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Comment by texaslonghorn5 | Hacker News Reader

I think this is a cool hack. And I frequently use delayed messages on Google Messages to obscure my late working hours and refrain from disturbing people with a 3AM notification.

But I've thought about this a bit recently, and I don't think I should have to worry about bothering someone at 3 AM. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect other people to have do not disturb on / notifications off whenever they don't want to be disturbed.

And one cautionary tale about scheduling messages (email in particular): I once encountered a problem at 3AM and scheduled an 8AM text to tell someone about it, but they woke up at 6AM and immediately fixed it and were confused why I still had the problem two hours later (when my message arrived).

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> But I've thought about this a bit recently, and I don't think I should have to worry about bothering someone at 3 AM. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect other people to have do not disturb on / notifications off whenever they don't want to be disturbed.

I'm very direct about this with new hires.

"I'm awake and work weird hours. Please don't take a message from me outside your normal hours to mean I want or need an immediate response unless the message is directly talking about a production outage in which case i'll be explicit about that. If you're around and you want to spend a few hours debating the merits of embedding a lua interpreter into a data processing pipeline vs trying to figure out how to droplessly reload golang code great, if not, we can pick it up the next time we're both around.

On the same note, please don't not message me because it's late where you think I am at the moment and please don't not let me know about something because 'it's normal US hours, he probably already knows.'

Please also don't take offense if I don't respond immediately, despite appearances, I do sometimes actually sleep."

Setting the actual expectations works great. Some people respond simply by saying that they won't put slack on their phone, or will turn notifications for slack off and I'm fine with that (having their number to call for actual emergencies).

I think the problem arises not from the direct actions here (messaging someone at 3am) but by the implicit expectation of a reply. I think some people don't realize what they're doing but I think a lot do and they want to create that implicit must-reply-24-7 nature.

I get telling people that you are comfortable being contacted whenever. That's your choice/life.

But if I was working for you I would not like this part:

> unless the message is directly talking about a production outage in which case i'll be explicit about that

because that means I have to keep notifications on and triage them even though the whole point is "I'm not going to respond outside work hours when my notifications are off / dnd is on."

This is a frequent disconnect.

It really depends on the scale of the business. In some large ones, there is always a person working to handle “must be fixed now” problems. If you are off shift, then it is the person on shift’s task.

In smaller operations with 24 hour operation, and infrequent “must be fixed now” problems, there will be workers whose job includes being on call. Sometimes the on call duty rotates, sometimes it does not.

So if you are from a land of large companies, it may seem insane for your employer to ask something of you outside your shift. Likewise, when you are a little guy scrambling to grow, getting out of bed once in a while and handling a problem to preserve that growth is your best option.

In the situation in this post, I would hope that the critical “get up and fix this” messages come through a different system, or have a way to cut through a “do not disturb” so the employees can mute the mundane messages.

It sounds like you are in the first group. My company didn’t staff 24 hours, but used to pay people extra when they were the “get up and handle this” person. The size of the pay, and the frequency of the events was tuned so there was always a willing pool of people queueing to be the pager carrier.

That’s not their point. Their point is they have to get your useless notifications at 3 am and check them even when they aren’t urgent because you can’t know which is which until you read it. Stop texting people at 3 am unless it is urgent.

> In the situation in this post, I would hope that the critical “get up and fix this” messages come through a different system

If PagerDuty goes "ding" at 3am, it's probably best to take a look.

If Slack goes "ding" at 3am, maybe you forgot to turn off notifications or something, but by no means do you need to even read the notification.

> but used to pay people extra when they were the “get up and handle this” person.

When they were the person on-call, or only when they actually responded to an outage? Unless outages are really that infrequent, it pays to set clear boundaries on when and who is supposed to be available for an outage, and the cost of a dedicated solution like Pagerduty (or Grafana OnCall) is negligible.

They were salaried engineers paid to carry, not for the calls. The people carrying were capable of initiating remedial action and of knowing which engineer to call if it really needed midnight engineering. We outsourced the simple triage by having pagers and the customer’s level 1 and level 2 teams had instructions for which pager to call.

