Foreign hackers breached a US nuclear weapons plant via SharePoint flaws

If they are, it’s enormous personal red flag. MSFT is very popular so I’m only speaking about my own experience, but I have learned over the course of 20 years that an MSFT IT stack is highly correlated with me hating the engineering culture of an organization.

I know I am excluding a lot of companies with great engineering culture where I would thrive and who just happen to use Outlook/Sharepoint/Teams, etc. but it has had such better predictive power of rotten tech culture than any line of questioning I have come up with during interviews that I still use it.

I don’t mean any disrespect to MSFT-centric engineers out there - it’s not you it’s me.

I've seen companies with varying levels of MS product integration but Outlook is pretty foundational.

Now, if a company says they use SharePoint or Teams to store their documentation, run to the hills. Wikis or bust.

Teams macOS client? Crashes on startup, even after clearing all of my user data.

Teams iOS client? You can join a call by a link, but you can't see the call UI because it's behind the login window.

Teams on Firefox? No video support for years, and most recently just glitches out and shows an empty page when trying to join.

Teams on Chrome? Tried joining a meeting, and was told by the organizers that they couldn't admit me because the button wasn't doing anything.

I've had all four of these things happen within the last month, and it's made me want to tear my hair out. I get that none of these are "Microsoft Edge/native Windows client", but they could at least pretend to care about other platforms...

It's never just Teams or SharePoint or a wiki. It's almost always some abomination created by putting various bits of knowledge on all three. Also, corporate wikis suck because how your team classifies data is almost invariably different from how someone else wants to see it.

SharePoint, for all of its flaws, typically gets used by the major announcement-and-policy makers at a company, because they just want to use MS stuff (primarily out of ignorance of alternatives), so at least it's somewhat coherent for everyone in the company.

Recently it's all been gmail/google workspaces.

The companies not using Microsoft, are using Google. Which in my experience is equally or measurably worse.

Just personal data points, but every avowed Microsoft hater I've ever worked with has been... difficult. Like a-drag-on-the-team-because-he-refuses-to-use-company-tools difficult.

Edit: How does an aged post on this site go from +4 to -1 in the span of a few minutes?

$ dig ycombinator.com mx

  ;; ANSWER SECTION:
  ycombinator.com. 300 IN MX 20 alt1.aspmx.l.google.com.
  ycombinator.com. 300 IN MX 10 aspmx.l.google.com.
  ycombinator.com. 300 IN MX 20 alt2.aspmx.l.google.com.
  ycombinator.com. 300 IN MX 30 aspmx4.googlemail.com.

The best company I ever worked at, provided every software engineer both a Mac laptop and a Linux desktop as standard equipment.

Now, if Microsoft creates a Microsoft Linux desktop OS, that would be something.

My work laptop is Windows, and the only native applications I run on it are a web browser, Zoom, and the company's VPN software. Everything else runs inside WSL.

I greatly prefer Debian to Homebrew, so if I can't run actual Linux, this is (to me) superior to trying to develop on a Mac.

Every company I worked for before or since just used IMAP.

The Mac hardware is vastly superior to most Windows laptops, especially enterprise Windows laptops.

The zoom fascination is pretty weird. It’s literally Webex 3.0 without Cisco bullshit.

Slack is pretty awesome. It wouldn’t factor in selecting an employer, but that’s just me.

honestly the things i read here sometimes hahaha

Not in my industry. And workstations, mobile or otherwise, on the clock? You work with what's certified and available. But to be fair, "Apple people", praise the Great Maker, are utterly irrelevant here. Hardware- and software-wise.

I strongly disagree about Mac hardware vs. Thinkpads or Framework, but to each their own.

Like, if a fighter jet pilot came and told all American jets are equally weak and overcomplicated and ineffective, it probably tells more about that pilot than about the jets.

I don't know if that's the case, but that would be the idea.

My direct employer uses GSuite (and Google docs as a source of record is as bad as a 2000s file share)

Mid-sized businesses (100-1000 employees): around 60-70%

Small businesses: more variable, maybe 40-60%

this reply was written by “AI” :)

Note that MX records are misleading here. They have no false positives, but are full of false negatives --- daisy-chaining MTAs is common, and since Microsoft owns the mailbox, it's invariably last in the chain. So the MX record will show something like Proofpoint (pphosted) or Mimecast or an internal company host, when really it's Microsoft in the end.

The fact that it's so widespread in our corporate culture is more indicative of how enshittified it is. Now, realistically, we might not be able to avoid it because of that, but let's not pretend that it's not shit.

