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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 13th, 2023

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  • Try being more direct, you can still write out your whole email with the full description, but put in a section somewhere that’s easy to see that’s labeled as “QUESTIONS” and then enumerate the questions you want answered. I often will have the whole section bold and further highlight important words in red. This makes it easier for people to answer inline on the reply and helps ensure questions weren’t missed.

    The truth is, most people don’t like the ‘email’ part of the job and may only check it once or twice a day and I’d most likely just skimming through several messages and not fully devoting much time to each message. By making it easier for them to reply you end up with a better result.

    You can also use this when you expect someone to take action from your email. Let them know precisely what you want them to do, and make it very easy to find ‘The Ask’.

    EDIT: Or, you can just downvote any comments that actually offer suggestions and stay of the opinion that everyone else is wrong and only you are correct.






  • We have a safe at work where we keep backups and ‘legal hold’ stuff. We hardly ever need to get into it. The first audit we had after I started and the guy who had been running things walks up to the safe and just opens it… without entering the code. The auditor looks at me, and I look at my employee and ask him if the safe is broken, and he said “No, I put the code in earlier so it would be easier to open for the audit.”

    Needless to say, we got dinged on that part of the audit.








  • You should generally only ask questions that relate directly to the job. If you start asking unrelated questions then the applicant could feel that you are discriminating against them for some reason. But I get the desire to give someone who is a good fit, but you should find a more subtle way.

    I’m in IT and I like to ask applicants if they have any systems at home that they manage. One guy told me how he went on craigslist and purchased an old server to play around with VMware when the company he was with first started looking into it. That impressed me because it’s something I’d do. He was a top contender, so I sent him home with some homework: I asked to see an example of some documentation that he’s written up. The next day he sent me a detailed diagram and full documentation of his home torrent system, how he has Plex, Sonarr and Radarr setup, and how his drives are laid out. I found a new best friend that day.