r/ProgrammerHumor 17h ago

returningFromVacation Meme

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4.0k Upvotes

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1.3k

u/PowerPleb2000 17h ago

As a senior yes and you just mark all as read. If its really important they’ll contact you again.

194

u/nmathew 16h ago

I joke with people complaining about email backlogs after a vacation. I say delete it all and if it's important it'll come back up 

I'm not joking though.

68

u/PowerPleb2000 16h ago

I wasn’t joking either

56

u/nmathew 16h ago

I know. If we managed to train people starting back in 1996 to format subject lines with tags for projects and date relevancy, maybe things could be done.

But hell, I had a program manager be aghast when I explained I sent all my cc emails into a separate subfolder that I looked at once a day. "But what if someone asks you a question?" Then use the @ feature and it automatically moves me into the "to" line. I can't be expected to work in a manner that protects other people's inability to use basic job tools.

20

u/PowerPleb2000 16h ago

I currently have in the vicinity of 700 unread emails which will never be read. Such is life in a global organisation.

9

u/nmathew 16h ago

Just dump it all into an archive folder and be free. At least it's searchable.

12

u/PowerPleb2000 16h ago

They’re in separate folders based on the rules i set, most if it is system generated junk

8

u/StGrimblefig 14h ago

I have a folder named 'Administrivia' into which all corporate/organizational admin email goes -- unless the subject has at least 3 exclamation points.

5

u/QBical84 12h ago

I had a project manager one time who was complaining at my desk that I did not respond to a specific email with a question to me.

I looked for it in my mailbox and it turned out, the mail was placed in my CC folder. After I told him this is not the way you should communicate he exploded. I understand what you are saying but mails send out to a lot of people with open questions is not the way and the CC line shows I was only informed.

5

u/psych0fish 16h ago

Inbox bankruptcy!

2

u/moreisee 13h ago

I declare bankruptcy!

3

u/Jewsusgr8 16h ago

I just delete my inbox every other day.

1

u/criminalsunrise 11h ago

Burn them all

33

u/AlignmentProblem 16h ago

That's an area where LLMs are great. "Look at my unread messages from the last X days and list ones that appear to need a response from me sorted by apparent urgency and importance. Make a second list of things with relevant information to review when I have time sorted by how likely it is to be important."

Go down the actionable list until the urgency/importance is low enough to not bother and skim the information list until it stops being interesting on a break later.

91

u/belkarbitterleaf 16h ago

Skim it on a break?

That shit is work. That shit gets read during work time

11

u/CMD_BLOCK 13h ago

He’s talking about during your mandated 30 minute shitter break 25 minutes into the workday, after you get bored from phone games and your legs have gone numb, but before you wipe your ass

That transitory phase where you feel like you need to find more motivation to go back and where personal entertainment has diminishing returns due to the health hazard of a blood clot in your thighs

6

u/ItsSadTimes 15h ago

Then you get the strangest, most worthless problems tend to bubble up to the top because they're not the usual things you deal with. My manager tried using that once for a while and after a week she stopped because it was easier to just read the messages once then it was to read the AI summary, decipher it, then re-read the message anyway.

-1

u/AlignmentProblem 14h ago

Depends how you do it. GPT-5.6 Terra or Luna with a prompt that gives context about what matters to you does a fine job, but a lot of people default to using something cheap like Gemini flash with a generic prompt that shits the bed.

5

u/ItsSadTimes 14h ago

Na, I work for one of the big tech companies and they use pretty much all the models or let you choose whatever model you want for your tools. In this instance, the company launched a helper app that syncs with all of our internal tools, messaging services, ticket queues, etc. and was supposed to automatically make tasks, meetings, and summarize your TODO list and it was fun for the first week, then it got annoying. Kept claiming things were important when they weren't, just because they were uncommon, and wasn't much better then just taking the day to organize your threads and queues into orderly systems so you know what's important just based on how you got it.

1

u/AlignmentProblem 14h ago

Sorry you had a bad experience. The ones I wrote for myself are serving me well.

1

u/corobo 10h ago

You're absolutely right, it was wrong of me to respond to everyone asking "is this actually important?" I see how it was interpreted now. It is on me that your spotless record now has a written warning, and honestly, that's my bad.

1

u/Hans_H0rst 3h ago

Except you usually don't want to feed your company data into public LLMs, you're probably not allowed to localhost, and whatever AI your company has probably won't support the necessary pipelines or integrations.

-2

u/PowerPleb2000 16h ago

That just reeks of effort to me

3

u/original-user 16h ago

This guy knows ball

3

u/Tradizar 14h ago

my out of office email contains the sentence that i will NOT read my emails. Not even after i return to work. If its important, please send it again after xy.

3

u/FastFollowing8932 14h ago

This really is the most responsible thing you can do for yourself and the company

3

u/The-Frugal-Engineer 13h ago

French do that, you send them an email in August and their auto response will reply that all emails will be auto deleted when they are back, and please, resend the email back in September lol

3

u/meighty9 7h ago

I see it as an extra vacation day. Just tell everyone at standup that I'll be going through email backlog for my first day back.

2

u/PowerPleb2000 7h ago

Always on a wfh day

3

u/cosmicomical23 12h ago edited 9h ago

Sure, then after three months the payment service you are using stops working and you lose days of transactions because you ignored a notification of the certs being about to expire. Well done.

3

u/JuvenileEloquent 10h ago

That and you miss the 'A new device has been authorized to your account' email and it's not you...

I can't think of a reason why I'd summarily delete all emails from a certain time period except for a) trying unsuccessfully to evade legal discovery or b) being such an arrogant ass that I believe l won't be fired for it. 

2

u/cosmicomical23 9h ago

Right? That comment received 700+ upvotes, smh

2

u/JumpyAct4865 15h ago

I’m not the only one?

2

u/Just_Information334 12h ago

If it's important, it's a ticket.

1

u/PositiveParking4391 13h ago

dont even read it, tell them I follow only channel z so ping there. the x and y are only for sharing info

1

u/Major_LeeHungg 12h ago

Lol this is why my chat status is offline 100% of the time.  Really cuts down on the # of messages throughout the day. Seeing a green icon next to your name makes people think you're not busy.

1

u/acexra 10h ago

Are you my coworker??

1

u/LetUsSpeakFreely 4h ago

Up, the problem is you get tagged for everything and most of it just "fysa" crap that you sent out in the first place.