6 ms·

It's a sad state of affairs when people are so anxious that a simple inquiry can cause them distress. I don't know if it's character, upbringing or just the mo

It's a sad state of affairs when people are so anxious that a simple inquiry can cause them distress. I don't know if it's character, upbringing or just the modern work environment but it really ought not to cause anyone any concern if someone just wants to check if you're available.

lucideer 4y ago
It's a sad state of affairs when the response to things like this is attribution to bad character or upbringing, rather than basic human empathy.
sfg 4y ago
But they do, so it is probably best to include a short note stating the purpose of the desired conversation. This will also help prime many people, and thereby improve the conversation, so it is probably worth doing even if the person won’t be made anxious.
- pantulis 4y ago
  As a manager, I've sometimes used the technique of adding something like: "It's nothing serious" to the message. Best way of course is giving context but hey, everyone is human.
  - ricardobeat 4y ago
    As a receiver of that message I'd say it doesn't help much. The stress comes from the information-less poke. Ideally you go straight to the point: “hi jack, I need to check in on XXX so we can update the quarterly goals, can you send me Y / can we speak?”. Nothing is gained by checking immediate availability with a greeting message. https://nohello.net/en/ https://nohello.net/en/
    - defrost 4y ago
      The downside is that if every significant bit of communication is straight to the point and in public ... how should sensitive personal infomation be handled ? It's either: - out there in public, OR - clearly sensitive as it's the only bit of communication the other party is masking. Depending on your environment workers may or may not want open signals about sensitive events being telegraphed.
  - madeofpalk 4y ago
    Merlin Mann on a few podcasts has a running bit when calling someone, answering the phone with "don't worry, you're not in trouble"
PointlessLogin 4y ago
Seconded. I'm rather curious as to whether those anxious about a simple inquiry register on the autism spectrum...... This is a tech news site after all. EDIT: Down votes for asking a speculative question? This place is turning into another Reddit.
- imakeinternet 4y ago
  _Any_ message without context leaves me anxious. I can't tell you why, but getting a blind invite from the HoE with various C-suites on it always gets me spooked. I hate it, but after 17 years, I get on with it. Usually a quick message to someone to ask for some context as to what the meet is about is enough to calm me.
- dang 4y ago
  Your comment was correctly downvoted and flagged because it was both unsubstantive and (worse) flamebait. Could you please stop posting like that? Also: Could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix&page=0&query=community%20identity%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
- cranium 4y ago
  No, you get downvoted when you posit that anxious people are autistic under the guise of curiosity/speculative question. Also, not everyone reacts nicely when someone implies they might be on the spectrum. You live and learn.
spacehunt 4y ago
Available for what though? Work? Chitchat? The point is that context is important.
MattGaiser 4y ago
The lack of info in the inquiry causes the distress, as there is often a reason that the info is being withheld. Otherwise there is usually more information in the request. "Can we talk?" has only ever come from my managers when someone is leaving. With my family, it is usually because someone has died. Otherwise, there is usually another sentence about what is going to be discussed.
bigDinosaur 4y ago
'Hi, are you available to discuss <x>'? is vastly better in every way because it: - allows someone to gather their thoughts and prepare for the actual answer, without committing someone to answering what is non-critical (critical would be, 'Call. Now.') - doesn't generate any fear among anxious employees that they're about to hear something discplinary or even worse, something more dramatic like a termination. - just on a personal level isn't annoying. YMMV with that but I really dislike it when people waste time by asking to ask questions and so on.
newaccount74 4y ago
It could be related to previous bad experiences. When I was a teenager, I received bad news via phone call a few times (friend got cancer, other friend was in car accident, etc). It conditioned me to become anxious every time my phone rang. Of course, I didn't tell people to stop calling me. The problem was my anxiety, not people calling unexpectedly.
hackish 4y ago
I'm confident enough in my work to not swear, "Hey, can we talk," type messages — but, in a previous role as a technical lead, I had a manager that would occasionally leave one of those large rectangular Post-It notes in the middle of my monitors with, "COME SEE ME ASAP - $BOSS," in sharpie for all to see. Trouble was, not once was it ever anything pressing, imminent, or even in-person worthy. I'd be lying if it didn't get me unnecessarily anxious that a coworker died on the way in or literally anything worthy of speedwalking before logging in had occurred. His reasoning? He doesn't like the impersonality of leaving digital messages.
