[dacohenii]

> Not that you should go out of your way to be hurtful, but any genuinely useful advice/suggestions should be given without regard for emotion. You're at work, not a social club.

I agree that this could be useful advice and that you should _not_ hesitate to give it if you think it will be useful. However, I think it's rather extreme and short-sighted to say that such advice should be given entirely "without regard for emotion."

Here's the thing. Your co-workers are human. Humans have lizard brains, and sometimes get defensive. In order to maximize productivity and harmony in the workplace, you want to avoid that.

There's this thing called tact. Use it.

[gavinray]

I have a hard time empathizing with this. I understand the principle, but here's where I come from/my experience:

When many of my coworkers message me on Slack for example, they don't just leave me a message asking for what they want, they say "Hey, how are you", or "How was your weekend", or some other silly thing.

I know they don't care about the answer to my question. Now, instead of being able to asynchronously answer their question, I have to spend my own energy (I'm slightly autistic, so it doesn't come easily to me) coming up with some reply to this, so that they THEN ask what they actually want to know.

  > [03 AM] COWORKER: Hey gavinray, how was your weekend?
  > [10 AM] gavinray: It was decent, what about yours?
  > [11 AM] COWORKER: Good. Hey, about ISSUE-123, do you...

Now they have wasted both of our time and drained me of my lifeforce. Sometimes there are hours of delay between this/we are in different timezones.

Just ask me for what you want, I know you're only talking to me because you want something.

[eventhorizon77]

This can be a cultural thing. In particular, if I understand correctly, in India it is considered rude not to make small talk before jumping into work. (I'm slightly autistic too but it's not completely useless. I ended up taking a trip to India at one point, and such trips are much easier if you've put in the effort to understand the culture, and your coworkers everyday lives.) I would suggest trying not to be so brief. Ask about their family, their commute to work, etc - get to know them a little better.

[abbeyj]

Spreading https://nohello.net/ around your company may help. I have it set as my status message.