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Comment by nullc | Hacker News Reader

I don't think this advice is useful because a lot of the time the reason people are doing this is the reason people don't like it.

When someone states their request outright the recipient may be "conditionally there" based on the content of the request: They'll reply if they find the question interesting/relevant and worth interrupting what they're doing and put it off otherwise.

The asker, however, would prefer their question get answered. If they first determine if the recipient is present there will be social pressure to answer the following question, even if its a waste of the recipient's time at the moment.

The recipient may find it aggravating to have people soft-force them to pre-commit to responding when they don't even know what will be asked.

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Just because I respond with "what's up?" Or "hey" does not mean I will immediately respond to the request. In fact I usually come back to these types of chats an hour or so later kind of as a punishment. You have to train-UP your peers and customers to set expectations. It may sound brash but we're not here to make friends and constantly being interrupted while in deep thought is not healthy.

Aside, the best work around I've found is replying to prompts is with something like "I'm kinda here, in and out-- just leave a message and I'll get to it when I make my way back around to the chat window." You're around, but you're not committing to reply on any particular time-frame.

They'll often keep doing it, but at least you don't have to feel pressured to accept a synchronous conversation sight-unseen.

I'm aware of this motivation, and it's the reason that I deliberately delay responding to "hey" messages. If I don't know what you want, then I also don't know whether I have time to think about it right now. It's a bit of an arms race.

There may be some who are doing this deliberately based on the reasons you mentioned; but for me personally, and my guess is for others, I did it out of ignorance of the frustration it gave the other person. Once I had awareness, I could change my behavior. So the article is useful.

I tend to ignore messages that convey no useful information. I also push back and ask them to please do not just say hello, I'm busy, I cannot triage if don't tell me what you mean.

social pressure lol

I’ll write back I’m busy or that I’m not going to do that

and accept the consequences

more people should accept the consequences

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