- m1gu3l 4y ago
  Messages in chat too impersonal… better go leave a serial killer ransom note. Manager brain right there.
  - Bakary 4y ago
    The serial killer part is actually leaving post-it glue on a screen
IanCal 4y ago
Or it's quite simply about mental health - which doesn't have to come with feelings that it's down to poor character or failures in upbringing. It's entirely reasonable that my brain is just different to yours. > It's a sad state affairs when people are so anxious that a simple inquiry can cause them distress. Yes. I would assume that the person posting this would much rather not get distressed about this kind of thing. I wouldn't say it causes me distress per se, but a blank "Can you talk" can by default launch my brain down a tree of "why, what if it's X or Y, it's this time and they so...". Being able to do this kind of thing makes me good at my job and worse at some social things, and work I've done to focus on "THIS LINE OF ENQUIRY IS NOT IMPORTANT TO PURSUE, BRAIN" make me better at both. It's still a conscious thing that I think other people don't have to deal with. I don't see it as a character flaw, a failure of upbringing or controlled by my work (since it's not tied to work). It's just who I am and maybe that is a sad thing to you, I'd rather not have the downsides but I'm not sure I'd trade away a full part of how I think just for a bit of peace.
- Bakary 4y ago
  I have a very similar type of mental burden to what you are describing. What I have discovered is that ultimately connecting it to a sense of identity, especially in a combative context vs. normies, is a losing battle that only increases anxiety. This is still the case even if it nominally seems like a logical choice to avoid unwarranted self-esteem issues in the face of culturally enforced social norms. At the end of the day, when it's something as trivial as a Teams ping, the onus is on us to confront the anxiety and to work on our reactions. I sympathize with the author and see myself in him but it's not a part of me that would be good to enable. Perhaps a clearer example would be someone who is afraid of swimming. It's a good idea for them to fight back against people who needlessly mock them for it. They shouldn't feel lesser for their struggles. But if they find themselves in a body of water, the Universe will not care one iota about the life history and mental world that prevented them from learning.
- satisfice 4y ago
  If I were working with you I would adjust my style. What I object to is the implication that everyone must dial down to the level of the most anxious among us. You don’t seem to realize how productive it is for I and my colleagues to ping each other for short real-time communications. Most people can handle this. I respect that you don’t want to, but don’t make general rules that are only about the comfort of a tiny few.
pdimitar 4y ago
People usually link those out-of-the-blue messages with being fired or asked to work extra for free. The rest is your own projection and a "kids these days!" rant.
vidarh 4y ago
The thing is, this is easy to say without context. But often there is all kinds of surrounding context that may or may not give cause for anxiety. E.g. a "can we talk?" right after a major project you led failed is far more likely to cause anxiety than the very same "can we talk?" right after a major success. But a lot of the time you as a manager will not even be aware of the context. E.g. all kinds of rumours might be circulating that you've not heard of, and given a staff member cause to be worried, or said staff member might think you're unhappy about something you've not even thought about. If you don't give context, chances are they'll fill in their own.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  > If you don't give context, chances are they'll fill in their own. 100% this. Not just in the workplace, but in all human interaction. If people don't know what's happening, they'll fill in the blanks on their own -- and usually they'll fill them in with a worst-case scenario.
  - vidarh 4y ago
    It can end badly even if they fill in the best case scenario. E.g. consider that hypothetical "can we talk?" after a massively successful project, and someone walking into the office having spent however long fantasising about spending a bonus that only existed in their head because the communication left room for it.
- carlmr 4y ago
