72 lines
3.5 KiB
Markdown
72 lines
3.5 KiB
Markdown
---
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layout: post
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title: The No Hello Nonsense!
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categories: ["ideas", "rant"]
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---
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# Not just hello! Just ask the question
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**No-Hello** is a term used widely in the developer communities to mean that they don't want
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to just be greeted with a message that goes "hello" on their messaging platform (Teams, slack,
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whatsapp and so on). Instead, they prefer getting the full context as part of the initial message.
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In other words, no-helloers hate the following,
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| Normal Person | *Hello!*
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| No-helloer | *Hi!*
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| Normal Person | *I need some help with blah blah blah.. do you know about it blah etc.*
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and would instead prefer to have the normal person send their first message this way
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| Normal Person | *Hello! I need some help with blah ....*
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No-helloers allege that the second version is more productive and doesn't waste anyone's time.
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They proudly showcase their ideology as a status message that is shown whenever someone tries
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to message the person. Often they link to a web page such as [https://nohello.net](https://nohello.net).
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They get mad if someone sends just a "Hi".
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The following are the status messages of a couple of no-helloers from my company. Everyone trying to
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send them a message is presented with a small non-intrusive floating dialog box with this message
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| https://nohello.net - Please don't say just hello, send the entire message
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| Please write your question in your initial IM (https://nohello.net)
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# OK, that's enough
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[Instant messaging](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant_messaging) apps are designed to be asynchronous.
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The sender can send a message and it is not necessary for the receiver to immediately respond to the said message.
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No-helloers completely miss the point of these softwares.
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There are some genuine reasons why starting a chat with a simple "Hi!" or a friendly matter makes sense.
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- Sender wants to make sure that you are available and can respond to this chat before they proceed
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with sharing the complete context.
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- Sender is new to the team and is nervous starting a conversation.
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- Sender is not a machine to avoid such polite expressions.
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As a receiver of a "Hi" message, you can
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- **Send a "Hi" back** and go back to doing what you were doing. As simple as that. If you care too much about
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your time - at the millisecond level, to not do this, then you can use the other option below.
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- **Ignore the message** and go back to what you were doing. If the sender never comes back, you have
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one less thing to worry about. If the sender does respond with a new message with details, respond to that.
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Considering the fact that simple options to deal with this behavior exists, antagonizing
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the behavior of just sending "Hello" is plain ridiculous. The only person losing time is the person asking you
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a question and while asking them to directly come to the point might be in their best interests, it is pretentious
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to ask them to do this while interacting with **YOU** as an IM status message as opposed to asking them
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to do this while interacting with anyone in general.
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Personally, I would stick to option 1 in most cases, and switch to option 2, when I feel like I might end up
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[suffering a fool](https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/not+suffer+fools).
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# Protesting against this nonsense!
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It should be pretty clear to you that I consider the entire no-hello movement nonsensical. To protest this,
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I have the following text displayed whenever someone tries to message me, to send a clear message to the
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no-helloers in my company 😆🦹
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| https://yes-hello.net - Feel free to just say hello in chat!
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