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Comment by dvtrn | Hacker News Reader

I tried for a while before giving up because almost nobody in my org reads statuses or heeds them to begin with anyway (as I’ve learned on multiple PTO days where I would change my status to “On vacation, please contact Mike at ——— for support” and getting P1 messages and calls over slack anyway).

Nowadays I’m just a stochastic replier.

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That’s actually a great point I was on “vacation” last week and got messaged every single day despite my palm tree emoji.

Indeed. I’m firmly in camp “slack isn’t the problem with workplace communication, it just happens to amplify the problems that were already there”.

Most (not all) tech that tries to “fix” communication in the office suffers from this problem though so I’m not blaming Slack alone for this. It just is what it is.

No one read status, everyone sees emoji though. Make an emoji for what you want to say.

What’s the emoji for “escalate to the Denver office for these issues, Chicago for those issues; otherwise I’m not here man”?

Because you see I had the palm tree emoji. AND a bit of text. Still got PMs and calls.

The emoji didn’t seem to matter.

As Joel Spolsky says, no one really reads. May be if you sum your status up in least possible words it will reduce the pokes a bit.

Also I sent a college a message while he was on holiday knowingly so that he can see and may reply if he wants to when he comes back.

If you are on holiday (palm emoji) you are free to not pick up any calls and messages, until an unless you job is life critical and requires you to respond immediately at any hour.

Everyone who doesn't really read, doesn't reserve a response anyway.

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