Say Hello
Imagine walking up to someone's desk, saying absolutely nothing, and dropping a 400-line stack trace on their keyboard... 🤦♀️
❌ Don't do this
Note that Keith got his fix, and also got quietly removed from three group chats, two lunch invites and one wedding. In fact, Tim had been having a lovely morning right up until then!
People who do this are generally trying to be efficient by not wasting a whole two seconds on pleasantries, like one would with a compiler - and that's... a choice. But it's 2026 and your coworker is neither a compiler nor a REST endpoint. For most people, being greeted costs approximately zero milliseconds. So despite peak optimisation, you're actually just making the other person feel like a cron job, which is lost morale (and kinda unsettling).
The same goes for:
- "per my last message"
- pasting 200 lines of logs with no words attached
- "did you even read the docs"
- "well, actually—"
- replying "k"
- etc.
Just say hi first! 😫
✅ Instead try this
Notice that Dawn opened with a greeting and nothing else, and the world did not end. The question turned up two messages later and got answered anyway. A "hello" on its own is a complete message - it means "I am here and I like you."
So all of these are perfectly good:
- "morning! 👋"
- "heyyy"
- "hi Sophie! hope the weekend was good 😄"
- "yo! coffee later? also prod is on fire 🙂"
- "hiya - no rush at all, but could you review this?"
- etc.
Attach a question if you have one. Don't, if you don't. Nobody has ever been fired for saying good morning.
It may seem trivial, but greeting someone before firing off your question also allows for being invited to things. If the other party is a person, and you behave like one too, they might one day ask you to lunch - instead of staring at your message and quietly wondering whether you were deployed or born.
It also costs you nothing. Genuinely nothing. You spent longer aligning that comment block.
When done right - everyone's happy! 🎉