Another haxor wannabe (regardless of his age) using tech as an excuse to be rude. Kinda like programmers and their endless complaint about documentation :)
Are people getting so many 2-word "thank you" emails a day to show this article has a valid point? Don't get me wrong, sending merely "thank you" as a reply-all to a 200-person recipient list is one of the biggest email sins. But as a unicast, it serves the purpose of acknowledging receipt. If it was worth sending, it was worth knowing it was received, understood, and appreciated.
I think you're missing the point. Sending a thank-you note to a 200-person list is a waste of time and rude to those who don't send such notes at every occasion. If you need acknowledgement than what's better than knowing that other person has read your email? (the default behavior of Facebook messages by the way). It is however another matter if the person who read your email decide to not reply back.
My mother realized this long ago. Now we communicate mostly through Twitter.
My first impression was that this is just sad but I guess that different people (and cultures) have different expectations when it comes to communication.
With that said, the author is living inside a bubble created by his environment and his expectations. Saying that everyone should conform to his way of communicating is rude. Saying "thank you" to someone (through whatever communication channel you find most appropriate) is generally not rude.
Maybe this is why the people I interview almost never send us thank you notes. Here I thought it was just a general decline in etiquette, but they're really just being respectful of our time!
Seriously though, I'm curious how many people send thank you emails (or even cards) after an interview. I was always taught that it was extremely rude not to do this, but I'd say as a conservative estimate, we get thank you e-mails after less than 1 of every 10 interviews.
I thought it was standard practice to send thank you emails or cards after an interview. I figured some people forgot, etc, but 1 out of 10 is a lot lower then I expected.
Honestly, it only takes a few minutes to write a simple thank you note and send it, so there's no excuse not to.
I'm recently out of graduate school and I've been interviewing for full-time positions recently. I send a thank you email 8-24 hours after every interview, with very few exceptions.
In contrast, I've been surprised/disappointed by the general vibe I've gotten in the interview process with a number of employers, large and small. Put most simply, there's little respect shown for candidates' time or situation. (This has been echoed through watching other classmates' experiences as well, so it's not just me being a low-value candidate)
The specifics vary, but it always clearly a one sided interaction and little effort is put in to relations with potential employees except for the most high-profile, rock star candidates.
To me, that seems to be a serious failing - I appreciate the mindset that says you should treat employees with the same mindset that guides your interactions with customers - especially in high-talent or high customer contact industries where employee satisfaction translates quickly into real business value.
So, I guess my point is that I feel the job search process reveals more about society in general when viewed from both sides.
Still, I will always send the thank you notes. I figure the place I want to work is one that appreciates the small gestures as well as the big ones...
"Put most simply, there's little respect shown for candidates' time or situation."
And the same companies that treat job seekers rudely will probably complain about how hard it is to find qualified employees these days.
"To me, that seems to be a serious failing - I appreciate the mindset that says you should treat employees with the same mindset that guides your interactions with customers..."
A lot of big tech companies aren't known for their wonderful customer service either.
I used to send an email (and still do sometimes) but sometimes it seems that there isn't a point. Usually I think I just give up hope and figure an email that they delete isn't going to make a difference in the end. When it's a job that I actually want (or with a company that can provide that job later) I go out of my way to make sure I send it and make it known I want to work there.
Occasionally I want to send the email but feel really awkward about asking for contact info in an interview (especially when there are more than one person at once). When they give a business card or I have their info beforehand I generally do even if it's just an awkward 'thanks for the time'. Somehow I feel like if they wanted me to contact them they would provide the info. I know I should make the effort to get the info but as you can see from my mindset above I generally feel like I bombed and it's pointless anyway.
Back on topic, I recall having to do interview stuff in classes (can't remember which...language arts maybe) in both high school and college and it was always brought up to send a thank you. Maybe people didn't pay much attention.
Apologies, but I'm shocked by the self-centered, entitled crap I see here; most if not all of those annecdotes speak to the self-important, self-absorbed nature of modern society.
(Side note: this isn't just my opinion - there's a decent amount of research on the growth of narcissism in modern scotiety. Look at the work of Dr. Jean Twenge, for example)
A small example:
>My father learned this lesson last year after leaving me a dozen voice mail messages, none of which I listened to.
If you enable voicemail and allow people to leave you messages, it's on you to listen to them. Social interactions are no different than product or software design - don't include an affordance for a feature that you don't want the user to use or, worse, will result in guaranteed failure to accomplish the desired task. The fault isn't the caller's.
