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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.