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?

> 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."

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.

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.

“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?