I was never a corporate manager, but my impression is that "deep thinking" in management happens in Word documents.
Personally, I am a fan of inline-quoting, but only when I know I'm talking 1:1 or with a fixed group of people. If new people are expected to be included down the line - as is frequent with conversations that seek approval or feedback in a company - then I default to top-post to preserve the history of the conversation.
I don't know how a deep engineering conversation looks when written down, because I'm yet to see any in a work setting; whenever a problem approaches any interesting complexity, someone can't handle the complexity and calls for video or IRL meeting.
If there's a culture problem, I think the "maker" group is much smaller than the group of engineers. I personally blame webmail (GMail and others), which by virtue of popularity essentially set the rules for how e-mail is supposed to work, and more importantly than defaulting to top-posting, popular webmail clients don't handle tree structure. Inline-quoting makes sense when your discussion forms a tree, and not a stream of messages.
Personally, I am a fan of inline-quoting, but only when I know I'm talking 1:1 or with a fixed group of people. If new people are expected to be included down the line - as is frequent with conversations that seek approval or feedback in a company - then I default to top-post to preserve the history of the conversation.
I don't know how a deep engineering conversation looks when written down, because I'm yet to see any in a work setting; whenever a problem approaches any interesting complexity, someone can't handle the complexity and calls for video or IRL meeting.
If there's a culture problem, I think the "maker" group is much smaller than the group of engineers. I personally blame webmail (GMail and others), which by virtue of popularity essentially set the rules for how e-mail is supposed to work, and more importantly than defaulting to top-posting, popular webmail clients don't handle tree structure. Inline-quoting makes sense when your discussion forms a tree, and not a stream of messages.