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.

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

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.

> 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’.

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

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

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.