  >If you don't give context, chances are they'll fill in their own. The lack of context is a general problem for communication. If you don't give sufficient context, you might cause anxiety, like in this case, but this is not the only problem. If you lack context your message will often not be understood. E.g. I was asked if I remember Nick. I didn't know who Nick was, there are many Nicks in the world. I might be bad with names in any case. Then I inquired about some context, I was told it's Anna's friend. I don't know who Anna is either, also a very common name. After a bit of back and forth I find out it's a guy I talked to at a wedding last month. There were hundreds of new names for me. Names I would probably not remember. But if you start with "do you remember Nick, the guy at the wedding we talked to about X", I might stand a chance.
jstummbillig 4y ago
What is your point of reference in history? When did people ever have to deal with a sole or multiple "hey can we talk" followed by an unspecified amount of time and supposedly handled it more gracefully? At the top of my head that is not how communication ever worked at a large scale and, certainly, hearing those words from a spouse or being asked into the bosses office without knowing why, has always been pretty anxiety inducing for a lot of people.
onion2k 4y ago
It's a sad state affairs when people are so anxious that a simple inquiry can cause them distress. Everything we see around us teaches us that people want to be kind and break bad news in a gentle way. The consequence of that is that when someone seems to be hiding something from us we, quite rationally, think they have bad news - we screwed up, we're getting fired, we're getting a ton of work dumped on us, etc - because they're trying to break it to us without upsetting us. We don't assume it's something good because we're conditioned not to go around thinking we're amazing and do good work all the time. We learn thinking that way is egotistical and self-centred. Our brains think "If it's something innocuous why wouldn't they just say?! It must be something bad." The anxiety we feel is a learned response to situations we encounter (or see, because we learn this from TV, movies, etc as much as real life.)
- i_am_jl 4y ago
  >The anxiety we feel is a learned response to situations we encounter (or see, because we learn this from TV, movies, etc as much as real life.) That seems a bit subjective. I don't know about you, but > 99% of the time someone at work asks me "Got a sec?", "You busy?", it's because they need me for something that isn't urgent. I think I can count on one hand the number of times someone has asked "Can you talk?" and then chewed me out or given me bad news about my job. The anxiety I don't feel is a learned response to the situations I've encountered.
stingraycharles 4y ago
It doesn’t matter: it’s very easy to change the communication to be more explicit, and even if 90% of the people would not be distressed, helping the other 10% comes at almost no cost.
ZoomZoomZoom 4y ago
If you haven't been conditioned to, say, flinch on a ring of a landline phone, congrats, your life's been gentle on you so far. Other people have other experience.
pfortuny 4y ago
It does not take so long to say “I am worried about this problem, cam we talk about it?”
nottorp 4y ago
Meh. A good part of what he describes is annoying online behaviour no matter who is doing it. Manager, coworker, friend, doesn't matter. It's better framed as distress if you want to get the manager off your back though :)
autophagian 4y ago
It's not a 'simple inquiry' though, because the context matters: it's an ambigious message from someone above you in the employment chain, that often has to make calls on employment of the people under them. Same reason why people bring up HR setting up zero-detail 'sync' meetings out of the blue. Getting an ambigious "Hey, can we talk?" from a coworker provokes vastly different feelings than one from someone who would make calls on my employment status. I like my employment status. I use it to buy food to put in my mouth.
PointlessLogin 4y ago
Quekid5 4y ago
(See other replies also, but just to add:) Given that this is an issue for some people (the reasons don't really matter) simply amending the message to 'Hey, are you available to talk *about X* ?' shouldn't be a big deal. It's not so much anxiety-inducing for me, personally, to get an ambiguous "can you talk?" message, but it is infuriating to be distracted by a content-free message like that in a chat. It's essentially a waste of my attention because the other person is being inconsiderate and lazy to not even bother adding a few words. I always just automatically reply "About what?" at this point. If the other person can't even be bothered to articulate a few words to say what it's about then they deserve nothing more than an automatic reply.
neilv 4y ago
If someone is concerned, isn't it better to understand why they are concerned, and not have the first prejudicial guess be that it's only their own poor character/upbringing.
Tao3300 4y ago
> I don't know if it's character, upbringing or just the modern work environment It's the last one. Every time I've been laid off, it started with can-we-talk/got-a-minute vagueness. Anyone who's been through that is going to think it's spooky af because its the sound of being 10 minutes from getting frog marched out the door.

