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433 points zdw | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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crmd ◴[] No.45660666[source]
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.

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fujigawa ◴[] No.45661217[source]
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?

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1. tw04 ◴[] No.45671057[source]
^^Microsoft may have its warts, but I don't know how someone can go from Excel to Google Sheets or Outlook to Gmail and think: this is just such a major upgrade I don't know how I existed in the past and I would never work someplace that uses Microsoft productivity tools.

Excel in particular, for any power user, sheets just doesn't hold a candle to its functionality. Outside of the valley Microsoft must still have a 10:1 ratio of corporate use, I never run across a customer that has made the switch.