I used to work in a big company where people would often drop a "hello" and then wait for a response before saying why they were messaging. It was mildly infuriating because I would check the internal chat about once an hour in order to remain productive. So the first time I check I see the hello, then next time I check I see what they actually wanted to say doubling the amount of time until they got a response compared to asking in one go. It doesn't need to be a single IM message but it should be sent pretty swiftly after.
I always wondered if people wanted to wait until the messagee was sat on the other end of the keyboard giving their full attention. If this is the case a phonecall would be more appropriate imo.
It's such a weird thing. Most of my coworkers don't do this, but a few will do a "Hi" type message.
It wastes so much time for everyone involved.
I sometimes wonder if these same people think I'm being rude when I write a message like "Hey, xyz, I was wondering if you knew PDQ about ABC?"
Like, are they expecting the convo to go like
me: "Hi"
them: "Hello"
me: "How's your day been?"
them: "fine"
me: "Crazy weather"
them: "yeah"
me: "Do you have a second to chat about ABC"?
them: "Just a sec"
me: "Ok"
them: "Ok, shoot"
me: "Do you if PDQ about ABC?"
them: "Oh yeah, it's 123"
Because I've absolutely had chat conversations like that. It drives me nuts because it's stuff that can be solved in 10 seconds but ends up taking 30 minutes worth of disruptions.
A Hello wastes my time, but sometimes I go along with it to see if that's what they really wanted - maybe they didn't have a question after all, and when I have time I'm happy to have a friendly chat:
them: Hello
*hour or two passes*
me: Hey how are you?
But so far every time they say Good and then ask their question :(. A surprising amount of the time when I wait an hour to respond to a Hello they'll tell me they already figured out the answer to their question too (I would never wait that long to respond to actual questions though).
> "It was mildly infuriating because I would check the internal chat about once an hour in order to remain productive. So the first time I check I see the hello, then next time I check I see what they actually wanted to say doubling the amount of time until they got a response compared to asking in one go"
But why is that your problem to be infuriated about? If they weren't bothered by doubling the time to a response, why should you be? And if they are ... why should you be?
One of my coworkers put this website as his status message. People stopped saying "hello" and waiting for a reply. Now they write something like, "Hey, I would like to chat when you have a moment". It's infuriating because it's basically the same as just saying hello because it still doesn't say what they want to talk about!!!
There should be one like this for email too, if your email is simple... put the content in the subject line! Like, if I'm telling someone the date/time for something (that doesn't warrant an "invite"), I'll put it right in the subject line. When I'm telling my coworkers I'm taking a few days off, I'll put those days right in the subject line...etc.
My response is:
?
and go back to work. I feel a bit mean if they are exceedingly polite and Start with "Good Morning" I might give them a Hi in that case.
Either way I go back to what I was doing until I come to a convenient stopping point, typically between 1 and 5 minutes.
i used to get straight to the point, but people find this offensive, like i am just using them as a google instead of treating them like a fellow human being
once i establish rapport and recognize our mutual humanity, then future engagements i can get straight to the point without people just feeling used
of course some people get offended by the preliminary niceties, but they are in the minority, so best to bet on the common case in absence of further knowledge
Chill out people. Get a little more patient and a little less nitpicky about protocol. You’re not that busy or important. None of us are.
This culture of nitpicking text communication styles has been with us for decades and isn’t going away soon. Same on IRC and Prestel before that. And it has always been about providing the enforcers with a sense of power and reinforcing tribalism around those who know the rules and those who need to be forcibly educated.
If it’s good enough for Lionel Richie, it’s good enough for you.
I do think the context where these communication issues are the most painful are when there are already other serious problems. But if you have a whole org where a decent fraction of people engage in these patterns, it can turn your day into one substantially driven by pointless interrupts.
Broken habits in an org that can exacerbate this:
- People don't feel safe saying stuff in a group context so there's a large number of DM conversations at any one time.
- The chat app is actually used for time-critical issues and sometimes an immediate response is strongly expected. People feel obligated to rely on notifications.
