Agreed. Perhaps it's less about the nice words one uses and more about the features (embed in a website, embed times in an email) that reduce the work for the person trying to book a meeting.
The family example was meant to be a silly example -- most of use Calendly for work -- but it's helpful feedback that it's probably better to say "my availability" versus "my Calendly."
I recommend using a "polite" script many people use: "Feel free to let me know when you're available. If you prefer, you can choose from my availability here." It opens the door for the other person first.
Do you think this would have landed better if the recruiter would have first asked you for YOUR availability before sending their link? Or was it just the act of sending a link of any type that required a click on your part?
I actually find Calendly useful for recruitment interactions.
Even though it might seem like the recruiter's time is more important, to me it feels the opposite.
When recruiters ask for my availability, I need to reserve that availability until they get back to me. Often they ask for 3 to 4 slots of time, which depending on the week, might be hard to find, and then those slots are blocked.
When they send me a Calendly link, I can pick whatever slot works best for me and I then only that slot is blocked for me.
I recently went through an Amazon interview round and I had to send them my availability three times because none of the slots I sent worked for their interviewers, which really wasn't ideal and feels like their time was much more important than mine.
For regular meetings though, unless it's my manager or a higher up, I do agree that it feels like whoever sends the Calendly link is in control.
But what happens when a person is busy and only has 30mn here and there? A huge blob of text for available times? What about when they get scheduled for a meeting 5 minutes after they send out that auto-generated blob? You could very well pick a time, set it aside, create calendar invites, etc... just to find out they _aren't_ actually available at that time.
It's a good point. There is a feature which allows the sender to "reserve times" in a one-off meeting. That way, they don't get booked before you have an opportunity to select a time.
Hey, there. I wrote the post. I agree: From my experience people "jockeying for power" tend to get the most irritated by a scheduling link getting dropped on them without some sort of niceties surrounding it.
"but I sure wish it were easier to identify engineering organizations by their type ahead of hire."
You can make it easier before joining. During the interview process, ask one of the interviewers if they can share an example of how the organization makes decisions in a quantitative and/or qualitative way. If they don't mention a Mode/Amplitude/whatever report with user data and/or talk about some user interviews (and the concomitant report) then it's probably not a data-driven process. Or the data isn't shared beyond Leadership. And if they roll their eyes or say, "We just build what the CEO or Sales wants" then you have even more evidence that this might the kind of place where you'll just take direction and not get a clear reason.
Sure, we've all known founders who've created products that were successful without talking to potential users, but it's very rare. What we've all encountered more often: founders who stubbornly don't talk to users as some sort of half-understood adherence to the biography of Steve Jobs. And then their product fails. If they had only tried a different way -- I don't know, talk to the people who might pay them? -- they could have avoided complete failure. It's not as glamorous as magically stumbling on a good idea, perhaps, and requires extra work, but it's often a more viable path for most of us.
I think what gets overlooked about Jobs, even among his admirers, is that he did start with an audience. Particularly by the macOS X and iOS days, Jobs was fundamentally driving the product design towards what he wanted with the implicit idea being that if he liked it and used it, others would too.
This has its own pitfalls, but he was fundamentally "talking to users", he had just narrowed his focus group to a user of one. He used his own products as far as we know as well.
The thing is that most tech doesn't dogfood quite so easily. Most founders can't replicate that as they are generally selling outside of the consumer market that they can just adopt themselves.
So, maybe cast another way, every product must have a target demographic and you need to interact with that demographic to get feedback on what you're building. Jobs just happened to have a shortcut that isn't generally applicable.
And of course, Jobs built the rest of Apple around this culture.
I read Ken Kocienda's book about working on the original iPhone keyboard [1]. He says development revolved around demos: first to each other, then to senior leadership, then to Jobs.
2000s Apple tried to hire people with good taste, then constantly tested against that taste. It was all internal, but it was testing.
