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433 points zdw | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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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.

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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?

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1. 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?
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2. 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.