- There's in general a poor commitment to supporting a "low-interrupt" mode of work for some roles.
Rules like the above are what causes a chilling effect on public comms and a rise in DMs. So chill out and create a relaxed space for your colleagues. If you need a low interrupt mode, get off Slack. If you’re in a job where you can’t, that’s a separate issue. If you have a time critical comms channel that’s being used for random chatter, it’s not a time critical channel.
It's not the same, though. Chat is asynchronous, so the recipient doesn't have to wait with their device as they would on hold.
A standalone hello is actually more efficient in time-sensitive situations. The sender needs to know if the recipient is actually available so that they don't waste effort typing a question that won't get answered in time.
it got so bad at my work they had to email out to the entire company to nicer. the one slack room with all employees and no one is allowed to leave is a mine field. anyone can post there, but if you do and your message is not deemed appropriate the slack police will descend to the threads and rip you apart. don’t even think about @here or @channel because there’s already 5+ emojis that will be tacked on your message to ensure you feel like a moron
The most stressful version of this for me is when someone sidles up to you on chat and asks "is X working?" or "is Y supposed to do Z?"
Like, if you're saying it's not working: say that. If you're saying it's not doing what you expect: say that. It's the QA version of "we have to talk" and I'm instantly anxious until you clarify.
We work in an open space and people usually ask to make sure they arent the crazy one. It can go either direction: we had to do that cause x, or yeah thats not how its supposed to work... Followed by... Well its how it works for now cause of this and this... Along with everyone agreeing its wrong. They arent trying to mess with you just confirm intended behavior.
In-person I almost universally heard stuff like "is anyone else having problems with X? the site won't load for me" and that second part is crucial.
In chat, something like 1/4-1/2 are "is X working?" followed by total silence. Sometimes they really are just asking if it's running, i.e. does X still exist. Sometimes they're having a failed build on a different system because their dependency manager cache is broken and it's blaming random libraries. Sometimes the frontend is busted.
What they're doing in practice is asking for 1:1 dedicated help on literally anything, so the only reasonable choice for a responder is those unicorn devs who know everything somehow. They almost never exist, so those "questions" go unanswered for a long time.
Lots of folks will guard against strong assertions like that out of habit, especially if it's not their area of expertise. They're leaving open the possibility that they could be wrong.
This sounds pretty similar to the "askers vs guessers" cultural difference. If it's okay to receive a 'no', then you're free to ask whatever. If you're expected to know before you ask, then you can't ask until you know what the answer will be.
But, yes, it's valuable if someone is asking can clarify "here's what I tried..".
I dunno it's definitely happened to me before that the company's git repo was only down for me, or whatever. Networking is weird, so it's good to confirm that others are having the same issue.
- Have clear questions that are easy to jump back and respond to. Have them separated out by spacing, and preferably numbered.
- If there's something I need to copy paste, an email address, a specific id, a phone number, then put it on it's own line. Then I can double click and get the whole thing rather then dragging the cursor to do it.
The very first thing you should type after your initial greeting should be your question(s). Don't bury the lede.
You can provide all the additional explanation (i.e. what you were doing when it broke, where you've looked, what you've tried, etc) after you ask your questions. By asking up front, you frame the conversation so that the person you are communicating with can read your supporting information with the correct context.
XY Problem is worth keeping in mind too. It's covered in your link under another name but is probably one of the main problems I get with questions from people.
But how do we feel about people breaking their thoughts up?
Into individually
sent
Messages?
Like this?
One
Right after
The other.
Anyone else find the constant badgering of dings and vibrations when colleagues communicate like this to be a real teeth grinder when you’re zeroed in on work (or trying to take a short pomodoro / coffee break and space out for a bit between tasks)?
I blame the chat apps more for this tbh. Coming from a long history of using IRC, using separate messages is a completely normal way of dividing up one's text, and it was fine because N lines of text in a single message wasn't hugely different from N lines of text over multiple messages. For the most part, the end result takes up the same amount of screen real estate, and I honestly like being able to send out thoughts piecemeal in a more active discussion--it lets others start priming their response before I'm done, or read through it as it's being said, versus having to wait for a complete set of messages. It's really one of the differentiating features that made me prefer chat over email or forums back in the day.
