By categorically saying no to quick calls, you're isolating yourself even more. While it can be distracting to jump on a call while you actually meant to focus on some coding, it can also be great to have a quick chat and brainstorm about an idea rather than let the other person work out the solution in isolation only for me to then suggest a totally different approach in the PR review (yay! asynchronous!).
It's always some project manager or business process or whatever person who wants to talk about something they don't quite understand on behalf of someone from the business. I regret never doing the statistics on it, but if I had to guess I'd say that 9/10 times they could have simply forwarded the email from the "someone" instead of being the middleman. I have no idea why anyone would ever want to do a "quick call" without telling someone the reason first. I'm perfectly fine with taking a call with a co-worker who wants to discuss something they're not sure about, but then they'll ask me "hey, can we talk about X because I'd like your input". Which isn't a "quick call" in my book. I don't mind meetings either, but I dislike meetings which are solely there to make pseudo workers or bad middle managers feel like they accomplish something. If there are more than 3 people attending a meeting then you can be pretty sure it'll be a waste of time. If there is no agenda you're going down the road of the "quick call" which is essentially that initiator hasn't done their due diligence beforehand.
I don't know about that. I tend to find that incoming "quick calls" with peers, even where they've turned out to be anything but quick, tend to be at least reasonably useful. People do always ask first as well, rather than calling out of the blue.
Overall though, I find working as an engineer at home to be an isolating, and increasingly depressing experience. I really like team I'm working with at the moment but we're scattered to the four winds and barely get to spend any time together, so I'm keeping half an eye out for any roles that are local and might involve a bit more facetime.
When I left my last role for the last 3 - 4 months I was going in 2 - 3 times/week after a handful of us made a pledge to do so and, honestly, it's the happiest I've been at work since the beginning of the pandemic.
I wouldn't say I regret leaving - it was definitely time to move on to something new - but I think that experience, versus how I feel at the moment, is somewhat telling.
Eh, coffee breaks serve the same purpose as a smoke break in my opinion. I'd guess nowadays the amount of coffee drinkers is probably the same as the number of smokers back in the day.
Interestingly, in my experience, a "quick call" has been something where the other person doesn't want an email to get forwarded. That's why they don't include the subject in the message/meeting invite. Usually some political maneuvering to try and get ownership of a project or push off a failing project to another team/organziation.
Second, I've not once in my life had a productive "water cooler" conversation. Not a single time, it's pretty much always just socialization about literally anything other than work. Same with lunch, people don't want to talk about work during their free time, and they don't. I've certainly never heard of anyone having a sudden eureka moment spontaneously like that either, and if they do these days they'll just post it in slack so that people can refer back to it rather than it disappearing into the ether as soon as the convo ends.
As for the idea thing, I can't say I've ever had many such a drastic PR where the approach was completely 180 degrees from what the PR is doing, and even in the rare occasions those do occur, both parties are usually more than okay with then hopping onto a short (meaning max 15 minutes, not some hour long monstrosity of a "quick chat") call to align.
I just realized it's worse than that. If the old adage on innovation "1% inspiration, 99% perspiration" is true, then water cooler simply cannot help much. Then, what you need for innovation (and not just a warm fuzzy feeling of a possibly good idea) is actual time to work on it, not a water cooler.
I know of two cases where office water coolers are super useful: in areas with high temperatures where cold water is much better that the warm water coming out of the tap, and (if your model supports it) for getting a cup of hot water for tea. I've also seen them used in areas where the tap water tastes funny, but that's more of a patch.
However, neither of our statements are very useful as they are just anecdotes, a result of our personal experiences.
Productivity doesn’t go down with fully remote work, but I think the kind of creativity that organically comes from ideas being constantly shared and discussed does
To be clear, I don’t think it’s always people’s job to be creative, and company’s should absolutely have roles for people who can work remotely who just join scheduled meetings and execute “the plan”
So I don’t want to shut the door on any interactions in the unlikely chance that it interrupts me in my optimal state.
What I like to do is block off “deep work” in my calendar a few times a week. Then people can think about if they want to interrupt.
This has let me look at these “quick call” or “hi” messages as just part of being human and having a pleasant team where people are happy to interact rather than dings to maximum team productivity.
Perhaps they should put all the water coolers in the executives' offices, so they can listen to all the brilliant conversations that take place at the water cooler.
Like, never?
I've had it happen on a regular basis. I see someone and suddenly remember to tell them "oh, I did some work on that long ago, I'll share it with you" or you overhear a conversation about a topic you didn't know they were looking at?
I can get a fairly similar experience on the org chat, though, and sometimes at the start or ends of meetings. And just meeting up in real life every now and then helps a lot.
Is "water cooler talk" the new "open office layout"?
Yes. It used to be that "water cooler talk" was considered an unproductive waste of time. But for people pushing an RTO agenda, it suddenly became the go-to argument for RTO. Very often, the same PHBs use this to push RTO, who back in the day complained about people doing "water cooler talk" on company time.
