It blew my mind to enter college and peer review other people's papers. Up until that point I understood that there was a range of capability with writing, but I figured that in college courses the floor would be pushed up. I was dead wrong, and it was shocking to me that these folks had managed to get all the way through high school writing like 8th graders.

ETA: This is over 20 years ago, btw. I hear it's gotten materially worse. That terrifies me.

There is somebody that I am having to work with right now that will not respond to a single thing I ask unless it is on a live phone call.

I will ask a relatively simple question via email, and then he will call me back an hour later and leave a voicemail just saying "Sorry I missed you, call me back" instead of even answering my simple question. I'm almost never at my desk, always running around out on the production floor (manufacturing engineer). I'll get his voicemail, call him back and leave HIM a voicemail re-iterating my question, and then I will also send an email again re-iterating my question.

We will go back and forth like this until EVENTUALLY we catch each other at the right time, then it's a quick 2-minute call. It takes days and days, sometimes over a week, to get one single answer that takes 2 minutes to talk over.

He is an external consultant I am working with, so I can't even just walk over to his desk. Absolutely infuriating. As soon as this project is done I am never asking him another question again, I'll find someone else. (I inherited the project and don't have the resources to find another consultant right now)

It’s about to get a lot worse too. Gen Z has had noticeably worse reading comprehension scores over the last 5-10 years and they are starting to enter the workforce now. Many prefer video over text and firmly believe that written text is “the harder medium”.

im unconvinced.

id place the reason that its more work to identify and raise those concerns ahead of time, since if they are correct, you did all that work coming up with the happy path and the issues ahead of time, vs if the issues come up later, you can focus on and fix them as they come up.

i dont think the meeting is in focus at all

You generally also get paid with ~10% of everyone else, regardless if you get 3x more done or 3x less done.

So, if like most people, your working to live instead living to work - your employer is doing a terrible job incentivizing you to do more than the bare minimum.

We all know you are far better off doing almost nothing and then all your time trying to get promoted for it, than trying to get promoted by actually doing a good job and thinking you'll get promoted based on merit.

Anyone who would advocate for this strategy against any SME is a moron anyway.

It's like watching someone who's expecting a knife fight walk in with a concealed handgun only to be immediately confronted with a tank.

The email is usually an attempt to not waste time in the meeting and get shit done. Leadership always favors those who can make it so. Anyone who stalls for time or hides information will always look bad. I don't get why people so desperately try anyway.

Most of these strange gambits in office politics are a losing game for the inept and inexperienced. One can only wonder why we keep pretending like there even is such a "game" of office politics.

Yeah that's true to an extent. I've also had many occasions where someone asks for an update on x and I respond with a two line email asking a yes/no question and the person just says "let's hop on a quick call" etc. That's so frustrating because they're turning 30 seconds into 30 minutes.

Not the person you're responding to but just needed to vent that. It's been happening a lot lately in my world

I am sympathetic to the "different communication style" line of reasoning, but I don't really buy it in the example I used / people I work with at present.

As far as I'm concerned, responding to some well-prepared prose with "lets discuss this", is just a non-response, and a refusal to engage. If one wanted to have a useful discussion, but preferred something verbal, actually picking up the phone, or responding with something like "I'm curuous about X/Y/Z. Let's discuss this at 2pm, I'll send you an invitation", or "please find some time in my calendar for us to look at this."

That would keep the matter progressing, and provide the opportunity to prepare for a useful discussion. "lets discuss this" is just saying "I need you to spoon-feed this to me, but I'm not going to make arrangements for that, so you'll need to figure out how to deal with that.".

>There is no good excuse for ignoring requests repeatedly besides laziness or self importance.

Not necessarily, there are also plenty of cases where a person's KPIs don't match their responsibilities or the actual needs of the team. This is frequently a management problem where resources haven't been properly assigned and the employee will always prioritize what they are evaluated on to minimize friction. Far too often managers collect responsibilities for their team (or are told to take on something), yet have zero plans other than "it will work itself out" and they don't bother to formalize how the requests will be dealt with.

There are certainly a lot of people out there that refuse to do their jobs, but it is common enough that there is something else wrong that a discussion with the manager about where the process is failing is the first step.

It’s not necessarily laziness. They just don’t care about your request. “This thing you’re asking for is not important compared to the other things I need do.”

