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Comment by brushfoot | Hacker News Reader

What an unpleasant attitude. People have emotions. If they're apologizing, maybe they feel bad. Accept it and get on with your day. A punctilious email etiquette isn't going to improve anything.

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I don't know, it seems pretty light-hearted. If they sent this directly to someone in response to an email, then I may agree, but since it's more of just an opinion blog piece, I find this to be a good outlet for thoughts to share without really impacting anyone.

I actually really liked the post. I'm often prone to apologizing, thinking that it's a social expectation, and the post made me smile and relax a bit, thinking to myself "oh, maybe it's not that important, and it'll be ok if I don't".

I think there is a cultural gap. He mention not only apologizing but giving explanations.

For instance my observation is that people in the USA will tend to give you a lot of unrequested information like all their health/medical problems or the sports games of their kid and what not. People in europe seems to be more private unless they are talking with very close coworker they would consider as friends.

I agree that the apologies tend to make one a little uncomfortable. This is because people do not simply say, "I am sorry I did not have time to write sooner. Here is my response", but instead say, "I would have written but my child was sick, etc.," so you feel the need to respond to that, and feel bad for having bothered them.

Almost nobody writes, "I am sorry I was scrolling Twitter and Hacker News while ignoring my e-mail. Fortunately, I have stopped and now can respond!"

I write no more than either, "Apologies for the delayed response," or "Apologies for the delayed response, I've been out of the office unexpectedly." Very business-like. Tone neutral. Easy to digest and move on.

The author does not seem to be advocating in favor of punctilious etiquette so much as simply getting the point.

Well, to be honest, for a lot of people, apologizing for late answer is more a social convention or a reflex than real apologies.

The same for : "How are you ?", "I hope this email finds you well" or worse than everything, Emails Greetings embedded into the signature.

And please remove the multi-paragraph legal disclaimers from your .sig. They are meaningless and annoying.

Those are almost certainly added by the mail server and not in individual signatures.

Responding too quickly to emails is the same as responding too quickly to IMs, it will often invite more responding.

That depends on context, and how you phrase the reply.

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