Comment by randallsquared
3 years ago
This has a lot of good insight, but I was struck by how differently I experience
> “What’s up?” is one of the most dreadful texts to get; it’s short for “Hello, I’d like you to entertain me now.”
The typical response to "What's up?" from myself and, uh, nearly everyone I know, is some variation on
"Not much! What's up with you?" or
"[trivial recent happening, quickly related] So, what's been going on with you?"
...and that's because "What's up?" is nearly universally a way to prompt someone to ask you that question back, so you can tell them about the thing you really want to say without it seeming sudden or forced.
This reminds me of the “no hello” proposal for workplace chat messages (e.g. https://nohello.net/). It’s much less of a big deal for personal communication, but I can understand wanting someone to just say what they want to say without a manual SYN/ACK first.
As a developer who occasionally gets pulled in to help with urgent support issues, I dread bare hello messages. It gives me too much time to imagine a down site or some other critical event. Asking the question up front spares me a lot of stress.
"hello" is impossible to triage.
You should essentially never do syn/ack IRL. If you don't know precisely what the recipient is doing, you do not know what they are doing, it could be important. Always lead with info to help them prioritize things. Ideally in the first ~5 words, because that's all they may see in the notification.
(this is also IMO why phone calls are terrible. they're the equivalent of "hello" over a channel that has no other message, so everything must be assumed to be maximum urgency or you might miss something truly critical)
I practice BLUF (Bottom line up front)[0] for that very reason, and never send bare hello messages.
[0] https://www.animalz.co/blog/bottom-line-up-front/
Just wait for the next message. 9/10 times I just don't respond until I get the actual request, then I say hello back and continue with helping.
Bob, Mon 4pm: hey
(I'm picking up kids)
Me, Mon 5pm: hey
(He's gone for the day)
Bob, Tue 9am: can you check the logs for xyz...
The number of times that this has happened, with certain colleagues of mine, over Slack. Ugh.
Dude, if you had just skipped the really-actually-not-required-on-slack pleasantries, I could have already given you the information you needed, 16 hours ago.
I like the "hello" before someone engages in a chat because this way I can confirm that i) I am available to talk and ii) the message is safe (i.e. I am not displaying in front of 200 people and forgot to switch off IM).
If someone just wants to send me an information, email is great for that.
My personal order of contacts is snail mail → email → IM → phone → in person. Each of the steps is one order of magnitude of urgency greater than the previous one.
There is probably also a cultural component.
I guarantee you are annoying people with this. “Hello” conveys no information, you might as well say “tag”.
“Hello, could we set a time to chat about xyz” lets the reader give a meaningful response when available (and maybe thats immediate)
I simply ignore hellos but happily respond to questions.
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> i) I am available to talk and ii) the message is safe
If I’m at work, I’m always going to be available to talk, and anyway, nothing is lost by them sending me what they want to say and me responding when I become available.
I’m of the opinion that you shouldn’t ever send messages that are unsafe for 200 of your colleagues to see.
If you want to know if the person can chat right now, you can always say "Oh, hello. Do you have time for a short chat right now?"
Every other time when you don't need to know that, you can still not get all the problems of the empty "hello" message.
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I’ll add too that it’s better to end a work convo with pleasantries than to begin one.
“Hey I’m blocked on xyz, thanks anyways how was your weekend?”
Is far more pleasant than
“Hey how’s the weekend? anyway I’m blocked on xyz”
It's a feeler (IMO way more descriptive than "doorknob") that lets you bail if you don't want to talk. Without it you may feel obligated to listen or have to be slightly rude. With it you have a range of options like "swamped on this project, catch up with you later" or such depending on circumstances to avoid straining a relationship.
In async communication it's unnecessary though, people might do it by inertia.
Hey, you wouldn't believe who I just met in the elev
TCP RST
I don’t mind people saying hello, but also would prefer they then go ahead and state their need. I don’t always respond right away, and often times by the time I get around to answering the need is gone or the person is unavailable. I definitely don’t mind interrupting my work flow, especially to route somebody to the actual correct person who can help them with their problem, but I don’t like the expectation of a synchronous conversation, so a “hello” with nothing else will usually fall to the bottom of my list of actual concrete problems to address for that minute/hour/day.
I had colleague that was 10x developer but 0/10 communicator, if he didn't receive separate first message with "Hi, how is it going?" without me waiting for his answer before requesting something, he wouldn't reply.
It was such a dead end for getting things done (he was productive on his things, but blocker for everybody else.
I once worked with someone who got visibly frustrated when people didn't stop in the hallways to listen to her lengthy response to the phatic "how are you?" expression. She treated it as a genuine question.
It was a weird hill to die on.