Another indication of Mr. Bilton's self-centeredness and entitlement is that he posts tons of articles from his own NY Times blog (and nothing else) to HN, assuming that we all want to read it:
Other than those posts, his total contribution to HN was one comment made over a year ago. It's a bit ironic that someone who can't even be bothered to listen to his father's voicemails would assume that a community that he apparently doesn't consider himself a part of will want to read everything he has to say.
Yeah... I am someone who agrees with most of the statements made by the author (and if you don't, try spending ten hours in one day trying to catch up on five days of email and failing: the emotional response you have to "thanks!" changes pretty quickly; even still, though, I usually can't really fault the sender), but that voicemail example was just inane: if he doesn't want voicemail, he should turn it off... he can even leave the message, but turn off the recording and storage. If he can't for some reason, he should just have the message tell people he can't check messages, and that they should text him (or whatever he had wanted).
Frankly, though, if he doesn't want to listen to voicemail, he should sign up for PhoneTag or YouMail or some other "uses humans to transcribe voicemail" services and then stop whining about it, as the user then gets to leave the voicemail they expected and that he even invited, and he gets the text message he wanted. Technology solved this problem a long time ago, and if he doesn't want to use it, that's really his own fault.
"try spending ten hours in one day trying to catch up on five days of email and failing: the emotional response you have to 'thanks!' changes pretty quickly"
I actually have the opposite reaction: when I'm trying to catch up on e-mail, any message that I can read and delete in a couple of seconds gives me a sense of relief. And the fact that it's a personal thank-you rather than some outdated notification from a build server makes it even nicer.
I feel like if I had a more finite amount of email I would feel that way. I know I used to. I actually get tons of "blank emails" from users leaving my app open in their pocket and sending an email (something difficult to control due to Apple's remote view setup, and a restriction that Cydia can't come with Substrate). I used to feel those totally no-action-item-at-all emails were great, but then I ended up having hundreds of them, now thounsands. The result is that I finally just feel anger and try to pre-filter them (which isn't 100% effective as users have custom signatures that are long or complex sometimes).
I think I felt the same way with thank yous, but now they seem like a penalty, a cost I incur if I respond to a user and solve their problem. I think of it more like my job is to help as many people as possible in the time I have, and every X thank yous is one less legitimate question or bug report I'm able to find.
My response has been to do everything I can to rely on "indirect solutions". Like, if I can cause a user to get a refund email from PayPal, I know they don't need me to also tell them (in fact, by this same moral, we might even call the duplicate rude at this point ;P). That massively cut down my "thanks!" responses.
(Yes, I realize with even more email technology I might be able to better cheaply outsource the filtering. I am working on that. At some point, though, you wonder why you can't just solve the problem at the source ;P.)
I don't want to live in a world where people are shunned for expressing their gratitude.
The problem here sounds like you're ill-equipped for the demands placed on you. (And, possibly, that anyone in your position would be, so I'm not trying to be snarky here).
If I were your manager (not that you have one, but hypothetically) – I would surmise that the issue is that your position is under-staffed or that you have too much on your plate as an individual worker.
Sure, technology might offer some solutions, but if it's to the point that you resent expressions of gratitude from your users, you're losing the ability to empathize with them and that begins to be dangerous from many perspectives.
Further, honestly, you lose something more when you avoid and/or lose that customer contact and that perception of responsiveness from a real person – people like immediate, self-service options, but they also value knowing there's a responsive human out there, ready to fix whatever imaginable problem they may face. That sort of thing wins and retains customers, users, etc.
--
"I think I felt the same way with thank yous, but now they seem like a penalty, a cost I incur if I respond to a user and solve their problem. I think of it more like my job is to help as many people as possible in the time I have, and every X thank yous is one less legitimate question or bug report I'm able to find."
As a final point, I just reject the idea that the time and cognitive load from one (or even a dozen) thank-you emails is equal to the time required for a question or bug report, so I doubt the gravity of the problem to begin with and maintain that there's more afoot here than simply over-demand for constrained resources.
I said that somewhat facetiously, purposely adding a ";P". I mean, to the extent to which I believe the problem is the source, it is that I am living in a culture that seems to require people to say "thank you" in order to not 1) feel ungrateful or 2) make the other person think you are ungrateful. That either of the players believes that that "thank you" is required (to the extent that people seriously say things like "thanks in advance" if they feel that a reply later will be difficult... that's just bullshit ;P) does seem like a problem, but as I live in a culture that does this, I play by those rules.
