[mr_tristan]

> A video conference is a sterile dehumanizing experience. A good in-person meeting is pure jazz. Its elegant sparring between those who care deeply about the things they are building, and watching and participating in this banter is one of the joys of my professional career.

This gave me a chuckle. After 20+ years in the business, the "pure jazz" in-person meetings vs "complete waste of time" in-person meeting ratio was, I don't know, 1:100. I can think of maybe 2 or 3 out of the last several years before the pandemic that were really consequential.

There are great reasons to meet and hash things out, but honestly, if everyone's in the office, I've found that it's a green light for lazy managers to work out communication and team build by... having more meetings. Not running them well, not writing any actual decision down, just having a meeting and thinking it's progress.

My main hope is that people use this remote-first time to really learn how to write and share writing. But, if I end up just getting people to learn how to start a Slack DM with a question instead of just "Hi! Are you there?", well, that will also be progress.

[function_seven]

> But, if I end up just getting people to learn how to start a Slack DM with a question instead of just "Hi! Are you there?", well, that will also be progress.

Why does this piss me off so much? I mean, the Slack thing. There are half a dozen people who DM me each day with "Hi." or "Good morning". ...And nothing else. Those messages fill me with instant dread. Oh God what are they going to ask me now?, or, fuckin' out with it, yeah?

I'm pretty sure it's because I'm right, and they know what they're headed towards will be a slog. So better to trap me by having me respond first ("Hi, what's up?"). Now that I've responded, THEY GOT ME! Without knowing the subject matter, I'm committed to a discussion about it.[0]

Contrast this with those compose an actual message. ("Morning. Quick question, how many modifiers are we allowed to comp on the widgets this year before we need the TPS Approval Team to get involved?", or "Hi. Can you update the stats today for tomorrow's meeting?") Those are fantastic. If it's a simple question, I can respond instantly without losing flow or whatever. If it's a complicated question, I can respond instantly with "I'll find out by COB tomorrow", or maybe it's complicated and also aligned with what I'm working on, so I pick up the phone and call them right then. I have options.

But the "hi" with no context or further messages? I just flat out ignore those now. Hopefully I'll be getting people to learn how to start a DM with a question.

[0] Hmm, I just got an idea. I'm going to start DMs with "Promise you won't get mad." :P

[darekkay]

It's a common asynchronous communication anti-pattern, there's a website dedicated to this: https://nohello.net/en/

I have found out a way to make people realize by themselves how inefficient this practice is: if I get a "hi" message without any further question/info, I will delay the response for a few hours. The next time I always get the full message right away.

[Olreich]

I find it funny that there’s also a competing camp: https://yeshello.org

[kristjansson]

The timestamps kill me

[sdoering]

Thanks for the tip. I need to try this one out.

I really despise this pattern, as described by OP.

[axiosgunnar]

Being passive aggressive is common among toddlers and mediocre companies.

People who build unicorns know how to communicate. It‘s not that hard, really.

[rlt]

> There are half a dozen people who DM me each day with "Hi." or "Good morning". ...And nothing else.

This must be a company culture thing. Approximately no one at my company does it.

On the contrary, it feels like a waste of everyone’s time to do the TCP handshake thing before asking the question, just fire off your UDP packet with the “hi” pleasantry and actual substance in all in one.

[XorNot]

Just the other day I was trying to figure out how to link a bot into Teams in the background to deal with this exact problem: if I get a message which only says something like "got a moment?" it would automatically send back "what's the issue?" or something similar.

[thrower123]

Alas, building a Teams bot to do something actually useful like that is all but impossible...

[XorNot]

It feels like someone should have disassembled the protocol and created a way to hook in as a pretend extra client by now (that just looks like your user) but Google's become very bad at making these sorts of resources available.

[thrower123]

Developer resources on the Teams front are just horrible.

It's mind-boggling how bad the SDKs remain this many years into the product.

[commandlinefan]

No, I just think it seems rude to start with a question instead of a stock pleasantry. I know you know I’m teeing up a question, if I wasn’t I wouldn’t be slacking you at all.

[function_seven]

Right. We both know you're going to ask a question. So fire away.

I don't mind a "Hi." followed by some [user is typing] followed by the actual question. It's the naked "hi" with nothing else. The "hi" that's just dropped there awaiting me to confirm that I'm now a part of a conversation I know nothing about.

Emails have subject lines and require the sender to write out what they want. Phone calls leave me the option to pick up or let go to VM if I'm not available. But DMs are the worst of those two: text like an email, realtime like a phone call.

