The Ash shirt

In collaboration with the Ash project team and Alembic we can now offer the official Ash shirt to all of you. Same high quality shirt and print that we use for everything.

You can get your shirt at Oswag. Along with Nerves and Elixir shirts :)

Why execs suck at email

I hate it when I leave an email unread for a long time when it deserves a response. Usually I'm pretty diligent about responding to email quickly, which is probably a bad habit in some ways but has been very effective in other ways. When people respond to this newsletter I typically respond and usually quite quickly. When people reach out about things that are not spam I tend to respond and usually quite quickly.

When I've had really busy periods it has become obvious how one of my least favorite traits of leadership people comes about. They are hard to get a hold of. They don't respond to email or DMs in a timely manner. And it is often simply that there is too much, tons to triage and assistants are a thing of the past. The way I handle an email I can't answer right away is to leave it unread. Lots of people do this. Then the github notifications roll in, the important email exchanges, the dozens of active exchanges. And suddenly a week has passed.

I am not interested in making an excuse for companies ghosting interview candidates because that happens way too much. But I'm not surprised it happens. I'm sure some just consider it efficient to not send as much as a "no thanks". My reckon is that the common case is less intentionally cruel and mostly dysfunctional. Usually interviewing involves one of those heavily bottle-necked individuals, often C-level, Director or at least a tech lead. Then there is not enough process in place to ensure that people get responses or are followed up to.

And the interest in the exchange is assymetric. The company doesn't care about the "yes" or "no" that they should be sending very much. They care a bit more about the "yes" but it usually doesn't feel urgent. The candidate is often hanging on their inbox to see how it went. And two weeks is a lot of time to be quiet.

I've seen perfectly reasonable people be incredibly bad at comms like this. Kind and caring people that you could not get a hold off unless you were aggressively forward about it. Right now I'm hanging on the response to an email someone mentioned they'd get back to me about this week. It is getting late in the week. And it is not critical in any sense that the thing moves forward right now. But it was what was discussed. Consequently, I am watching that inbox. And they'll think nothing of it. And I'll let it go.

I know how it happens. "I meant to respond to that but it kept getting pushed down" or even "Oh, I thought I had responded to this" and I believe it. Because I've felt it, done it.

The best to hope for is that a person is fairly consistent with comms. Email can be expected to produce a response within X days, DMs within X hours, phone call for emergencies. That can be worked with.

Anyway. I'm watching my inbox a lil' bit this friday. Hope you aren't :)

Thanks for reading. I appreciate it.