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433 points zdw | 112 comments | | HN request time: 0.67s | source | bottom
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crmd ◴[] No.45660666[source]
One of the first things I do after getting an inquiry from a recruiter or friend referral is lookup the MX record for the company’s email domain. It is an anonymous one-command check to see if they’re a Microsoft shop.

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.

replies(11): >>45660852 #>>45660872 #>>45661217 #>>45661616 #>>45662254 #>>45662313 #>>45662719 #>>45663474 #>>45663495 #>>45665083 #>>45675213 #
1. fujigawa ◴[] No.45661217[source]
I'm gonna be honest, you sound like a problem employee.

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?

replies(19): >>45661276 #>>45661318 #>>45661625 #>>45661903 #>>45661968 #>>45662387 #>>45662494 #>>45663148 #>>45663393 #>>45663463 #>>45664329 #>>45664878 #>>45666991 #>>45667600 #>>45667845 #>>45669168 #>>45669404 #>>45671057 #>>45672125 #
2. Etheryte ◴[] No.45661276[source]
I don't know man, you're gonna have a very tough crowd if you're gonna try and convince anyone that Teams is as good as Google Meet.
replies(1): >>45661327 #
3. bitmasher9 ◴[] No.45661318[source]
Doing research on a potential employer and filtering out opportunities based on preferred toolchains is a green flag not a red flag.
replies(3): >>45661558 #>>45661875 #>>45662317 #
4. fujigawa ◴[] No.45661327[source]
They are all equally crap. I'm convinced the people designing collaboration tools don't have to use them on a daily basis.
replies(5): >>45661410 #>>45661596 #>>45664124 #>>45665323 #>>45668062 #
5. dieortin ◴[] No.45661410{3}[source]
I’m sure the people who designed Teams and Meet use their own products on a daily basis. And if those are crap, what’s a better alternative?
replies(3): >>45662526 #>>45663032 #>>45665406 #
6. Spooky23 ◴[] No.45661558[source]
Dev tools, sure. Self-selecting yourself out of the office/email toolset used by 90% of companies seems like a weird flex.
replies(2): >>45661755 #>>45664183 #
7. supportengineer ◴[] No.45661596{3}[source]
The plague that is currently infesting our software industry is "Promo-Driven Culture". Employees are incentivized to get a promotion, not to make life better for anyone, except for their manager's promotion.
8. supportengineer ◴[] No.45661625[source]
Windows is a parasitic drag-on-the-team.

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

replies(2): >>45661729 #>>45661935 #
9. dpifke ◴[] No.45661729[source]
That's basically WSL.

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.

replies(1): >>45661863 #
10. philipallstar ◴[] No.45661755{3}[source]
Teams is just so much more horrible than Slack and Zoom, and dev teams use Slack and/or Zoom.
replies(5): >>45661871 #>>45664019 #>>45665410 #>>45666207 #>>45666284 #
11. illusive4080 ◴[] No.45661863{3}[source]
I agree that Debian beats Homebrew. But wouldn’t a persistent Debian container on Mac be better? WSL is nothing more than a container on the system, no?

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

replies(4): >>45662036 #>>45663276 #>>45664309 #>>45667417 #
12. Spooky23 ◴[] No.45661871{4}[source]
Most customers of both use O365.

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.

replies(3): >>45662868 #>>45667378 #>>45668054 #
13. cactusplant7374 ◴[] No.45661875[source]
In this economy? This sounds like a fantasy.
replies(1): >>45665602 #
14. coolestguy ◴[] No.45661903[source]
"using the biggest software suite tailored for offices/IT environments is a red flag"

honestly the things i read here sometimes hahaha

replies(2): >>45663043 #>>45665274 #
15. spankibalt ◴[] No.45661935[source]
> Windows is a parasitic drag-on-the-team.

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.

16. erikerikson ◴[] No.45661968[source]
As someone who has been accepting of MS houses and worked at a few, the heuristic holds up in my admittedly anecdotal experience. The Mac houses are fine and Linux houses have been best.
17. dpifke ◴[] No.45662036{4}[source]
With Windows 11, WSL has X and Wayland support, so you can run graphical applications as if they're native (e.g. share the same cut-and-paste buffer, switch between windows using alt+tab, and so on). It's also much easier to attach USB devices like Yubikeys to an already-running container than the last time I tried to do the same with Parallels. (That was quite a few years ago, so maybe it's gotten better.) You can also launch Windows applications from Linux, which is makes it trivial to control my (Windows-native) browser from within WSL.

