HACKER Q&A
📣 borghildhedda

How many Slack messages do you send/receive outside working hours?


How many Slack messages do you send/receive outside working hours?


  👤 PaulHoule Accepted Answer ✓
If they gotta reach me when I am off they send a text.

👤 MDGeist
A fair amount (maybe 15-20% of messages) since I'm on the east coast and my company is on the west coast. I don't feel obligated to reply if its outside of working hours though.

👤 dangus
Quite a few, but that’s just because I have friend groups who use Slack.

Discord would probably be better since Slack’s pricing favors business use. We lose our old messages on the free version of Slack, but the all-or-nothing per-user monthly cost of a paid version prohibits our group from upgrading.

The way that Discord’s premium features are based on an individual person’s willingness to pay rather than the entire organization is definitely a better model for personal use.


👤 albusdumbledora
I have no clue because I have Slack muted after 5pm.

👤 kody
During COVID WFH, probably 20-30 per day. I didn't think it was a big deal since I had extra flexibility with my time during work hours. I eventually understood that I was blurring the lines between work and life. Now that I'm back in the office, I don't have Slack or my work email on my personal devices at all and I feel better for it.

👤 skydhash
None. I don’t have slack on my personal devices. And I shut down the work laptop at the end of day.

👤 paulcole
0. If I absolutely "have" to send something, I schedule it for working hours.

I also don't have Slack installed on any personal devices. If I "have" to send something I'll install Slack and then delete it right after.

More often though I'll just email my work address with the message I want to send and then take care of it the next day.


👤 toomuchtodo
Zero. Notifications disabled outside of biz hours. There will always be a job, living life only happens once. Family and loved ones will miss you, your job will slot another cog into the machine without skipping a beat.

👤 galenmarchetti
I don't count, but probably 10% of the total volume of messages that I send. A bit different for me as a founder though. It also spikes up and down depending on urgency/sprints

👤 cableshaft
Pretty much zero. A couple of times I was asked to submit some document or log some hours I forgot or something outside of hours and I went 'oops, let me take care of that'. Otherwise, none.

Well, at this job. At my previous job, which involved making software for and supporting a call center (on behalf of health insurance companies), I would get texts sometimes as late as 10pm saying that something had gone down and they needed me to get on a call and tell the server teams what we needed to be back up. The department was a skeleton crew the last couple of years I was there and I was the only guy that knew everything about our phone systems so they were pretty reliant on me or else 90+ agents would be twiddling their thumbs.

I was on Teams calls for up to 16 hours sometimes (through the night and into my normal shift the next day) trying to get things resolved (and the people I was on a call with would tell me "I'm going home for the night. You'll now be talking with Y" So they didn't have the same skeleton crew they forced our department to have.

It was bad. They had all sorts of problems at the data center too, and/or made breaking changes without letting anyone know. It got a bit more stable near the end, but man it was horrible for at least a year and a half straight. This was a major corporation also.

I decided that would be the last job in phone systems I would have, and I'd never let myself get into that bad of a situation again.


👤 aprdm
Hmmm sometimes I send/read, but I have notifications off and have zero expectation of replies or replying.. just when I'm bored.