At the same time, open office or cubicle layouts are proven to be detrimental to work output, concentration, health and happiness. But same as RTO, it is not about any of that, nor about collaboration. It is about PHBs fearing their loss of purpose and control.
because it is actually one of the most important thing in a job. During Covid, work was boring as hell because there were no spontaneous interactions or small breaks to chit chat with other people.
And guess what, most of the colleagues I have talked to mentioned that they missed those kind of interactions. Barring some super introvert ones who just want to be left alone, but those are a tiny minority.
I think the general phenomenon is often talked about under the umbrella term "zoom fatigue" - besides the fatigue this also encompasses stress and anxiety. (https://spectrum.ieee.org/zoom-fatigue)
Personally the best improvement was closing the camera feed, and that has been my team's experience as well.
There will be extremely few meetings (mainly HR and meetings with external vendors) where we set the camera, and even for those you can do the opening and presentation with camera on, and just shut it after that for the meat of the discussion.
The biggest part is we're presenting documents and slides either way, so seeing the person's face somewhere just doesn't help. In particular we want to check the meeting transcript realtime to be sure it matches what we're talking about. Overall I've seen no downsides doing it since the pandemic, and don't see going back to camera on meetings by default.
It's become a bit of a meme now: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Dl0rpDY9460
Personally I've yet to find a cure :P
We do a weekly fixed appointment where we gather together and smalltalk about whatever is on our minds.
We also have something like that. But since it is not spontaneous, not every participant in the same state of mind and hence those meetings are a dud. Whereas participants in water cooler conversations are there because they want a break and want to chit chat. So conversations are more natural and hence enjoyable.
Have you found any tricks/ideas from the implementation at your org that has made it more successful for you?
If anything these kinds of “meetings” felt like they made the culture on my team worse because they felt so forced and inorganic
For instance, every morning when I come in there is a person on my team that will talk about their family, their kids, their life, and that goes on for about 15 minutes. In the spirit of team building, I entertain it for awhile. But that does come with a cost.
Someone came in a few weeks ago not feeling well, but decided not to stay home. Ended up having covid and spread it to others. It's hard to be productive when half the team is out sick.
Every day I have to be in the office with others, I truly hate it. The pandemic was hard, but I absolutely miss being able to work from home every day.
To me this sounds like neither you nor your coworkers... talk? Like you're not used to communication unless the photons you receive in your eyes are the same ones that bounced off someone's face (or unless there's a face at all).
I still took coffee breaks to unwind for a tiny bit of time, and I still talked with teammates during those times while I was taking a moment to unwind. Async. The conversation would either stop after a few exchanges, or continue for the next minutes.
Not much different from, say, IRC or Discord. Obviously there will be professionalism in the "real" channels, but other than that it just happened that sometimes a teammate would just send me a DM like "hey, have you watched this series?", or I would post in a shared channel something like "yooo look at this thing I built last night".
I don't really need any specific medium to talk to a person. I can have my preferences, and other people can have their preferences as well, but there's still not much difference either way when it comes to getting to know each other. There's some people I only know through text chats that I'm on better terms than with some I know in person. There's some people I know in person that I'm on better terms than with some I only know through text chats.
PS: disclaimer a) I do support short spontaneous calls and like them, but try to never initiate them on my side, because I understand they ARE very disruptive. disclaimer b) I actually like working in the office in some aspects, but it is totally not worth 30 full awake and unpaid days of my life per year wasted on commute. Like not even order of magnitude close in benefit compared to the waste of time.
> it can also be great to have a quick chat and brainstorm about an idea rather than let the other person work out the solution in isolation only for me to then suggest a totally different approach in the PR review
In my team we work mostly remotely and have a lot of ad hoc calls about issues, after an initial exchange of messages introducing the problem so that it can be loaded into memory. In my experience talking about a problem on a call is almost always better than text tennis. You're focused, our minds work better and are more engaged when we're talking and it's quicker easier to summarize then question ad hoc ideas, etc...
"Can I ask you a question?" (Ugh) "Sure."
It might only take five minutes. Then I'd reconnect to _my_ work. That and getting over my, admittedly emotional, irritation at the interruption would take another 5 minutes.
I really liked being able to delay those folks to when it was convenient for _me_ while working from home.
This is my biggest frustration when working with new people. Too busy to explain context, then let me do it my way, then in PR review tell me to flip the whole thing based on specific context only few people had along with team specific style nits. Finally, manager asking why it's taking me so long to complete the work.
Working remotely gives us the ability to have infinite water-coolers any hour of the day. Great power, great responsibility.
People take this personally completely forgetting there is a much larger world than theirs.
However, there are many, many, many (really a lot) of organizations out there that are in various degrees but continuous state of chaos. Things like constantly shifting deadlines, goals changing, roles being poorly defined and various other things.
The sort of company where anyone who cares about their work will find themselves in a boiling frog type of scenario if they are not careful. They try to take up extra work that is not technically part of their role description, or simply by being knowledgeable attract attention.
In those companies where everyone is a continuous state of mild panic it isn't just one "quick call" it is a steady stream of them, interrupted by unannounced actual calls. Or, if you are in the office, people constantly walking by and "quickly" asking for things.
