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 3 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 3 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.

	▲	SoftTalker an hour 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.

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infamouscow 3 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.