I believe that some of this is differences in communication style. I like written communication because I don't process verbal communication as well. But I've also had plenty of colleagues who are more comfortable with verbal communication, and may not process prose as well. Many of them seemed hesitant to believe they'd fully understood something until they'd had a chance to talk through it to confirm. And, yes, needed verbal prompting in the same way that I tend to need written prompting.

The most functional workplaces understand and respect these differences and make room for everyone's communication style.

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soupfordummies 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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

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pmg101 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Some people just don't have enough to do and setting up "quick chats" makes them feel busy.

	▲	8note an hour ago \| parent [-]
		ornthey think they have a lot of questions and think they will be less disruptive by having a call. You also didnt give them the response they wanted to hear, which is that you own the problem and they can tell somebody else that its being handled

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dprkh 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I feel you.

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tacostakohashi 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.".

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stiglitz 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

My theory is that it’s an intuitive rate limiting scheme devised to cope with the corporate fire hose. There’s no limit on the amount of text coming into an office worker’s inbox in a unit of time. But if one focuses on verbal communication, there’s always going to be a single stream.

Personally, I don’t do this; instead I deal with the stress of the fire hose by grinding my teeth to stubs at night. And for the messages I don’t get to, instead of “let’s discuss”, the sender gets nothing at all.

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macNchz 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

My gut based on what you're describing is that there is some degree of "strategic neglect" happening here, where people the people doing this are effectively allowing the things being asked of them to self-prioritize: the proposals/emails/PRs/etc that get attention are the ones where the person who sent it follows up or schedules a meeting to discuss it, meaning they're likely higher priority than things where the person doesn't make that extra effort. This is a longstanding if exasperating strategy many people use, but I think it's getting more popular now that lobbing out a long proposal is easier than ever (because of AI).

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chneu 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I've worked with a lot of people who will not engage with a request until the request has been made multiple times.

Its a very lazy way of filtering.

"It couldn't have been that important" is their logic.

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bunderbunder 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I mentioned elsewhere that I was once coached to do this. In that situation it honestly wasn’t lazy at all. At the time I was fielding such a high load of incoming requests that even reading and responding to them was eating up a huge chunk of my time and preventing me from getting anything else (i.e., actually doing any of the requested work) done.

I realize that this looked to the people requesting my attention like deliberate stonewalling. That’s because it was. And it wasn’t cool. But, “This quarter I didn’t ship any software because I was too busy answering email,” would not have earned me a satisfactory performance review. And I certainly was not going to openly admit to anyone but my immediate manager that I was using persistence as a prioritization signal. I saw what happened to the poor schmuck who made that mistake.

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SoftTalker 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Are LLMs are going to neutralize this as a tactic? Or reinforce it? They will happily bombard you with text, and you can set up an agent to fire back. More text than ever will be transmitted, with less and less of it ever coming to the attention of a human.

	▲	8note an hour ago \| parent [-]
		itll stay exactly where it is. scheduling a meeting is telling somebody that you consider this to be a priority and therefore they should too

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infamouscow 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

What I learned managing high performers is a disproportionate number of them had very hard childhoods and carry permanent scars that make this behavior destructive. These are the people that generally get ignored in every aspect of their life because their brain is operating much faster than the rest of society and get mistaken for being insane in every facet of their life. So when they experience this kind of behavior in an environment that's supposed to reward them for their ideas, it's stultifying. Those high performers are not going to continue putting effort and energy into novel ideas if they're being ignored.

The solution is pretty simple: just fire the manager.

	▲	8note an hour ago \| parent [-]
		a high performer will push through that to get what they want done though. the obvious case for a higher performer in this is to develop strong back channels and trust with whoever usually blows off unnecessary work

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bunderbunder 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Totally fair. I don’t know your actual situation and I also find these kinds of interactions to be infinitely frustrating.

But it took me a long time to realize there can be a sort of “double empathy” problem across communication styles that makes it difficult for people to accurately infer each other’s intent. They might even be operating from two slightly etiquette norms, such that the same behavior is considered polite by one person and dismissive or hostile by the other. Not saying that’s your particular situation, just talking generalities since that’s all I reasonably can speak to on a pseudonymous forum like this.

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ozgung 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This is similar to me asking some basic questions to the LLM instead of reading the text it wants me to read and review. The difference is that it’s a robot and you’re not.