Foreign hackers breached a US nuclear weapons plant via SharePoint flaws

Dev tools, sure. Self-selecting yourself out of the office/email toolset used by 90% of companies seems like a weird flex.

Teams is just so much more horrible than Slack and Zoom, and dev teams use Slack and/or Zoom.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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’.

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.

Yes - agreed. I'm just saying that in my experience dev teams do care about some tools that Office is trying to replace.

Slack is an unintuitive piece of junk, and yes I will die on this hill.

It is, but all the other ones I've had the misfortune of dealing with have been worse.

Including IRC.

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.

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).

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.

I once rejected a job because of Teams; I felt bad/entitled about it though...

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

> 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.

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.

I don't mind teams but really do hate outlook.

Teams client version for Linux was discontinued 2022. Yeah MS loves Linux, in the same way cats love mice.

> 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.

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.

But you can ‘thumbs up’ an email!

Do you even read your ‘weekly digest’?

/s

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.