It’s normal and expected to get paid to be on call even if you don’t have to get up. You have to schedule your life around the fact you might be interrupted. That’s worth money.

As said in the reply from 10 hours ago, these were alaried engineers "paid to carry", so you're right, but it's not hard to imagine a company having an on-call rotation for such pager without any extra pay.

> it's not hard to imagine a company having an on-call rotation for such pager without any extra pay.

I imagine it’s possible but that seems like a terrible idea. Making the compensation for being on-call obvious seems better for everyone involved. At least the one who might have to get up on Christmas know exactly what they are getting out of it and that no one is taking advantage of them in the rotation.

> I have to keep notifications on and triage them

Nope. Read the whole comment, i address that :)

Some people said "fine, then I'm turning off notifications" and I'm fine with that, if I have an alternate method of contact for the (very rare) production outages.

I hate to say email, but I feel like the venue for not time sensitive messages is.. email.

I had this dynamic at my last gig with very pushy users, spamming of @here/@channel, and a boss working weird hours. I found no solution other than disabling all notifications for slack.

Still, when I would wake up & quickly scan through slack to make sure there were no open fires to login & help with, I would invariably have to dig through commingled fires & "just sending this now cuz I'm online" threads.

My next solution became that I just stopped even checking slack at all in the morning until I was either in-office, or ready to login while remote. Otherwise I found myself stewing about some annoying but non-urgent messages that I had exposed myself to.

Most people would prefer to get 1 properly thought out email than to wake up to a series of 5-10 slack messages or slack wall of text.

If I want to go back to an email, I can leave the individual message unread. A slack message I end up with a red dot next to my bosses name for an unread message (and obscures any more messages that have come since) OR use the "remind me" feature to them get a red dot popping up next to my bosses name in an hour to make me jump thinking my boss has some new urgent thing to ask me.

We've invented a pretty good async non-urgent message medium, and yet forgotten how to use it. I think all of these super clever DM strategies are self defeating.

I don't like email.

Keep in mind my workflow is much more likely to result in you ending up in a new task focused group or with a new message in a group vs a 1:1 DM.

This pretty much demonstrates the problem most people have with your approach: it isn't about you - it's about the wellbeing of the people you work with.

Also, 'just turn off notifications' isn't a solution. Having to ignore messages from your superior puts people in a very uncomfortable position.

Granted I know very little about you other than the tiny bits of information gathered in this post, so take it with a grain of salt, but I've worked with people exhibiting similar attitudes and it is extremely toxic.

Yup.

"just ignore your boss" is usually considered a CLM (Career Limiting Move)

OK one more! Beyond out of hours..

A huge huge problem with slack versus email is out-of-office behaviors. In outlook, I set myself OOO in calendar, create a scheduled OOO response with active dates and audience types to respond / not respond to (internal/external). It's like 3 clicks, and defaults to the same message I always use, and I have to set myself OOO in calendar already anyway so people don't book meetings / my boss knows I am out.

In Slack, I mark myself away, set my status to OOO, put a stupid little palm try icon up, disable notifications and...

AND I still get people blasting me with DMs as if I am working. I come back to a mess of unreads I need a couple hours to unwind as I scroll up channels/DMs/etc. Users can even force notifications through against my will (except that I disabled them at OS level :-) ).

Slack needs an OOO response tool, and even the ability to block senders to go a step further.

Yes, and being on the receiving end of that behavior, I hate it. And in slack it is very hard to manage other than turning off all notifications and just shrugging your shoulders. I can't mark individual messages for followup easily, so I have to leave entire DMs/groups/channels unread.. missing subsequent messages.

I end up in 50 different channels, 30 different DM groups and 20 1:1 DMs over the course of a week. Some conversations span 5 different channels/DMs as people are added/removed.. Outlook would just have one nice threaded email on the subject. Slack I end up with 5 little red dots on my channel browser pane.. it's a mess.

I've now had to institute a policy for myself on escalations that is - if it doesn't come through PagerDuty, it's not an incident or urgent. This in theory, by official policy is correct. In practice, this is like a union slowing down the trains..

Understood. The expectations of your job/team (emergencies etc) are probably just different from what I'm used to. Seems like a good system for your team so I'm glad it works for you.