Slack, Discord, etc. wander in and turned chat into a _product_, and specifically a modern mAxImIzE eNgAgEmEnT product. No fucking chat app should send as many notifications as Slack and Discord do default, and they also shouldn't return to the same noisy default every time you join a new server, but they do. There's a good reason for this: constant pings make you use the app more because human brains are easily distracted, doubly so when something has been crafted to grab your attention. This probably results in a mix of actual stickiness and garbage interaction stats that product managers toot in internal meetings to demonstrate how good their ping flood is to clueless upper management, but the end result is that the distractathon defaults are just accepted as the way things are.
Love it. It lets us interrupt each other so we don't waste time if one of us "gets it" before the other.
Plus it keeps attention from straying when the conversation is semi-critical but not critical enough for a call.
A coworker of mine does the opposite: 10 minutes of "X is typing...." The result is a finely crafted paragraph. But we could've done without 90% of it because I would've had an answer for him after the first sentence.
It lowers the latency of the communication and also makes the text easier to read. Before you've finished typing it all out, your co-worker has already started processing and thinking about the question.
This is superior than just sending one big block of text.
I like it. The reason is that sometimes I will see "X is typing...." and it seems to last 5 minutes and I don't know if the app just messed up because they bumped space by mistake and left to get a coffee or if they are actually slowly composing their thoughts in their version of correct capitalisation and grammar.
Breaking it up lets me get to the point quicker than they do, and I'm ready with a reply by the time they're finished (or cut them off when it's appropriate and they're going down the garden path).
The dings are annoying but that's a problem with the chat apps. I turn off sound on my work laptop usually anyway.
And personally, I got into this habit in online games before voice chat and we all moved this over to ICQ/IRC and the habit stuck. It now feels very inefficient to do it the other way.
Interesting. Have you observed others on your team doing the same-or is it something you pay attention to? I admit and understand not many people really care to notice the habit.
To me, that's fine if you're actually having a conversation (i.e. that chat window is likely to be in the foreground). It can be a case of using spare bandwidth to minimize latency, so to speak. But it's terrible if the thread is meant to be in async mode.
Overall, I think the problem here isn't the method of communication, per se. It's people placing unreasonable demands on your attention. Someone who came up to you in the middle of your break and started rambling a vague request would be annoying in the same way, even though the method of demanding your attention is different.
I’m horrible about this. I ask a question and then answer it, hold a whole conversation with myself and the poor recipient. Someone take away my Mattermost login!
> Anyone else find the constant badgering of dings and vibrations
Aside from the obvious issues with the annoying by default clients this is an unfortunate regression in desktop/mobile environments, they offer very little in the way of passive notifications. Silence and changes to the system tray icon used to handle this with a minimum of annoyance but now everything has to play a sound, flash the window or send a notification.
It depends. If they are just typing fast and have real sentences on each line then that's different from two words per line like you showed.
But I think personally that for cognitive work it's actually necessary to be able to turn notification sounds off and ignore chat sometimes if it is used routinely. And if the employer didn't understand then I would try to get another job if possible.
Sometimes very guilty of this but I've done the "type as I think" then "end up figuring out the answer before I finish explaining my question" enough times that I now make an effort to fully form my question before sending.
The exercise of trying to concisely explain the situation and form the question is frequently enough to sort out a path forwards.
Not all coworkers enjoy being used as a chat-based rubber duck!
I think it's a matter of what kind of IM culture you grew up with. As a kid and young adult I used IRC and messengers that limited message size, so doing that was pretty common and everyone did it.
My younger co-workers who only seem to have known Slack and the likes find it really annoying.
I had one friend who did that for years, it was always hard to read him. Surprisingly, after moving from local instant messenger (Gadu Gadu) to facebook messenger he started typing as everyone else. No idea why.
Nope. Not my duty to modulate my communication to YOUR notification preferences.
I say this as someone who has been working remote with various teams for nearly seven years.
