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.
And I guarantee that others are annoyed when folks leap in with no lead in. And I am annoyed at people who ignore messages, even a basic “hello”. Seems pretty rude.
> 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.
Try: "Oh, hello. Do you have time for a short chat right now about a database schema change?”
I almost always have time to fight fires — unless busy with a larger conflagration. I may or may not have the time to debate the finer points of table naming conventions however.
Without context I might say yes and then have to take it back once I discover the topic.
You're rebuilding TCP over UDP. Chat apps are connectionless (or RESTful, if you will). What makes them productive, especially in the workplace, is the fact that they can work without all the handshaking that accompanies more structured communication like in-person, spoken human conversations.
Nothing is stopping you from adding back all your binds, listens, SYNs, and ACKs to a protocol that doesn't need them. But it's a conversational code smell if you do.
Dear sowbug - apparently you live in a place where it is fine to send a message and it does not matter if the recipient is ready to receive it or not. Good for you.
The solution here would be for Microsoft to add a "hello will be ignored" option to Teams so I can just check that and have it look like Teams is saying back to them " please write more then just hello "
It does not work that way in my place. You write "hello" and if there is no immediate "hello" back, then you leave this aside until there is. There is no staring at anything.
The phone is the last but one "urgency" level. It means that if someone calls me on the phone it is really urgent. I would interrupt a lot of things, including a presentation, if I get a call.
If this is to say something minor I will block that person, or never pick up their call again.
I see, however, that you're rudely just communicating here without telling people hello first, and waiting for a reply to know they're available to converse.
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.