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Comment by ggregoire | Hacker News Reader

Surprisingly enough, I see a lot of people installing whatever tools their company uses on their personal phone/smartwatch _without anybody in the company asking them to do so_. It just seems like an "obvious" thing to do for people. I've never had to argue about it with anyone as you did, but if it happened I can already see the other person asking me, surprised, why I don't have Slack on my phone and how do I keep in touch with work outside of the office.

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I personally installed several of these apps because it allows me to respond to emails and messages while I'm not home (running errands, doing chores, playing hookie, etc). This, in turn, gives me much more freedom while working from home. To me, this outweighed whatever privacy issues people can come up with. Funnily enough, this has probably had the opposite of the intended effect, which is to increase productivity.

I was not talking about privacy issues but that's actually a good reason too.

It's because people don't think of these implications, and software companies are deliberately dishonest these days. People are stuck in the mindset that tech companies are benevolent with their customers best interest at heart, and are somehow different in philosophy than those cold hard brick and mortar companies that only care about a dollar. This is why Chrome market share remains so high.

They probably get an unsolicited email every 10 days, just like I do, from slackbot, asking them to install the slack desktop client to get a "better experience," because someone at work added you to the slack channel. Only they don't realize that the slack desktop app is just a second web browser dedicated to going to slack.com, that they are running while they are presumably running their first web browser. Slackbot doesn't tell you that you are wasting compute having two browsers open, just that it's 'better' somehow than running the site on the browser you already have open. It also isn't very clear that once you have slack open, all your coworkers can see you are "available" like its 2001 and you are logging into AIM.

> It's because people don't think of these implications

Even if they don't, I'd assume they would uninstall it as quick as they installed it when they start receiving notifications from colleagues during their break lunch or on the weekend. But it doesn't seem to be what the majority of people do. Not sure why people feel morally or socially obligated to keep checking what's going on at work on a 24/7 basis.

I wonder if there is a link with Twitter/Facebook/Instagram addictions.

Probably depends on the culture. My slack is pretty dead generally. However, imagine you are a new hire. You see the slack is active. You want to be seen, so you are now active on slack, and it ramps up from there. I think its less addiction, and more corporate-culture virtue signalling. "Look at how much I'm on slack 'working' and how readily I throw away my personal free time to be here on slack, please promote me."

I think slack knows a certain amount of people are like this, and have crafted the patterns in their product to maximize this behavior. That's why I get many notification emails a day that frequently leave out messages or repeat ones I've been sent already, to maximize my time checking the main client and be thinking of slack throughout the working day. Slack wants organizations to feel reliant on its services, even when it does little more in practice than email threads have done for my org at least.

Android work profiles make this so easy - it doesn't appear as easy on iOS, but I was never a big iOS user.

I don't mind using resources on my personal device, I mind the access to my personal information. Carrying two phones vs. one for isolation make sense, but if the isolation can be done in hardware/software on the same device it's much easier for me.

Work profiles are okay. They're a little buggy for my taste (e.g., I still have the wrong Play Store installed after removing my last work profile), and I think the remote IT department has a little too much control over the device (e.g., rather than being able to push an update immediately no matter how expensive the network I'm on might be -- I think it would be much more reasonable to just restrict work profile app access till after I've installed such an update at my leisure).

> why I don't have Slack on my phone and how do I keep in touch with work outside of the office.

I always ask why should I keep in touch with work during my private time. If it is really important, one could call my phone. If one does not bother to find my phone number, that means it is not urgent at all.

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