No Hello: A New Wave

I&#x27;ve seen these for years, and I&#x27;ve sent it to people who needed it, but as I get older and learn more emotional intelligence, I&#x27;m starting to consider the reality is some people just want to build relationships at work because of how terribly difficult it is to make friends as an adult.<p>Also, depending on your job, you may have to accept that some jobs require you to be malleable to having wrenches thrown into your flow state. It feels like people expect life to always have their boundaries in mind, but none of us are the main character here.

So this is a direct copy of <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nohello.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nohello.com&#x2F;</a> ?

My coworkers have it down to a tee (the wrong way that is):<p>Co-worker: hello<p>Me: Hi, what&#x27;s up?<p>Co-worker: got 5 mins?<p>Me: Sure<p>Co-worker: <i>rings me to ask a question that could have been a single chat message</i><p>In isolation, this would be fine but this can happen multiple times a day.

I tend to share <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nohello.net&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nohello.net&#x2F;</a>. It may be newer, but it&#x27;s also open source, is available in multiple languages, emphasizes asynchronous communication [1][2], and uses _The Office_ as its setting which makes sharing it a bit more lighthearted.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Asynchronous_communication#Electronically_mediated_communication" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Asynchronous_communication#Ele...</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;async.twist.com&#x2F;asynchronous-communication&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;async.twist.com&#x2F;asynchronous-communication&#x2F;</a>

I&#x27;ve got a similar issue with people emailing IT to ask if they should raise a ticket - just raise the ticket and if it&#x27;s the wrong place to ask a question then you&#x27;ll get a response telling you that. Instead we get email question-&gt;response: raise a ticket-&gt;ticket raised-&gt;actual response to question<p>It&#x27;s especially annoying as our ticket system can just be emailed, so the original email question could just include the ticket system as well which would enable us to answer it and not waste attention and time for both us and them.

I’ve seen colleagues share this or link to it in their Slack status. It feels a bit… odd to me.<p>Yeah it’s maybe a bit annoying when people do this, but does it really need a whole campaign website? Not everyone is going to communicate in exactly the way you like.

When these types of conversations come up, I prefer the phrase “optimize for the receiver” - thinking on how to best be understood versus what is easiest&#x2F;most convenient for the sender (in the hello case: requiring someone’s attention).

I&#x27;m always annoyed by &quot;hello&quot; messages. I once got to a point where I almost started creating a Slack bot that automatically replies with a &quot;Hello&quot; to such hello messages. In the end I never got to implement it but I still think that it is the right way to make the problem go away.<p>For now, I just settled on being more patient and stoic about the &quot;Hello&quot; kind of people and to lead by example and not do it myself.

I follow a simple rule.<p>If I&#x27;m looking for a written conversation, I say hello followed by whatever I want to say next in the same message.<p>If I want to call someone, I say hello and ask them if they are available in the same message.<p>I avoid situations in between because they are usually highly entropic and confusing. And sending a single message works, so there&#x27;s no need to fix it.

Wouldn’t it be nice if everyone just wrote letters?<p>I suspect the author is annoyed when the cashier says “hello, how are you?” before they start ringing them up.<p>This is just culture. Being upset about it is an inefficient waste of energy.<p>I think people frequently say hello to ease people into their request. To note that we’re all human and more than just doing jobs. Also to prove and see if you’re there and available for an interruption. If you don’t respond to “hello,” then perhaps instead of messaging they will call or email or wait.<p>If they wanted async, they would just email.

This seems to stress a lot of people out. But doesn&#x27;t stress me out at all. After a bit of thought, I think it&#x27;s because I turn off notifications for all slack&#x2F;email type stuff at work. Instead I just habitually check them. If someone really urgently needs me, I&#x27;m sure they&#x27;ll call.

I used to do the nohello thing but since seeing this popup a few years ago I switched back to hello to be annoying. I&#x27;ve got an instinctive reaction whenever I&#x27;m told what to do to try doing the opposite.

people who are obsessed with this subject usually have poor communication skills.

Imagine being this triggered because somebody opened their conversation with “Hello”. In my experience not many people will simply leave it at “Hello” for more than a few minutes. At which point you can respond to their question. And if they never provide more details then the problem solved itself.

I disagree. I start text chats with &quot;hello&quot; all the time.<p>It basically relates to channel choice. For some kinds of messages a near-real-time text chat is the right channel but async email-like flow would be entirely the wrong channel.<p>So I start a convo with &quot;hello&quot; to probe if the other party is available for near-real-time text chat, because away-status indicators are frequently unreliable.<p>There are also special kinds of communication needs like if I need help with something and there are 3 people who could potentially help me out on something that&#x27;s a blocker for me. I then just want to probe for the first person capable of unblocking me. The protocol is then something like: &quot;me-to-person-a: hello&quot;. wait for 5 minutes. no respone. &quot;me-to-person-b: hello&quot;. wait for 5 minutes. no response. &quot;me-to-person-c: hello&quot; wait for 5 minutes. all of a sudden person b has become available and replies &quot;person-b-to-me: hello, what can i do for you?&quot; ...now i start chatting with person b. meanwhile, 20 minutes after my initial prompt when I&#x27;m already well into my way, discussing my blocker with person b, person c comes online and says &quot;hello&quot;. I respond &quot;oh, never mind: person b is already helping me out&quot;. ...person a, as it happens, is fighting a production issue and not responding to me right now, knowing that i&#x27;m a newbie developer who likely has newbie questions. fair enough, he&#x27;s entirely within his rights to ignore me.<p>If instead, I just open the convo with a drawn-out description of the issue i need help with, I&#x27;m kind of stuck after firing off a message to the first person. Because now, I don&#x27;t want to start wasting another person&#x27;s time by &quot;cross-posting&quot; to a second 1-on-1 chat, as that is likely to duplicate work. In that case, to be polite, I&#x27;d have to at least wait a few hours, cross-post to a second person, and then say to the first person something like &quot;oh, it seems like you&#x27;re unavailable. actually never mind, I guess person-b might be able to help me out faster&quot;. ...this latter kind of communication is kind of awkward, and in any case inefficient.