I originally wrote this text on an internal wiki page at Google. It was short-linked to "go/nohello" and sparked a fair bit of discussion, including another page with exactly the opposite viewpoint. I have no idea who Brandon High is, but he must have copied it from inside Google and posted it publicly.
Seems like a problem that a scriptable chat client should solve: if it's the first message in a long time and it's short, debounce notifications for 30sec~1min.
Not a silver bullet but it might solve it in many cases
I kind of disagree with this. If you post your problem to someone without asking if they have the time, it interrupts their flow to a much greater degree, because it's simply not possible to read that question without your mind engaging with it.
Posting just "Hey" is kind of dumb, but starting with "Hey, do you have a minute? I have an issue" is fine. It's easy to respond to with "no, sorry" and keep working.
This. If I don't have time, I'll say "I can look at this at [time]" or just not answer if I'm e.g. presenting or something. It makes my life a lot easier when someone just gives me the facts, and it gets them to done faster as well. Pleasantries are fine and great, but in work chat, I don't consider it rude to just ask a question to someone directly. Ideally, a channel can answer, but sometimes you're working with someone specific on a thing. I also don't have a problem referring people to channels when I don't have time or don't want to get into the habit of answering that type of thing myself 100% of the time.
TL;DR help the person you want help from by doing the legwork of figuring out the exact error, and get to the point where you're asking an answerable question. Give them all the relevant details, and try to take as little of their time as possible. This, to me, is a sign of professional politeness and respect. It also tends to get you an answer quickly, and a high likelihood of that person helping you again in the future.
I just put my Skype on "do not disturb". No notifications, no sounds, just pipes all messages to my email where I'll see them when I want interruption.
So this is one way to do it. But it has its downsides too [and thus I find the webpage slightly pedantic for ignoring the tradeoffs]. I think the "Hello" is like "Syn." Cases where you may want to use hello are
1. You need an immediate response, if they are afk then you don't want to ask them the question at all because you'll ask somebody else.
2. You want to signal that you'd like to talk to them when they're free, but that your message is low priority. Generally I'd take a "hey" off-hours to mean "don't answer this unless you're on slack at your computer. Pong me back when you're in the office"
3. Some people care more about the communication being natural and human interaction than they do responding to the maximal number of things in a day. If we have to sacrifice our ability to enjoy our intercations with other people for our job, I'd ask that we don't sacrifice without a fight.
And I'm not trying to discount your experience, rather I'm trying to show that there are other people who have contradictory preferences... and raise the discussion from a "my way is objectively best!" to a conversation.
For 1, I'd rather just go ahead and ask, and if no response is forthcoming, ask someone else and then respond to the original with 'no worries, found out from ...'
If it bugs you just don't respond to the hello. If someone complains just say you were waiting for the actual content (no one just says hello on chat for no reason). You assumed that the hello was just to warn you that something longer was being typed and that you shouldn't immediately leave.
The nice feature of this approach is that you can immediately leave if you know that you really don't want to deal with whatever it is that is coming and can legitimately say you never saw it.
Yup. I ignore a lot of "hey"s, if you respond then it just incentivizes more later. No one has complained but I'd just complain back about their inefficiency. If it's an emergency, they can call me twice.
While I question the need to make this an entire website. I completely agree.
I have people who do that all the time on Skype. Say hello first then I need to say hi back and wait for them to actually ask their question. It is such an absurd waste of time.
Just include your question in your first message! Please.
I've personally found that I get much better results when I say hello first, as opposed to including everything in a single message.
My hypothesis: When you ask someone a full detailed question, the other person sees the whole thing at once, as one big daunting block of text, and they decide to ignore it for a while. Conversely, when you message someone saying "hi", it builds suspense. They start to wonder what you're going to message them about. They pause what they were doing for the few seconds while waiting for you to type out your full comment. Often times, they even reply saying something like "hello" or "what's up". All this increases their buy-in into the conversation, and makes them feel more invested. As a result, when they finally get your actual question 20 seconds later, they are a lot more willing to reply immediately.
Is it time inefficient for the other person to have to sit around for 20 seconds while you're typing in your actual question? Yes, sorry for wasting 20 seconds of your time. But that's a trivial tradeoff in comparison to me getting the information I need so I can be unblocked and productive.
If and when people start to reply promptly to messages, I'd be perfectly willing to stop using these tricks and hacks. But until then... hi.
