31–40 of 134 posts
Everyone has their different communication preferences.
Personally I have never felt like the no-hello thing is worth caring about - its chat, just let it happen. It is not like you are trapped there unable to do anything else waiting for them to type their question. Just ignore it until it is worth responding to and get on with your day?
The other person isn't necessarily waiting for the response. At the least, its a communication that you are about to ask them something, i.e. check back here in the next minute or so while I type out my question. Also, "Hi" is a good way of finding out if a person is present, sometimes you might ask to call them instead of typing your question. It also might be the case there are multiple people who can answer the qu…
If you might ask to call, just ask to call. "Hi! I have a question about X that would be easier to explain on a call. Do you have time to hop on a call for 5 mins?" is a better way to start the conversation by a factor of about 10,000. You can even send this to 3 or 4 people and let anyone who doesn't respond first say you caught so-and-so first and are good to go now. Or just delete the message.
I think the problem is that the receiver wants to be polite and answer. And the sender wants to be polite and not interrupt[1]. So the extended etiquette is: if you don’t have time, it’s ok to not reply. [1] There’s also the concern that your message appears on someone’s shared screen during a video call.
It seems that both of these problems would be solved if the sender just gets to the point?
The other person isn't necessarily waiting for the response. At the least, its a communication that you are about to ask them something, i.e. check back here in the next minute or so while I type out my question. Also, "Hi" is a good way of finding out if a person is present, sometimes you might ask to call them instead of typing your question. It also might be the case there are multiple people who can answer the qu…
Or you can achieve exactly the same thing by just sending whatever message you were going to send anyway.
> It's as if you called someone on the phone and said "Hi!" and then put them on hold! Typically you both say a greeting then a conversation starts. > Instead of being polite, you are just making the other person wait for you to phrase your question, which is lost productivity. Please don't count every second of your life in productivity lost to someone else. The root of the problem might be frustration with not gett…
How do you know it takes three seconds for the other party to continue the conversation they started? It can just as well go like this: - Bob writes "Hi" and I get a notification - I enter the chat and wait for Bob - 30 seconds later the indicator shows he's typing something - 30 seconds later, still nothing - 30 seconds later the typing indicator goes away - I go away. Eventually Bob follows up with the actual conte…
> It's as if you called someone on the phone and said "Hi!" and then put them on hold! Typically you both say a greeting then a conversation starts. > Instead of being polite, you are just making the other person wait for you to phrase your question, which is lost productivity. Please don't count every second of your life in productivity lost to someone else. The root of the problem might be frustration with not gett…
Maybe the soft return is the key here. When I ask a question via slack it’s a single carefully formatted message, while my most irritating correspondents send multiple messages to convey a single question.
Oh, and don’t paste 80k log files in a message. make it easy for me to respond
The other person isn't necessarily waiting for the response. At the least, its a communication that you are about to ask them something, i.e. check back here in the next minute or so while I type out my question. Also, "Hi" is a good way of finding out if a person is present, sometimes you might ask to call them instead of typing your question. It also might be the case there are multiple people who can answer the qu…
Oh by the way, I have a follow up question....
I think it's a South African thing, but just about any call I receive from a number I wouldn't be expected to recognize, be it from cold calling spammers or legit service providers, starts with "Hello, how are you?" to which I respond with "Sorry, do I know you?". I wish call centres and companies would explain to their agents that it's not like approaching a customer who has walked into a physical shop where the cus…
The one that really gets me is when a doctor's office calls me about something, but their outgoing number is different from the number I have to call to reach them, and then they start asking me authenticating questions like my DOB and address.
No, buddy. You just called me from a number I do t recognize. I'm not going to give you identifying information!
Then they offer to give me a number where I can call them back, as though that resolves the issue. I'll call you back at your published number, where I always call you, but any old scammer could give me any old number to call them back and it wouldn't make it legitimate.
I just wish they would stop training all their patients to be scam victims.