Outlook is objectively a terrible experience.

Man alive, what you mean is normie "Apple-style" Windows laptops with a bit of an "enterprise" makeover. Mobile enterprise workhorses (e. g. Panasonic, Getac)? Apple has no hardware in this segment. Detachables with extended five-year warranties plus certified dual-OS support? Nothing. Some of you fruit afficionados need to get out more.

Yes, it’s not great, but so what?

H1Bs use Microsoft products more than others? Or they do it because they have to…or what??

Please explain yourself.

Also yes, due to availability and various other reasons, H1bs, particularly from India, seem more likely to use a MSFT stack.

If they're also making you use Outlook or especially Teams then they're going to start losing "points".

Microsoft Office usage is highly predictive of lots and lots of other choices.

I just down-voted you, so I contributed to that.

OP bent over backwards to make it clear that he didn't mean any offense, and you opened with "you sound like a problem employee."

For example, if OP for some reason stops liking a maintainer of, say, RabbitMQ or PostgreSQL, they might be penetrant about switching a finished project to a different stack without any tangible reason, causing completely unnecessary headaches for the team.

I wouldn't be surprised if many people find that smaller companies are more fun/interesting to work at, so even if this were only filtering out large companies checking for MS could be helpful.

Definitely not.

Maybe it can be argued that it depends on how you use it, but meet is so far and away better for video calls and screen sharing, its not even funny.

Jitsi is also an incredible improvement, and it is self hostable and free.

Teams is likely the worst software that a company will force on all its employees- with that in mind, I guess some people can get stockholm syndrome? Some people who only jump from MSFT shops literally don’t know that there’s anything better. They went from Communicator to Lync to Skype for Business and now to Teams- and Teams is better than those just about.

He didn’t say he doesn’t like Satya or Gates or whatever, he was clear that he doesn’t like the solution.

I just went back to a microsoft shop, and honestly while the company is great you can feel how the communication is stilted compared to my previous company. Those little edges, warts, unreliable loading moments and awkward loading times all sum up to people being disincentivised to create, edit and consume documents or even to chat.

This inexplicably drives meeting culture as async communication just doesn’t happen. I totally understand why its primarily MSFT shops that have RTO mandates.

That doesn’t sound like they have faith in Teams themselves.

I use Teams every day and it can’t even do threading in channels properly. The spellchecker is unreliable and even copy and paste is occasionally patchy.

It is not a good product. I’d switch to Slack given the choice.

The only issues I’ve found with Zulip is how it looks and training people to use it right. I’ve had a lot of comments that Zulip has ruined people because they realised how good it is only after they stopped using it, and can tell that everything is so much worse, but the whole time they used it- they hated it.

The other issue, if we can call it as such, is that there’s not that many native third party integrations, we had to write our own bots for some pretty basic things. But writing bots is so much easier in Zulip than Slack (and for Teams its a lesson in genuine masochism) so I give them a pass.

File hosting, web application hosting and integrating with Office.

OP doesn't like working for people that have bad tools mandated by the company. He uses a proxy measure to determine this beforehand.

The other poster had problems with people like OP because they don't use the (bad) tools provided by the company.

It doesn't sound wrong from either side. It's actually a win-win for both if they don't meet, which would mean OPs strategy is great for both. It might preclude OP from some opportunities though if the filter is too wide.

I personally do think that if you mandate the wrong tools you will never get the best developers, because great developers are very picky about the tools they use. It can be a bit too extreme in some cases, but I've rarely seen anybody that is good at this job and not very opinionated in some way or the other.

In most cases the problem is mandating though, if you give recommendation but allow deviations from that recommendation within reason you can usually get everybody to be happy.

It tells the company values price more than capability.

I asked in my company why we use SharePoint and the answer was name a better alternative. So I asked an better alternative to do what? I never got an answer.

Developer’s quality of life might differ.

Job sites could do with this as a filter. Even more specifically, ‘Teams’.

Including IRC.

That just seems factually incorrect. I’ve seen no correlation on RTO and tools used. Do you have data on this?

  > How does an aged post on this site go from +4 to -1 in the span of a few minutes?

First, the post looses two points at once. When I see that, I know it's going to continue losing points consistently until it settles into -2 to -4. There is some trigger that starts with a loss of two points, and then continues down.

Companies that use Teams as primary communication software have all had strong and non-negotiable RTO mandates, companies that use o365 and Slack allow exceptions for certain individuals and teams, but have also had RTO requirements.