It was not easily understood or developed.

My approach to many of these things is a direct result of me doing it very badly at some point and having to deal with the consequences of it.

Yeah, I have both Slack and Email notifications off out of hours, but people who might need me have my phone number on the trust that they only use it in emergencies. And automated production outage notifications get sent via SMS in addition to other channels (we have very few outages so this ends up being low noise)

I also work weird hours at times, but hold my messages.

> Please don't take a message from me outside your normal hours to mean I want or need an immediate response unless the message is directly talking about a production outage in which case i'll be explicit about that.

This still means they need to wake up everytime a message is received. There are likely other mechanisms for waking them during an outage, but the pressure it still there that it could be related to an outage that did not page them specially.

Similarly, getting a message while you are at a BBQ, family event, or bar will make you start thinking about the problem right away. Potentially removing their mind from the moment they are currently in.

> If you're around and you want to spend a few hours debating the merits of embedding a lua interpreter into a data processing pipeline vs trying to figure out how to droplessly reload golang code great, if not, we can pick it up the next time we're both around.

You may be saying this honestly, but many people, especially junior new hires will feel pressure none the less. They really to make good impressions and impress people.

This was pretty clearly (I thought) covered later in the same comment:

> Setting the actual expectations works great. Some people respond simply by saying that they won't put slack on their phone, or will turn notifications for slack off and I'm fine with that (having their number to call for actual emergencies).

> This still means they need to wake up everytime a message is received.

Agreed if urgent messages are going through the same channel as non-urgent. Otherwise, message sent doesn’t necessarily imply message received, and I reckon it makes more sense to encourage people to turn off work notifications out of hours.

I think this creates a very undesirable culture where working outside of hours becomes normalised / expected / pressured. You can say it all you want that people don't have to read it or reply but some will still perceive that they need to read or respond to the messages even if it is just so they are "in the know" or not left out of discussions that might occur out of hours.

I delay all messages I send (even emails) so they appear in business hours. Slack and Outlook both support this and I suspect other tools too. The only real downside is that sometimes things evolve and then you have an incorrect or out of context / misleading message popping up ("It seems like the production database is down" popping up 8 hours after it was resolved etc).

This is why I like slack. I work with people across the globe, so they want to message me without fear that I'll be notified at 2am. Slack won't send you a notification after hours, unless the person presses "Notify anyway?". I've never had that happen in the last 3 years or so of using Slack where I am.

Then you work with nice people.

The problem with slack is it only takes 1 bad user in the organization and it becomes hell.

My org has both app devs & app users within slack. Users can spam channels and DM devs when they figure out who the useful idiots are. The "notify anyway" button gets used, frequently.

The idea that they expose this button to the sender is toxic.

That's a people problem though, not a technology one.

Surely you can resolve this by talking to the person, then their manager?

If it still doesn't resolve it, mute them and advise you've done so due to abuse of notifications, and their issues will always be looked at when you're next looking.

i'm old school but:

1) there's this amazing tool that allows you to send a longform communication directly to one or many people where it will get stored and when they're starting their workday they'll see it. it's called e-mail. you should turn off notifications on your phone for e-mail... if a message is urgent, they can call or text.

2) you shouldn't obscure when you're working. creative people often prefer to work late, you should be honest about this so early morning expectations are relaxed. if you're typically a morning person and up on a production issue you should not be expected to be in first thing the next day after staying up late to fix it.

3) all this delayed fake timestamp messaging just contributes to a toxic culture of everybody appearing to be working all the time.

Firstly, IMO, email is by no way amazing. It is useful and essentially a standard way of communicating by now, but I have never once thought of the communication protocol as being amazing.

Second, there is nothing toxic about scheduling a text. My father is one of the people who never silences his phone, so when he gets a text or call at night he always wakes up. He gets annoyed if it's not urgent, so a scheduled text message in the morning would make him much happier. Scheduling a text message is all about convenience for the recipient of the message and comes out of a desire to be respectful of the other person's time.

Communication protocols extend through the human layer too. As long as both ends agree on what that is, the medium that the message uses to get from A to B is arbitrary.