The one concession I make to my reality is that I tend to go out of my way to make certain that when I say "thank you", you feel thanked: I don't just say it as a trite addition to a conversation, I make it clear and emphasized, and I try to get eye contact; if at all appropriate (such as dealing with a customer support person) I make it clear why I thanked the person in order to underscore just how much effort I'm putting into it over what some people who say "thanks".
I will then point out both that I had said "even still, though, I usually can't really fault the sender" and how I went to great lengths to describe my attempts to solve these problems indirectly by 1) adding better filtering, 2) working on technical solutions that better allow outsourcing the problem of e-mail ingress triage, and 3) figuring out ways to avoid the thank you from happening in the first place (such as avoiding solving a problem in a way that causes them to get an e-mail).
> Sure, technology might offer some solutions, but if it's to the point that you resent expressions of gratitude from your users, you're losing the ability to empathize with them and that begins to be dangerous from many perspectives.
I like to presume that every user I've helped is grateful (unless of course they send me back a nastygram in response). To assume otherwise and to only get that feeling if they send you a "thank you" seems like an overly negative way to live life. I mean, its nice to get the occasional "thank you" (especially from someone who put a lot of thought into it), but if it's to the point where to "empathize with people" (seriously?) and to feel you've helped them you need to obtain silly expressions of it, there's probably something horrible that has gone wrong.
> Further, honestly, you lose something more when you avoid and/or lose that customer contact and that perception of responsiveness from a real person – people like immediate, self-service options, but they also value knowing there's a responsive human out there, ready to fix whatever imaginable problem they may face. That sort of thing wins and retains customers, users, etc.
So, to verify: you think that a user who sends an e-mail to someone's personal e-mail account in English (or Chinese, or whatever) in long-form asking for a refund, who then receives that refund, is going to assume that a computer took care of that issue, instead of a human? That just doesn't make any sense to me at all... I would find it much more believable if you told me that a non-negligible number of people using an actual self-service option (a term you seem to be mis-applying) believed there was a human who processed all of the requests (a statistic that may even be true).
> As a final point, I just reject the idea that the time and cognitive load from one (or even a dozen) thank-you emails is equal to the time required for a question or bug report, so I doubt the gravity of the problem to begin with and maintain that there's more afoot here than simply over-demand for constrained resources.
I can only assume that I'm trying to run a company with many more users than you on margins much lower than you (assuming you are running a company at all, which is not clear). I would easily receive many hundreds per day of varyingly complex versions of "thanks" if I sent a "Done. -J" to every issue I fixed. Even doing what ...
This article is a result of what happens when you have no idea what to write about but you need to get something out quickly + when you want to sound sophisticated and socially progressive.
I can't tell if this article is supposed to be sarcastic or tongue-in-cheek. I actually think it's part of a worrying pattern from nytimes to be idiotically controversial, perhaps to increase readership and link shares.
Anyway, I'll assume it's serious. A great piece of advice I heard a long time ago: if you constantly feel you're in a rush or don't have enough time for small tasks, you're probably not actually busy, you're mentally disorganized. Simplify the way you perceive the world and properly prioritize things. I feel like that advice applies well to this article. A superfluous e-mail is not a big deal.
Rude: "Thank you", vocal communication, simple requests for information
Perfectly acceptable (?): futzing with electronics when dining with others, talking loudly into the ether regardless of setting, sending passive-aggressive links to Google
Manners aren't passé, simply underappreciated in some quarters. In others they can make all the difference.
24 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 60.9 ms ] threadI think this article makes a lot of sense.
My first impression was that this is just sad but I guess that different people (and cultures) have different expectations when it comes to communication.
With that said, the author is living inside a bubble created by his environment and his expectations. Saying that everyone should conform to his way of communicating is rude. Saying "thank you" to someone (through whatever communication channel you find most appropriate) is generally not rude.
Seriously though, I'm curious how many people send thank you emails (or even cards) after an interview. I was always taught that it was extremely rude not to do this, but I'd say as a conservative estimate, we get thank you e-mails after less than 1 of every 10 interviews.
Honestly, it only takes a few minutes to write a simple thank you note and send it, so there's no excuse not to.
