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No Hello

nohello.net

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Re: No Hello

#181

Post by benberryjam »

DrammBA wrote: post #158
pards wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have several responses depending on how ornery I'm feeling 1. Respond with, "Hello. How can I help?", or 2. Wait until 5:30pm then respond, "Hello" and close my laptop for the day

Lately I've been going with 3. No response, people that have something important eventually follow up their lonely hello with their actual question/issue, the rest just forget about it I guess so the conversation never starts.

That’s what I do. There’s been plenty of times where the conversation never actually begins

Re: No Hello

#182

Post by yuriks »

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #115
dfboyd wrote: post #86

I'm the original author of this content. I wrote it on the internal wiki at Google in 2007. Someone copied it and posted it at nohello.(something) after I left Google. It's made the front page of HN multiple times. The discussions always split between the people who just want to get on with the conversation and the people who can't bring themselves to do that because they consider it unforgivably rude. The second gro…

There’s more than two groups. Some people are just being friendly, behavior which is hard to exhibit when you primarily (or only) interact with someone over chat. Yes, some people are just being nervous around potentially breaching etiquette in an ironic way that happens to be a different breach of etiquette (for some, at least) but I just respond with “hi” strictly because I am interested in getting on with the conv…

The context I usually saw this used in is that people would put the link on their online status or profile bio, as a signal and to inform anyone looking to contact them that it's ok and encouraged to just go straight to asking their business. I've never heard of someone sending it to explicitly "chide" someone for violating that etiquette.

Re: No Hello

#183

Post by gbalduzzi »

nunorbatista wrote: post #57

This is not the first time I see this here and to be honest, I was in total agreement a few years ago. In principle, I still am. Then I became a manager, I had to start dealing with more people, to navigate the enterprise environment and I understood that one of my strengths is to be understand people and to accommodate their ways of working. In this context, being hard with people that just say hello just doesn't ma…

I think that for this kind of minor things it can just be a simple note in the company policy, without being too pedantic about it

Re: No Hello

#184

Post by NackerHughes »

cogogo wrote: post #22
susam wrote: post #3

A similar guideline has been around on IRC networks for as long as I can remember. Many channels include it in their 'topic' or have a bot that reminds users: Don't ask to ask, just ask. See also https://netsplit.de/channels/?chat=don%27t+ask+to+ask >.

The first startup I worked at used IRC - well before slack etc. I hadn’t touched it since I was a teenager and think I managed to violate just about every internal channel guideline. Took me a minute to understand what “echan” meant.

For the rest of us, what does “echan” mean? Searching online for “irc echan” wasn’t much good.

edit: some wider-range searching suggests it might be Spanish for “kicked”.

Re: No Hello

#185

Post by andelink »

hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #179
quietbritishjim wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what way is that better than "Hello. How do I do x?" If they never reply, that's of no practical difference from just sending "Hello" and not getting a reply. In TCP, it's useful because it happens in a different layer of abstraction. Even then, QUIC was developed (partly) because it was realised there's no point waiting for the full SYN / SYN ACK / ACK before starting some of the higher-level exchange (although t…

It's better because X might take a while to write correctly, and you might want some assurance that you have the other person's full attention first before you even send that message. It's a commitment mechanism of sorts.

This doesn’t make sense to me. What does it matter if you have their attention first? It’s asynchronous communication. I find it so damn rude to demand my attention first before you begin typing out a long message. Like do you want me to watch the chat bubble animation while you type or something?

Re: No Hello

#186

Post by feoren »

nunorbatista wrote: post #57

This is not the first time I see this here and to be honest, I was in total agreement a few years ago. In principle, I still am. Then I became a manager, I had to start dealing with more people, to navigate the enterprise environment and I understood that one of my strengths is to be understand people and to accommodate their ways of working. In this context, being hard with people that just say hello just doesn't ma…

> Then I became a manager

So it bothered you when you had actual work to do, but once you moved to a position where everyone else was doing the actual work and you just sat around benefiting from their labor, you didn't mind minor interruptions and time wasters anymore? Shocking.

Re: No Hello

#187

Post by sceptic123 »

antonchekhov wrote: post #169

I don't understand why, if the recipient of the initial detached "hello" is annoyed at the communication tax of having to acknowledge it before the querier gets to the real point of the convo, why in the "preferred" example, he/she responds to their gratitude ("ta") with a "np"? That seems like just as much pointless communication noise, only at the other end of the chat. When I say thanks to anyone in real-life verb…

It's mostly about flow, you are already interrupted by the hello, and may have to wait some time before their response to your reply (as they then have to type out their actual question.

Thanks/No problem is closing off the interruption so there's no future expectation.

Re: No Hello

#188

Post by eddd-ddde »

antonchekhov wrote: post #169

I don't understand why, if the recipient of the initial detached "hello" is annoyed at the communication tax of having to acknowledge it before the querier gets to the real point of the convo, why in the "preferred" example, he/she responds to their gratitude ("ta") with a "np"? That seems like just as much pointless communication noise, only at the other end of the chat. When I say thanks to anyone in real-life verb…

It's not about trying to eliminate social interaction, it's about minimizing asynchronous overhead and unnecessary waiting.

That last "np" is a little nicety that lets the other person know their question was happily answered, no waiting created.

Re: No Hello

#189

Post by jvanderbot »

JdeBP wrote: post #175
jvanderbot wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, does "Alexa, add peanut butter to shopping list" fall under the UDP frame size? Joke reversed.

Your wife is possibly wondering why you send everything cleartext in one single frame and don't do challenge-response or any sort of state machine resynchronization between client and server. (-:

My wife is probably wondering why I'm using her politeness as a joke on the internet

Re: No Hello

#190

Post by scrumper »

I've seen this a lot from Indian colleagues, some European colleagues, and people from various (not all) Latin American countries too both senior and subordinate to me. I see it occasionally from some older gen X and boomer USA and UK-born people without any obvious correlation to race or gender. In other words it's pretty broad, probably has some cultural aspect to it, but I can't map it to anything obvious.

I don't think it's a failed attempt at politeness actually, partly but not only because it's so obvious how to be courteous ("Hi! Hope you had a great weekend, when you get a sec could you tell me XYZ?" or "Hey - hope your day going well. I'm stuck on ABC and it's quite urgent, please get in touch asap.") and it's even more obviously discourteous. I think it's more that we don't have the same understanding of the medium. Slack/Teams/Chat to me is a lot more like text messaging than email, and it's not at all like walking over to someone's desk or phoning them. Their mental model of it probably differs. (They're wrong of course.)

Most charitable explanation is, they want a realtime chat and don't want to be pushy about it.

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