Those that are using gsuite or are paying lip service to email and documents (excel, word etc) and using mostly Confluence and something like Slack for most communication are the only ones with proper flexible working.

Now, I could be wrong, and there's no public data to back this up. If I think about how I would construct such a dataset I can't even fathom how; even if I was to check every company with an RTO mandates MX records there would be no way to control for the sheer dominance of O365, and, no way to tell who is only playing lip service to their productivity suites.

I'd be interested in hearing other opinions, but like mentioned, it feels pretty universal. I haven't seen even a single exception to this, and I'm pretty old and I have friends across many companies.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30264591

Yes, though Zoom came first, Webex copied their UI during the covid Zoom craze.

Why subject yourself to something you know you’ll hate every day if you can avoid it?

Is that being entitled? Plenty of people don’t have such choices, sure!

If so, who cares? Live your life, make your decisions. Don’t let jealous people make your life miserable.

Personally, I’d rank it as:

1. Google meet (as good as a gvc program can get for actual meetings, near as I can tell). Best when you have a group of people who are somewhat co-ordinated and not malicious though.

2. Zoom (not great for actual meeting quality, like audio/video, but not bad - and has a lot of useful tools and workflow stuff, especially for larger groups of strangers. I get it)

3..24 - every other random product.

25. Teams (lots of random bugs, worse than zoom for actual meeting quality, tons of silly MS’isms when trying to actually use it, somehow doesn’t work well for groups of people working together OR for groups of strangers, etc).

MS is the king of the package deal and ‘check box sales’, so they are impossible to avoid for long however.

Hard to say what the actual office environment would end up like (plenty of toxic nerds out there), but I’ve worked for CEOs who were devs, and I even when they were terrible people, I never once hated the development part of the job.

Oracle support took the cake however, but that was with a commercial support license and a weird bug triggered by a newly released feature (never do that!) in Oracle DB, many years ago. ORA-600 errors for the ‘win’.

I don't think I was ready for how bad it is. Not going to go into an inventory of it all, but I'll admit I genuinely lost it when I discovered that the terminal -- the terminal! -- freezes after staying open several days, and you need to kill it and restart it.

The worst part, I think, is how the brokenness ends up permeating the engineering culture. Malfunction is just normalized. There's no reliability baseline; if it's broken to the point the amount of work you can do is zero, just open a ticket with support, who will add yet another bit of duct tape or just reboot something somewhere and ask you if the problem went away somehow.

I think possibly the coworkers who don't look away from the emperor's non-clothed-ness, and the higher standards that they drive, may be more valuable to have around than you imagine, if you can get past the bad emotions that their lucidity gives you.

The "Google lacks support" chorus we hear frequently is more associated with their free tier.

To be fair, any employee that knows their worth and is not afraid to treat the relationship the same way as the company is a problem for the company ( and thus: 'problem employee' ).

Not to say that the developers working on it are satisfied with it..

Why? It's much better than Teams, if for no other reason than Teams just got deprecated on MacOS Monterey and that's really annoying. Or rather not for just that reason, but for the reason that Teams is Microsoft's 10th biggest priority, whereas video calling is Zoom's only priority, so they make a better product.

(1) host an up to date Zulip version

(2) setup or rent a Jitsi Meet or other open source / free software voice + video chat solution. Jitsi Meet might be a bit difficult to properly set up, compared to Zulip, because of extra things needed, like TURN server and in general the complexities of web RTC. Maybe renting that for some < 10 EUR is fine for a company.

(3) Configure Zulip to have for example `/jitsi` or `/meeting` for creating meetings right out of Zulip.

(4) Setup other integrations, that exist for Zulip.

(5) Setup backups for the Zulip database. It is just a postgres database. One can dump it and move the dump to a backup store.

If this is too much, for example because the company doesn't have the knowledge in their employees to manage this, then one can also rent Zulip hosted solutions.

Getting away from Salesforce alone is in my opinion already worth it.

Do you even read your ‘weekly digest’?

/s

It worked pretty well, I do wish Zulip had better ability to generate links from the video call button, it works really well with Jitsi this way.

Libreoffice Calc and Excel are probably your strongest argument, Excel runs the world after all.

But, if it wasn’t for incompatibility and fear of incompatibility- I have a hard time thinking Calc is materially worse; I doubt theres a single workflow not possible in Calc- and if O365 utils get worse looking then Calc will win there too soon enough.

For everything else in the microsoft stack, either its “this thing does many things thus is incomparable to any one thing!” or its simply worse.

