They know what they want, they do go around the bush doing pleasantries and waiting for the script to get to the place where they can ask the question they wanted to ask in the first place.
To me person like that will be first to raise a hand when something is not right in the project. It might also be a good indication of goal oriented thinking, they know whats important and prioritize to achieve goal
As long as they’re not just talking about nothing but what they want, then they aren’t the problematic cases I was referring to.
The few times I’ve had someone do that, the last thing those folks did was (as one put it) “look for problems” by raising project issues or really doing anything but the bare minimum. A bare minimum that had to be clearly articulated several times to the several people I’ve run across - who one then specifically asked EXACTLY what I meant by ‘keep the system running’, so they could exclude a bunch of long term maintenance work from that minimum shrug
IMO, if someone is curious and cares about what they are working on, it shows, and we would never even have this discussion about them - even if they did ask about EXACTLY what the vacation policy was.
Would you then consider that a plus?