I'm recently out of graduate school and I've been interviewing for full-time positions recently. I send a thank you email 8-24 hours after every interview, with very few exceptions.
In contrast, I've been surprised/disappointed by the general vibe I've gotten in the interview process with a number of employers, large and small. Put most simply, there's little respect shown for candidates' time or situation. (This has been echoed through watching other classmates' experiences as well, so it's not just me being a low-value candidate)
The specifics vary, but it always clearly a one sided interaction and little effort is put in to relations with potential employees except for the most high-profile, rock star candidates.
To me, that seems to be a serious failing - I appreciate the mindset that says you should treat employees with the same mindset that guides your interactions with customers - especially in high-talent or high customer contact industries where employee satisfaction translates quickly into real business value.
So, I guess my point is that I feel the job search process reveals more about society in general when viewed from both sides.
Still, I will always send the thank you notes. I figure the place I want to work is one that appreciates the small gestures as well as the big ones...
And the same companies that treat job seekers rudely will probably complain about how hard it is to find qualified employees these days.
"To me, that seems to be a serious failing - I appreciate the mindset that says you should treat employees with the same mindset that guides your interactions with customers..."
A lot of big tech companies aren't known for their wonderful customer service either.
Occasionally I want to send the email but feel really awkward about asking for contact info in an interview (especially when there are more than one person at once). When they give a business card or I have their info beforehand I generally do even if it's just an awkward 'thanks for the time'. Somehow I feel like if they wanted me to contact them they would provide the info. I know I should make the effort to get the info but as you can see from my mindset above I generally feel like I bombed and it's pointless anyway.
Back on topic, I recall having to do interview stuff in classes (can't remember which...language arts maybe) in both high school and college and it was always brought up to send a thank you. Maybe people didn't pay much attention.
(Side note: this isn't just my opinion - there's a decent amount of research on the growth of narcissism in modern scotiety. Look at the work of Dr. Jean Twenge, for example)
A small example:
>My father learned this lesson last year after leaving me a dozen voice mail messages, none of which I listened to.
If you enable voicemail and allow people to leave you messages, it's on you to listen to them. Social interactions are no different than product or software design - don't include an affordance for a feature that you don't want the user to use or, worse, will result in guaranteed failure to accomplish the desired task. The fault isn't the caller's.
http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=nickbilton
Other than those posts, his total contribution to HN was one comment made over a year ago. It's a bit ironic that someone who can't even be bothered to listen to his father's voicemails would assume that a community that he apparently doesn't consider himself a part of will want to read everything he has to say.
(http://imgur.com/OxrsFTP)
Frankly, though, if he doesn't want to listen to voicemail, he should sign up for PhoneTag or YouMail or some other "uses humans to transcribe voicemail" services and then stop whining about it, as the user then gets to leave the voicemail they expected and that he even invited, and he gets the text message he wanted. Technology solved this problem a long time ago, and if he doesn't want to use it, that's really his own fault.
I actually have the opposite reaction: when I'm trying to catch up on e-mail, any message that I can read and delete in a couple of seconds gives me a sense of relief. And the fact that it's a personal thank-you rather than some outdated notification from a build server makes it even nicer.
I think I felt the same way with thank yous, but now they seem like a penalty, a cost I incur if I respond to a user and solve their problem. I think of it more like my job is to help as many people as possible in the time I have, and every X thank yous is one less legitimate question or bug report I'm able to find.
My response has been to do everything I can to rely on "indirect solutions". Like, if I can cause a user to get a refund email from PayPal, I know they don't need me to also tell them (in fact, by this same moral, we might even call the duplicate rude at this point ;P). That massively cut down my "thanks!" responses.
(Yes, I realize with even more email technology I might be able to better cheaply outsource the filtering. I am working on that. At some point, though, you wonder why you can't just solve the problem at the source ;P.)
I don't want to live in a world where people are shunned for expressing their gratitude.
The problem here sounds like you're ill-equipped for the demands placed on you. (And, possibly, that anyone in your position would be, so I'm not trying to be snarky here).
If I were your manager (not that you have one, but hypothetically) – I would surmise that the issue is that your position is under-staffed or that you have too much on your plate as an individual worker.
Sure, technology might offer some solutions, but if it's to the point that you resent expressions of gratitude from your users, you're losing the ability to empathize with them and that begins to be dangerous from many perspectives.