Certainly, when you find yourself in a situation where the documentation is always lacking. If you then make the mistake of writing the few pieces of documentation that actually are useful you suddenly might find yourself in the position of "knowledge holder" where everyone flocks to for their questions. In companies like this knowledge holders then get over asked (with questions often covered in the documentation), making it difficult for them to focus on their work.
In that sort of situation you need to be competent at setting boundaries as companies will often not do that for you. They happily take advantage of someone running 100% of the time, so they don't need the expense of another FTE added to payroll. Or if I'd have to do a slightly less cynical take, because they simply do not realize they are missing an FTE. Or, to go back to a more cynical take, they are filling roles with seat warmers instead of competency.
In a previous organization, I have had to actively enforce what the article suggests and more. Even then I eventually decided to leave as I simply couldn't see a path forward with the company getting their structure in order in time and me keeping my sanity.
A few of the things I started doing (some overlap with the article):
- Set my teams status with a message encouraging people to ask the question, not just greed me. Eventually, I did include a link to one of the "no hello" websites. I think https://nohello.net/en/
- Refuse unannounced teams calls from most people except a few people. I'd hang up and just leave a message along the lines of "hi, bit busy with something at the moment, what was it you are trying to reach me about?".
- Decline meetings without a clear agenda.
- Decline meetings with a clear agenda, but where I was simply not needed. Sometimes it was not related to my responsibilities, I would let them know and if I could, I would forward the meeting to a person that was responsible. In other cases, I simply was not needed in person because the information was already written down somewhere. In that case I'd provide them with the information.
- Decline meetings during my lunch break.
- Decline meetings that overlapped with other meetings in my agenda, specifically stating I was not available due to another meeting.
- Block a few moments in the week in my agenda as "focus time", set those to private meetings. To the credit of the company, they eventually did recognize that a lot of the IT engineering staff was sitting in too many meetings and then as a company policy blocked of two afternoons for everyone as focus time.
- When getting general help requests about things I knew for a fact were written down in documentation, I'd refer them there first. Ask them to go over the documentation first and then let me know if they had specific questions.
To be fair, this was an extremely chaotic and continually panicked company, with a lot of extra things compounding all of this. But it isn't that rare either as I know plenty of people who actually burned out over similar things at various different companies.
I’ve done plenty of meetings in a remote only setting where at the end I say “if anyone wants to hang and chat about things further, or just hang out and socialise, feel free to stick around”.
People get to choose if they stay. It’s at a natural context switch (end of meeting). It’s deliberately informal and not organised (“hey, let’s just hang for a bit”).
The opportunities are there to achieve the same goal as the water cooler.
When I see people lamenting what has been “lost” I usually read it as “I don’t want to look for alternative solutions”.
I'm not sure you understand the water cooler moments if you think the 'quick call' is in anyway a replacement.
So in my opinion, the author is a little bit selfish too. The company cannot 100% align with what best works for you.
There's 2 thoughts in that one sentence
1. The overall productivity of the company may be increased having a single individual accomplish less of their _individual_ goal. People helping each other can multiply productivity.
2. What one person thinks works best for them may not _actually_ be what makes them the most productive. It is a very rare person that works best in a complete silo, separated from any input from others; likely almost nobody. It is an _uncommon_ person that doesn't benefit from some amount of casual discussion about what they're working on. If a developer thinks they are most productive working on their solution start to finish without ever discussing it with someone else; odds are that developer isn't very good at what they do.
No, of course not. It is a scale/grade where balance needs to be found. Unfortunately, in some companies the balance is really off where in order to maintain your sanity you do need to set clear boundaries like this. If not you will not even be able to think clearly as you are in a constant state of being interrupted.
There is also a big difference in the quality of quick questions.
For example.
1. Bad, no context: Hey, quick question.
2. Still not good: Hey, quick question about why Y is part of X (where the reasoning is clearly documented).
3. Better: Hey, I was looking at Y and X and see the reasoning for doing it like this, but I still have some questions about the details.
As far as why I rate these the way I do:
1. certainly is bad because it just means I get a ping, need to respond, need to wait for the answer (being distracted again from what I was doing), etc.
2. Is just a waste of time but is okay enough as I can just point to the documentation and ask to follow up if the question is not covered.
3. Is much better as I know what it is about, you have the right knowledge as well, and now we can actually answer your question in a meaningful way.
Having typed this out I realize I am just repeating the article. Which also does not say that everything needs to be a meeting with a clear agenda. It basically boils down to one thing if you want something from someone make sure to include enough context. It really is not that difficult :)
If it’s really a “quick question” just write it down and in the off chance that it develops into something else you can have that meeting.
Of course it’s also a cultural/etc. thing. Some people are just horrible at expressing themselves in text or communicating asynchronously (the “Hello [I won’t tell you what I need until you reply”] ones or those that think that they are being helpful by making their messages as terse, short and consequentially vague and unspecific as possible)
I’m not sure how can that be beneficial for the team/company if it significantly affects productivity.
Thankfully these people tend to be quite vocal about these views online so I can appropriately take it as a soft red flag when hiring.