Crucial to the success of any remote team is feeling comfortable sharing and communicating via async and text based means.
You can always just turn $SLACKISH off and actually focus. If you're on call or in a situation wherein you need to watch messages and respond immediately - you're not going to reach flow state anyways.
Do not disturb and other notification settings exist so you can decide when you get dings.
I'll leave my bite sized messages for detailed threading, thanks!
> Do not disturb and other notification settings exist so you can decide when you get dings.
Yeah, but an option which I think would smooth this situation which I never see available is "give me a notification when they've stopped adding messages for at least k seconds".
If some of my teammates write chunky messages which are immediately actionable, I'm fine seeing the notification immediately. But if I put that in my settings, the a minority of people who send a stream of short drip messages which are only actionable when considered in aggregate seems super annoying.
I am just as annoyed at this as OP is, and yes when someone does this to me I mute their thread/messages. This is fine for me, but keep in mind you will get much slower replies from me since I will no longer see notifications for your messages, compared to people who don't do this.
I’m not asking you or anyone to moderate or change anything about how you communicate, friend (entirely because I know how futile it is). Just idly pondering if others have similar reactions to it.
Communication should be done with an awareness of the audience / recipient. Respecting explicitly expressed preferences, if reasonably accommodated, is simple courtesy.
This raised the question of - why not use email instead, then?
Then answer I came up with is that the asker wants an immediate-ish response.
But in this case, the "hello" makes sense not as a pleasantry, but as a way of finding out, "if I ask you a question right now, will I be able to get an immediate-ish response?"
It doesn't sound like this problem can be easily solved with "nohello", it sounds like a more involved solution might be needed.
Or you can just send me a brief sentence about what your problem is. So I can decide how much of a context switch it is. At my last company, I could be working on any number of problems from the front end (not likely), to infrastructure, to dealing with documentation for a customer. If you tell me what the issue is, when I do come up for air, I can decide where I place you in the queue. A “hello” goes to the bottom of the queue. I might not even put “respond to bo1234 to see what he wants.”
If I am asking a question where your response isn’t blocking me, I’ll say that...
“No rush, it’s not blocking me. I have X,Y I can be working on”.
“I’m working a little late tonight. If you’re busy, this can be a tomorrow problem.”
I personally prefer a wall of text telling me everything they have already tried. If they have already tried my first ideas, I can decide whether I have time or not.
> But in this case, the "hello" makes sense not as a pleasantry, but as a way of finding out, "if I ask you a question right now, will I be able to get an immediate-ish response?"
Eh, I respond a lot quicker to questions than "hello", I can ignore a hello for hours.
Email is a linked list with lots of metadata on each node, messages are an array with minimal metadata. Although modern email clients can make email threads simple and easier to follow, the UI is still much more cluttered and sometimes threading gets borked.
I was in an IRC channel a while back that had "Don't ask to ask, ask" in its topic, because it was so common for people to join and write "May I ask a question?".
We see this all the time today over in the Reactiflux channels on Discord. We've got a bot that will show pre-recorded answers for common topics when we ping it, and one of the most frequently used ones is exactly this:
Readit News
I always wondered if people wanted to wait until the messagee was sat on the other end of the keyboard giving their full attention. If this is the case a phonecall would be more appropriate imo.
It wastes so much time for everyone involved.
I sometimes wonder if these same people think I'm being rude when I write a message like "Hey, xyz, I was wondering if you knew PDQ about ABC?"
Like, are they expecting the convo to go like
Because I've absolutely had chat conversations like that. It drives me nuts because it's stuff that can be solved in 10 seconds but ends up taking 30 minutes worth of disruptions.But why is that your problem to be infuriated about? If they weren't bothered by doubling the time to a response, why should you be? And if they are ... why should you be?
There should be one like this for email too, if your email is simple... put the content in the subject line! Like, if I'm telling someone the date/time for something (that doesn't warrant an "invite"), I'll put it right in the subject line. When I'm telling my coworkers I'm taking a few days off, I'll put those days right in the subject line...etc.