Further, honestly, you lose something more when you avoid and/or lose that customer contact and that perception of responsiveness from a real person – people like immediate, self-service options, but they also value knowing there's a responsive human out there, ready to fix whatever imaginable problem they may face. That sort of thing wins and retains customers, users, etc.
--
"I think I felt the same way with thank yous, but now they seem like a penalty, a cost I incur if I respond to a user and solve their problem. I think of it more like my job is to help as many people as possible in the time I have, and every X thank yous is one less legitimate question or bug report I'm able to find."
As a final point, I just reject the idea that the time and cognitive load from one (or even a dozen) thank-you emails is equal to the time required for a question or bug report, so I doubt the gravity of the problem to begin with and maintain that there's more afoot here than simply over-demand for constrained resources.
I said that somewhat facetiously, purposely adding a ";P". I mean, to the extent to which I believe the problem is the source, it is that I am living in a culture that seems to require people to say "thank you" in order to not 1) feel ungrateful or 2) make the other person think you are ungrateful. That either of the players believes that that "thank you" is required (to the extent that people seriously say things like "thanks in advance" if they feel that a reply later will be difficult... that's just bullshit ;P) does seem like a problem, but as I live in a culture that does this, I play by those rules.
The one concession I make to my reality is that I tend to go out of my way to make certain that when I say "thank you", you feel thanked: I don't just say it as a trite addition to a conversation, I make it clear and emphasized, and I try to get eye contact; if at all appropriate (such as dealing with a customer support person) I make it clear why I thanked the person in order to underscore just how much effort I'm putting into it over what some people who say "thanks".
I will then point out both that I had said "even still, though, I usually can't really fault the sender" and how I went to great lengths to describe my attempts to solve these problems indirectly by 1) adding better filtering, 2) working on technical solutions that better allow outsourcing the problem of e-mail ingress triage, and 3) figuring out ways to avoid the thank you from happening in the first place (such as avoiding solving a problem in a way that causes them to get an e-mail).
> Sure, technology might offer some solutions, but if it's to the point that you resent expressions of gratitude from your users, you're losing the ability to empathize with them and that begins to be dangerous from many perspectives.
I like to presume that every user I've helped is grateful (unless of course they send me back a nastygram in response). To assume otherwise and to only get that feeling if they send you a "thank you" seems like an overly negative way to live life. I mean, its nice to get the occasional "thank you" (especially from someone who put a lot of thought into it), but if it's to the point where to "empathize with people" (seriously?) and to feel you've helped them you need to obtain silly expressions of it, there's probably something horrible that has gone wrong.
> Further, honestly, you lose something more when you avoid and/or lose that customer contact and that perception of responsiveness from a real person – people like immediate, self-service options, but they also value knowing there's a responsive human out there, ready to fix whatever imaginable problem they may face. That sort of thing wins and retains customers, users, etc.
So, to verify: you think that a user who sends an e-mail to someone's personal e-mail account in English (or Chinese, or whatever) in long-form asking for a refund, who then receives that refund, is going to assume that a computer took care of that issue, instead of a human? That just doesn't make any sense to me at all... I would find it much more believable if you told me that a non-negligible number of people using an actual self-service option (a term you seem to be mis-applying) believed there was a human who processed all of the requests (a statistic that may even be true).
> As a final point, I just reject the idea that the time and cognitive load from one (or even a dozen) thank-you emails is equal to the time required for a question or bug report, so I doubt the gravity of the problem to begin with and maintain that there's more afoot here than simply over-demand for constrained resources.
I can only assume that I'm trying to run a company with many more users than you on margins much lower than you (assuming you are running a company at all, which is not clear). I would easily receive many hundreds per day of varyingly complex versions of "thanks" if I sent a "Done. -J" to every issue I fixed. Even doing what ...
Anyway, I'll assume it's serious. A great piece of advice I heard a long time ago: if you constantly feel you're in a rush or don't have enough time for small tasks, you're probably not actually busy, you're mentally disorganized. Simplify the way you perceive the world and properly prioritize things. I feel like that advice applies well to this article. A superfluous e-mail is not a big deal.
Perfectly acceptable (?): futzing with electronics when dining with others, talking loudly into the ether regardless of setting, sending passive-aggressive links to Google
Manners aren't passé, simply underappreciated in some quarters. In others they can make all the difference.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit
to
Re: Lorem ipsum dolor sit -- Thanks!
(On disqusish comment systems, I often upvote a reply to suggest I saw it rather than reply once more.)