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'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?

Doing research on a potential employer and filtering out opportunities based on preferred toolchains is a green flag not a red flag.

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.

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.

It fills a niche. What’s else does?

Yes, it’s not great, but so what?