I think you're still missing the point that the question isn't about what kind of conversation the initiator is ready and willing to have, but rather about the information asymmetry and time/emotional costs imposed on the recipient. When you open a conversation with "Hello," *you* know generally what you want to have a conversation about and that this is a good time for you to have it. The recipient receives only the notification that you would like to talk about something and is left to imagine what that might be as you type, or wait for a reply to begin typing.

Beginning a text chat with "Hello, I have a few questions about xyz and was wondering if now would be a good time to talk?" is considerate of the other party's time and attention, and it does not cost you anything but seconds to provide this context up front.

Edit: you edited and lengthened your comment.

> The protocol is then something like: "me-to-person-a: hello". wait for 5 minutes. no respone. "me-to-person-b: hello". wait for 5 minutes. no response. "me-to-person-c: hello"

I'm sorry, this is _insane_! That's 10 minutes to send out 3 words of communication, and the people who don't get back to you right away will now be getting back to you later to clarify, further worsening your signal to noise ratio! You could have spent 20 _seconds_ composing the first message with a one sentence synopsis. "Don't worry, no one is dead" or "The factory is on fire" are useful to know up front. You could copy and paste it to the next two people if they don't get back to you.

...I really don't think there's "emotional cost" on the part of the recipient in entertaining a "hello", at least not in peer-to-peer scenarios.

Now, if you're someone's boss and hitting up a subordinate with whom there is known "bad blood" then I get the point about the "emotional cost" of a scenario where you write, close to the end of the business day, "hello", then your subordinate doesn't respond for 10 minutes. Then you go home, or get into a block of meetings that will make you unavailable to continue the convo for several hours.

But if you have that little emotional intelligence, you shouldn't be anyone's boss, and if a mere "hello" from your boss freaks you out, you should probably just quit then and there.

I think there is an emotional cost in receiving a work-related message that only says "hello".

My data point: it enrages everyone I know. And they lose respect for the person who said "hello" and wasted their time.

I can’t conceive of working in an environment where coworkers are enraged by minor communication differences. Like wow you just work with a bunch of assholes.

Probably that’s the thing to solve for, not “hello”, “query” vs “hello, query”.

No. It completely disrespects the recipients work and time by demanding a meeting with no agenda.

Everyone I work with feels the same. The “hello” people are the outliers and the rest of the office knows it.

The hello people? rofl

...there must be some psychology student out there to whom this thread is an absolute gold mine for their Ph.D. thesis. ...or maybe a standup comedian.

People are telling you that they find your behavior disruptive and rude, yet you continue to discredit their feelings.

You cannot control how a recipient receives your message.

> You cannot control how a recipient receives your message.

My point exactly. Only problem: If A hurts B's feelings, that doesn't automatically mean B has the moral high ground and A is therefore in the wrong.

If B plays the "hurt feelings" card after A has done nothing to give offense other than start a conversation with "hello" in a text chat where they had no way of discerning B's emotional state, then that's the best example I've encountered yet, of a situation where A's hurt feelings clearly seem like A's problem.

The unspoken context is that this goes beyond saying "hello".

In my experience, hello people usually present with the following comorbidities:

- inability to learn and retain new information.

- inability to own their work and take responsibility from end-to-end.

- tendency to push their own work onto other people and become a victim when the other person doesn't do exactly what they want.

Maybe the psychology student you mentioned could look into this phenomenon for their thesis?

...wow, and you got all of that from "hello".

Also, not sure if you saw my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33933186

I already established that (a) I'm one of those hello people. (b) I'm allowing this conversation to change my behaviour, based on the fact that I simply never had any idea that people could take offence from a "hello". If your definition of "learn" is "coming around to your point of view", that would seem to make me a counterexample to your psychological typology.

But it still rubs me the wrong way to think that this society is leaving the business of "creation of cultural norms" to crybabies. Show me a group that's complaining about being said "hello" to, and I'll show you a group that needs to check their privilege.

No, I got all that from my multiple years of repeated interactions with "hello" people and noticing a consistent pattern.

Maybe you don't fit that mold and just like to say hello and you are a good coworker without all the bad traits I mentioned. Didn't mean to make this personal... just sharing my observations of the past.