lucideer 4y ago

It's a sad state of affairs when the response to things like this is attribution to bad character or upbringing, rather than basic human empathy.

sfg 4y ago

But they do, so it is probably best to include a short note stating the purpose of the desired conversation. This will also help prime many people, and thereby improve the conversation, so it is probably worth doing even if the person won’t be made anxious.

pantulis 4y ago
As a manager, I've sometimes used the technique of adding something like: "It's nothing serious" to the message. Best way of course is giving context but hey, everyone is human.
- ricardobeat 4y ago
  As a receiver of that message I'd say it doesn't help much. The stress comes from the information-less poke. Ideally you go straight to the point: “hi jack, I need to check in on XXX so we can update the quarterly goals, can you send me Y / can we speak?”. Nothing is gained by checking immediate availability with a greeting message. https://nohello.net/en/ https://nohello.net/en/
  - defrost 4y ago
    The downside is that if every significant bit of communication is straight to the point and in public ... how should sensitive personal infomation be handled ? It's either: - out there in public, OR - clearly sensitive as it's the only bit of communication the other party is masking. Depending on your environment workers may or may not want open signals about sensitive events being telegraphed.
- madeofpalk 4y ago
  Merlin Mann on a few podcasts has a running bit when calling someone, answering the phone with "don't worry, you're not in trouble"

PointlessLogin 4y ago

Seconded. I'm rather curious as to whether those anxious about a simple inquiry register on the autism spectrum...... This is a tech news site after all. EDIT: Down votes for asking a speculative question? This place is turning into another Reddit.

imakeinternet 4y ago
_Any_ message without context leaves me anxious. I can't tell you why, but getting a blind invite from the HoE with various C-suites on it always gets me spooked. I hate it, but after 17 years, I get on with it. Usually a quick message to someone to ask for some context as to what the meet is about is enough to calm me.
dang 4y ago
Your comment was correctly downvoted and flagged because it was both unsubstantive and (worse) flamebait. Could you please stop posting like that? Also: Could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix&page=0&query=community%20identity%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
cranium 4y ago
No, you get downvoted when you posit that anxious people are autistic under the guise of curiosity/speculative question. Also, not everyone reacts nicely when someone implies they might be on the spectrum. You live and learn.

spacehunt 4y ago

Available for what though? Work? Chitchat? The point is that context is important.

MattGaiser 4y ago

The lack of info in the inquiry causes the distress, as there is often a reason that the info is being withheld. Otherwise there is usually more information in the request. "Can we talk?" has only ever come from my managers when someone is leaving. With my family, it is usually because someone has died. Otherwise, there is usually another sentence about what is going to be discussed.

bigDinosaur 4y ago

'Hi, are you available to discuss <x>'? is vastly better in every way because it: - allows someone to gather their thoughts and prepare for the actual answer, without committing someone to answering what is non-critical (critical would be, 'Call. Now.') - doesn't generate any fear among anxious employees that they're about to hear something discplinary or even worse, something more dramatic like a termination. - just on a personal level isn't annoying. YMMV with that but I really dislike it when people waste time by asking to ask questions and so on.

newaccount74 4y ago

It could be related to previous bad experiences. When I was a teenager, I received bad news via phone call a few times (friend got cancer, other friend was in car accident, etc). It conditioned me to become anxious every time my phone rang. Of course, I didn't tell people to stop calling me. The problem was my anxiety, not people calling unexpectedly.

hackish 4y ago

I'm confident enough in my work to not swear, "Hey, can we talk," type messages — but, in a previous role as a technical lead, I had a manager that would occasionally leave one of those large rectangular Post-It notes in the middle of my monitors with, "COME SEE ME ASAP - $BOSS," in sharpie for all to see. Trouble was, not once was it ever anything pressing, imminent, or even in-person worthy. I'd be lying if it didn't get me unnecessarily anxious that a coworker died on the way in or literally anything worthy of speedwalking before logging in had occurred. His reasoning? He doesn't like the impersonality of leaving digital messages.

