Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

> importantly, nobody can demand that I do that in order to get some work done.

I mean, even if you go to great lengths to choose to subscribe to a particular email service that does this and choose to buy a phone that only does this, an employer could still demand you use a regular phone or regular email for correspondence or choose to not hire/work with you. I really can't imagine most people would be like "huh your phone only works in this one very peculiar way, I guess there's just nothing else that can be done about that." They'd just tell you to get a regular email.

To other people there would be little difference between you choosing to use a service and device like this as you only using your email client once every 24 hours. Its ultimately the same thing: you're choosing to put yourself in a position where you can't be reached for 24 hours. Shifting the blame to some 3rd party isn't really effective when you theoretically can change back and sign up for a regular email account at any moment.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not demanding you live your life any particular way. Personally I don't care how you choose to live your life and I agree we could all use some time to detach from our always on always connected communicators. If you only want to be able to communicate by a 24 hour delay, go for it. Just don't expect everyone to suddenly be OK with it because you went out of your way to choose a service provider that facilitates that. I imagine you will encounter a good bit of friction doing it with the way society works right now.




> I really can't imagine most people would be like "huh your phone only works in this one very peculiar way, I guess there's just nothing else that can be done about that."

Think about it like: I'm already on vacation, that my boss three levels up (CEO) approved, including explicitly approving / encouraging-as-company-policy my use of this device/service during my vacation. Now boss-two-levels-up (some VP) is trying to cover their own ass for something they didn't do, by telling me to do urgent work during my vacation. The only way to actually get them to go away in a way that doesn't result in awful office politics happening to me, is to make it technically impossible for me to be reached, or for me to do synchronous work. Thus the device, and the public/institutional knowledge that I'm only reachable through such a delayed mechanism.

That way, rather than me having to make waves (which could get turned around on me, since I'm not there to defend myself), the VP would have to make waves about me not responding — which would expose publicly to the rest of the company the fact that they're trying to make me work on my vacation, and cause the CEO to come down on them. Very likely, they'd realize that, and just give up on the idea of shirking their responsibility off to me.

(This is all hypothetical; I don't even have a boss.)


When I'm on approved and documented vacation time I just quit syncing my work emails and disable push notifications from the chat app. My work machine stays powered off in the bag unless somehow an emergency managed to break in to my life. If for some reason I'm curious about how things are in the office I'll do a manual sync of the email or pop on the chat. No need for a separate device but ultimately the same deal.

This is also a good reason for putting a vacation auto-responder on your email/chat. You then have a documented paper trail that you're not supposed to respond so they can't later argue they thought you were shirking off work.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: