It’s just two different cultures, though, neither necessarily better than the other — although business email tends to be short and on a single point, with anything more complicated going to the phone or a meeting as a first step. Engineers tend to resolve entire issues through email, with a meeting as an absolute last resort.

(And when you get into the Usenet heritage then >-quoting really shines over top-posting, because at that point it really does matter which parts of a message (or, often, a whole bunch of messages) you’re referring to.)

I don’t know anyone who replies-by-line (I work in the sales org). I think it would even be a little abrasive.

Actually, now that I think a little bit, we do reply-by-line sometimes, when anything else would be like “yes, yes, no, can’t get that til tomorrow, yes, no, ok”.

So yeah, I tried not to be the “internet culture” specialist in the room because I’m totally not, but it just sort of happened when everyone around me was completely baffled that I spent so much of my day talking to people I’d never met inside my computer.

But then, these were people who were baffled by the existence of graphic novels (“They even have GAY anime?!”), so towards the end I stopped finding all this surprising. ;-)

I do weird out my teammates occasionally by using vi or bc instead of notepad or Windows’ calculator.