One of my biggest annoyances.
I have gotten in the habit of just responding "yo" and going back to whatever I was doing.
Could be minutes to an hour before I come back to the chat
Either way I go back to what I was doing until I come to a convenient stopping point, typically between 1 and 5 minutes.
Just curious, because I think of myself as being pretty sage but that sort of response would sit with me for awhile.
once i establish rapport and recognize our mutual humanity, then future engagements i can get straight to the point without people just feeling used
of course some people get offended by the preliminary niceties, but they are in the minority, so best to bet on the common case in absence of further knowledge
Using chat for support. The first thing it asks is "Please explain why you need assistance"...
I fill it in with all the pertinent details...
Then, when the support person finally comes online their first or second message is: ...and how may I help you today?
Why the hell did I just spend the time to type that in to my phone if I know have to type it again for you.....
This culture of nitpicking text communication styles has been with us for decades and isn’t going away soon. Same on IRC and Prestel before that. And it has always been about providing the enforcers with a sense of power and reinforcing tribalism around those who know the rules and those who need to be forcibly educated.
If it’s good enough for Lionel Richie, it’s good enough for you.
Broken habits in an org that can exacerbate this:
- People don't feel safe saying stuff in a group context so there's a large number of DM conversations at any one time.
- The chat app is actually used for time-critical issues and sometimes an immediate response is strongly expected. People feel obligated to rely on notifications.
- There's in general a poor commitment to supporting a "low-interrupt" mode of work for some roles.
He explained it. Its the equivalent of calling someone for help and putting them on hold.
I think it's okay if you at least give the topic of your question or start asking it in the first line and within five seconds or so get to the point.
But if you just give a greeting or something and then delay, it wastes people's time.
A standalone hello is actually more efficient in time-sensitive situations. The sender needs to know if the recipient is actually available so that they don't waste effort typing a question that won't get answered in time.
I was about to downvote you, but this last shout saved you.
"Sometimes life beats down and crushes the soul, and art reminds you that you have one." --- Stella Adler
Busy? Absolutely.
Like, if you're saying it's not working: say that. If you're saying it's not doing what you expect: say that. It's the QA version of "we have to talk" and I'm instantly anxious until you clarify.
In chat, something like 1/4-1/2 are "is X working?" followed by total silence. Sometimes they really are just asking if it's running, i.e. does X still exist. Sometimes they're having a failed build on a different system because their dependency manager cache is broken and it's blaming random libraries. Sometimes the frontend is busted.
What they're doing in practice is asking for 1:1 dedicated help on literally anything, so the only reasonable choice for a responder is those unicorn devs who know everything somehow. They almost never exist, so those "questions" go unanswered for a long time.
This sounds pretty similar to the "askers vs guessers" cultural difference. If it's okay to receive a 'no', then you're free to ask whatever. If you're expected to know before you ask, then you can't ask until you know what the answer will be.
But, yes, it's valuable if someone is asking can clarify "here's what I tried..".
Deleted Comment
- Use spacing to make your message easy to parse.
- Have clear questions that are easy to jump back and respond to. Have them separated out by spacing, and preferably numbered.
- If there's something I need to copy paste, an email address, a specific id, a phone number, then put it on it's own line. Then I can double click and get the whole thing rather then dragging the cursor to do it.
The very first thing you should type after your initial greeting should be your question(s). Don't bury the lede.
You can provide all the additional explanation (i.e. what you were doing when it broke, where you've looked, what you've tried, etc) after you ask your questions. By asking up front, you frame the conversation so that the person you are communicating with can read your supporting information with the correct context.
http://xyproblem.info/
But how do we feel about people breaking their thoughts up?
Into individually
sent
Messages?
Like this?
One
Right after
The other.
Anyone else find the constant badgering of dings and vibrations when colleagues communicate like this to be a real teeth grinder when you’re zeroed in on work (or trying to take a short pomodoro / coffee break and space out for a bit between tasks)?
