not rare.

werdnapk 4y ago

I find when I ask questions in public forums and provide a lot of detail about the issue, it seems to get ignored because there's too much information compared to other people who ask more basic questions that require follow up questions. Also with a detailed message, people don't seem to read (or grasp) the entire thing and get fixated on parts that aren't the issue or ask questions that I already answered in my initial question. I guess you need to know your audience and adjust your question style based on that.

EvanAnderson 4y ago
What's daunting is when you don't know the audience-- like opening a new tech support case. I could write a thorough narrative with a good description of my environment and details of all the things I tried to do. Then I get dismissed by a technician who says (this actually happened): "Your issue is to complicated to be solved over email. We need to have a call." The call lasted less than 5 minutes. It consisted of me reading my email (verbatim, because I'm an asshole and took being dismissed personally), the technician telling me what I needed to do, and me doing it. I could go with the whole "quick question" route and spend more time than it would take to write having a back-and-forth with a technician who can't let me speak and keeps interrupting with suggestions (for things I've already tried or aren't applicable), repeated questions( because they aren't keeping written notes), or out-right confusion (because they have preconceived ideas about my situation and haven't validated them with questions). I find it easiest to just grind away on a problem myself, reverse engineering, referring to source code, etc. Then I don't have to feel bad or make someone else feel bad. I loathe having to involve an unknown third-party. My confirmation bias says that it'll usually be bad.
deamanto 4y ago
Yep I suffer from this too. From my perspective it's trying to "prove" that I at least did some work on my part to figure it out and if someone were to ask me a question I would hope they do the same. I don't want to come off as the person who didn't spend a small amount of time researching myself before using up other people's time. But it's a double edged sword. I am not the most articulate person so sometimes the information ends up becoming more confusing for the reader which doesn't help either.

sneak 4y ago

The reason that so many people ask for calls is because they are slow/bad at typing. Speaking is faster/easier for them because they are not trained.

WastingMyTime89 4y ago

I am going to strongly dissent on that one. I much prefer the first situation where someone says hi and that leads to a discussion on their issue to the second one. All the things the article asks for will come forwards in the discussion anyway and ninety percents of the time the people asking for help have a different problem than the one they thought they had anyway. I am not a robot. I don’t want to be treated like one.

i_like_apis 4y ago

"Don't ask to ask" is also relevant for chatrooms: https://sol.gfxile.net/dontask.html https://sol.gfxile.net/dontask.html

semireg 4y ago

I’ve been looking for “how to ask questions the smart way” for years! I kept googling the wrong title … I love how thorough it is, in the style of a Linux how-to or RFC. I’m a solo developer and receive maybe 10 emails a day from end users. I can answer 90% of the questions with a few characters on my phone via “text replacement” so if I type: lllic it’ll automatically insert https://label.live/faqs/licensing/can-i-use-a-license-on-more-than-one-computer https://label.live/faqs/licensing/can-i-use-a-license-on-mor... You know, as an example… A few other favorites: Llty “Thank you for the email.” Lllmk “Let me know if this helps.” I should really invest in Text Expander or similar. Although, maybe ZenDesk will come out with some wild AI integration that allows me to piece together a response based on my prior responses. Surely that’s coming.

EvanAnderson 4y ago

Different people have a different "style" for this. I prefer to work people whose style is similar to mine. I think most people are the same way. That's all this comes down to, sadly. There's no formula to that will ever solve this mismatch. Be tolerant of others and gently suggest they can help themselves, in the future, by helping you. Be thankful for the times you get to work with people who share a common style with you.