For some reason those seem to correlate with users who want me to do their work for them, or are about to drop a request that I have no time for—and don't even have the time to explain why it's not my domain or a good fit for my schedule. These are requests I'd love to get via email so I can respond on my own time. Or as a voicemail. Or even as a written out DM.

But not as another message in "a conversation we're having now."

[sdoering]

Additionally I really am fed up with people splitting everything in Slack into multiple lines so that I receive multiple notifications from what should have been a three to five liner.

Was it a nuisance when work from home started more and more people switched over to this pattern.

Nowadays I am just fed up with it.

But it might be because after 23 months we (the company I am working for) still haven't been able to learn how to replace most meetings with forms that don't take up that much synchronous time.

Most meetings I am in could be at least cut short when prepared up front by a document that enables commenting. Then one could discuss ideas and not need to generate them on the fly.

And then there are the few cases where the need is to brainstorm. These can be fun. And I like them. But they are for cases when the map/way/ideas are yet unknown.

When the path is more clear things imho should be more asynchronously organized.

[rhizome]

>Additionally I really am fed up with people splitting everything in Slack into multiple lines so that I receive multiple notifications from what should have been a three to five liner.

On IRC this is called "scrolling" and depending on your relationship with the person you can ask them if someone is playing a joke by hooking their enter key up to their spacebar.

In general I think what's happening is a tell that a person doesn't act with fully-formed thoughts when they open their mouth.

[tnorthcutt]

Yes, but even more rude with async communication like Slack is sending a pleasantry by itself, and not following it with a question until the initial pleasantry receives a response.

https://nohello.net/en/

[mr_tristan]

Yes, it's very much the expectation that I need to somehow be immediately available that makes it rude. I don't know how many times I have to respond, "Hi! Do you have a question? If you want to chat, feel free to schedule some time on my calendar, I'm free most of the day."

[vladvasiliu]

> Yes, it's very much the expectation that I need to somehow be immediately available that makes it rude.

I pretty much agree with the other comments against people just saying 'hi' and nothing else. But this made it click to me.

I think many of the people who do this are the same who drop by your desk and ask for a random thing, without taking the time to ask whether you're available or not. This is the same thing, just moved online.

Also, bonus points for people who just say 'hi', you say hi back, and they never reply anything. Reminds me of people in person who would come up to your desk, say hi, while at the same time frantically typing on their phones and making you wait.

[marcosdumay]

Well, it is very rude to request attention without any sign of what you want to discuss and no indication that you will even be there to say anything once you get the person's focus.

I completely understand where you are coming from. But rest assured, your politeness is stressing the people around you and lack of it will at worst perceived as rushness.

[D13Fd]

“Hey, [question here]?”

[LAC-Tech]

Yeah that's what I default to. Or maybe even "Morning, how's it going? [question here]".

I like to be friendly but also to not to waste time by doing some kind of weird manual slack handshake protocol.

[disgruntledphd2]

In slack at least you can insert line breaks so the pleasantry first, line break, then question.

[distances]

Exactly this. All in one message, not so that you send the first "Hey" and then formulate the main question for a couple of minutes while the other person is already waiting.

[distances]

Sure start with a pleasantry, but include the question in the same message! Write it out first in notepad or whatever if need be. The first message needs to have enough information for them to process the topic as you are already demanding the recipient's attention with it.

[rsanheim]

I agree that many meetings are often useless and much could be gained if more folks could learn to express ideas and debate and converse in long form writing (not slack messages, not what passes for code review at many shops).

I don’t think that contradicts Rands’ main tpoint that something significant is lost when a good discussion or debate or rant can only be held over video conf. Modern management dictates endless meetings to justify its existence, but that is largely a separate issue from the fact that a truly “alive” face to face human interaction can not be replicated by current tech, not even close. I’ve worked primarily remote for 10+ years, but I still cherish the times when a good team I was on got on-site to debate or argue and then figure out a way forward and plan it out l. I think it can be easy to forget that with the rise of remote-first jobs and endless travel restrictions we live with.

The highest bandwidth conversation is done in person, and I don’t think tech has really come close, regardless of how far it has come. I hope that gap narrows and more younger folks can experience what they have missed if their only real job experience has been done over zoom and slack.

[bckr]

I think what's being left out of this conversation are "quick syncs"--the equivalent of coffee breaks or "can we look at something together?"

These are what I desire to have (that and grabbing lunch together) and why I'm looking forward to <100% WFH

[rootusrootus]

> There are great reasons to meet and hash things out, but honestly, if everyone's in the office, I've found that it's a green light for lazy managers to work out communication and team build by... having more meetings. Not running them well, not writing any actual decision down, just having a meeting and thinking it's progress.