With your father, texts are synchronous comms, possibly without requiring an explicit acknowledgement. This may be different for different groups of people. Define what that agreed protocol is and it removes the ambiguity.

I agree with your father, if someone texts/calls during normal sleeping hours it really should be an emergency because if everyone mutes their phones and there’s a real emergency then nobody will be able to get in touch with anybody.

Other than drunk friends and booty calls someone had better be in the hospital or dead if they wake me up in the middle of the night.

> if everyone mutes their phones and there’s a real emergency then nobody will be able to get in touch with anybody

You can tell Android and iOS to make noise when someone calls a 2nd time.

Yep, and the spammers know that too so they call twice in a row.

And I’m pretty sure you’re only entitled to one phone call…

> Yep, and the spammers know that too so they call twice in a row.

Didn't you just argue everyone shouldn't mute their phones?

> And I’m pretty sure you’re only entitled to one phone call…

You're thinking of a plot device probably.[1]

[1] https://www.betternoahlawyer.com/your-one-phone-call/

> Didn't you just argue everyone shouldn't mute their phones?

Mute your phone, don’t mute your phone, doesn’t matter to me. Just don’t wake me up at 3am for petty stuff is all I ask.

I also believe the two call thing let’s anyone through even if you have it where only saved contacts can ring the phone. Maybe, I’d just have it where it would only ring for contacts because I never get calls from random numbers that I ever wanted to talk to other than when I was at work and trying to get people in the cab who would often miss my call and immediately call back so I wouldn’t take off without them.

> It is useful and essentially a standard way of communicating by now

perfect. beautiful. AMAZING!

the smtp crypto situation is a mess, sure, but work emails usually all stay on the same machine or hosting provider anyway. more importantly, it comes from an era before zomg smartphone notifications now now now and as such has respectful communications properties built-in.

> Second, there is nothing toxic about scheduling a text. My father is one of the people who never silences his phone, so when he gets a text or call at night he always wakes up. He gets annoyed if it's not urgent, so a scheduled text message in the morning would make him much happier.

personal matters are just that and i was referring to work stuff mostly.... buuuuut that said...

you should try sending him an e-mail! even if you schedule your text for when he's awake, you're still sending him a demanding interrupt! old people love their e-mails they sit in their big comfy chairs and read them at their leisure with their favorite glasses on with their nice big lamps! he probably will appreciate that even more! if it's urgent and he hasn't responded, THEN you can send an interrupt by giving him a call or sending a text.

instead you're instructing robots to steal your dad's attention at some predetermined time in the future while you do something else... do you see the dystopic themes here?

> it comes from an era before zomg smartphone notifications now now now and as such has respectful communications properties built-in.

Gmail on iOS certainly will try to notify you for “important” messages. If anything, I think the failure of email in combatting spam is the only thing saving us from the notification-heavy defaults you mentioned.

> instead you're instructing robots to steal your dad's attention at some predetermined time in the future while you do something else... do you see the dystopic themes here?

Not that different from setting a reminder to send the text yourself…and you’d presumably pick a scheduled send time when you’re also available to reply. But I do agree, it’s marginally more impersonal.

> when they're starting their workday they'll see it

Well… I often don’t check my email till after lunch or later. This has never been a problem since anybody who needs an answer to something in less than 24 hours uses slack or text messaging.

Do not disturb is terrible if you are a part-time caregiver or on pager duty. No phone OS gives enough control over its settings and bad news often arrive from unknown numbers, i.e the hospital, 3rd party robot call service, friend of a friend etc. Speaking from experience.

I have DND and the PagerDuty alerts are set to bypass it through the app. There can be improvements made but expecting your social graph to respect an assumed context has similar problems (not to mention due to spam I think most people screen/ignore calls from unknown numbers). I like iOS’s ability to share your DND state with your contacts but even that has challenges (eg people turn it off for privacy reasons real or perceived).

Why has the above (knowing how to properly use the devices that make their lives go round) become so rare?

I push the button that looks like an old school phone handset and punch in a sequence of numbers corresponding to another phone then talk to someone.

Is there a more proper way to use a phone?

I have mesages that can’t be linked to contacts on vibration during day (silent at night), messages from contacts on vibration during day (during night only the second message within of 15 minutes sends makes a noise), and phone calls always on loud.