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Completely agree. I think it's polite to greet others properly but it's rude to wait for a reply before moving the conversation forward. So I just write my greetings and then write what I need to say on the following lines, old school letter style. Works really well in my experience.
We have a no "Thank You's" policy because it re-opens the ticket which is really annoying.
The argument might be made, that this is a problem with many (most?) ticket management systems.
How difficult would it be to design a mechanism that facilitates humans being nice to each other, rather than making humans emulate emotionless robots?
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I'd think that the "thank you" gives finality that both parties agree it's closed.
Can you write a slack plug-in that automatically replies "Hello, what's up?" back?
That way you'd only be pulled into the conversation once there's actionable information.
I imagine it will be like this:
12.00 - Hello
12.01 - Hello, what's up?
12.02 - (long text explanation with some urgent changes)
(you just returned from another urgent 3-hours meeting)
14.40 - sorry, just read your message?
Thank you for the nohello.net thing, I am usually pretty awkward when it comes to starting conversations and but I guess I never paid attention to why that was the case. The discussion on this thread clears out the impression I had that it is usually rude to directly jumping to the question/task. I got my queue! :)
Ah, no hello! There's a lot of that where I am. Seems... a bit much? Like, I can't spare a second to say hi back again?
Regrettably, calling people "autist" demolishes one's credibility to represent the way normal people talk.
I think the author was referring to this in the context of improv, not normal conversation. It's bad to do in improv because it contributes nothing to the sketch - it's lazy and puts the entire effort onto the other person. It's much easier to riff off any kind of declarative statement or directed question. For example, "Dude this dog birthday is the weirdest party ever." or "So are you going to forgive my mom for dinner?" gives the other person an immediate context and hook to work with. Keegan-Michael Key explained this very well in a video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coZARWbdNls
When I was younger and more pretentious I used to get annoyed at friends for answering "what's up?" with "nothing much" because in my head by asking that I was obviously fishing for conversation material so you should just bring up something that we can talk about.
Something that happened recently or something that you heard about or something you remembered or something you are looking forward to, just... anything.
It seems some people might be more comfortable sitting in silence and so they don't feel the need to talk about _anything_ as a way to break it. Maybe it's an introvert/extrovert thing.
Well why are you putting it on them to come up with something to talk about? "Not much, sup with you?" puts it back on you.
I used to only ask "what's up?" after I'd exhausted everything I had to talk about usually. I used to think a lot about dynamics like these lmao.
What's up?
I'm playing with LEGO®.
I'm eating sushi. You?
I'm in spaaaaaaceeeee but I'm separated from my module!!! Halp!
I used to be that way too. Now I see that there are depths there that I didn't see. I was blind to my blindness. I try to keep my cool now. Reply with something soft and cool.
> prompt someone to ask you that question back
Huh. I’m glad this is not a thing in my circles. Being direct and exposing some vulnerability seems to work great for us.
I known its just a custom that can’t be analyzed too deeply, but what you describe sounds so timid and shy from the outside.
Rightly or wrongly (probably wrongly), if I picked up that someone was doing this, I’d assume they need a lot of special handling and ceremony to feel comfortable. It would take a lot for me to want to bother.
> "What's up?" is nearly universally a way to prompt someone to ask you that question back, so you can tell them about the thing you really want to say without it seeming sudden or forced.
Maybe in the United States, but I would hardly call it universal.
Like saying “How are you doing?” in Europe is an invitation to tell your life story.
"WHAT'S UP!?". The pre-emptive assault. The demand.
Like he's swinging a club at you. The only reply is to raise your shield.
Or you could do something clever. But either way your attention has been lassoed.
Gotta be cleverer.
"What's up?" is the knock. They could lead with whatever they really want to ask you or push at you, whether it's telling you about their vacation to Ireland or asking you if they can hold a thousand this month, but instead they've given you the opportunity to not respond, or to say "Hey, really busy; talk later?" :)
I mostly agree, and think that In addiction to what you said “what’s up” is basically like pinging someone to see if they are available so that some additional reason planning can occur
> “… so you can tell them about the thing you really want to say without it seeming sudden or forced.”
Yes. And I find myself using this pattern when I want to talk (heck, I started the conversation, so I have something in my mind), but I’m not sure if it’s a convenient time.
If my asking “What’s up” unlocks a conversation, then maybe it’s not a good time to talk about what I was thinking.
While I certainly hate the "what's up" question, questions post kids with friends are related to their kids, jobs, relationship issues and pop culture video games questions.
Honestly, I've had a hard time turning these into interesting discussions. It amounts to, "no time to really reflect. Here are my mundane joys and traumas. Okay, back to the pressing issues at hand..."
Its a greeting that confirms a certain level of intamacy. You don't have to answer with anything more than the same question. Like a modern "how do you do".
Whats up? Your down. (I am in Australia)