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

18. numpad0 ◴[] No.45662317[source]
I think the point is that GP red flagging all MS shops, which is more or less just sorting companies by headcount and flagging all from top, implies incompetency at GP's side than at the company side.

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.

replies(3): >>45662627 #>>45663029 #>>45664949 #
19. crmd ◴[] No.45662387[source]
The chairman of my last big company said I was “ungovernable” at one of our last board dinners, so I’m reluctantly inclined to agree with you.
replies(2): >>45665074 #>>45666634 #
20. NeutralCrane ◴[] No.45662494[source]
Google is leaps and bounds preferable in my experience than Microsoft. I agree with the above. A Microsoft shop isn’t a guarantee the company culture is bad, but it’s correlated enough to be a flag.
replies(1): >>45667396 #
21. NeutralCrane ◴[] No.45662526{4}[source]
Zoom + Slack
22. ◴[] No.45662627{3}[source]
23. zelphirkalt ◴[] No.45662868{5}[source]
I definitely wouldn't call Slack "awesome". Self-hosted tools like Zulip are doing a better job. Slack is however, the smaller evil amongst MS Teams, Zoom, MS Outlook and similarly bad software. Like, if someone told me all communication, including text chat shall happen via MS Teams, I would seriously consider looking for another job. It is a recipe for absolute disaster and completely broken communication. If the same happened with Slack, I would dislike it, but I guess it is at least usable. Still garbage, but not as much garbage, as MS Teams.
replies(2): >>45663755 #>>45664734 #
24. int_19h ◴[] No.45663029{3}[source]
SharePoint really is that bad though (and I say this as someone who used to develop for it as a platform).

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.

replies(1): >>45663771 #
25. zelphirkalt ◴[] No.45663032{4}[source]
It is funny, that even a Slack Huddle, something that's not even the core of Slack's function, is better than anything one gets with MS Teams. MS Teams is so laughably bad, I think I have never used a worse chat/voice chat/video chat program. Probably not even Skype in its single core days was worse, even though it ate one third of my single core CPU, just to have a call back then.
replies(2): >>45666220 #>>45675807 #
26. zelphirkalt ◴[] No.45663043[source]
If this is "tailored", then I don't even want to know what how bad other MS products are. Oh wait, we can see that in Windows in general. But then again MS Teams is worse. It's almost as if the more MS has its fingers on something, the worse it gets.
27. stickfigure ◴[] No.45663148[source]
I currently work in a Microsoft shop that has Slack. Everyone uses Slack and all the Microsoft tools, including email, are crickets. This was never the case in the Google shops; we still used email.

Outlook is objectively a terrible experience.

28. spankibalt ◴[] No.45663276{4}[source]
> The Mac hardware is vastly superior to most Windows laptops, especially enterprise Windows laptops.

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.

29. darkhorn ◴[] No.45663393[source]
Microsoft's softwares do not follow standards thus they hard to work with.
replies(1): >>45677989 #
30. monooso ◴[] No.45663463[source]
How can OP be a problematic employee when he's specifically decided never to become an employee of a company which uses such tools?
replies(1): >>45668880 #
31. kapone ◴[] No.45663771{4}[source]
It fills a niche. What’s else does?

Yes, it’s not great, but so what?

replies(4): >>45664008 #>>45665002 #>>45665814 #>>45672212 #
32. mcswell ◴[] No.45664008{5}[source]
What else? LaTeX Beamer, for one; Libre Office Impress for another.
replies(1): >>45664290 #
33. Kirby64 ◴[] No.45664019{4}[source]
Just because someone uses Outlook doesn’t mean they use Teams too. I’ve seen Zoom or Slack with Outlook/Office suite for the remainder at companies.
replies(1): >>45666224 #
34. nicoburns ◴[] No.45664124{3}[source]
IME the call quality varies quite widely between video calling software. And being able to reliably hear and be heard with reasonable latency is pretty important!
35. pxc ◴[] No.45664183{3}[source]
Companies that use Microsoft for one thing invariably use it for another, and then another, and then another, because they're "already paying for it". Their business model has always been like this.

