Exactly. Your employer is not going to enforce boundaries to ensure healthy work/life balance for you, you must do it yourself (until labor regulations catch up; see France [1] and NYC [2] labor law regarding checking email outside of work hours for examples).

[1] https://newatlas.com/right-to-disconnect-after-hours-work-em...

[2] https://legistar.council.nyc.gov/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=3...

Are you, with a straight face, saying that you'd rather receive a PHONE CALL than a notification from an app that you can set time-sensitive notification methods for (i.e. DND overnight, etc.)? I'm not fan of getting any kind of work message outside of working hours, but I'd FAR rather let my co-workers send me a slack message that I can ignore and/or deal with when I feel like it than call me on the phone. No one at my office except my direct manager and HR has my phone number (and in the 5+ years I've worked here), no one has called me on it.

You're not wrong, but there's also the filter of "is this a real emergency or could this be an email he'll see tomorrow morning?" that goes through the coworker's head when his options are call vs. email. And, at least in my position, if it is a real emergency I'd like to know.

That said, other than a handful of coworkers who I'm friends with outside of work, only my manager & HR have my personal number. This adds an extra step where the coworker should determine if getting in touch with me immediately is actually worth the effort.

So far, I've received one such phone call in 3 years. It was an actual emergency, and easily resolved by me at that time because they called me. If they had waited until the next working day, the issue would have blown up and taken much more effort for me to resolve.

This might alternatively be an argument for working with people who respect your time.

Pretty much this, it's an instant bullshit filter.

If I were to ever receive so many phone calls it becomes a problem I'll solve that problem. Right now I've had all of zero calls this year so I think I'll be right for the moment.

Yes I do. Why? It raises the bar. Its all too easy to whisper someone via electronic communication. If you need to get to speak to the person, and they hear my kid yelling at the background, perhaps they'll wonder if I got other things to do in my leisure time.

Furthermore, I don't find it particularly bright to host sensitive data by such a vague company. Bonus negative points for the infosec community using such.

At least on iOS, Do Not Disturb covers phone calls, too. With the ability to set overrides for calls from Very Important Numbers. Voice mail exists as well.

Android as well, it can allow starred contacts through.

Voicemail? How tedious. A Slack message is far preferable. Nothing stopping you from setting do not disturb in Slack.

> Are you, with a straight face, saying that you'd rather receive a PHONE CALL than a notification

Yes, a thousand times. People often write on company instant messaging just to ask things that can figure on their own.

Yes, if for no other reason, that calling someone adds friction.

People don't phone you for stuff that could have easily waited till tomorrow morning.

Slack has work hours. After that nothing notifies me. FWIW I use Slack to keep in touch with other groups of people too. It’s actually quite good.