This would also apply to people working in offices where someone stops by their desk every five minutes. If you are constantly being disrupted in your work, have to shift focus, rinse, repeat, it makes sense to start setting boundaries.
Question, do your job openings by default include one of these phrases?
- Thrives in high-stress environments
- Excels in demanding situations
- Delivers outstanding results in challenging circumstances
- Effective in fast-paced, high-pressure settings
- Demonstrates resilience in demanding conditions
- Capable of handling high-pressure tasks
I think this is a really key point. For many developers, human communication feels hard or full of seemly useless rituals.
Making communication something well defined and structured helps to get a feel of control and to deal with it in a less anxious way.
I believe most will fake enjoying those random social situations in order to get the job.
The large, overwhelming majority of impromptu meetings I've ever been in that didn't have a fellow engineer on the other end of the call have been nothing but massive time wasters. And usually if it's another engineer a few messages is more than enough, anyways.
1) are your goals aligned with the ultimate success factors of the company? Probably. 2) are the people who want to stop you from doing your job aligned? Probably not.
Ask yourself if people who "just want a minute" would go stick their arm in an industrial metal press, willingly. Don't they want to make a good impression? Or would this be a horrible act of self harm that is completely disruptive?
Also, giving context is good, regardless of medium.
If I know the "Hi Joe" is hanging there, part of my focus is holding onto it until I clear it.
I mean, I glace at them at some point, but I don't put much thought into them.
At least I know slack/teams messages are meant for me. If it's important, don't send me an email about it, ping me on one of those.
They correctly assume you don’t need a public reminder for your responsibilities so they opt for a subtle nudge.
Find the right balance by understanding the needs of the whole business, the needs of your department, and the needs of your specific team, and your manager’s expectations of you. Then balance all that with the work assigned to you, deadlines, etc. And then align your day to day work with what the business is telling you is most important.
(This is also how average engineers can put themselves in positions to be promoted ahead of “rockstar engineers”. Companies promote and elevate employees who have the most positive impact on the business, not people who have the most impact on the codebase)
People who act like their time has so much value they can ignore and talk down to their co-workers end up with no professional contacts worth anything when they get laid off. "I had my head down coding, I didn't have time to socialize or make friends." Optimal for an hour, maybe, but a losing strategy in the long game.
But while what you're describing does not describe a well-functioning organization, it's definitely true in practice. People who buck the silly social dynamics in office cultures will be perceived as less productive whether it's true or not and are frequently devalued.
A knee-jerk response to what I just wrote of course will be maybe those people just can't see the real value of all these allegedly silly office rituals, but before you jump to that conclusion, consider the possibility that it's at least equally likely that the people perpetrating the rituals are overvaluing them.
The point is all of these social dynamics and office rituals should be open to being reexamined every so often to see if they're truly adding the value people think they're adding so they don't devolve into rituals people do because they're rituals. Keep the good ones, ditch the useless ones, and be proactive about objectively evaluating which are which.
At a certain point it just doesn't make sense to over-optimize for productivity, when the sacrifice {insert impact} isn't worth the gain {insert output}.
Don't be fooled by the use of the word "optimize" which suggest some minimal gains over the current situation. In the short term you double the effort of that person/team, in the long term you will get frustration, people asking for huge raises (to reflect the effort) and then people just quit.
Dude. You're just an engineer from an Engineering department of some company.
Nobody's gonna read & apply any special rules of communnicating with you, especially written by yourself (sic!)
If you're asking for 30 minutes or an hour of someone's time, it is only common courtesy to tell them why.
If you send someone a message, don't just say "Hi". This is incredibly bad manners in the context of asynchronous communication. Give the recipient an opportunity to prioritize your message. You don't know what they are doing. They could be fire fighting. They could be tied up in a face-to-face conversation. They could be in deep flow. They might have three or four other messages to prioritize alongside yours.
If you don't give someone the information to make an appropriate prioritization decision, all you are doing is inducing anxiety.
This is all a matter of being kind and accommodating to your colleagues, enabling them to work with you effectively, and making it easier for them to help you.
Purposefully making your colleagues' lives more difficult is a recipe for an unpleasant working environment.
Agree, but
> If you don't give someone the information to make an appropriate prioritization decision, all you are doing is inducing anxiety.
Disagree here. I used to think the same "why you only sayibg Hi and not what you want", but I realized it doesnt have to be my problem if I dont let it become one.
You said Hi? Expect a Hello from me sometimes during the day. You needed something urgent? "Why didnt you tell me?". A "Hi" isn't urgent, so I know I dont feel the burden of not being able to assign it a correct priority.
A lot of people have trouble recognizing when their teoubles are really other people troubles in disguise.
We have a team that works this way 100% of the time, assuming the invitation is not coming from higher management.
They are always the last to deliver and the team with the most critical bugs. If you don't make time for back channel sync, you will become an isolated island and your product will eventually suffer.
Good etiquette isn't common sense, and that's why there are books written about it for centuries.
On the other hand, you don't have to reply to those random "quick call" messages as well as videocalls without an agenda.
And what OP argue about is a direct consequence of that: small talks, serendipity, politness rules, etc.