m1gu3l 4y ago
Messages in chat too impersonal… better go leave a serial killer ransom note. Manager brain right there.
- Bakary 4y ago
  The serial killer part is actually leaving post-it glue on a screen

IanCal 4y ago

Or it's quite simply about mental health - which doesn't have to come with feelings that it's down to poor character or failures in upbringing. It's entirely reasonable that my brain is just different to yours. > It's a sad state affairs when people are so anxious that a simple inquiry can cause them distress. Yes. I would assume that the person posting this would much rather not get distressed about this kind of thing. I wouldn't say it causes me distress per se, but a blank "Can you talk" can by default launch my brain down a tree of "why, what if it's X or Y, it's this time and they so...". Being able to do this kind of thing makes me good at my job and worse at some social things, and work I've done to focus on "THIS LINE OF ENQUIRY IS NOT IMPORTANT TO PURSUE, BRAIN" make me better at both. It's still a conscious thing that I think other people don't have to deal with. I don't see it as a character flaw, a failure of upbringing or controlled by my work (since it's not tied to work). It's just who I am and maybe that is a sad thing to you, I'd rather not have the downsides but I'm not sure I'd trade away a full part of how I think just for a bit of peace.

Bakary 4y ago
I have a very similar type of mental burden to what you are describing. What I have discovered is that ultimately connecting it to a sense of identity, especially in a combative context vs. normies, is a losing battle that only increases anxiety. This is still the case even if it nominally seems like a logical choice to avoid unwarranted self-esteem issues in the face of culturally enforced social norms. At the end of the day, when it's something as trivial as a Teams ping, the onus is on us to confront the anxiety and to work on our reactions. I sympathize with the author and see myself in him but it's not a part of me that would be good to enable. Perhaps a clearer example would be someone who is afraid of swimming. It's a good idea for them to fight back against people who needlessly mock them for it. They shouldn't feel lesser for their struggles. But if they find themselves in a body of water, the Universe will not care one iota about the life history and mental world that prevented them from learning.
satisfice 4y ago
If I were working with you I would adjust my style. What I object to is the implication that everyone must dial down to the level of the most anxious among us. You don’t seem to realize how productive it is for I and my colleagues to ping each other for short real-time communications. Most people can handle this. I respect that you don’t want to, but don’t make general rules that are only about the comfort of a tiny few.

pdimitar 4y ago

People usually link those out-of-the-blue messages with being fired or asked to work extra for free. The rest is your own projection and a "kids these days!" rant.

vidarh 4y ago

The thing is, this is easy to say without context. But often there is all kinds of surrounding context that may or may not give cause for anxiety. E.g. a "can we talk?" right after a major project you led failed is far more likely to cause anxiety than the very same "can we talk?" right after a major success. But a lot of the time you as a manager will not even be aware of the context. E.g. all kinds of rumours might be circulating that you've not heard of, and given a staff member cause to be worried, or said staff member might think you're unhappy about something you've not even thought about. If you don't give context, chances are they'll fill in their own.

JohnFen 4y ago
> If you don't give context, chances are they'll fill in their own. 100% this. Not just in the workplace, but in all human interaction. If people don't know what's happening, they'll fill in the blanks on their own -- and usually they'll fill them in with a worst-case scenario.
- vidarh 4y ago
  It can end badly even if they fill in the best case scenario. E.g. consider that hypothetical "can we talk?" after a massively successful project, and someone walking into the office having spent however long fantasising about spending a bonus that only existed in their head because the communication left room for it.
carlmr 4y ago
>If you don't give context, chances are they'll fill in their own. The lack of context is a general problem for communication. If you don't give sufficient context, you might cause anxiety, like in this case, but this is not the only problem. If you lack context your message will often not be understood. E.g. I was asked if I remember Nick. I didn't know who Nick was, there are many Nicks in the world. I might be bad with names in any case. Then I inquired about some context, I was told it's Anna's friend. I don't know who Anna is either, also a very common name. After a bit of back and forth I find out it's a guy I talked to at a wedding last month. There were hundreds of new names for me. Names I would probably not remember. But if you start with "do you remember Nick, the guy at the wedding we talked to about X", I might stand a chance.

