Clojurians Log v2

There are lots of stories of employees being disciplined for not responding quickly enough to emails, even if they're focusing on work more important than the latest email. Responding defensively this way is a way to acknowledge receipt of the email while making clear that you won't have a substantive response immediately.

(and yes, I would agree that micromanaging email response times for non-urgent matters definitely indicates that "something is wrong with the company")

This time I was contacting HR-type person and I'm not inside of that company. So it doesn't really matter how long they'll take to respond. Why is my message even important...?

I don’t read any urgency in that. This just seems like a nice message in the guise of “i got your email. it’s on my list”.

it’s just a confirmation

I wrote to the person after one day. They read my message and simply missed to answer a single question. Instead they answered the last point of that message. So they gave me an answer but to something that I didn't even expect to get an answer to. And they missed a question that was actually important.

they told you they will answer you when they can. it sounds like you had an urgency rather than a “regular message”

You are right. I do have an urgency to get a job.

Goldman had (has?) a policy where certain account/advisor employees have to respond to a customer within 15m 24/7/365, no exceptions. I have personally worked at companies where a similar timeline is in place during "business hours". I think it depends a lot on the context. But I do very regularly reply with a quick "hey I received this, but I won't get to it until at least XYZ such time", which seems to work well.

That phrase is typically used to be polite, indicating that although they cannot respond immediately, a reply (or more complete reply) is forthcoming. If a person does not answer questions posed in an email, it could be that they didnt understand the question or had a different view of what was important. The art of effectively communicating with a person is knowing a little about that person and their motivations. When you have no relationship with the person you email, it is usually effective to be very clear and yet brief when asking questions. If a lot of reading is required to answer the question, they may skim passed everything and just provide a rough estimate of what they think was asked. Asking lots of different questions can be done more effectively in a shared document rather than an email. (as this is quite a long thread, I didnt read all the answers ...)

I wrote one sentence, then a question, then two sentences. Maximum 30 words. It felt like a girl from tinder who's attention span is the last sentence. You may be right.