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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

One thing that really annoys me is when I get an email asking for advice about pursuing a career in my type of work or something along those lines, I write a reasonably thorough response, and... Nothing. Not even a "Hey, thanks for taking the time to respond." Apparently what I received was just a form letter asking for a job. This sort of event, which I assume is not unique to me, really discourages taking the time to respond to queries.

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I've developed a technique. Write a brief reply asking them to explain about specifics they have already investigated, so you can avoid repeating advice they've had from elsewhere. I have a few near standard responses.

I rarely hear back, and it acts as a filter for those who are willing to put in some effort.

I agree, this has happens to me regularly. Someone reaches out on email asking for advice, I take the time to write a significant response, and get none in return. I've also found it discouraging as this kind of response is the most common I get. It's rare for me to see so much as a "thanks for the reply!" and rarer still to see an in kind response. I'm not very motivated to reply when I've been trained that they usually won't return the courtesy.

I can comprehend this sentiment, but, on the other hand, I rarely find "thank you" emails add anything to the conversation. It's just sitting there, wasting few seconds of my time to read it, distracts me when searching for information in old conversations with zero information added.

What's worse, "thank you" emails also socially force me to add mere "be nice boilerplate" to mu future emails to that person, instead being short and to the point. It's funny how technical, business, or fact based conversation can become unnecessary long and loose the focus with all that boilerplate.

On the other hand, being nice and polite is good in real life, on the face to face (or voice to voice) conversation, but, IMHO, just waste everyone time in email.

It'd be nice if we could send emails with a flag to skip the inbox. It'd still appear as a reply to the thread, but not add to the firehose.

That's actually how Stack Overflow feels at times.

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