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

replies(3): >>45665084 #>>45666153 #>>45667088 #
36. dpark ◴[] No.45664290{6}[source]
You are confusing SharePoint with PowerPoint.
37. Wingy ◴[] No.45664309{4}[source]
You can do that at least for CLI apps with OrbStack. Not sure if it has X or Wayland support.
38. 827a ◴[] No.45664329[source]
Well, in my experience every Microsoft shop I've ever interacted with has been a problem employer. Why do you feel your angle has greater moral defensibility?
replies(1): >>45665658 #
39. 1123581321 ◴[] No.45664734{6}[source]
What do you do to make Zulip better than Slack? A vanilla installation is not better, and scales worse with more users, more devices per user more mobile users and more integration sources. But, I’ve never been in a situation where I was forced to make Zulip an attractive communication tool to an organization; there must be a lot that is possible. Getting away from a Salesforce product is a good goal.
replies(2): >>45665482 #>>45668327 #
40. rewgs ◴[] No.45664878[source]
> How does an aged post on this site go from +4 to -1 in the span of a few minutes?

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."

replies(1): >>45664941 #
41. rcbdev ◴[] No.45664941[source]
But, he truly does. That is not because they have caused any offence, it's just that this pattern of behaviour may indicate similar tendencies in other parts of the tech stack.

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.

replies(1): >>45665348 #
42. autoexec ◴[] No.45664949{3}[source]
> I think the point is that GP red flagging all MS shops, which is more or less just sorting companies by headcount

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.

replies(1): >>45665599 #
43. cachius ◴[] No.45665002{5}[source]
What niche?
replies(1): >>45665508 #
44. craigmcnamara ◴[] No.45665074[source]
One of us! One of us! One of us!
45. ◴[] No.45665084{4}[source]
46. epistasis ◴[] No.45665274[source]
The idea that the most commonly purchased thing in the market is of mediocre quality should not be hard to accept, and neither should the idea that some people only want tk work with what they, personally, consider to be the best.
47. dijit ◴[] No.45665323{3}[source]
Equally?

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.

replies(1): >>45667477 #
48. dijit ◴[] No.45665348{3}[source]
Using collaboration and productivity software as a proxy for how the company thinks about collaboration and productivity is, good, actually.

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.

replies(1): >>45666938 #
49. Lio ◴[] No.45665406{4}[source]
Do they? Didn’t Microsoft force all its employees back to the office?

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.

replies(1): >>45668048 #
50. davkan ◴[] No.45665410{4}[source]
My company uses both outlook and slack. Teams is also used for scheduled meetings but never touched for chat. I personally don’t find teams to be significantly worse than zoom but I’d rather never use either.
51. dijit ◴[] No.45665482{7}[source]
I’ve never touched a scaling issue with Zulip, how many devices are we talking about here? Maybe I’ve just never touched the walls of scaling it. The architecture seems fine to scale if you self host though.

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.

52. dijit ◴[] No.45665508{6}[source]
The niche of trying to do everything and being good at none of it.

File hosting, web application hosting and integrating with Office.

53. carlmr ◴[] No.45665599{4}[source]
Then it's an overcomplicated company size check.
replies(2): >>45665974 #>>45669200 #
54. carlmr ◴[] No.45665602{3}[source]
OP might not have recently been looking for a job.
55. carlmr ◴[] No.45665658[source]
I can kind of see both points.

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.

56. croes ◴[] No.45665814{5}[source]
How about using tools that do their job great instead of one tool that can do them all but none of them good.

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.

replies(1): >>45666668 #
57. lucketone ◴[] No.45665974{5}[source]
Imagine small startup where ceo knows only windows and small startup where ceo uses linux.

Developer’s quality of life might differ.

replies(1): >>45667534 #
58. lostlogin ◴[] No.45666153{4}[source]
> Microsoft Office usage is highly predictive of lots and lots of other choices.

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

replies(2): >>45667290 #>>45667460 #
59. cc81 ◴[] No.45666207{4}[source]
When it was introduced Teams was pretty bad but these days it works just fine. I don't see that it being a decider really more than just historical preference.
replies(1): >>45679246 #
60. cc81 ◴[] No.45666220{5}[source]
What is it that is bad about it these days?
61. philipallstar ◴[] No.45666224{5}[source]
Yes - agreed. I'm just saying that in my experience dev teams do care about some tools that Office is trying to replace.
62. 7thpower ◴[] No.45666284{4}[source]
Slack is an unintuitive piece of junk, and yes I will die on this hill.
replies(1): >>45666289 #
63. rkomorn ◴[] No.45666289{5}[source]
It is, but all the other ones I've had the misfortune of dealing with have been worse.

