I know I am going to be downvoted so hard for this, but this is the most Hacker News thing ever.
People have all sorts of different ways to converse; people have different models of politeness, people are shy, uncertain or awkward in all sorts of different ways.
Some things just can't be blurted out. Some things need the scene setting.
People are people. Not robots. Producing a website to demand that people address you in an efficient way is a perfect example of why people dread asking us questions at all.
It's staggeringly entitled.
Now, I will follow that up by saying that when I want to get an answer from a website chat support person, I _always_ plan out, draft or bullet-point exactly what I need, so I know I am not asking a dumb question. And then after I have said hello (!) I explain I have done that so I can paste bits in as needed.
But this website goes a bit too far. "No hello"? Really? This is the framing?
If anyone is considering forwarding this to any internal mailing lists: don't.
I agree with what you're saying as far as framing it around "don't say hello": it's really saying "don't just say hello and wait", but that's not as catchy.
If you ignore the literal "no hello" part and focus on the bigger point, it is really about teaching people chat etiquette. I think the "hello" message happens when people think of chat as just a text-based equivalent to a voice call. The trouble is chat is something new: email and forums are fully asynchronous, voice and face-to-face are fully synchronous, but chat is a kind of hybrid. Just as sync vs async demand different styles and etiquette, so does chat.
"Hello, hope today is going well and the family is all good. I was wondering if you can help me with figuring out the data on a report?" is fine, if you really need to include the small talk, but it's perfectly polite to say "hey, do you have some time to help me debug a report?"
In either case you're being clear about what you need and the recipient has some idea what they're getting into.
You know what's awful? A conversation like this, spread over several minutes:
"Hello"
"Hi.."
"How are you today? How is the family?"
"Uh, good. What's up?"
"I am trying to get together a report but the data makes no sense to me, and I don't know what's wrong."
"Oh. Sorry I'm about to join a meeting and have a few more this morning so I won't be available for a few hours"
I appreciate that this is a fine hair to split, but I didn't actually say that setting boundaries is entitled.
It's the website, and the sort of arms-length sharing of it, that is staggeringly entitled. Worse still, putting it in status messages or biogs.
People will see this thing and think: OK, but when I do communicate precisely the way they want, they are sometimes still abrupt and terse and difficult. Why am I jumping through hoops?
The thing is, the way people are, they might have tolerated that a little more, or maybe not even noticed it much, if it hadn't been pre-emptively shoved in their faces with a literal manifesto website.
Setting boundaries is difficult. But it's what line management is for.
It's also more easily done mid-communication, which I think is often missed here. It's easier to say, "yeah, I can do this, but for next time, could you summarise the problem in your initial message? It helps me deal with your inquiry."
And then remember that everyone is different. If they say "OK, that can be a little difficult for me because...", their reason might be good and it might build a bridge if you try to remember it.
Forwarding that link to a mailing list will damage people's perceptions of you and ultimately kick-start a company-wide discussion on tone of communication that will ultimately result in someone writing a Damore Memo.
(I am only half-joking)
Accept that people are awkward, different and diverse and that we benefit from that too. And then don't forward it.
I once wrote an email to an internal email list about the lack of forks in the departmental kitchen and how I'd bought lots more and they'd all gone too.
I was polite, like this website, and frustrated, like the people who wrote this website. But the request made people who'd simply forgotten to return a fork, or who'd had a cake meeting that day, or whatever was genuinely more important than returning a fork, a little bit piqued. People told me to my face how my politeness came across to them. I should have just bought more forks.
but part of that awkwardness is that some people send these to internal lists :)
you already bought the more forks, and it's okay to send a message to folks that now it's someone else's turn. will they listen? like you experienced, usually no. but it's not like their entitlement that their thing is more important than others' so they can take the forks is perfectly okay, even if it's the reality that we deal with. (and usually the effective way to deal with it is to bring your own fork, or have dedicated catering, or whatnot, leaving it to the community unsurprisingly usually doesn't work in a workplace.)
What I am saying is, don't get into the habit of making requests like this that make you look smaller.
Forks are inexpensive.
Here, I suggest that it is probably better for office harmony and one's career to do the inexpensive thing rather than burdening other people with dealing with your lack of tolerance for doing the inexpensive thing.
Being a little rude like this won't ever blow back on you in ways that you can directly measure. But it will blow back.
The forks email went to a departmental email list archive that happened to be open to the internet (this was 1996). You could find the forks email against my name in early search engines.
These days I understand that all of those people who got a bit snippy with me were right. And that even if I tend to forget the forks thing until topics like this come up, maybe they don't. Maybe they wander this world with a mental image of me being easily perturbed about forks.
> Being a little rude like this won't ever blow back on you in ways that you can directly measure. But it will blow back.
I do want to comment that I consider the just saying hello messages to be rude, itself. It's a balance isn't it, I don't want to be rude to others (buy more forks), but I also don't want people to be rude to me. So depending on the situation I might comment on that, but probably not with a link to a website like this, unless I think I can manage it with a humorous tone.
it's not rudeness. (I assume the rules about workplace kitchenware is that everyone has to return them, etc.)
sure, I completely see your point. I am the buy more fork guy in almost all of my social circles. like you said, it's just inexpensive, easy, etc.
but that doesn't necessarily works for attention. it's pretty scarce, so if someone feels they are really bothered by these hellos, then stating their preference up front seems okay to me.
career advancement is important, but the recruiter won't care, the interviewer won't care, and your next team also won't care about what happened on the internal lists at the previous workplace. (even if it's the first hit for your name in Google)
> but that doesn't necessarily works for attention.
It definitely does not, indeed.
But I still think this kind of approach is damaging. And putting the link in your slack status or sharing it to a list is reputational self-harm.
> career advancement is important, but the recruiter won't care, the interviewer won't care, and your next team also won't care about what happened on the internal lists at the previous workplace. (even if it's the first hit for your name in Google)
Haha luckily it didn't make it into the Google era (or if it did I never found it).
I mean more that, how to put it: you don't have control over how and when briskness and terseness is interpreted as rudeness, and how long that rudeness is remembered.
So things like this website: to me it just comes across as very entitled. Creating a movement around something as small as this is just exactly why people don't like approaching tech people with questions.
We're not actually entitled to be approached in any particular way except politely, and politeness is not something with a single definition that everyone must know for us to be expected to respond at all.
People have all sorts of different ways to converse; people have different models of politeness, people are shy, uncertain or awkward in all sorts of different ways.
Some things just can't be blurted out. Some things need the scene setting.
People are people. Not robots. Producing a website to demand that people address you in an efficient way is a perfect example of why people dread asking us questions at all.
It's staggeringly entitled.
Now, I will follow that up by saying that when I want to get an answer from a website chat support person, I _always_ plan out, draft or bullet-point exactly what I need, so I know I am not asking a dumb question. And then after I have said hello (!) I explain I have done that so I can paste bits in as needed.
But this website goes a bit too far. "No hello"? Really? This is the framing?
If anyone is considering forwarding this to any internal mailing lists: don't.