I used to run build call and this was the bane of my existence. People who just never engage (but pretend they are to get you to go away).

Dogbert: "I can only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good, either."

> The real solution is to simply fire these people.

I don't think that firing people is an intelligent solution to a problem that boils down to your personal inconvenience.

If you posted a PR and it's awaiting review, it is no longer your problem. You are literally blocked by others. Who knows what they are dealing with? Perhaps they have higher priority items than reviewing your work? I mean, would you stop making this complain after they review your 3rd or 30th PR? Everyone around you also has work to do.

If PR reviews are slow, escalate the issue with your manager.

I’ve even been explicitly coached to use this strategy as a sort of pre-triage. Because when you’re truly swamped with incoming requests even prioritizing starts to eat up a lot of time.

> Blocking off face-to-face time is a signal that the work is important enough to get done.

This.

I'd also add that not bothering to book a meeting means that people treat you like a low-value work queue that they use to dump low-visibility and low-accountability work. They invoke you to handle silly tasks that no one but you accept.

By requiring a meeting, you're increasing the threshold of effort that your requester is willing to invest in getting it done. If they can't be bothered doing a meeting, you shouldn't bother doing the work for them.

At my company it is "post-mortem"

Totally... I've been through this cycle more times than I'd care to count:

"What would be a good day next week to block off time to review this?"

"We don't need a meeting for this, I can get to it <whenever>"

"That's an excellent point, and I tend to agree. Nevertheless, this has been hanging out there for several weeks now. We can schedule the meeting now, and if it ends up getting done before then, it can be canceled.".

I think not reading or responding to e-mails is largely (from my experience) indicative of more fundamental communication problems in the company/group.

The first problem is e-mail fatigue. Many groups have ridiculous amounts of automated e-mails that amount to line noise. The information in them is rarely actionable and certainly never so critical it needs to be read by everyone immediately. "Everything is OK" alarms are fucking infuriating. It's very easy to miss the super highly critical e-mail from a manager that's just a lazily forwarded e-mail from the automated systems. The "Have you seen this?" with the entire contents of the line noise e-mail from the automated system.

Second is people, especially middle management, that for some reason assume e-mail is a real-time communication medium. They send an e-mail and expect the recipients to drop everything to respond to it. Simultaneously the people actually doing work are actually working and not checking their e-mail every nanosecond to see if they need to drop their actual work to explain their actual work to management. So then the middle management sends a cascade of instant messages and schedules meetings to get the people doing actual work to drop everything to explain their actual work. These meetings will inevitably contain complaints about not getting work done.

It's now even worse with AI in the middle. Instead of using LLMs to write easy to scan and digest bullet point e-mails they're used to expand bullet points into useless novellas.

My solutions to these problems are thus:

1. RSS - Automated systems should just emit RSS feeds with their normal status with separate feeds for exceptional conditions. Only in those actual "machine on fire" conditions are e-mails sent by such systems. Parties interested in constant updates just watch their feed reader and everyone has a single source of truth for event logs from the automated systems.

2. Automated systems should just file tickets automatically so everyone involved has a single source of truth and can all collaborate in one place. Even better if the ticket/bug tracker supports RSS because it becomes dead simple for anyone to follow feeds they're interested in and even set up system notifications for new issues.

3. Company/group wide e-mail policies that constantly remind everyone it's not a real-time medium and that filling everyone's inbox with noise is not effective communication. This can be enforced with automated delivery delays guaranteeing e-mail won't be immediately delivered as a safeguard against people using it instead of actual real-time channels.

4. Verbose e-mails are also rarely effective communication and shared LLM prompts that make e-mails shorter and clearer would also help.

Removing most of the noise from e-mail makes it more effective and can make it an actual communication medium. If e-mail becomes effective communication far less of everyone's limited lives needs to be spent zoning out in meetings where their only purpose is to "give a status update".

Back in the days of paper memos the literal cost and effort required to send them required the sender to really think about what they were trying to communicate and how to say it best. Because e-mail is essentially free it is widely abused since so little thought needs to go into its composition and delivery.

They're annoying companies to work at, yes. They're also highly profitable, so it's difficult to make the case that they're poorly run.

An innovative approach. And by submitting a PR on Friday afternoon, you might get a free hand to do anything you like!