That catches all unexpected emergencies without bothering me too much due to emails, IRC messages, or a random text from a friend.

A brute force solution would be a second (or third) phone for those situations

That seems excessive, because the only people who you give the second number to would be the people setup to bypass the dnd anyway.

That’s idealism whereas this hack deals with realism: many people don’t have their notifications setup perfectly and also feel the pressure to respond immediately.

Why’s that the message sender’s problem though? I can’t help if you pressure yourself even if I’m clear I’m putting none on you.

Because if you are on duty for production issues you may not be able to put your entire smartphone in do not disturb yet you don't want to be woken up at 3 am because some coworker send you something non critical.

Having separate devices for personnal and professional stuff helps. I can't speak about iOS, I used it way too long ago but both Android and most messaging platforms do not provide ways to have flexible do not disturb policies depending on multiple parameters such as sender/timeframe/app/format of message. It is usually a mix of the global do not disturb function for the OS, the global notification parameters per app and possibly some mute options on a contact/channel basis but that is not time range capable and only works on a blacklist instead of whitelist model.

On iOS the two most popular systems for on-call (OpsGenie and Pager Duty) both bypass DND if configured correctly so it's a non-issue. I imagine Android has something similar.

Dunno my companies all used regular sms, teams or xmpp in the past.

I would argue that, in most social contexts, “receiving a message” does put some amount of pressure on a person.

Unless you have a really explicit understanding with the person you’re texting, they’re gonna assume you expect a response, or just expect them to read the message.

You gotta know how your actions will be received; “I can’t help you” really just isn’t enough if you wanna be a kind and thoughtful person, IMO.

I disagree; a message sent on an async platform is not expected to be responded to immediately, it's simply meant to be removed from the sender's "to-do" list.

The distinction between sync vs async messaging isn’t as easy to figure out these days as it was when snail mail vs phone call were the primary options.

The negative consequences of making the wrong choice are both extremely low and extremely loud, so I urge you to just take a guess, with a strong bias for every technology platform being async.

Once upon a time, email was more generally considered to be non-interruptive, while a phone call and later sms was considered interruptive.

Ober time, this distinction has blurred due to technology changes and resulting cultural adjustments including immediate email delivery, voicemail and advanced messaging and notification systems.

And that change over time is causing some disconnects between expectations of good behaviour.

*due to Samsung, who decided that every email deserved a ringing notification.

It’s especially appalling when they played this trick on my old parents, who receive a slew of emails every morning at 5 or 6am.

> I can’t help if you pressure yourself even if I’m clear I’m putting none on you.

That's... exactly what this is about. Now you _can_ help it.

Except for the part where you send me a message at 3 am about a work-related issue while I was placidly browsing Reddit and now you made me worry about work-related issues while on leisure time.

Work-related messages during working hours, please.

No. Manage your own messaging systems, don't put that extra work onto others, as not everyone has the same schedule as you.

In France, the law says the employer must use an email platform that disables communication during non-working hours.

Yes, it exists. Yes, no-one can notify the guy on duty because no-one can send him emails.

Eventually, policies like these lead to “don’t hire employees in France”. At which point, no French employees are even bothered by employers on their free time again...

Ah, you say "don't hire employees in France" but it reads "don't grab slaves in France". If worker's rights are an issue for you, those people in France are better without your "job", thank you very much. There are many many other jobs without near-slavery conditions, luckily.

Yeah, "This guy is great but we will have a hard time contacting him spontaneously after hours so I guess it's back to the hiring pool!"

...is not a sentence that'd be said very often/ever.

No, manage your own life. You work with me, you should know my schedule. And if you don't, consult it in the timetable. Your laziness is no excuse.

Whose work hours? Times have changed where many people no longer have the same 8ish work hour overlap. There are tz differences and Flex Time. It’s up to you to manage your messages.

Ah, no. The schedules are available for everyone to see. In many countries it is illegal to send work messages outside of working hours. Which should be common sense, but the fact it had to be made law shows that common sense is less common than it should.

That only works 1:1. What about groups? Can I not post Slack messages to a group channel unless everyone is within their working hours? What about email? What if you're in a different locale temporarily for some reason?