If you want raw efficiency, the article makes sense.
However, in most orgs, that's not what most workers want.
> And what OP argue about is a direct consequence of that: small talks, serendipity, politness rules, etc.
You can do that while following the same rules of politeness and small talks.
For instance I had a colleague who used to put "Hi" or "Good morning" messages several times a day on my teams chat.
He could be as polite saying and include small talk in a single message:
" Good morning prmoustache, do you have some time to help me on project BLABLABLA, I need assistance regarding setup of FOO in a BAR context. Mr John Doe told me you had experience with that. Here are the errors I get.
<some snippet>
If you have some time now we can maybe do a quick call, otherwise can I schedule some time?
By the way, how is the weather in Spain today? Did you enjoy some nice time on the beach with your daughters? "
This is polite, include all the info I would need, some small talk, would give me an idea on how much time I might need to dedicate to that to give assistance, if I have to check some info in my note/wiki/whatever and either decide to stop what I am doing now and help him immediately or ask him to schedule a meeting later during the day or week. And maybe I have the exact solution and I can point him a link that will help him directly.
People who usually don't go straight to the point either do it:
- for cultural reasons
- by ignorance on how to work effectively with remote worker
- or because they want to brute force their way into you.
- a combination of all 3
I did this when I had a question that perhaps 20 people who I knew could answer, though I had no way of telling who (if anyone) was free to chat something over with me. I didn't send a group email as the projects that I was working on contained need to know stuff, so sending details of it to 20 people would be a no-go but saying I spoke about this with Bob, here is the audit trail would be fine.
I still think that this was optimal in that situation, though I often see it derided with no better option suggested.
Then all 20 people get to see it at once, they can see if someone else already responded and other people on the team who may have been wondering about something similar also get to see the question and the answer(s).
Asking someone directly almost always results in a quick response, even if it is a "I don't know" answer. And an "I don't know" from a senior colleague can mean a lot, for example that the problem is much harder than you initially thought.
There is also the bystander effect - i.e. yelling call 911 vs asking someone directly to call 911
I'd be OK with skipping that last option; asking for help is hard enough as it is, and I can imagine people not wanting to flaunt their imagined ignorance. Which is also why it's good for more senior people to do it, so they can set that culture that shows that it is OK.
I was always very puzzled by people who do that instead of just saying “Hi, [short description of the project/question]”.
Especially by junior developers who usually struggle with estimating the importance/complexity of the problems they are trying to solve.
We were also told not to share things about projects with other staff unnecessarily.
If someone can't think up a few bullet points for a meeting in advance, that person has not prepared for their meeting, and will waste some of the participant's time.
Not creating (one-line) minutes that most importantly include decisions that have been made in the meeting is also the perfect set-up for wasting other people's time.
I see this similar to the effort of writing a good commit message.
Today I learned: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsibility_assignment_matr...
Everyone should know going in what is being discussed and what the expectations are around the objective of the meeting.
If you don't have these, you have no idea if it will be a productive meeting.
And don't forget https://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
All easily preventable if the person organizing the meeting prepares for it, and shares a brief agenda so that other participants can prepare to, or find replacements if they themselves are the wrong person for the meeting.
I hadn't thought to use a RACI chart in this way, but as you describe it, it seems like the most obvious application.
I highly disagree. A call has a definite start and end. Async chats leave an open thread in your mind that needs to be constantly polled and interrupt flow much more than a call.
In the office I've had people sit at a desk next to me and just talk at me for more than an hour about themselves. Trying to politely end these kinds of conversations just results in a brief blip in their monologue before they go back to it. I've even had to get up and walk away after someone wouldn't stop talking at me.
For whatever reason there are many people who are incapable of thinking about how they're using other peoples' time. The only defense is asynchronous media like chats or emails where you aren't forced by social politeness into continuing to be disrupted.
Some of the most inspiring discussions come from someone bringing up an issue they have right there and then. Good discussions often start from something that doesn't seem so important, that doesn't have a clear outline from the start.
If there isn't the possibility to start a discussion instantly once in a little while, there is a good chance it won't ever happen.
Oef, you clearly had not to deal with the "quick" calls I had to deal with at a previous organization. If I had not set boundaries, these would easily drag on for who knows how long.
Besides, chat messages I can respond to in my own time when I have had proper time to look into whatever they need from me.
If they need documentation I can look it up, have them read it and maybe then ask targeted questions. Just to give a simple example. Which is also why "no hello" is important. It isn't that most people mind being greeted, just accompany it directly with the right context.
Which can be as easy as "Hi creesch, if you have some time I wanted to ask about X".
>Don't worry, I'm not mad at you. Those are common mistakes that people make
Calling a common and natural communication style that is not your preferred communication style objectively a "mistake". Charming.
>Maybe you work in an environment where productivity is low, so everyone has time to jump on a quick call or chat with you any time you ask.
"But I don't, because I'm amazing. You've probably heard of me."
I've assumed the former.
I don't really like posts like this. Sure, it's a great idea in a remote context to write down how you like to communicate, and how you like to be communicated with at work. (You should do it, it's great!)