jstummbillig 4y ago

What is your point of reference in history? When did people ever have to deal with a sole or multiple "hey can we talk" followed by an unspecified amount of time and supposedly handled it more gracefully? At the top of my head that is not how communication ever worked at a large scale and, certainly, hearing those words from a spouse or being asked into the bosses office without knowing why, has always been pretty anxiety inducing for a lot of people.

onion2k 4y ago

It's a sad state affairs when people are so anxious that a simple inquiry can cause them distress. Everything we see around us teaches us that people want to be kind and break bad news in a gentle way. The consequence of that is that when someone seems to be hiding something from us we, quite rationally, think they have bad news - we screwed up, we're getting fired, we're getting a ton of work dumped on us, etc - because they're trying to break it to us without upsetting us. We don't assume it's something good because we're conditioned not to go around thinking we're amazing and do good work all the time. We learn thinking that way is egotistical and self-centred. Our brains think "If it's something innocuous why wouldn't they just say?! It must be something bad." The anxiety we feel is a learned response to situations we encounter (or see, because we learn this from TV, movies, etc as much as real life.)

i_am_jl 4y ago
>The anxiety we feel is a learned response to situations we encounter (or see, because we learn this from TV, movies, etc as much as real life.) That seems a bit subjective. I don't know about you, but > 99% of the time someone at work asks me "Got a sec?", "You busy?", it's because they need me for something that isn't urgent. I think I can count on one hand the number of times someone has asked "Can you talk?" and then chewed me out or given me bad news about my job. The anxiety I don't feel is a learned response to the situations I've encountered.

stingraycharles 4y ago

It doesn’t matter: it’s very easy to change the communication to be more explicit, and even if 90% of the people would not be distressed, helping the other 10% comes at almost no cost.

ZoomZoomZoom 4y ago

If you haven't been conditioned to, say, flinch on a ring of a landline phone, congrats, your life's been gentle on you so far. Other people have other experience.

pfortuny 4y ago

It does not take so long to say “I am worried about this problem, cam we talk about it?”

nottorp 4y ago

Meh. A good part of what he describes is annoying online behaviour no matter who is doing it. Manager, coworker, friend, doesn't matter. It's better framed as distress if you want to get the manager off your back though :)

autophagian 4y ago

It's not a 'simple inquiry' though, because the context matters: it's an ambigious message from someone above you in the employment chain, that often has to make calls on employment of the people under them. Same reason why people bring up HR setting up zero-detail 'sync' meetings out of the blue. Getting an ambigious "Hey, can we talk?" from a coworker provokes vastly different feelings than one from someone who would make calls on my employment status. I like my employment status. I use it to buy food to put in my mouth.

PointlessLogin 4y ago

Quekid5 4y ago

(See other replies also, but just to add:) Given that this is an issue for some people (the reasons don't really matter) simply amending the message to 'Hey, are you available to talk *about X* ?' shouldn't be a big deal. It's not so much anxiety-inducing for me, personally, to get an ambiguous "can you talk?" message, but it is infuriating to be distracted by a content-free message like that in a chat. It's essentially a waste of my attention because the other person is being inconsiderate and lazy to not even bother adding a few words. I always just automatically reply "About what?" at this point. If the other person can't even be bothered to articulate a few words to say what it's about then they deserve nothing more than an automatic reply.

neilv 4y ago

If someone is concerned, isn't it better to understand why they are concerned, and not have the first prejudicial guess be that it's only their own poor character/upbringing.

Tao3300 4y ago

> I don't know if it's character, upbringing or just the modern work environment It's the last one. Every time I've been laid off, it started with can-we-talk/got-a-minute vagueness. Anyone who's been through that is going to think it's spooky af because its the sound of being 10 minutes from getting frog marched out the door.