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.

Teams is just so much more horrible than Slack and Zoom, and dev teams use Slack and/or Zoom.

Most customers of both use O365.

The zoom fascination is pretty weird. It’s literally Webex 3.0 without Cisco bullshit.

Slack is pretty awesome. It wouldn’t factor in selecting an employer, but that’s just me.

I definitely wouldn't call Slack "awesome". Self-hosted tools like Zulip are doing a better job. Slack is however, the smaller evil amongst MS Teams, Zoom, MS Outlook and similarly bad software. Like, if someone told me all communication, including text chat shall happen via MS Teams, I would seriously consider looking for another job. It is a recipe for absolute disaster and completely broken communication. If the same happened with Slack, I would dislike it, but I guess it is at least usable. Still garbage, but not as much garbage, as MS Teams.

What do you do to make Zulip better than Slack? A vanilla installation is not better, and scales worse with more users, more devices per user more mobile users and more integration sources. But, I’ve never been in a situation where I was forced to make Zulip an attractive communication tool to an organization; there must be a lot that is possible. Getting away from a Salesforce product is a good goal.