However, not everybody will agree with you and part of being a good employee on a large, distributed, team is understanding and working with other people's communication styles.
Even if you hate it.
Their post is meant to change norms, basically a, "Hey we really should all understand why nohello.net was created". Oddly enough, the post itself is my version of nohello. I'd prefer that they started with the conclusion and then build from there. [1]
The author is attempting to change norms. I already fixed it with my kid, she asks amazing questions and includes all the right context.
It isn't that they don't agree or disagree, very few "hello'ers" will be able to defend or even explain their position. It isn't about preference or dislike. A blind "Hello" isn't a communication style, it is a faux pas.
It doesn't matter if you are remote or on the next desk over, we should do better with communication. And that includes how to deliver the message that a blind hello is poor form.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLUF_(communication)
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/inverted-pyramids-in-cybers...
With remote work, you get the chance to rewrite company communication so that the above pointless meetings aren't needed.
People who write articles like the OP have realized that and view the former way to communicate as the extremely inefficient and intrusive system that it really is.
If you're in a fully text based async culture, then all the conversation, including the famous watercooler stuff and how're the kids doing stuff happens text based and async. I'd say the watercooler/kids stuff can happen more often, because you know you won't interrupt them when you ask, and they'll answer whenever they take a break.
Keywords are both text based and async. Not one, both.
Calls can be much more effective than messaging for detecting and handling the XY problem now that users can easily screen share, because you can often see why the user wanted to do X, not just (as in their two lines of text) that they wanted to do X, and you may be able to solve Y and make them happier.
I dont think the rule can be applied universally.
1) Cultural norms - This may not work in all environments
2) You have an issue which requires cross function help. Hard to frame a precise question when you dont know which features are the most significant.
If you have the luxury to pick and choose, going to a company where that works is a huge improvement at large.
In my personal experience at least, I've seen no place where the "let me quick call you" is a norm and engineering is also decently respected and paid appropriately.
> 2) You have an issue which requires cross function help. Hard to frame a precise question when you don't know which features are the most significant.
You'll need more investigation either way, I'm not even sure you'll be able to properly decide who should be part of the meeting. The whole "who should I talk to" can be potentially be done better by chat, where you ask a whole group at once who's concerned by your problem and further narrow down as you get pointers.
Messaging a whole channel at once will probably be better accepted than inviting random people at a meeting to realize none of them were concerned.
> I've seen no place where the "let me quick call you"
You haven't seen places where people say "Hi?", especially in the context of remote work?
>...decide who should be part of the meeting
This would be where "could we have a call?" matters,
As said first, words used with purpose provide a specific utility.
Nor did I mention messaging a whole channel? Whatever the situation you are envisioning, it is of your own experience that looks to be bleeding in.
But some points are a stretch and that weakens the whole argument.
Point 3.1 : you waste HOURS of time debugging the wrong piece of code -- going off on a quest based on just one single chat message with incomplete info (and not even a stack trace as you deem it so essential yourself)? You don't ask any clarifying questions to validate your assumptions before sinking hours into work? Is that not your fault instead?
Point 4: so you want a whole IT support ticket (with attachments and priority classification if IM allows it) in a single chat message?
Why are you accepting support requests on chat instead of via a ticketing tool that keeps track of request volumes, history, SLAs etc.
If your workplace doesn't care about this level of productivity management and efficiency anyway -- why bother with these rules of engagement.
Also when someone pings you about an issue ... there is a chance you already know about an outage/issue and are working on it...and might just say "I know, fix is on the way by EoD, sit tight." If so... the whole stack trace and explanation of the problem scenario, what they have tried etc is all useless waste. They are just trying to optimize THEIR productivity by pinging you first instead. Two people can play this game.
4: Stakeholders really like chat, and it's a constant battle to make them go through the motions to report things properly. Why wouldn't they like it, it puts the burden onto you rather than them. It's often a tricky balance to strike, depending on the organisation, they can often be more important than you.
Wow. That's just straight up admitting being an idiot and blaming others for it. If a person leaving out a stack trace causes you to ask for a stack trace that is on them. They wasted some of your time. (Or at least I guess you can argue that.) If a person leaving out a stack trace causes you to blindly modify random parts of the code then that is on you and you only.
Confused people ask confused questions. Because they are confused. If they could ask the right questions they would have already helped themselves. It is your job to not let their confusion overtake you. Ask questions until you understand the situation. Software engineering is not a SWAT raid. You can and should ask questions and shoot only later.
Ask Question and *TroubleShoot only later.
FTFY. Nice one by the way, quoted.
Managers treat meetings as the most important thing you do. (Its the most important thing they do.) The disconnect is that we don't see them the same.
Once you start taking credit for all the meetings you attend, you'd be surprised how many fewer you get invited to.
Once you start adding tickets for every meeting and ad-hoc call, and from that it becomes obvious that these are now taking 70% of your time and what little remains is not nearly enough for the "real work", you'll find how the attitude shifts and those managers start protecting your time...
Interestingly, managers often don't seem to consider meetings "real work" for engineers, but it's almost the only type of work they do, and take credit for...