In my office, this has gotten significantly worse during the pandemic. Death by a million zoom calls, we have far more meetings now than when we worked in the same space. Sure, we had plenty of dumb meetings then, but it has escalated to new heights in the last couple years.

[mr_tristan]

To be honest, I think this is a sign that the company really isn't experimenting, and probably won't figure out how to stay fully remote post-pandemic.

The best thing my company did was host a single "async week". Absolutely no video calls, only async. A lot of communication shifted after that week.

For example, my group has eradicated "round robin" calls, where individuals share their status or whatever. Instead, you create a card on a doc that's mostly a kanban board. That card just links to notes in another doc. So... we basically have an agenda system that: a.) keeps regular meetings on point quickly, and b.) keeps notes of what's been decided. We wouldn't have figured this out without ripping off the band-aid and forcing everyone to do it differently for a week.

[droidist2]

Agree, and at least in-person meetings give you human contact. Zoom meetings are like giving yourself a sunburn but also not getting any Vitamin D in the process.

[rightbyte]

Meetings at my prior place was limited by meeting room scarcity. Ofcourse the amount of meetings explode in such a place!

[gedy]

Also been in this industry for 20+ years, at 5-6 companies, and feel same.

I hate to sound so cynical, but the only people I've see jazzed about meetings are business types who are uncertain what they want in the product, and engineering talks them through reality of "well we could do this or that", and sometimes it results it clarity and excitement for them, e.g. "Yes! Okay!"

[babyshake]

This is a pattern that has always been there but it seems to be a lot worse for some reason in the age of video conferences:

1. Business types: "Is {vague and half-baked feature idea} feasible?" 2. Engineer: "Why yes, it's not a perpetual motion machine so I think it should be feasible." 3. Business types: "Okay, great. So we can expect it to be shipped next week?" 4. Engineer: "Well first we would want more detailed specs and we're waiting for an API we need from another team and we have three other projects that we are finishing up to ship next week..." 5. Business types: "We need this feature next week so let's schedule another 45 minute meeting with 15 people to figure out how we can get this done by next week."

[nunez]

OMG yes. I can never understand the teams that think “Why yes, more meetings to talk about how to do this thing with a sudden deadline” is a good idea. Unfortunately, my experience has shown that people on these teams work nights and weekends to actually get the thing done, and then gloat about how much they’re working, since that’s what everyone else in the org does (and is rewarded on to some extent)

[alexashka]

Hahaha this reads like a comedy sketch :D Experienced developers I've met are quite adept at managing expectations, so this is only an issue if you get thrown into a senior role far too early in your career.

[alexashka]

> if I end up just getting people to learn how to start a Slack DM with a question instead of just "Hi! Are you there?", well, that will also be progress.

As an ex-hi-are-you-there, let me chime in.

Unless you've had years of practice writing out your thoughts (what good programmers do for a living) and have a systematic understanding of what problem you're having and how the other person may be able to help - it is actually really hard to express yourself concisely and coherently.

People who've engaged in online forums for years or are otherwise quite intelligent just don't understand how much of a challenge this is for a lot of people.

[mushbino]

You do follow the Hi with a question, right? You're messaging the person because you have an actual question, I'm assuming. Why not just combine them into one whole message instead of dividing them? I'm not sure I understand where the lack of practice thing comes in.

[alexashka]

If people could just ask a concise question and get a concise answer, they would just do that.

But they don't. Why? For many reasons, one of which is my previous reply.

[themadturk]

But if they’re going to ask the question anyway, what’s so hard about just typing “Hi,…” then ask whatever rambling or imprecise thing they’re going to say before hitting enter? No one is requiring it to be concise; it’s just that they got our attention with the “Hi” and now we’re waiting five minutes for the question to be asked, instead of the question, in whatever form, appearing without the preliminaries.

[alexashka]

Because, it, doesn't, solve, their, problem.

If it did, they would do it, and we wouldn't be talking about it.

This also applies to all other possible 'why don't X do Y?' questions - it's nice like that.

[themadturk]

They could do it if it was presented to them as a norm, "this is the way we like to do messaging around here." Not everyone spontaneously comes up with the best, most effective way to do things. Sometimes they need to be taught.

[odonnellryan]

I don't mind getting a "good morning" message. Why does that bother people?

[hinkley]

> just having a meeting and thinking it's progress.

Or for the pageantry, which the quote you cited is all about.