Forwarding that link to a mailing list will damage people's perceptions of you and ultimately kick-start a company-wide discussion on tone of communication that will ultimately result in someone writing a Damore Memo.
(I am only half-joking)
Accept that people are awkward, different and diverse and that we benefit from that too. And then don't forward it.
I once wrote an email to an internal email list about the lack of forks in the departmental kitchen and how I'd bought lots more and they'd all gone too.
I was polite, like this website, and frustrated, like the people who wrote this website. But the request made people who'd simply forgotten to return a fork, or who'd had a cake meeting that day, or whatever was genuinely more important than returning a fork, a little bit piqued. People told me to my face how my politeness came across to them. I should have just bought more forks.
but part of that awkwardness is that some people send these to internal lists :)
you already bought the more forks, and it's okay to send a message to folks that now it's someone else's turn. will they listen? like you experienced, usually no. but it's not like their entitlement that their thing is more important than others' so they can take the forks is perfectly okay, even if it's the reality that we deal with. (and usually the effective way to deal with it is to bring your own fork, or have dedicated catering, or whatnot, leaving it to the community unsurprisingly usually doesn't work in a workplace.)
What I am saying is, don't get into the habit of making requests like this that make you look smaller.
Forks are inexpensive.
Here, I suggest that it is probably better for office harmony and one's career to do the inexpensive thing rather than burdening other people with dealing with your lack of tolerance for doing the inexpensive thing.
Being a little rude like this won't ever blow back on you in ways that you can directly measure. But it will blow back.
The forks email went to a departmental email list archive that happened to be open to the internet (this was 1996). You could find the forks email against my name in early search engines.
These days I understand that all of those people who got a bit snippy with me were right. And that even if I tend to forget the forks thing until topics like this come up, maybe they don't. Maybe they wander this world with a mental image of me being easily perturbed about forks.
> Being a little rude like this won't ever blow back on you in ways that you can directly measure. But it will blow back.
I do want to comment that I consider the just saying hello messages to be rude, itself. It's a balance isn't it, I don't want to be rude to others (buy more forks), but I also don't want people to be rude to me. So depending on the situation I might comment on that, but probably not with a link to a website like this, unless I think I can manage it with a humorous tone.
it's not rudeness. (I assume the rules about workplace kitchenware is that everyone has to return them, etc.)
sure, I completely see your point. I am the buy more fork guy in almost all of my social circles. like you said, it's just inexpensive, easy, etc.
but that doesn't necessarily works for attention. it's pretty scarce, so if someone feels they are really bothered by these hellos, then stating their preference up front seems okay to me.
career advancement is important, but the recruiter won't care, the interviewer won't care, and your next team also won't care about what happened on the internal lists at the previous workplace. (even if it's the first hit for your name in Google)
> but that doesn't necessarily works for attention.
It definitely does not, indeed.
But I still think this kind of approach is damaging. And putting the link in your slack status or sharing it to a list is reputational self-harm.
> career advancement is important, but the recruiter won't care, the interviewer won't care, and your next team also won't care about what happened on the internal lists at the previous workplace. (even if it's the first hit for your name in Google)
Haha luckily it didn't make it into the Google era (or if it did I never found it).
I mean more that, how to put it: you don't have control over how and when briskness and terseness is interpreted as rudeness, and how long that rudeness is remembered.
So things like this website: to me it just comes across as very entitled. Creating a movement around something as small as this is just exactly why people don't like approaching tech people with questions.
We're not actually entitled to be approached in any particular way except politely, and politeness is not something with a single definition that everyone must know for us to be expected to respond at all.
(I am only half-joking)
Accept that people are awkward, different and diverse and that we benefit from that too. And then don't forward it.
I once wrote an email to an internal email list about the lack of forks in the departmental kitchen and how I'd bought lots more and they'd all gone too.
I was polite, like this website, and frustrated, like the people who wrote this website. But the request made people who'd simply forgotten to return a fork, or who'd had a cake meeting that day, or whatever was genuinely more important than returning a fork, a little bit piqued. People told me to my face how my politeness came across to them. I should have just bought more forks.
Buy more forks.