How to reach a software engineer

What lands in a software engineer's inbox

A software engineer's inbox is a queue of work items, and yours arrives with no ticket, no deadline and no owner. That is the first thing to understand. Median annual pay for software developers in the United States is $135,980, which works out to about $65.38 an hour; fifteen minutes of attention is $16.35 of somebody's money. Whatever you send has to be worth interrupting a task that requires holding an entire system in your head.

The messages that get read tend to share three traits. They are short. They name something specific about that person's work. They ask for something bounded enough that the reader can picture finishing it. The ones that get deleted usually open with a paragraph about the sender's company and end with an open-ended request for thoughts.

Decide which of the common asks you actually have. Recruiters and hiring managers write about a role. Founders write about a co-founder search. Others want a few minutes of technical judgment, a review, or feedback on a decision. Each needs a different message. Mixing them — one paragraph about a job, one about advising, one about a call — reads like a fishing expedition, and engineers are trained to spot the case that does not fit the pattern.

Before you write

Spend twenty minutes on the person before you spend twenty minutes on the draft. Read the README of a project they maintain. Watch ten minutes of a talk. Read the design doc or the post they wrote about the migration that went sideways. You are looking for one concrete thing you can point to that connects to your ask. If you cannot find one, you are not ready to write yet.

Then define the ask in minutes. "Would you look at this retry logic and tell me if it double-charges?" is a fifteen-minute ask. "Could I get your thoughts on our architecture?" has no edge and no end, so the reader has to guess how much of their week you want. Write the number down before you write the sentence. It forces the request to shrink to something a busy person can imagine finishing.

Check the subject line separately. Keep it under 70 characters and make it state the topic: "[your company] — question about your Kafka post" beats "Question." Plain words beat formal ones throughout. The message coach inside Introworth checks exactly this list before a sender pays — length, questions, why them, the time asked for, plain wording — and running your own draft past those five questions is a reasonable test whether or not you ever use the product.

What to say in the first message

Keep the body between 50 and 125 words. That figure comes from Boomerang's analysis of more than 40 million emails, which found messages in that band got the most replies. The same analysis found that one to three direct questions did better than none, and that plain, simple writing did better than formal, college-level prose.

Four moves, in order. First sentence: who you are and why this person, in one line. Second and third: the ask, narrowed to a single artifact or question. Fourth: the time it takes and a concrete next step. Skip the throat-clearing. Weak: "I wanted to reach out about our backend architecture and get your thoughts on where we should start." Good: "Your post on idempotency keys changed how we retry webhooks. Would you look at our retry logic — fifteen minutes, two links, no call needed?"

One ask per message. If you attach a deck, a calendar link and a job description, the reader picks none of them. If you want a call, say how long the call is; do not open with a call request and no agenda. And do not describe your company in adjectives. Describe the problem in one sentence a stranger could repeat back to you.

The test before you send: could someone answer this in ten minutes from a laptop, without a meeting, without opening five tabs? If not, the ask is still too big.

How to follow up

Send one follow-up, about a week later, in the same thread. Reply to your own message so the whole exchange stays in one place and the reader does not have to reconstruct who you are. Two or three sentences: restate the ask in one line, add one new thing, and make declining easy. Then stop. Two messages reads as persistence. Five reads as a filter that files you somewhere unpleasant.

Follow-ups that work add information. "Following up once in case this got buried. We shipped the retry change and the duplicate charges stopped. Still happy to hear a no — ten minutes, Thursday or Friday?" That works because the reader learns something and because saying no costs them nothing.

A follow-up that only says "checking in" adds nothing and asks for the same decision a second time, which is why it usually gets the same silence. If you have nothing new, wait until you do. A narrower question counts as new.

If the first channel was email and you have a real reason to try another — a thoughtful comment on a public issue thread, a reply to something they posted — you can, but say you already wrote. People notice when the same ask arrives twice through different doors, and it changes how they read the second one.

When a paid message makes sense

Some asks die in a crowded inbox not because they are unwelcome but because replying costs the reader something real. A paid message changes the trade. On Introworth, members set a price for messages from people they do not know. The sender's card is held, not charged, and payment is captured only if the recipient replies within the reply window; if they do not, the hold is released. The recipient keeps 85%, and Introworth's commission is 15%. The lowest price is $15.

The suggested prices roughly track time. A quick question at five minutes is $5.45 of their time, suggested price $15. A considered reply at fifteen minutes is $16.35, suggested $20. A review or short call at thirty minutes is $32.69, suggested $40. An hour of advice is $65.38, suggested $100. Put any of those next to what a wrong hire or a lost month costs you and the arithmetic stops being interesting.

Paid messages fit when the ask is specific, when you can name the time, and when a written answer is genuinely useful to you. They fit less well when you need the same answer from five people, or when your real goal is an introduction rather than a reply. For that, a warm introduction through a mutual connection may do more: the connection forwards your note with a line of their own, and the person accepts as a free conversation or passes.

Whatever route you choose, do the same work on the draft. Money buys attention, not a shorter message.