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Comment by dmcq2 | Hacker News Reader

At a job I had they wanted me to install an instant messaging app on my compute! I refused point blank. I said they could email me and I'd look at he email every so often. If it was really important they could get up and walk to see me. If it wasn't important enough for others to walk then it definitely wasn't important enough to interrupt me. Before that I was at a place where they had tannoys. I moved the tannoys away from me but they were still annoying. I tried showuing that they were losing the place millions. It would have been far cheaper to have somebody employed to walk around looking for people. They only got rid of them when marketing got in and the first thing they said was to et rid of the tannoy.

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"Instant messaging" doesn't have to be "instant". You can just close the program and open it every other hour, just like with email (which also trigger notifications). Or better yet: don't even install the chat app. Just use it in the browser and open as needed.

The expectation that you always have to be online is also unreasonable. But if you're still required to put out a show for an unreasonable employer, you can always set it to "Busy" and disable notifications. This also signals to people that you won't reply immediately.

Of course some co-workers will want to "chat" when you answer them, but this is where you must set limits and say you'll only have time for chat outside your busy hours. This is normally perfectly acceptable IME.

"Instant messaging" is just as disruptive as email if you have notifications turned on. There is zero difference between your email program going ding ding ding on every incoming email vs slack/teams/whatever doing the same.

My current company has _all_ of their communication on Slack, the only emails I get are meeting invitations and status emails from automated systems that haven't been integrated to Slack yet.

I can easily click to pause notifications on Slack if I don't want to get interrupted - or I can just close it and read the backlog when I have time to focus on it.

I think the idea is he doesn’t get push notifications on email.

I would not hire you if you refused to use instant messaging (my enterprise uses Slack and gChat). You would be unable to do the job- you wouldn't be able to contribute to decision making, or would miss out on all sort of information. We (our department) has moved out of email with the exception of formal requests and things that cost more than a few tens of thousands of dollars.

Would you use IRC? That's all slack really is.

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