How do you respond to a one-character email from your boss's boss's boss? (2018)

https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/5-years-later-jeff-bezos-just-confirmed-jeff-bezos-question-mark-method-that-scares-heck-out-of-everyone-at-amazon-heres-how-it-works.html

by notpushkin • 4 years ago

34 47 4 years ago

inc.com

willcipriano• 4 years ago

Reply with a exclamation mark, that's shorthand that you are alarmed.

imwillofficial• 4 years ago

Hahahahahah like metal gear solid!

klyrs• 4 years ago

(single raised eyebrow)

memco• 4 years ago

thrown_223• 4 years ago

?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

sokoloff2• 4 years ago

While I greatly dislike the “if I act excessively squeaky, I will get some grease”, I have to say this is remarkably effective process within companies.

I just wish there was a way to better calibrate the company response to balance the 99.75% of customers who don’t write to the CEO with the tiny fraction who do.

roflyear• 4 years ago

I once had an issue for a client and managed to get in touch with the CEO of HP's exec assistant. The issue was resolved literally next day after weeks of HP being unhelpful through usual channels.

This often works with government too, especially local government. Call your state reps and your town government officials if you need to. It is why they are there.

ivraatiems• 4 years ago

It's very common for companies to have an "executive support" organization entirely dedicated to dealing with customers who complain to executives. They often have power to do things and move pieces within different parts of the company in ways that nobody else does.

I had this experience with Charter Spectrum. Among other things, they kept threatening to send me to collections for not returning equipment which I was actively using to obtain their services, which I was paying for. I looked up the email addresses of a few executives in relevant departments and sent them an email explaining everything. I got a call from an "executive support agent" (or some similar title) the next day. It still took a couple weeks to resolve the problem, but it did get resolved, and they locked me in at a lower rate.

Sad that it's necessary, but hey, if it works, it works. Just be polite and ask for what you need.

avidiax• 4 years ago

Just did the same thing with Comcast. They let the future renter of my address take over the address and cancel my service a month in advance. Complained to the FCC and got a call from the executive customer service a couple of days later.

Still took multiple hours to resolve, but it was at least done right, not barely patched until I have to spend 2 hours on the phone again for the next incomplete patch.

Havoc2• 4 years ago

I find the claim that bezos sees “most of those emails” quite hard to believe. Must be thousands of them

pas2• 4 years ago

how many people know the address though?

sokoloff2• 4 years ago

As the sometimes recipient of these complaints, it seems that customers go looking for any somewhat high-level person with a published email address.

moltar• 4 years ago

Tons of sellers know it for sure. It was a common tactic to email jeff@ with any seller problems with a hope of getting them addressed quickly.

beloch• 4 years ago

You've heard of the "royal we"? This is the "executive I". Where the potentate uses the former to lend the weight of the many to their words, the executive uses the latter to take personal credit for the work of many and thereby justify the weightiness of their own salary.

Havoc2• 4 years ago

"executive I".

haha fair enough. Haven't heard that phrasing before

adventured• 4 years ago

I sent Bezos (@jeff anyway) an email a couple of years ago, about the absurdity of using Alexa.com for the analytics tool, while simultaneously having Alexa the wildly successful voice assistant line. Customers looking for the voice assistant go to Alexa.com, whoops; customers go digging for Alexa on Google and end up at Alexa.com, whoops. A particularly dumb thing for a supposedly smart corporation to do. I went step by step through why they were wrong in that approach and what they could be doing with Alexa.com instead, around five paragraphs of text (all respectful).

The clowns at Amazon still have a dead page at Alexa.com. They're slow and they have no idea what they're doing.

Here's what they replied with:

I'm [insert name here] of Amazon's Tech Support Executive Customer Relations team. Jeff Bezos received your email and I'm responding on his behalf.
I relayed your feedback to the AWS Relations Team to handle this scenario. You should hear back from them in the next 1-2 business days.
Thank you again for bringing this to our attention. If you would like additional assistance, please do not hesitate to contact us. We are here to help 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Thank you for your inquiry. Did I solve your problem?

Sure, you solved my problem. I never heard anything from the AWS Relations Team of course.

sacrosancty• 4 years ago

I'm not sure unsolicited business advice from a stranger really deserves a personal response, especially not five paragraphs of it!

smugma2• 4 years ago

That’s terrible. Better to go into a black hole than to expose shitty CRM gone wrong.

agiacalone• 4 years ago

The article also says to do it too: > That email address, by the way, in case you'd like to contact him: jeff@amazon.com I tried it, just for the giggles. I was shocked to get a response only minutes later. > ?

earthboundkid• 4 years ago

memorable• 4 years ago

aussieshibe• 4 years ago

I suspect this is a reference to the "press f to pay respects" meme. I read it as a jocular expression of sympathy for the Amazon employees, playing on the single character point.

pas2• 4 years ago

If it's common it cannot rally be a big deal. Also drop everything to investigate? Sure why not, if you are at Amazon and you don't mind the culture at least you are probably getting paid for your conformity.

