Sorry to say but Evan does not come across as particularly pleasant or likeable to anyone he corresponds with. Common courtesy would go a long way.
I wouldn't reply to someone's email and accuse them of "low-effort sales" or whatever. I'd just say "thanks, not interested" and then be internally mad at the low effort.
From the other side, I think that sales should be aware that these emails can read like "hey, we're going to shut you off unless you chat with me for 30 minutes" which is annoying. It would be nice to clarify that up front, to avoid the negative emotion associated with that prospect.
Evan's is the wrong way to do it. "I am busy–do you have specific recommendations you can share over email" is more concise, polite and to the point. (Ignoring the e-mail, or a simple not interested, are also options.) And if you want to use those words, fine, but leave off the "low effort" insults at the end.
Certainly I think there's a better way of saying it than OP did, though: perhaps, "before we schedule anything, can you propose an agenda so we can both be sure a meeting is the best use of our time?" or something like that.
The OP could have ignored the email, or even marked spam it. If you take the effort to reply then do it courteously there is no excuse for being rude.
> I feel that your initial outreach was intentionally deceptive in a transparent and falsifiable way -- and for no reason. You could just as easily have said you were "interested" in Phabricator without being dishonest.
> It's important that I be able to trust people I do business with. It took you three words to violate my trust by lying to me.
It's okay to be annoyed with someone for using a standard email template. He takes it a step too far and accuses them of having malicious intentions when it's obviously not the case.
I don't believe this applies to salesmen, though. They're trained to exploit all holes related to human decency and courtesy. They expect a polite person will not reject an invitation (to a meeting they absolutely don't need and which serves only one party) and so on.
2. You're free to just ignore them, especially over electronic communication. (Silently mark it as spam if you're really annoyed). I teach my kids that the adult way to respond to this kind of pushiness over something like email is to simply ignore them. Responding back with rudeness is juvenile, this is like day 1 of Being A Professional 101 kind of stuff. 'No thanks' and/or then ignoring them puts you in control of the situation, it's ultimately the high road
It's really not, but I agree completely with your second point. I've managed interactions with vendors for only ~5 years and this is for a small startup, with not a lot of them, and still over 5 years they switch up your account managers left and right (people keep moving companies) and you never know what you're going to get. And each of them thinks your whole job is to just wait for their random emails to have calls without agendas scheduled where they'll go over whatever playbook they were given to see if you'll commit some more spend this quarter before their earnings.
I tend to reply after only several days and try to not get baited into looking an asshole like this Evan person did - but sometimes it's hard. I can imagine this person gets way more email than I do and my advice would be to just not reply if what you're going to write is to "teach them a lesson". There's no point in telling someone they lied to you in a sales email, get over yourself.
Someone illegally robocalling my cell will earn my scorn immediately. As well as any idiot calling at 3AM in the region of my area code. When I'm called the very next day by a company I asked to put me on their do not call list, while I won't emotionally terrorize the fellow on the phone, it's worth pointing out in no uncertain terms that this is completely unacceptable, and exactly why. If someone scrapes my git logs for emails to give poorly targeted recruiter spam, I'm going to share my two cents about how exactly I feel about their half assed effort.
> he comes off a low EQ.
Low in empathy, maybe. Low in EQ? I disagree.
High EQ doesn't make you a slave to false smiles and empty pleasantries, nor require you to engage in networking with anybody with a pulse. Not all relationships are positive, cooperative, and worth building and reenforcing, nor necessairly worth attempting to salvage in such a direction. The author's initial responses are a bit cold and testing - correctly suspecting low effort sales full of faux relatability without much actual common ground - while not being so negative as to prevent the possibility of correction should that suspicion be proven wrong instead of validated.
Evan perhaps makes a minor mistake in not triaging, cutting off, and ghosting these sales pitches earlier - when it becomes clear it's not a relationship or conversation he'll value. This would likely be driven by curiosity, concern, a desire to give the benefit of the doubt, and/or empathy despite the cold demeanor - but that's not particularly a low EQ thing either.
TL;DR: Sith lord EQ techniques are still EQ techniques.