Foreign hackers breached a US nuclear weapons plant via SharePoint flaws

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.

I’ve definitely noticed a correlation with low regard for labor (h1b abuse). But maybe that’s just a location thing, I’m in California where regard for labor, especially local talent, is non-existent. You know, move fast and break things like nascent tech worker unions and the state itself.

WTF is this even supposed to mean?

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

Please explain yourself.

Companies more likely to want to save money on labor costs (employing many h1bs) are also likely to want to save money on Tooling costs, by using safe options like MSFT stuff, rather than finding better tools.

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