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Comment by black_puppydog | Hacker News Reader

It's great that you don't have the expectation of people reading or replying to your messages after hours.

However, please recognize that even with a well-meaning boss like you, there are still mechanisms that incentivize individuals to at least read these messages, and once their free time has been "tainted" with work stuff, much of the damage is already done. Psychological pressures (which may be entirely internal but often are the result of other peers' attitudes as well) will still take a toll.

IMHO, as grown-ups, it is the most reasonable thing to avoid such leakage altogether; when my phone rings after hours I need to be certain that this is not something that can wait.

Luckily, since you're already using slack, you can just use the "send later" feature which is super simple to use and will work around this effectively. :)

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This boss isn’t well meaning at all. They expect people (unlike what you said) to actually read all messages right away, no matter the time.

Because, as they also say, sometimes it might be appropriate to respond right away (“Or it could mean ASAP”).

If that’s the case, then the clear expectation is that people read all messages at all times, they just might not always have to respond right away (but in order to make that judgement call they have to actually read all messages).

This might actually be worse than just sending messages after hours where you actually have to respond right away – because you actually have to do sifting and filtering (after hours!) through messages, the vast majority of which might not require an immediate answer. If you are only contacted at those times where you actually do need to respond right away then at least you know what to expect …

This sounds like a pretty awful boss with awful communication who somehow convinced themself that they are oh so gracious and nice.

I disagree with your take and I am mostly on the receiving end of those late Slack messages. If you do not wish to get notified unless it's an emergency there is a nifty feature that allows you to define your working hours, out of which you won't get a notification when getting messages on Slack.

In case of something that is urgent the sender can override the "do not disturb" and send a notification anyway. This in my opinion is the right way to do.

You should own the fact that your free time is yours and that you shouldn't open Slack to read those late messages. People work at different times (especially true for globally distributed team) and expecting people to "know" that they are outside of YOUR business hours simply does not scale to multiple employees.

Instant messaging should be used for instant messaging. There’s a reason we have email and now tickets as well.

And his cries of "stop that, no, you're doing it wrong!" fell on deaf ears, for use is born not from design but usefulness.

> You should own the fact that your free time is yours and that you shouldn't open Slack to read those late messages

It sounds like that works for you at your company. Congrats!

But if you're lucky enough never to have had an overbearing boss, you're not familiar with all the nifty ways they will try to control or coerce labor while not paying you.

In US low-wage jobs, they know they can get away with violating labor law with impunity until it gets bad enough to attract media attention. Even if workers had the money to sue, it wouldn't be worth it.

I got to see texts from a younger relative's boss at a national chain restaurant leading up to quitting. She had been working 6-7 days a week for over a month, but wage theft was keeping her under 40 hours a week paid. Multiple demands she come in on her day off with less than a couple hours notice to "support the team" or "do her part", with escalating threats in response to anything less deferential than "yes boss".

She finally responded by quitting. That solicited a remarkable fit of rage, calling her a loser who can't hold down a real job and so on.

The thing that kills me is I know most people don't want to be abusive shitheads. It is absolutely learned behavior from an abusive top-down system. The only way to win is not to play.

And I think that's driving a lot of the job churn our sanctified "job creators" are bitching about. Fuck 'em. If you can't build a company without abusing people, you don't deserve a company. Go get a real job, whiners.

But all the users above me said the market takes care of it... im confused. It sounds to me like you're saying that labor laws exist as a response to widespread bad behavior rather than dirty liberals trying to make it possible for plebs to have control over their own lives?

> She had been working 6-7 days a week for over a month, but wage theft was keeping her under 40 hours a week paid.

There are already laws against wage theft, if her current employer is already ignoring the existing laws, what exactly will improve with an additional one? Bad work environment won't be improved by a ham-fisted legislation around when your employer is allowed to talk with you.

This kind of good intention laws can only be used by employees that already have some leverage and are in a decent work environment. Say the no-text-after-5 law is implemented in the US, what exactly do you think will happen when your relative quotes it to her employer? In an at-will state she'll get fired, in a not-at-will state she will get fired for a bogus reason.

Powerless people don't magically gain power with shitty edge-case laws like this. Create a social net that allows her to quit without dying of starvation one month later or going bankrupt from lack of insurance. That will give the poorest among us some actual leverage.

>Create a social net that allows her to quit without dying of starvation one month later or going bankrupt from lack of insurance.

That's a very good point! And true. But it's not a xor situation, you can have both as they handle different things. Regardless of any social security net, you can still be bullied or manipulated into yielding your free time. It's good to have it written into law that it's against the law to contact a worker outside their contracted hours.

> But it's not a xor situation

I did not argue that it was, I meant that the counter argument of the person I was replying to was moot. Vulnerable people stay vulnerable and those laws are just basically just cosmetic.

> Regardless of any social security net, you can still be bullied or manipulated into yielding your free time.

Yes, but I am old fashioned and that's where I break from some of the takes in thread. If you can say no, then it's your responsibility to say no. If you are bullied at work or manipulated while having a social net and you choose to endure then I think the responsibility lies with you as you make no effort to improve your situation.

Now my last point is entirely an opinion based on my values, I can recognize that, but I hope it clears up why I believe in a social net that prevents abuse while also opposing laws like the one discussed.

The right way to do it is to not install work slack on any of your non-work devices. Barring emergencies, which should be directed to dedicated on-call staff, or extenuating circumstances like prearranged projects with tight deadlines, there should be no reason to have to reply to your boss until the next work day.

Or if there is, write that into the contract and pay accordingly.

Slack also has a scheduled send option. Just schedule it for the morning if its unimportant. Then there's no implied expectation of when something should be addressed.

I, like others, sometimes use work laptop for pleasure. actually, I know a lot of people who do this exclusively. sure, you can blame it on them... but also I use slack for more than just work, and when I see unread notifications, even if I didn't get a push, i'm compelled to read them.

> out of which you won't get a notification when getting messages on Slack.

This is actually not true. Slack will still red-badge the app or workspace and show that you have an unread message waiting for you. All do-not-disturb does is prevent OS-level push notifications I believe.

I use Slack also for some social groups (though, I'm trying to less and less), so just "quitting slack" means also removing myself from groups im in outside of work.

I wish Slack had a way to "soft log out" of a workspace - right click -> deactivate and it greys out the workspace and doesnt show any unread messages indicators until you reactivate.

I agree. Even if I don't receive a notification, if I happen to open the Slack app and see pending messages – particularly if they're from a manager or someone higher in the hierarchy – then I feel obligated to respond to them.

Well then, it sounds like you need to put your phone down or at least don't open Slack, knowing well what would happen if you do. The onus is on you to disconnect from work, not to ensure everyone else conforms to your schedule.

"just not opening slack" and "arguing for a prohibition of after-hour non-emergency contact" are two strategies built on the anticipation of trouble coming from receiving messages after hours. They just work on different (individual vs collective) levels, and IMHO (stress on O) the collective measure here seems more promising for the simple fact that we already a know a lot about the compulsive behaviour that digital communicatuons drive, even ones like slack with a relatively benign business model and UX. Pushing for a non-individual solution here is throwing out the figurative Oreos before we get the craving.

On the other side of this argument, which other society-scale problems do we know of where an appeal to individual discipline has worked well?

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