But writing a daunting block of text will often take more than 20 seconds. What you wrote comes off as an incredibly self-centred point of view.
If you're writing big paragraphs right off the bat, then perhaps you need to think about what your typing and refine things a bit more before you break someone's attention from what they are doing.
As Mark Twain wrote, “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” You shouldn't do this, even with instant messaging.
> If and when people start to reply promptly to messages…
And there's that air of entitlement again. There seems to be two wrong assumptions: First, that everyone is in front of their instant message client all the time; and second, that they're that invested in dropping everything they are doing to sink ten or twenty minutes of chat messages back and forth with you.
Since you've made a number of assumptions about me, let me make one about you as well. You sound exactly like the colleagues I've worked with who think that their time is more valuable than everyone else's. In reality, most research shows that helping others in an organizational context is strongly correlated with business success.
I am extremely selfless in helping colleagues who ask me for help, and I would like others to do unto me as I would do unto them. To me, that sounds perfectly fair, and well aligned with the greater organization's goals.
Regarding some specific points you made:
- I spend a lot of time thinking about exactly what I'm going to say, even before I send the first hello
- It typically takes me only 20-30 seconds to write out the message immediately following the hello
- If someone happens to be busy and doesn't respond immediately to my message, I have no complaints. This is equally true whether or not I start off my message with a "hello", and is irrelevant to this discussion
There's a certain irony that your original comment sounded like you think your time is much more valuable than everyone else's too, which is probably why it's gotten so downvoted. In any case...
I probably do sound like the colleagues you've worked with. It's not that I think my time is more valuable than everyone else's, but I do this my time is valuable. It sucks that your colleagues have treated you this way. I've worked with colleagues who would interrupt me every ten or twenty minutes, just when I'm getting back into the flow of concentration needed for programming which they broke ten or twenty minutes ago, often for what seem like very simple or trivial things. My frustrations with that probably bled through in my writing.
I also agree with the principle of treating others as I would like them to treat me. Looping that back to the original topic: that is exactly why I strongly prefer not to just receive a, "Hello," with a wait for response in instant messaging, but an initial message more in line with what the article suggests. This is also what I do when sending an initial message for the same reason: I value the other person's time and want to be cognisant of that.
There's certainly a balance to be struck between valuing your own time, and valuing that of your colleagues. I just think that most people tend to err far too much on the side of not helping a colleague in need. This is backed up by the study that I linked in my previous post as well.
In an ideal world where my colleagues have learned to find that balance, no such hacks are needed. But given the reality of most teams I've worked with, if using such hacks and "wasting 20 seconds of their time" is the price I need to pay, that certainly seems like the lesser of two evils.
It sounds like you are talking about customer support chat. The "hello" problem this article talks about is more relevant to chats between coworkers or friends.
Other user types any of the common greetings alone (hi/hello/hey)
Client responds with: "this is an automated response - your greeting has been blocked until you provide a more meaningful reply"
Then filter out some rude/idiotic replies and keep filtering until the response's entropy is above a threshold and the sentence has some basic structure or presence of a couple of POS (eg a verb and noun)
This reminds me of a little anecdote. My colleagues in the office all used Skype, which was particularly handy for me as I was the only person who worked remotely (about half the time).
However, I always had the habit, when in the office, to eschew Skype and go see a person directly. It had the advantage of higher fidelity communication, and about half the time I'd figure out the answer to my own question before I got there.
After a while, I started turning Skype off when I was in the office (remember there were no other remotes at this time). This actually became an annoyance to one of my colleagues as they would have to, get this, walk across the hall if they wanted to talk to me. My ill concealed amusement at their ire did not go over well.
In person, face to face: the original instant messaging.
I see the logic here, though I would forgive people who didn't grow up on the internet for treating chat like real life (where no-one says "hello" without a moment's pause after). I think people are slowly catching on that they can do what the post describes
Absolutely DO say hello (or whatever intro, like a firstname) and DO wait for the other party to respond.
Why? Because I would hate to get "update: our quaterely results will be bad, we expect a 20% loss on our shares" popping up during a meeting just because I forgot to switch off the messaging app on my desktop.
I may be someone who is expected to see that but possibly not the other 20 participants.
A "ready for lunch?" can work without an introduction, though.
I strive to respect other people's time/concentration and I appreciate the same. So I typically start chats with, "Hey, do you have a minute?" to give them the chance to say no.