Again, this is not about you and your personal experience. You do not know what kind of day someone else has had, and when Slack has 25+ notifications and you have deadlines, little failures to be considerate DO take a toll, just like when someone honks their car horn at you for no reason or refuses to hold the elevator for you. Sure, it's not genocide, but it's inconsiderate. Just because littering isn't murder doesn't mean it's fine.

> If instead, I just open the convo with a drawn-out description of the issue i need help with, I'm kind of stuck after firing off a message to the first person.

Succinctly, your whole strategy is wrong. Instead of round-robin'ing your way around the people, you should be broadcasting your message to an appropriate channel set to the group of people that can respond to your query.

Also: Slack allows for both private group channels, and public group channels. - If you post in a public group channel, then others who may face the same problem (maybe months later) will be able to benefit from you asking the question.

Group chats have a problem with "diffusion of responsibility" [1], and sometimes you have reasons for not wanting to broadcast whatever it is you're about to say (e.g. you're in a toxic culture where your bosses will use the fact that you need help from others against you).

I wouldn't round-robin my way through 10 people, but with 3 people it kind of seems fine to me.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_responsibility

I think if you're the kind of person who often asks for help, I'd strongly advise you to listen to advice like "no hello" (because "no hello" is broadcasted by people who are often asked for help).

Rather, you can't have both "I often ask for help" and "I don't need to listen to advice".

...this is some rando posting something on github. Advice that's binding on the recipient is not advice, it's a command. And I don't take commands from randos on github.

I also don't understand how this thread got so ad-hominem so quickly, with you acting like you know me well enough to put me in a category of people "who often ask for help", and then imply that those people are less entitled to autonomous choices on how to conduct themselves.

> this is some rando posting something on github

Sure, but it's a post which strongly resonates with many people.

I'm not even saying that I wouldn't take the advice, after all it's not costing me much to add a "topic header" to my "hellos".

...the fact that there's resonance here is something I'm only beginning to become aware of right now, as I see how people are reacting right here to what I wrote above.

I say this with 6 years of work for fully-remote companies under my belt. In those 6 years no one has ever complained about a "hello", none of those companies had this in their "netiquette" guides, and I've been on the receiving end of "hello" many times.

It has just always seemed like the most innocuous and normal thing in the world to me. So it's really weird to see people reacting so strongly right here.

In any case, you could/should simply send one DM with these 3 people (effectively, creating a private group) and then asking the question once.

- You are going to get your answer faster

- Your query is only going to people you trusted to ask for help anyway

- The parties that were not able to help at first don't need to come back to you after to see if you still need help, and you don't need to respond with "never mind, someone else helped me".

- It's just more transparent to your colleagues about what you need.

- IT STILL AVOIDS THE NO-HELLO ISSUE

I don't know your culture or your boss, but I have worked with people who could not code their way out of a paper bag, and round-robbined there way through DMs to "pair" to complete their assigned work. These people were highly paid and highly damaging to productivity and morale. I suspect I'm not alone, and I'll freely admit I have a large amount of bias in how I perceive your arguments due to that.

I will also say that your mentioned group chats should probably be a team channel, and the responsibility then becomes the Team Manager if the team members don't step up on their own. "#team-channel: @BobTeamManager are you able to help here?" would get a specific team member assigned.

I fully understand your predicament. If you type all of the problem to a person, and they don't respond, you don't know when to switch it to another.

I must confess though that by default I am very slow to respond to message that starts with hello. I just don't know if they have a 5s question or 2hr problem. So I don't respond until I can commit the upper bound of time. This will result sometimes in slow responses to quick questions - but over years I started to feel the asker should take some responsibility for their own success. A dangling Hello is just insufficient offer.

Perhaps a good compromise is "hey, can you help me troubleshoot this webserver log?" (30min ask) or "hey do you know who's on shift today" (5s ask) or "hey I need to create a new ops manual for payroll processing, when can we Get together" (4hr ask) . It's polite, not assumptive, still inquires on whether they can help in needed timeframe without committing them, but it provides receiver something to help them reply on their own terms.

You're wasting so much time and annoying people by doing that. This whole nohello thing was made exactly for people like you.

I’m guessing people seem to not answer you over IM a lot?

> 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.

What's an example? I encounter maybe one situation per month where I'd consider asynchronous communication "wrong", despite having multiple synchronous meetings per day.

In the situations where it is wrong, no one (IME) pings anyone with "hello......", They schedule time on a calendar (asynchronously).