But in the end it's 100% just a gimmick, the machine marches on, even if there are structural/process changes resulting from these emails overall they doesn't have much to show for it since 2018. And if it's just a support channel, then Jeff could just look at a random sample of the support tickets and not fuck up the sprints of various teams...

aarghh• 4 years ago

I'd be tempted to respond with "Use your words, Jeff". But then I am a mere minion.

cs137• 4 years ago

Unfortunately, people like us who respond to that sort of thing like a normal human (as opposed to a brainwashed corporate drone who lives in terror of the master's displeasure) tend not to do well in the corporate world.

The trick of corporate survival, as observed in those who can actually hack it, is extreme compartmentalization. They become two people: one who watches the abuse from a distance as if it were happening to someone else, and then a normal self that is functional enough to do the grocery shopping without bursting into tears. The problem is that very few people can sustain this compartmentalization (also known as: dissociation) for more than a few years. It tends to play out badly (memory issues, alexithymia, autoimmunity) in the long term.

LAC-Tech• 4 years ago

Yeah but how cool would you feel at parties being able to tell people "I once got fired for telling Jeff Bezos to go fuck himself" ?

firecall• 4 years ago

Like I said to my therapist last week; they hire you for your skill and creativity, then want you to sit in a box and do as you are told.

Or somehow magically know what to do and say. If you say to little, you are not engaging with the team, say too much and you are disruptive. Say the wrong thing and thats a big problem.

We really need to move our society on from telling people that companies are a family and they look after people. They dont.

dannyw• 4 years ago

You need to work for a different company, this isn't normal.

thrown_223• 4 years ago

Yes, this is called being professional. The idea that acting in a predictable and consistent manner is some form of abuse is bizarre.

To put it in engineering terms: I don't care about the amazingly rich data structure manipulations you're doing internally, I want the json api endpoint to have the same spec as it did yesterday.

bravetraveler• 4 years ago

I've had a few managers/execs that must have read this book and taken it to heart.

I've found ignoring the zero effort message to be moderately effective. Not ignore the work... like actually go deal with the incident or whatever. I just avoid feeding into the loop of it. Some time later I'll casually let them know how it went.

Sometimes they're persistent. If you don't respond quickly they might send another question mark (no joke), or escalate.

When they do escalate I tend to present it as 'Oh yea, we noticed that on the monitoring system and I dealt with that afterwards'.

This could be a complete fabrication, I just don't like to encourage them. Was it you, or the queue?

euroderf2• 4 years ago

I worked in a company where the CEO had a rep for one-word email replies. They worked quite well !

bqmjjx0kac• 4 years ago

Bezos forwarded it to your boss, with only a single character added: "?."

As an armchair typographer, I think we need to stop insisting on placing sentence-terminating periods inside quotation marks.

It would have been clearer this way.

Bezos forwarded it to your boss, with only a single character added: "?".

bobbylarrybobby• 4 years ago

It doesn't even make sense. The sentence containing the quotation only ends when the quotation itself ends, not before. `print("abc)"`

peyton• 4 years ago

It’s a tradition from the fixed-width font typewriter era IIRC. Quote mark followed by period looked bad because of all the whitespace.

thrown_223• 4 years ago

You're assuming a context free grammar, this is a context sensitive grammar.

Much like <b>being bold <i> being both </b> being italic </i> is a malformed CFG but a perfectly valid CSG.

Ironically it's the one advantage XML type notation has over Lisp type notation when it comes to expressiveness. It's rather unfortunate that, essentially, all XML tools assume proper nesting.

krnlpnc• 4 years ago

dsr_• 4 years ago

evan_• 4 years ago

Allegedly Victor Hugo sent a telegram, which at the time charged by the letter, to his literary agent shortly after the publication of Les Misérables to inquire of its sales:

The agent responded:

bombcar• 4 years ago

Supposedly the story goes that in 1843, after annexing the Indian province of Sind, British General Sir Charles Napier sent home a one word telegram, "Peccavi" implying "I have Sind." Although apocryphal, it's still a great story.

smugma2• 4 years ago

Apparently a 16 year old made up the joke and it was published in Punch in 1844.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peccavi

For those who don’t get it, peccavi is Latin for “I have sinned” and it’s a pun as Napier conquered/captured the Indian province Sindh.

denton-scratch• 4 years ago

NoScript blocked 19 of 22 scripts.

How do you respond to a one-character email from your boss's boss's boss? (2018)

Related Stories