Slack, Discord, etc. wander in and turned chat into a _product_, and specifically a modern mAxImIzE eNgAgEmEnT product. No fucking chat app should send as many notifications as Slack and Discord do default, and they also shouldn't return to the same noisy default every time you join a new server, but they do. There's a good reason for this: constant pings make you use the app more because human brains are easily distracted, doubly so when something has been crafted to grab your attention. This probably results in a mix of actual stickiness and garbage interaction stats that product managers toot in internal meetings to demonstrate how good their ping flood is to clueless upper management, but the end result is that the distractathon defaults are just accepted as the way things are.
Plus it keeps attention from straying when the conversation is semi-critical but not critical enough for a call.
A coworker of mine does the opposite: 10 minutes of "X is typing...." The result is a finely crafted paragraph. But we could've done without 90% of it because I would've had an answer for him after the first sentence.
This is superior than just sending one big block of text.
Breaking it up lets me get to the point quicker than they do, and I'm ready with a reply by the time they're finished (or cut them off when it's appropriate and they're going down the garden path).
The dings are annoying but that's a problem with the chat apps. I turn off sound on my work laptop usually anyway.
And personally, I got into this habit in online games before voice chat and we all moved this over to ICQ/IRC and the habit stuck. It now feels very inefficient to do it the other way.
Overall, I think the problem here isn't the method of communication, per se. It's people placing unreasonable demands on your attention. Someone who came up to you in the middle of your break and started rambling a vague request would be annoying in the same way, even though the method of demanding your attention is different.
Aside from the obvious issues with the annoying by default clients this is an unfortunate regression in desktop/mobile environments, they offer very little in the way of passive notifications. Silence and changes to the system tray icon used to handle this with a minimum of annoyance but now everything has to play a sound, flash the window or send a notification.
But I think personally that for cognitive work it's actually necessary to be able to turn notification sounds off and ignore chat sometimes if it is used routinely. And if the employer didn't understand then I would try to get another job if possible.
The exercise of trying to concisely explain the situation and form the question is frequently enough to sort out a path forwards.
Not all coworkers enjoy being used as a chat-based rubber duck!
My younger co-workers who only seem to have known Slack and the likes find it really annoying.
I agree that this spacing-out is annoying, but...there's an easy way to solve this problem at receiver-end.
edit: i guess FB shows chats in a small popup too, forgot about it bc i always use the big interface @ messenger.com
(hejka, zawsze smiesznie spotkac tu kogos z pl!)
I say this as someone who has been working remote with various teams for nearly seven years.
Crucial to the success of any remote team is feeling comfortable sharing and communicating via async and text based means.
You can always just turn $SLACKISH off and actually focus. If you're on call or in a situation wherein you need to watch messages and respond immediately - you're not going to reach flow state anyways.
Do not disturb and other notification settings exist so you can decide when you get dings.
I'll leave my bite sized messages for detailed threading, thanks!
Yeah, but an option which I think would smooth this situation which I never see available is "give me a notification when they've stopped adding messages for at least k seconds".
If some of my teammates write chunky messages which are immediately actionable, I'm fine seeing the notification immediately. But if I put that in my settings, the a minority of people who send a stream of short drip messages which are only actionable when considered in aggregate seems super annoying.
Then answer I came up with is that the asker wants an immediate-ish response.
But in this case, the "hello" makes sense not as a pleasantry, but as a way of finding out, "if I ask you a question right now, will I be able to get an immediate-ish response?"
It doesn't sound like this problem can be easily solved with "nohello", it sounds like a more involved solution might be needed.
If I am asking a question where your response isn’t blocking me, I’ll say that...
“No rush, it’s not blocking me. I have X,Y I can be working on”.
“I’m working a little late tonight. If you’re busy, this can be a tomorrow problem.”
I personally prefer a wall of text telling me everything they have already tried. If they have already tried my first ideas, I can decide whether I have time or not.
Eh, I respond a lot quicker to questions than "hello", I can ignore a hello for hours.
"You just did."
"May I ask another?"
"You just did."
"You are allowed 3 questions and you just used them."
https://github.com/reactiflux/reactibot/blob/a4e4e9d211a11c4...