No, if you don't want notifications outside your own personal work schedule, then it's up to you to manage them.

With the freedom of remote work and flexible schedules, comes the responsibility to manage your own notifications.

> That only works 1:1. What about groups?

Check the table for all members.

Can I not post Slack messages to a group channel unless everyone is within their working hours?

Nope.

What about email? What if you're in a different locale temporarily for some reason?

Same.

> No, if you don't want notifications outside your own personal work schedule, then it's up to you to manage them.

Nope. Don't push your duties over other people. It's lazy. You should not message people outside working hours. As I said, it's common sense. Not so common, seems, seeing people like you, insisting on carelessly spam other people because they are too lazy to check a table.

And I repeat, it's even illegal in a bunch of first world countries to send anything, even an email outside of working hours.

So please, don't be that guy, respect other people's free time.

You've never worked in an org with more than one time zone, have you?

Yes, and in any minimally organized company, the schedules are posted in a spreadsheet, so everyone knows when the other person is available.

I agree, to be clear I continue to schedule messages despite my inner dialogue.

I’d be ok with messages in a business app (teams, slack or whatever) at whatever hour. But if people are sending me iMessages to my personal phone number I’d be annoyed at just waking to a bunch of work stuff in there.

Context would really depend on my response to asynchronous messages piling up.

Yeah, it's really weird to have to guess the settings other people desire.

That's why do not disturb on / notifications off is on each of our phones. We control that. I don't expect other people to figure out the right timezone and sleep patterns I have.

> I don't think I should have to worry about bothering someone at 3 AM. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect other people to have do not disturb on / notifications off whenever they don't want to be disturbed.

I don't enable do not disturb for people who think that way. I just block them. If you are rude and entitled enough to decide you can disturb me any time you like, I'll ensure you can't.

3am calls/texts are fine for friends/family with an emergency. I will not let you put them at risk because I needed to dnd my phone because you choose to be a jerk.

I think it’s sort of depends on the workplace culture and everybody buying in or not.

At my company, they are very strict about “just because you message somebody on slack doesn’t mean they have to respond immediately.”

The corollary is “if you don’t set yourself as away or indicate you’re on PTO, as long as it isn’t wildly outside of work hours I expect a response.”

So I have no problem sending somebody a message at 10 AM on a Saturday. Because I know that everybody at the company generally has everything flipped off. Even if they get a notification, my assumption is that they will go “oh I forgot to turn that off,” flick it off, and promptly respond to me on Monday.

Like most of these things, the devil is in the details. And if you don’t make the rules clear from the get-go, then it can be ripe for abuse and situations like you being bothered by people in the middle of the night arise.

You realize phones can dnd everyone but the people you want to disturb you in the middle of the night now right?

Sure.

I choose to use default-allow, and block people I consider rude and/or abusive.

I want my partner/friends/family to reliably be able to emergency call me from a payphone or borrowed phone, more than I want to pander to cow orkers with vestigial social skills.

That's how my thinking has come around as well and a benefit of maintaining work vs. personal device separation.

If I'm on a work computer/device/profile I don't mind seeing work-related items. Even better if its clear when action is needed.

As many companies become more diverse in working times, trusting individuals to manage it seems like one option while the other is would be patterned off the French "Right to disconnect"

Culture is a shifting beast.

Being courteous means trying to think on behalf of the other person.

However, as we interact with ever increasing numbers of individuals with an ever increasing variety of backgrounds and personal circumstance, it’s increasingly impossible to think on behalf of everyone we interact with.

And therefore it makes sense that we all need to design and configure mechanisms, that allow us to interact while keeping stress levels somewhat manageable.

>I don't think it's unreasonable to expect other people to have do not disturb on / notifications off whenever they don't want to be disturbed.

This makes sense in a world where vendors have perfected notifications. IMO, notifications are still a cluster^*&k. This is why they are still very much a moving target for ios.

Most of the time when I delay emails or Slack messages, it’s because I don’t want others to respond until later because of my own busyness or more important items to address today. Scheduling let’s me delay more back-and-forth but with the luxury of queuing my latest message now.

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