Including IRC.

replies(1): >>45667007 #
64. terminalshort ◴[] No.45666634[source]
Yeah, when I hear "problem employee" from a higher up I think "I want that guy on my team." Sounds like someone who pisses off management, but is too valuable to fire.
replies(1): >>45667562 #
65. mindok ◴[] No.45666668{6}[source]
If the objective is to put files where you can’t find them again, I think you’d be hard pressed to find a better alternative.
replies(1): >>45667215 #
66. kenjackson ◴[] No.45666938{4}[source]
“I totally understand why it’s primarily MSFT shops that have RTO mandates.”

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

replies(1): >>45667246 #
67. dotancohen ◴[] No.45666991[source]

  > How does an aged post on this site go from +4 to -1 in the span of a few minutes?
Oh, I can answer that one. It's happened consistently to me on HN when I post about a specific topic.

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.

replies(1): >>45672668 #
68. dotancohen ◴[] No.45667007{6}[source]
A few years ago I worked at a company that actually used Telegram and Telegram Desktop. It was great. Available on mobile and desktop, all platforms, supports all the features we needed, new users get full history.
replies(1): >>45667036 #
69. rkomorn ◴[] No.45667036{7}[source]
The best I've used, and I say this in all sincerity, is actually Facebook's work platform (but it's not a chat-first experience, obviously, and that's probably what made it better).
70. honkostani ◴[] No.45667088{4}[source]
The whole Eco-system is designed like a lobster trap. Easy to get in, hard to get out except by swimming through hot butter sauce.
71. eitland ◴[] No.45667215{7}[source]
Except any plain file server that you can connect to via ordinary protocols?
72. dijit ◴[] No.45667246{5}[source]
Only anecdotes across 20 or so companies (and: european ones).

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.

73. dijit ◴[] No.45667290{5}[source]
I once rejected a job because of Teams; I felt bad/entitled about it though...

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

replies(1): >>45667427 #
74. rootusrootus ◴[] No.45667378{5}[source]
> The zoom fascination is pretty weird. It’s literally Webex 3.0 without Cisco bullshit.

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

75. pjmlp ◴[] No.45667396[source]
Until one needs to reach out to support.
replies(2): >>45667552 #>>45667672 #
76. pjmlp ◴[] No.45667417{4}[source]
My Thinkpad has CUDA and native Vulkan support, with hardware specs that are 1000 euros cheaper than getting the same capabilities on a Mac laptop.
77. lazide ◴[] No.45667427{6}[source]
I’m fairly certain I’d deeply regret my life choices if I had to use teams daily. Occasional (mandatory) usage interacting with it for various gov’t usage, etc. has reinforced that view.

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.

replies(2): >>45667526 #>>45670549 #
78. qwertytyyuu ◴[] No.45667460{5}[source]
I don't mind teams but really do hate outlook.
replies(2): >>45668480 #>>45681068 #
79. qwertytyyuu ◴[] No.45667477{4}[source]
It seems you have had the fortune to not have had to suffered through jabber
replies(1): >>45667549 #
80. type0 ◴[] No.45667526{7}[source]
Teams client version for Linux was discontinued 2022. Yeah MS loves Linux, in the same way cats love mice.
81. lazide ◴[] No.45667534{6}[source]
It absolutely would. I can even tell you what type of laptop/dev equipment you’d likely get.

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.

82. dijit ◴[] No.45667549{5}[source]
Oh, I did… I quite liked it actually. :)
83. lazide ◴[] No.45667552{3}[source]
G workspaces support has always been at least decent in my experience. MS support, less so.

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’.

84. lazide ◴[] No.45667562{3}[source]
Yup. If they weren’t indispensable, they’d be the ex-employee.
85. Balinares ◴[] No.45667600[source]
My current gig is an MSFT shop and when I joined I was genuinely excited to find out just how far that universe had come in the 20+ years since I last worked in a corp environment that uses it. The Ballmer days are long behind and there's been some genuinely cool stuff coming out of MS since.

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.

replies(2): >>45672234 #>>45673335 #
86. joenot443 ◴[] No.45667672{3}[source]
Google's support for their business clients is considered pretty top of class.

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

replies(2): >>45667901 #>>45669304 #
87. A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 ◴[] No.45667845[source]
<< you sound like a problem employee.

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' ).

88. pjmlp ◴[] No.45667901{4}[source]
That wasn't my experience on the only project I took part on GCP.
89. alternatex ◴[] No.45668048{5}[source]
Teams is used in the Teams org that develops it in Microsoft yes. Source: I work on Teams free/consumer.

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

90. philipallstar ◴[] No.45668054{5}[source]
> The zoom fascination is pretty weird

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.