RoadieRoller 4y ago

I always start the chat conversation in office with a simple "Hi" or a "Hi, Do you have a minute?" This way, I am giving that person a choice if 1) He/she is in a meeting, they have a choice - to or not to reply 2) If their screen is shared, I am not disturbing the meeting attendees making them read what I typed, and what comes in the notification pop-up 3) Gives enough time for the other person to switch context 4) Ignore me for an indefinite amount of time and continue their work If the other person responds, my second comment would be with full details.

james_in_the_uk 4y ago
Agree with this. Perhaps it's my British sensibilities, but I find it rude when people launch straight in.
- nql 4y ago
  I absolutely hate it when people send me a question that doesn't have the question. Now I have to pull it out of them, on their time.
- jon-wood 4y ago
  I think there’s a middle ground. “Hey, are you free to talk about Project X?” is a perfectly valid entry to something where you know an actual conversation will be needed. Likewise “I’m having trouble with the frobinator, when I run frob -x blah it gives me this error: XXX, are you able to help?” if you just need an answer. Niceites are, well, nice. They help to make sure everyone remembers we’re all human beings rather than question answering machines, but we are also talking to get a job done. Unless you’re actually a good friend of mine if you drop me a message asking me how my weekend was, I know that you’re just lining up to ask me a question, but now I have to do The Dance to work out what it’s going to be about, whether I have time for it, and if I’m even the right person to ask.
  - grayclhn 4y ago
    +1000. "Do you have 5 minutes to join this conversation?" is totally fine. The alternative of > Them: "Hi" > ... > Me: "What's up" > ... > Them: "Do you have 5 minutes to join this conversation?" > ... is awful.

sam_lowry_ 4y ago

No one said it better than Robert Sheckley in Ask a Foolish Question: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/33854 https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/33854

chihuahua 4y ago

I found that when I'm about to ask someone a question, in the process of writing down all the details of what I want to do, what I've tried, what happened, which alternatives I've tried, and why it can't possibly be the fault of my own code, at least half the time I find the answer on my own. So these days, I start writing down all this stuff as I'm exploring the problem, and much of the time it helps discover the solution and I don't need to send the message.

__derek__ 4y ago
This is commonly known as rubber duck problem solving (or debugging).[1] [1]: https://blog.codinghorror.com/rubber-duck-problem-solving/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/rubber-duck-problem-solving/

chihuahua 4y ago

On the r/bread subreddit, I am greatly irritated by people who post a picture of their failed bread along with the title "what did I do wrong???" Please, tell us what you think is wrong with your bread, as well as the details of the recipe you followed. Why are you expecting us to be mind readers just so we can help you?

anotherevan 4y ago

Also learn to send multiple paragraphs in the one message. (Usually shift+return.) Frustrating watching the description slowly emerge, line by line, like an old teletype machine or something. Get the entirety of what you want to say in one hit in one message. I know then to respond and not sitting there waiting for the next nugget of information.

dvtrn 4y ago
I have a few people who send text messages like this. Each stream of thought comes as a separate message which can be incredibly annoying when I’ve turned my brain off for the day because I only have so many spoons for anything other than sitting there with my thoughts (actually very enjoyable) or maybe a book and the phone out of nowhere starts dinging every two seconds because I’m on the receiving end of a disjointed and scattered series of someone’s thoughts. I love my friends. I hate how they communicate over text.
- SilasX 4y ago
  Haha yes. I have just one friend that does that. I also have a friend on the opposite end (late 50's early 60's I think?) who treats text messages like old-school letters. "Silas, I hope this message reaches you well. The sun is setting and I am optimistic about the future. I am wondering if you are interested in the upcoming conference, where you are sure to find many fans of that course you like. Let me know what you think and get back to me. [his name]" Me: "Oh sure I'm going already got ticket and booked flight."
  - dvtrn 4y ago
    Not gonna lie, I vastly prefer that. Not to say I bombard people with entire encyclopedias when messaging, but…I dunno. I guess, maybe this is the result of being one of those “elder millennials” I send text messages with the kind of intentional and to the point messaging style with the brevity of someone who pays $0.50 per message like it’s 1999 and isn’t running across the house to respond to every blip and beep my phone makes. (Interestingly once I scared off a potential dating partner who is heavily into texting constantly and called me out for my asynchronous messaging habits and I flatly responded “sometimes I just want to put my phone down and do literally anything else”)

landofredwater 4y ago

I find that with friends a slower conversation style works fine, but in any professional context (even if you are otherwise friends) you should try and make your questions snappy. "Hey, you there?" works for a text to your partner "Hey, are you available at 12:00 tomorrow?" works much better for your coworkers.