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Comment by ponker | Hacker News Reader

You could only have such a system in an environment with a huge power imbalance between the sender and recipient, like Tim Cook sending a message to an Apple IC engineer. But with that kind of power imbalance all of these things happen anyways -- if an individual engineer gets an email from Tim Cook he definitely isn't firing off a poorly-thought-out reply from a mobile device.

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I sort of see what you're saying. When a person with Great Authority says that Something Needs Doing, I need to think through what I'm going to say about what I'm going to do. But the single best response is to spend those fifteen minutes seeing if there's an obvious solution. If there is, you can be quite terse and just say: "done". Do that five times and even Tim Cook has your attention.

No, actually the opposite is true. The whole idea of any policy is to give artificial "power" to one side to straighten out the situations where the balance of power is unclear.

An exec (the remote-only version of Tim Cook if you like) can use their leverage to change the existing email flows between all managers and all engineers. Because it's more scalable than micromanaging one engineer.

In other words, some people are good at organizing through setting policies (the better sort of politics) and it's a good place to discuss such ideas.

Parent's formulation doesn't look convincing though :)

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