[smeej]

I've worked entirely remotely at companies of a variety of sizes since 2017 and didn't know people do this. Who are the people who do this? I don't mean to imply they don't exist. I genuinely want to know who they are. Like is it a generational thing? A role thing? Someone else's thing?

[vundercind]

You get some weird shit depending on company cultures.

Tools also affect it. Teams is terrible for “structural”, long-lived team chats (oh, the irony!) like are totally natural in, say, Slack, so tends to push more stuff into meetings and ad-hoc group chats. It’s a really bizarre (and endlessly irritating) design choice. You also can’t “digress” within the same channel like you can in Slack without spamming the main chat.

Worse tools = people use them differently (worse) like calling more and doing more private messaging. Add corporate, division, and individual cultures and preferences, and you can get all kinds of weird stuff going on, including the bare “hello”.

[danaris]

IME, it's partly a generational thing. People who grew up before instant, asynchronous digital communication became common seem more prone to treating chat conversations like a phone call or face-to-face conversation.

But I think a lot of it is also just individual and regional foibles. Some people feel very strongly that a conversation must begin with meaningless pleasantries or it's horrifically rude. Some people feel like it's rude to just ask you a question without first asking if that's OK—even if that's your role.

We could really do with a lot more explicit communication about communication in our culture, corporate and otherwise, setting boundaries and expectations up front.