151–160 of 362 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a common theme in my workplace. Especially with everyone working remote and odd hours these days. We use both email and Slack, but most conversations tend to be asynchronous regardless and I frequently wonder why we even have an instant messenger. That said, I find that even if a message is asynchronous, it is much easier to track conversation flow via slack than email. Reply chains and indentations get messy…
> I would appreciate a more standardized practice around, "If Slack says you are available, we can expect you to respond relatively quickly" than seeing a green dot and not hearing back for hours or a day. No. Slack does not know if I’m at my desk, busy, or even taking a protected me-time lunch break. And no, you cannot expect me to manually update my status in Slack, Teams, Zoom, and every other communication tool I…
If you can't close Slack or update your status to let people know you are unavailable for long periods of time, what is the point of being on Slack? Or a team for that matter?
Barring an emergency, I'm not going to call someone directly because they're too busy working to (team)work.
If you can't play nicely on a team then maybe a different job is for you?
I am the original author of the document this document was based on. It was an internal Wiki page at Google written when I was an SRE. After I wrote the original page, someone put up an internal shortlink at "go/nohello". After I left Google, someone took the Wiki page content and [illegally, since it was Google confidential, simply from being on the internal Wiki], and put it up on the net at "nohello.com". The link…
>People who do this are generally trying to be polite by not jumping right into the request, like one would in person or on the phone - and that's great! Different people have different reasons but I notice that many people that do a naked "hi" / "hey" are trying to see if the receiver is present for an immediate reply. In other words, the sender deliberately wants a synchronous instead of asynchronous convo. They do…
If you send that, now I know you’re asking for a synchronous conversation, and I can just say yes or no or “how about later?”
I think the right way to deal with the frustration of this is to find a way to let of your frustration. Why? Because carping about it here and making web sites for this is going to change nothing. There are reasons people start chats like this, and those reasons aren’t going to go away, so this is going to keep happening whether it annoys you or not. * They want to have a live chat with you and are trying to see if y…
Maybe a more nuanced status instead of just green could help. Like Purple means I’m signed in and available for synchronous chat.
I find the styles differ based on a few factors: if someone says hi because we don’t work together very often, that makes sense. My teammates usual just throw the whole request into the hello. There’s also the issue that if I don’t answer immediately the initiator might need to find someone else. If they write their whole request out and I’m not there, it creates a demand incongruity especially if I try and work it (or provide an answer) 15 minutes later but someone else is already on it.
There’s also the factor that sometimes the person you need help from is the same person who has 40K unread emails in their inbox and doesn’t make it to all the meetings they accept. That’s another issue, but those people are also the kind of people who are subject to the most varied attempts at communication initiation.
Chat is not email. It's perfectly normal to do a handshake (syn? Syn ack. Syn ack.) in this medium, as it's fine to say "hello" or "mushi-mushi" at the beginning of the phone convo. Please don't push your lack of social skills on others.
>People who do this are generally trying to be polite by not jumping right into the request, like one would in person or on the phone - and that's great! Different people have different reasons but I notice that many people that do a naked "hi" / "hey" are trying to see if the receiver is present for an immediate reply. In other words, the sender deliberately wants a synchronous instead of asynchronous convo. They do…
I'm trying really hard to understand this mindset. What sort of question either needs to be answered immediately or not at all?
What's HN take on short messages vs long messages in slack/signal/whatsapp ? I was recently asked to make longer messages rather than short sentences when exposing ideas in the flow of the conversation (I think the manager was annoyed by incessant notifications on his phone but he could either keep the screen on or turn them off instead of telling me I could use shift-enter :D). I don't intend to change my style thou…
Your messaging habit of sending each message fragment as a new notification is the most annoying. 5 messages to communicate one thought? You have no respect for other people or their attention and are so self centered that even at their explicit request you can’t use the shift key when hitting enter.
You,re the type of communicator I’d have to look up Slack documentation to mute all messages. And forever more you would get no synchronous responses. And that’d be ok: you lack respect, you don’t deserve respect.