321–330 of 362 posts
Just go in and ask your question. Or if you feel the need to be polite, say hello then just ask your question.
If you truly need synchronous communication, then use the damn phone.
Crap, I'm not the only one. A "Hi" conveys no actionable information. It's impossible to triage. It's disrespectful of people's time, even though the sender thinks it's being polite. The further I get in my career, the busier I get, and the more painful this becomes. Relentless prioritization is the only way to get the right shit done. I need to choose and pick where my attention goes to, so please, just ask!
>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…
Just “hello” seems to be rather curt.
On a similar note, please don't send a private message to someone asking a technical question more suitable for a channel. It puts unfair pressure on the receiver, denies others who could help the opportunity to do so, and doesn't help others who have the same question (including the answer not being archived in search).
That being said I have no problem if someone says, “can you ask this on the Foobar channel?”
>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…
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…
Gods, but this drives me absolutely nuts at work. Like OK, what?! It tells me nothing about the urgency of the matter, let alone what it relates to. So I can put it to the side and keep working - but it's going to be nagging at me "hmm, what if it's about x?". So now I've got to break focus and waste time just to find out how important it is, and what it even relates to. I much prefer "Hi, I have a question regarding…
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 guess I could go something like «Hi I need one of you five people to give me some context on this topic I know little about right now so I can continue on my reasoning for what actions to take by the business to mitigate some problem” and just see who answers first. Now five people are context switching for no reason and I’m a legit problem. When I don’t know what I need. Synchronous communication is very efficient…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Indeed, most people understand that Slack is not guaranteed timely delivery and knows that unless you get a reply the message may not have been received. Usually we just tap the thumb emoji to acknowledge we read and understood the request.
am I the only one to think that in the > Keith hi > Tim ...? interaction, the issue is Tim not answering by "hi, what's up" ? I find that utterly rude
One could also argue that it's utterly rude and disrespectful to the other persons' time to just type "hi".
>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…