But I would never, under any but the most egregious circumstances, complain directly to a colleague who does it or (especially) send them this link.
People are different, and most people are different to me. I'm getting paid partly to deal with other people, so that's what I'll (sometimes grudgingly) do. If they're doing this all the time to each-other, my productivity is still going to be relatively high anyway.
True. Nor would I. I would push for the company to publish guidelines about remote and asynchronous communication. And then if someone repeatedly communicated badly, I'd provide constructive feedback either directly to them or to their line manager.
It is actually normal for individuals to be lazy, and searching docs is more work (for the asker) than just asking a quick question. This is why rules are necessary, otherwise every asker will just waste someone else's time. It shouldn't just be on the two parties in this interaction to enforce structured communication as a rule, it should also be on the company hierarchy to do so. Because in the end, the whole company will suffer if e.g. the knowledge about fixing problem X died with Bob who always just answered inquiries about problem X in private chat.
The trick is to frame their behavior as inconvieniencing them rather than you. In other words, if they send you all the details up front, then you can send them a good answer as soon as possible rather than needing them to drop what they're doing later on to send you a follow-up reply when you ask for clarification.
I've also found that, for people who seem to prefer talking to typing, asking them to record a short Loom video of the issue usually gets them to explain the problem with enough details to solve it.
If you need more info from someone, just paste "Can you provide more context please?", and move on with your life.
I require all staff to learn to touch type if they don’t know how, and prefer candidates with high typing test speeds.
Is it really a concern for younger candidates to not be able to touch type these days? I suppose Gen Z who are phone-centric would not have much experience touch typing.
Most larger orgs run on a mixture of those depending on role and where they interact you get friction
If you force the one on the other in either direction that person gets nothing done. Which is functionally what this article attempts - solves writers problem (“do it my way”) but ignores the consequences for others.
Oh, come on...
Am I loosing time waiting for your "hello" back? Well, guess what: maybe I took it into consideration the fact that you're busy, and that I might be waiting for hours, but not answering at all only makes you a jerk.
This is far from politely refusing "quick calls" when busy. And no: you can't be always busy: if you want to keep telling yourself you're working in a team you need to allocate a reasonable amount of time to social interactions.
Do you really expect me to send you a calendar event invitation to have a quick call with you once in a month? To update you about something that might even interest you? Maybe it's not going to be communicated in the most efficient way possible, as would be with an email, but certainly it will be done in a way that would keep us human beings, not mentioning the fact that it would also improve team work.
If you do, please do not expect me to sit next to you if we happen to meet in person, and be happy and friendly.
Classic 'you are with us or against us' level of argumentation. Saying hello is already a _mistake_, and paraphrasing: you either like to work for a company of underperforming losers, or you need to follow the advice of the article. How convincing!
You break it, you fix it, including the troubleshooting.
A lot of this is summed up for me by a piece of advice to managers that I read several years ago, almost certainly in an article linked from this site: "don't be spooky".
I.e., be clear about what you want. Don't leave people in the dark. Particularly as a manager, if you send a vague request for a quick chat with someone, they're quite likely to think it's something bad or they're in trouble, and become anxious, particularly if they don't know you well. So not only are you breaking their flow state, but you're freaking them out as well.
Specificity, along with an appropriate level of detail are profoundly reassuring from a variety of perspectives: including reassuring people that you're not simply about to waste their time.
I agree the 'Hi' type are annoying, but I for sure don't expect a stack trace.
Worst case the person is from another team, and I would rather have context on why they're contacting me directly on IM. Best case is that's a coworker, and I trust that if my coworkers ask me in particular and not my team's chat, its a specific issue I will have an easier time dealing with (or I made myself available for help because I'm on toilet duty and will jump for anything remotely interesting).
If I am engaged with you and you ask me for a quick call, I either have 30 minutes ahead and agree, or I don't, and refuse. I fully expect the call to last anywhere between 2 and 30 minutes (unless you're a PO and I set aside 2 hours). The more we understand each other, the quicker the calls will be anyway, so even if the call isn't 'productive', it ultimately is.
But social behaviors are habitual. I spent time in many parts of Africa where it's just downright rude/unacceptable to go to someone and ask something, even if it's just a change for a few bucks. You have to go through the pleasantries and WAIT for them to acknowledge before you ask what you want.
It's impossible to change that habit, no matter the tool, medium, rationale, process, even urgency. They're still going to say "can I talk to you for a sec" and wait for an answer. I've had people do this in the middle of production issues and it's driven me crazy. Even when things are burning, their way of escalating is still only to say "I NEED to talk to you right now", they're simply not tuned to state what they want.
To not help with this, I also went through trainings on personality traits and communication styles. Some people reveal and then explain (direct communication style), and some people first explain then reveal (indirect style), they need you to go through the thought process first before concluding. I learned that it's guaranteed to create conflicts when the communication style for a person is reversed. If you give a conclusion-first to someone who needs explanation-first, they're tuned to mentally reject the conclusion – no matter how you sugar coat it or your intention or rationale.