Even the best tools that I would actively defend (MSSQL) are only equivalent to other solutions (PGSQL) and almost never better than everything offered elsewhere.

Microsoft support has been very good. Google support was abysmal and very "you're dumb, we're smart because we're Google" style.

And we pay money for support to both organizations.

People who signal that MS is sh*t are always worthwhile to listen to. They have character and principles, and they know bad and good software when they see it.

Needless to say, in my company all microsoft products are banned and I would never hire microsoft fanboys.

My personal "sample size" is too small to be sure, but I worry that Teams usage is poisonous to collaboration and engineering culture.

Excel in particular, for any power user, sheets just doesn't hold a candle to its functionality. Outside of the valley Microsoft must still have a 10:1 ratio of corporate use, I never run across a customer that has made the switch.

Google Workspace is an infinitely better productivity framework; there's no space for discussion here.

Says it's unthinkably bad then proceeds to give only one example. There are several other issues you can list.

>the terminal -- the terminal! -- freezes after staying open several days, and you need to kill it and restart it.

I wonder when that issue ever happened since I'm always ssh'd into my homelab via the terminal for days and never had to restart it since it never froze.

>The worst part, I think, is how the brokenness ends up permeating the engineering culture. Malfunction is just normalized.

Microsoft didn't make the culture like that, the managers were always like that which made them choose Microsoft because they just choose the biggest corporate name brand supplier. It's your typical old-school MBA.

I've worked at all-MS shops and at all-Linux shops, and despite the issues with MS tech, the all-MS shops were far less toxic and pleasant to work at as people treated it as a 9-5 job instead of their own personal start-up project that needs to strictly conform to their world view, therefore the linux-shops I worked at tended to attract more of the toxic problem employees like your grandparent whos work life revolved around tech evangelism than pragmatism, which I didn't like since I just wanted to get work done and go home, not participate in some crusade at work to judge and shame choices of OS/IDE/languages/frameworks/tools the company should be using. As long as I get paid, I'll use any widely available tool, I don't really care.

Mindset explains the other users complaint perfectly I guess. I suppose it comes to how one views and feels about work. Take pride in your work? Dont go MS shop. Don't care and are just there to get paid? MS shop.

that attitude explains why I can no longer edit calendar evemts in the android app unless I turn the phone sideways, and a deluge of other issues with MS products that reek of sloppy low effort work.

Also I was compressing my responses in my back-end but Azure Front Door was decompressing them. Why?!!!

I do wonder if they tried to push teams for text chat before I got there and were shot down. Management seems fairly receptive to some amount of give and take when it comes to decisions about office tooling e.g. I was cited as “the reason” engineers still have access to Figma Dev Mode, and I can’t say we had more than a handful of vocal people pushing to keep it. Company size is somewhere between 200-500 iirc

The web client is pants, though.

Yes, how dare SW engineers work to just put food on the table for their families, and not fight your imaginary tech revolution against MS-shops?

> Take pride in your work? Dont go MS shop.

Sorry buddy, but I work the SW equivalent of "putting the fries in the bag", my work has no impact on the tech issues in your life, and I don't live in The Valley, or the US, or some major international tech hub where hip, non-MS jobs fall from trees in order to make an impact, and so MS shops make the brunt of the jobs market where I live. Should I go homeless and hungry just to virtue signal on HN on how righteous I am via your self-defined Russian nesting doll of obscure purity tests?

>that attitude explains why [...]

Hate to break it to you, but some people on HN like you guys in this thread, are so over privileged with your career opportunities, that their delusions take over rationality and common sense views of the reality outside their bubble, and think the rest of the world must conform to your viewpoints or else they're somehow the "evil ones" responsible for the issues you perceive.

By all means feel free to have your own beliefs and values that differ from others, just don't try to virtue signal, judge others, or impose your view on others, as nobody likes such obnoxious arrogant people on their high horse thinking they're on the right side of history and everyone else is wrong. Live and let live, that's my life's mantra.

“Nobody ever got fired for choosing MSFT” goes hand in hand with “if we don’t exploit the H1B system to get cheap coders who won’t sue us or try to organize then someone else will.”

Using FOSS, hiring citizens, treating employees well, actually innovating and producing great products, all hang together. Sadly, such companies and people are increasingly rare in tech, because the tech oligarchs fund bad people and bad products because they are often greedy egoists whose wealth is derived from being in the right place at the right time, or from what I call “moral arbitrage” (doing things others are too ethical to consider) rather than deriving wealth from actual talent or ingenuity. Ymmv