[cryptoboy2283]

The level of entitlement in this post is ridiculous.

Dude. You're just an engineer from an Engineering department of some company.

Nobody's gonna read & apply any special rules of communnicating with you, especially written by yourself (sic!)

[Leynos]

It seems reasonable to me. I tell my reports to decline meeting requests unless the invitations include an agenda and a clear goal.

If you're asking for 30 minutes or an hour of someone's time, it is only common courtesy to tell them why.

If you send someone a message, don't just say "Hi". This is incredibly bad manners in the context of asynchronous communication. Give the recipient an opportunity to prioritize your message. You don't know what they are doing. They could be fire fighting. They could be tied up in a face-to-face conversation. They could be in deep flow. They might have three or four other messages to prioritize alongside yours.

If you don't give someone the information to make an appropriate prioritization decision, all you are doing is inducing anxiety.

This is all a matter of being kind and accommodating to your colleagues, enabling them to work with you effectively, and making it easier for them to help you.

Purposefully making your colleagues' lives more difficult is a recipe for an unpleasant working environment.

[MaxikCZ]

> don't just say "Hi"

Agree, but

> If you don't give someone the information to make an appropriate prioritization decision, all you are doing is inducing anxiety.

Disagree here. I used to think the same "why you only sayibg Hi and not what you want", but I realized it doesnt have to be my problem if I dont let it become one.

You said Hi? Expect a Hello from me sometimes during the day. You needed something urgent? "Why didnt you tell me?". A "Hi" isn't urgent, so I know I dont feel the burden of not being able to assign it a correct priority.

A lot of people have trouble recognizing when their teoubles are really other people troubles in disguise.

[daghamm]

"I tell my reports to decline meeting requests unless the invitations include an agenda and a clear goal."

We have a team that works this way 100% of the time, assuming the invitation is not coming from higher management.

They are always the last to deliver and the team with the most critical bugs. If you don't make time for back channel sync, you will become an isolated island and your product will eventually suffer.

[Leynos]

How so? There is no excuse for sending a meeting invite without an explanation as to what will be discussed or what you hope to achieve. That just results in aimless meetings that either have too many unnecessary attendees or missing people who do need to attend.

When someone asks you to provide an agenda for a meeting, do you really just ignore them?

[daghamm]

I don't know, but let me hypothesise.

When you work with complex stuff, there will always be one or two urgent meetings where the caller doesn't have time or the data to set up a proper agenda.

A meeting invite saying "oh shit, all hands on deck" does not need to be due to bad planning. Obviously this should not be the norm, but when it happens you cannot simply instruct your people to ignore it.

[Leynos]

I hate to say it, but dealing with high priority incidents with a meeting invite saying "oh shit, all hands on deck" and no further information does not sound healthy. The organisation should have a proper incident response plan in place setting out communication standards and channels.

[daghamm]

I think you are misunderstanding my message.

This should never be the norm. But when the work is challenging and non-trivial something like this happens once in a while.

[wccrawford]

I think what you're missing is that this isn't just this person's preferences. These are things that bother many, many engineers and don't provide any value compared to the alternative.

Good etiquette isn't common sense, and that's why there are books written about it for centuries.

[prmoustache]

> Nobody's gonna read & apply any special rules of communnicating with you, especially written by yourself (sic!)

On the other hand, you don't have to reply to those random "quick call" messages as well as videocalls without an agenda.

[meowface]

I think the core advice here is excellent and something I frequently think about when I receive requests for help, "can we hop on a quick call?", and "hi [name]" - but it's written extremely condescendingly and obnoxiously. This person seems intolerable to work with or interact with in general.

[malux85]

I thought this was excellent, and I would enjoy working with people like this