So we have to constantly keep reinforcing what we're ok with. Just keep calm and reinforce, tell people to provide context in your chat profile, use an auto reply, copy paste a message saying "next time please feel free to ask the question..." and so on. It's kind of a never ending battle. The only thing is, please don't assume anyone is being a jerk, the same way you are not being a jerk by ignoring that message or replying tersely.
The truth, once again, is in the middle i suppose.
But it's important to remember that it is an adaptation for a specific comms medium & applying it too broadly may really just be a way of shirking socialisation. That's fine if you're most productive as an engineer working alone on your fully-self-contained owned project, but in most cases collaboration is beneficial. Collaboration introduces communication inefficiencies but its a known trade-off.
Especially extending this barrier-to-entry to other things like calls (verbal comms) & meetings (in-person) can lead to significant inaccessibility, exclusion & siloing. It's worth stepping back & looking at problems you may be trying to solve here: e.g. too-many-meetings or long meeting run-on. These are problems that frankly this doesn't do anything to solve whatsoever; you'll just end up with managers setting boilerplate agendas for the same "too many long meetings" & meanwhile some of the peers you may need to have a valuable short meet with will be too hung up by your requirements to contact you at all.
I work with people whose days are a sequence of meetings and chats within meetings. They don't understand (or respect) that I have meetings but also must concentrate for periods of time.
One of my first bosses would constantly push me to make phone calls instead of firing emails, and even though I didn't enjoy it, it undeniably worked. Things got done much faster, with far less effort from everyone.
Moreover there are studies showing that if people socialize and get to know each other a bit before working together, there are more chances to collaborate and to reduce conflicts.
It's been some years since I saw this site and ever since I always add context in all my on-line interactions with co-workers.
this dude sounds like an introvert that doesn't work well with others.
Ex. "Hello, good morning. When can you spare 10 minutes today to catch me up on PR reviews?"
However, I managed to "bully" everyone into following this simple rule because I had some influence in the organization; I was a manager of a large department. Unfortunately, interns will probably get an eye-roll for such suggestions, even if they reference their superior's rule.
My point is, don't send you colleagues this link, you will come off as rude. You'll get further by e.g. feigning surprise to the lack of agenda, and maybe you get to use that opportunity to spark a conversation about the importance of an agenda. If you're a manager and above, then by all means, use your influence to force it, it will make everyone's job easier in the long run.
Oh, as for the messages that contain only "hello", just ignore them, they will either solve their own problem or quickly jump to the point once they tire of waiting for your equally pointless response. Or just have a chat with your colleagues every once in a while, maybe they genuinely care about you and your cat.
"Quick Call" people are a personality type so they are not going to change.
This is probably a factor behind execs crying "but muh productivity" and scaling WFH back.
These are huge distractions, agreed, but not answering messages like this or responding with _a link to a fucking website telling you how wrong you are_ will never not be perceived as asshole behavior.
A better approach is to _just respond to the message_.
Saying "hey! How can I help?" Takes two seconds to write. Shit, you could probably automate this.
Responding to asks for "quick chats" with "hey; I can't do a quick call right now, but happy to talk when I'm free. Mind scheduling something on my calendar?" is much more respectful and most folks will do just that.
Sorry for the harsh language. This is the kind of incredibly elitist and condescending behavior that make people like Eric Schmidt call us "arrogant" and spend billions of their own money finding a way of getting us out of the way.
But sometimes the question is fuzzy, to me "hey got a minute?" means "I'm about to unload something confusing on you, and I don't want to break your flow state, so let me know when you have a minute to take it"
I'm a tech like the author, and personally I'd prefer not to see all the details up front, because I can't control my flow and I'll start scratching at their problem right away even though I was busy doing something. I'd rather have the sign lit up that says they need help, WITHOUT KNOWING what it is, and then when I'm ready to help them, I'll find out. If it means I need to check on some stuff first, then fine, we'll set a meeting a for it at some point in the future (that's now the agenda), even if it's just "Let me get back to you in an hour about that"
I am constantly annoyed by people's poor communication skills, but I find it much more efficient to lead by example and communicated back, sooner rather than be passive aggressive.
No agenda for meeting? Email back or chat in the group channel kindly asking for an agenda, maybe throwing in something useful along with it.
Co-worker sending me one of those "Hiya" type messages, well "Good morning! How are you today?" Sooner or later they get to the point and I schedule a proper meeting about it.
> So, when I answer your "Quick call?" with "What's the problem?", that's really for your own good :wink face:
Please do not ever write sentences like this in a professional context where you are not friends with the recipients, it's terrible.
It sets the tone to "adult to children discussion where I think that I am smarter than you" which is the last thing you want when you try to solve on of your pain point.
One the other hand if you want me to avoid interacting with you as much as I can that would be spot on.
Each of the ideas in here is solid, but there's too much writing around the core idea -- a sentence or two for each point and then a tldr like "put in some basic level of effort if you're going to ask for others' valuable time." would do it for me personally.
It's incredibly valuable, but sure doesn't scale.
However, having said that I've found these kind of "Hi can we chat" meetings are great ways of flagging corporate sociopaths and general losers. They make it their career to schedule as many of these as possible to get out of doing other work.
