Hacker News Reader

Comment by idontwantthis | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why people get so upset about slack messages. Do you get berated by your boss if you don't reply immediately?

At my company, we send messages when we need help, but the expectation is that the reply comes at the convenience of the person being asked.

View on HN

Yes. When the pandemic started this, a boss berated someone in the main channel for not responding within 5 minutes.

Incidentally he accidentally posted porn in the slack.. and never made a deal out of it from then on.

Lmao. Do you actually like working somewhere like that? Why not quit?

I was a freelancer and it was my first gig in the industry. The parent company eventually fired him and in doing so, everyone lost their jobs. True story.

Sounds like a 2022 version of The Office (UK)

> I don't understand why people get so upset about slack messages. Do you get berated by your boss if you don't reply immediately?

Sort of, yeah.

Sorry to hear that, it sounds stressful.

That’s not an issue of Slack, IM, or remote work, though.

If you don't answer a Slack message immediately, how to you remember to answer it later? It's not like email where you can archive threads that are done. Instead chats (i.e. channels, private messages or threads) with unanswered questions look exactly like other chats.

This assumes some messages are urgent and some are not, and that you can't know which is which until you open the chat and thus mark it as read.

Slack has saved messages. I use this as an inbox/todo list. Any message that takes longer than two minutes to reply to, I move to my actual todo list and un-save the message.

Thank you, I will try this.

You either mark it as unread if you are going to get to it as soon as you wrap you what you're currently doing, or you click "More actions" and select a "Remind me about this" option.

"Mark as unread" just makes it look like an unread message. I want to read every message as it comes in, in case it's urgent. "Mark as unread" would either obscure new incoming messages from the same sender, or cause me to unnecessarily triage the same message several times.

"Remind me" is time based, which is too arbitrary. I want to instantly see everything unanswered, not have it trickle in at random intervals. Using the "Save" button as "Move to inbox" as nthj suggested makes more sense. It's also easier to click.

Yeah, I either had never really noticed the Save functionality, or never thought to use it as a pseudo-todo list. Will definitely give it a try.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com