[linkregister]

I agree; Slack includes features to disable notifications outside of working hours. An @here message will trigger a pop up with "sure you want to wake up the people outside of your time zone?" I have been fortunate enough to not be compelled to answer messages outside of working hours, even with 10-hour variance between time zones in a remote team.

Can anyone describe a situation where the introduction of Slack changed their company's culture to an "always on" mode?

[eropple]

"Changed", no. Reified an existing one by providing additional reinforcement to the expectations of instant access? Certainly.

[res0nat0r]

But that isn't at all Slacks fault, it is your company culture and people.

[eropple]

I don't agree with that at all. I am a consultant. I see lots of companies. I see lots of companies jumping on the "plug our employees 24/7 into everything" bandwagon. Slack has a moral obligation--we all have the moral obligation--to not be the stooge of bad actors just as it works to improve the productivity of good ones. If Slack took this seriously, it would do significantly more to protect its users from toxic behavior.

For example: it is possible to ignore people's do-not-disturb settings (added relatively recently, after a long period of asking) to force their phone to blow up at four in the morning. This empowers assholes to be bigger assholes and strengthens a shitty culture by providing tools to be shittier; you can never not be at their beck and call; if you refuse to answer, that's you being bad and not the person who feels entitled to interrupt your life on a whim.

You also cannot mute or block users on a Slack. This disempowers people downrange of assholes and strengthens a shitty culture by not providing tools to avoid the perpetuators of shitty culture. (They have been asked for this feature and have refused.)

[matwood]

> For example: it is possible to ignore people's do-not-disturb settings (added relatively recently, after a long period of asking) to force their phone to blow up at four in the morning.

How is this any different than someone calling you at 4am? Or sending a bunch of emails? This has nothing to do with Slack and everything to do with a bad company.

[eropple]

The context of email, in my experience, is that "you'll get the email when you see it." Slack's ephemera, the social contract that it encourages, is "you are on all the time." It is an asynchronous communication tool that it tries to convince its users is synchronous, and if you aren't using it in a synchronous manner (as I don't, for the most part), you are breaking that perceived illusion. You are not being a Team Player.

There is a significantly different social implication to clicking the "fuck your do-not-disturb settings" link and calling you. (I would argue that the former should be worse, but it isn't, ever.) Ephemera matters. Context matter. Slack creates a bad context. They own that.

[res0nat0r]

Slack's job is to make communication easier, and apparently it is doing just that based on its massive user base spike. I'm signed into 6 different Slack org's right now on my laptop to let me talk to different clients all at once and is extremely easy to use and a great timesaver.

When I leave my desk my phone gets direct messages to me that I've missed. It is incredibly useful and is doing it's job. All of the complaints above are all just deflecting your company's lack of respect for your personal time. Don't feel like being on instant messenger away from your PC? Don't install it on your phone, or turn mobile notifications off.

I've worked at previous jobs where my manager would send emails at 1AM to my BlackBerry and expect a quick response. I didn't blame BlackBerry for that, I blamed my previous management for expecting me to be online 24x7.