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Ask HN: Non office hours chats and email

6 points by khrist ↗ HN
When you have a culture originating from top about posting messages and emails late at night and on weekend how do you view this? In my case I spend time working evenings and weekend but I take extra care to not push(commits) or post, email during non working hours. Now in my company there is growing culture of unabashedly posting non-urgent stuff middle of night which I find insensitive and ostentatious.

My question is am I thinking too much or its a symptom of a deeper problem which is going to get worse and I must do something.

4 comments

[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 18.6 ms ] thread
viraptor
What kind of communication is it? Are they posting something that requires reaction / is some response expected? Or is it just posted because that's when they happened to think of it / do the work?

I think the first one is pretty bad and I wouldn't hesitate to publically respond "I'll deal with this in business hours". (If I even saw it - I won't configure work chat or email on a personal device) On the other hand, I don't see anything wrong with people working when they want to. As long as others are not expected to match that, why is that anyone else's concern? Are you worried those messages imply some expectations?

It's Saturday evening and I actually just pushed some doc with team notification on GitHub because it was on my mind and I was really curious if some way of linking documents would work. I don't expect anyone to either see or react to it before Monday though.

khrist
Sometimes it is non-urgent non-important communication about something which makes the poster excited, Sometimes its status of the work they were doing Mostly stuff which if required at all, could easily wait till business hours. I understand that they might not explicitly expect any responses. But the timing of the posts makes me nervy - ungodly hours - and esp coming from higher ups. Is all that innocuous?
joeax
Unless there's a policy establishing otherwise, it's going to get worse, especially if it's coming from the top. If it's something that bothers you then try to ride it out, but have a foot out the door in case you hit your breaking point.

It always starts with little subtleties, harmless emails like "check this out". Soon you find yourself on a Monday morning getting accosted by your boss or overly-ambitious co-worker before you even had the change to get coffee with "did you get a chance to take a look at that thing I sent?" Eventually these micro-telegraphs take their toll and you find yourself feeling guilty about not participating in the Slack chat at 2am. Now the precedent of being available whenever the boss has the whims to work is set, whether you like it or not.

Disclaimer: I'm all for working after hours as it merits, I just prefer to do it on my schedule or on an as-critically-needed basis.

khrist
>> "you find yourself feeling guilty about not participating in the Slack chat at 2am." Thats me at times, though feeling more helpless than guilty