Vol. I
A Manifesto
Est. Today
In defence of human decency

Hello
is fine

A gentle rebuttal to the spreadsheet-brained notion that greeting your colleagues is a productivity failure.

helloisfine.org
✦

Somewhere along the way, we started treating our coworkers like APIs. This is a problem.

The nohello movement made a reasonable point and then took it too far. Yes, don't send a "hello" and then wait three hours before asking your question. Everyone agrees on that. But the cultural artefact that followed — the Slack status linking to nohello.net, the implicit signal that any greeting is an inefficiency to be eliminated — has made remote work measurably colder.

A "hey!" followed immediately by a question is not the same as a bare "hello" with a cursor blinking expectantly. Both are acceptable. Neither should require a disclaimer.

"The person who sends you a warm greeting before asking their question has not wronged you. They have simply decided that you are a human being."

The actual argument

Three things nohello gets wrong

01
It misnames its own advice
The site doesn't actually tell you not to say hello. It tells you to include context alongside your hello. The name implies rudeness is efficiency. It isn't.
02
It ignores cultural difference
Not everyone is comfortable blurting out a request cold. Greetings ease people in. Different backgrounds, different anxiety levels, different styles — all valid.
03
It optimises the wrong thing
You saved 0.4 seconds of async wait time and created a workplace where people feel like ticket numbers. Great trade.
Both of these are fine

The only message that's actually bad

❌ The one everyone agrees is annoying
Alex Hey
You Hey! What's up?
Alex — 3 hours later so I had a question about the deploy pipeline
✓ Fine. Both of these are fine.
Alex — option A Hey! Quick q — do you know if the staging deploy runs on merge or manually? Thanks!
Alex — option B, equally fine Hi :) hope your morning's going well! When you have a sec — do you know if staging deploys on merge or manually?

Option B is warmer. Some people prefer warmth. That is allowed. The recipient of option B is not being oppressed. They have been wished a good morning and asked a question about infrastructure. They will survive.

In closing

Be efficient. Also be a person.

By all means, don't leave people hanging. Include your question. Respect async norms. But saying hello — genuinely, warmly, humanly — is not a bug. It is a small insistence that the person on the other end of the wire is more than a service endpoint.

You can have both. Many people do, every day, without incident.

Hello.

That's it. That's the whole message. You've just been greeted, and nothing bad happened.

helloisfine.org