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.

Too bad Microsoft shops run the world. All the factories and shops, nearly every commercial backoffice runs windows, office/exchange and what not.

the software is so bad it's literally a national security risk.

While I may agree on Sharepoint, not everything from Microsoft is bad. Often the alternatives are even worse.

ok, excluding things they have bought and not yet destroyed. what's good? (we'll accept that xbox is good, distinct and unrelated to the rest of their offerings)