It‘s similar to how some people in the company’s chat first initiate a longish back and forth of formal chit-chat before actually coming to the point of asking their question. I know full well from the first „hi“ that there will be coming a question my way at some point later but now I have to stop what I was doing and engage in an unnecessary real-time conversation to enable the other side to ask. Whereas if they just asked the question outright it would not matter if I was AFK at the time. I can simply answer asynchronous.<p>When I come back after lunch and find a message saying simply „hi“ from 30 minutes ago and now that person is AFK it spreads out the conversation over the whole day.<p>I am not saying you should drop the formalities, but there is nothing that forces you to split it up into multiple messages. Just write „Hi“ followed by the question in the same message.
In a similar vein, I have a couple coworkers who regularly DM me on Slack to ask “Hey, can I ask you a question?”<p>First off, you already have.<p>Second, you know the answer is yes. Why ask?<p>Thirdly, you’ve wasted my time and made this potentially asynchronous interaction synchronous. After typing “sure” and hitting enter I am basically entirely guaranteed to sit and wait for your second question because you have already interrupted my thought process and whatever I was doing.
Does this work with medical emergencies?<p>Don't say presumptious, lazy shit that walls people out like, "Is there a doctor in the house?"<p>Instead, say, "Help! How do I bleed (so to speak) bubbles of air out of someone's aorta?"
The examples given are more about inexperience talking with skilled people and less about etiquette. Same thing happens when you directly talk to anyone else with deeper knowledge of any kind.<p>For anyone reading this that is not a dev just ask us what you're trying to accomplish without the formalities. If the dev throws a tantrum, they're still green and you should try to ask up the org chart if possible. Otherwise don't hesitate to ask the dev if there's someone who is a better fit for your question.<p>I do agree with the general idea behind this post though. We ask for brevity because we know, and you do too, that the conversation is going to be a long slog. We are not reassured by your formalities that this is going to be a clean one. Nobody likes to feel embarrassed or dumb. There's no way around this, just dive in please. I've been doing this for over a decade and I have been humbled many times by the broader business concerns I had no clue about. It happens.
Amusingly, this same topic is on Twitter at the moment, where the dominant opinion seems to be “let people communicate however they want, don’t try to change that.”<p>It’s Twitter, so I don’t take it particularly seriously, but I also find it ironic how the same people who will say that you must let people be themselves do not want to let me be myself. I despise small talk. My productivity plummets if I have to work in an office, because people keep talking about nothing.<p>If you have an actual technical question, by all means, hit me up and I’ll be happy to engage you. But otherwise, no, I’d rather just keep focusing on whatever I'm working on.