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People only use email to create a paper trail. It's not a discussion, as a medium it's a set of assertions and challenges. If you don't have a personal relatio
by fatdog 10y ago
People only use email to create a paper trail. It's not a discussion, as a medium it's a set of assertions and challenges.
If you don't have a personal relationship with someone, questions aren't even honest questions, they are signals of liability transfer.
The cc: line is a kind of blackmail where assholes list the people they are performing for, or threatening to scandalize you to.
Everything about e-mail is abnormal.
It's a performance. The only way to win is not to play. Hence executives eschew it.
- gohrt 10y agoEverything you said applies to other forms of communication as well as email.
- closeparen 10y agoPlease name the organizations that led you to believe this so we can never work for them. I don't doubt that this toxic environment exists, but I'm fortunate not to have worked in one yet and I'd like to keep it that way.
- fatdog 10y agoThe entire public sector, and most organizations over 1000 people. Bureaucracy is what happens when your dunbar-number sized network overflows and starts to metastasize. When people say they work for a company that is collaborative and non-hierarchical, I've found it either means they are a manipulative and delusional tyrant or they are the sucker at the table.
- closeparen 10y agoMy large organization manages this pretty successfully by having small teams that don't interact much. It's absolutely hierarchical from a macro level, but engineers live in pretty collaborative 5-10 person leaf nodes and we don't need to interact across the tree very often. What you describe might exist for senior management, but they generally take cross-team dependencies to be a bug in the way the tree was partitioned, and fix it at the next re-org.