91. alternatex ◴[] No.45668062{3}[source]
When it comes to Teams, unfortunately we do. It's actually used across Microsoft in general. A company of this size requires Teams even if just for the sake of keeping up with security and compliance.
92. zelphirkalt ◴[] No.45668327{7}[source]
What I would do if hosting Zulip for a company, is:

(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.

replies(1): >>45668659 #
93. lostlogin ◴[] No.45668480{6}[source]
But you can ‘thumbs up’ an email!

Do you even read your ‘weekly digest’?

/s

replies(1): >>45679237 #
94. dijit ◴[] No.45668659{8}[source]
Literally did that at my last company, but the google meet link was “meet:<x>” where the friendly URL of the meet-link was inserted.

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.

95. mikkupikku ◴[] No.45668880[source]
It seems like a sour grapes thing. "I can't have you as an employee? Well you must be a problem so I don't want you anyway."
96. ExoticPearTree ◴[] No.45669304{4}[source]
Where I am we're kind of Dual Stack for various reasons with GCP and Azure.

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.

97. abc123abc123 ◴[] No.45669404[source]
I disagree. He sounds like an excellent, intelligent, potentially attractive employee.

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.

98. pxc ◴[] No.45670549{7}[source]
If everyone else genuinely loved Teams, I could stomach using it even though I hate it. But regardless of what anyone says about it, it seems the rest of the company also hates it— it's a ghost town. There's no sense of community whatsoever.

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

replies(1): >>45679229 #
99. tw04 ◴[] No.45671057[source]
^^Microsoft may have its warts, but I don't know how someone can go from Excel to Google Sheets or Outlook to Gmail and think: this is just such a major upgrade I don't know how I existed in the past and I would never work someplace that uses Microsoft productivity tools.

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.

100. SergeAx ◴[] No.45672125[source]
I am not a Microsoft hater; in fact, I have been using Microsoft products since MS-DOS 3.3. But Outlook and its ecosystem are a horrible shit show and an indicator of terrible decision-making.

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

101. linksnapzz ◴[] No.45672212{5}[source]
Lotus/IBM/HCL Domino.
102. jack_tripper ◴[] No.45672234[source]
>I don't think I was ready for how bad it is.

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.

replies(1): >>45676718 #
103. saltcured ◴[] No.45672668[source]
Addressing the "aged" part, I think people forget that timezones exist and so different global audiences may wake up and add their votes on a long-running comment chain here.
104. Etheryte ◴[] No.45675807{5}[source]
In the early Skype days, that tradeoff made sense. Internet speeds across the globe were far from fast so they spent more CPU cycles on compression so they could save on bandwidth.
105. Grimblewald ◴[] No.45676718{3}[source]
> as long as I keep getting paid, nothing else matters

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.

replies(1): >>45681524 #
106. phs318u ◴[] No.45677989[source]
What? Are there UX "standards", the lack of which might impede an end-users experience of the product? Or are you referring to protocol and/or interoperability standards, which make it difficult for 3rd parties to integrate (though, looking at my current work desktop, I can see that Zoom integrates very well with Outlook).
replies(1): >>45678884 #
107. darkhorn ◴[] No.45678884{3}[source]
This was 2 years ago; compression in Azure Front Door works only when you enable caching in Azure Front Door. This is made up rule by Microsoft. It is not standard.

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

108. phatskat ◴[] No.45679229{8}[source]
When I did my orientation, we got set up on teams and they made a group chat for our cohort. I think I’ve used it…once in the two years I’ve been there? Otherwise, Teams is for meetings, thankfully the company managed to stick with Slack despite pretty much everything else being wrapped in the MS tendrils.

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

109. phatskat ◴[] No.45679237{7}[source]
I’ve never been so constantly annoyed and confused in an email client than I am in Outlook. I miss actual important emails because the UI is a sea of junk.
110. phatskat ◴[] No.45679246{5}[source]
We have Teams and Slack and I don’t ever see anyone push for a chat in teams. Most channels are a ghost town. To me, teams would be “fine” if it’s all we had, but when you see it next to Slack it’s a no-brainer for me. Teams UI is just baaaaad
111. michaelcampbell ◴[] No.45681068{6}[source]
I like(d) the fat Outlook windows client; it had the set of rules/filters features that corresponded to my needs.

The web client is pants, though.

112. jack_tripper ◴[] No.45681524{4}[source]
>Mindset explains the other users complaint perfectly I guess.

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.