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Foreign hackers breached a US nuclear weapons plant via SharePoint flaws

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433 points zdw | 1 comments | 21 Oct 25 15:51 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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crmd ◴[21 Oct 25 19:41 UTC] 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 ◴[21 Oct 25 20:24 UTC] 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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bitmasher9 ◴[21 Oct 25 20:33 UTC] No.45661318[source]▶
Doing research on a potential employer and filtering out opportunities based on preferred toolchains is a green flag not a red flag.
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Spooky23 ◴[21 Oct 25 20:53 UTC] No.45661558[source]▶
Dev tools, sure. Self-selecting yourself out of the office/email toolset used by 90% of companies seems like a weird flex.
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pxc ◴[22 Oct 25 02:10 UTC] No.45664183[source]▶
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.

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lostlogin ◴[22 Oct 25 08:10 UTC] No.45666153[source]▶
> 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’.

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dijit ◴[22 Oct 25 10:57 UTC] No.45667290[source]▶
I once rejected a job because of Teams; I felt bad/entitled about it though...

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

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lazide ◴[22 Oct 25 11:19 UTC] No.45667427[source]▶
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.

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pxc ◴[22 Oct 25 15:23 UTC] No.45670549[source]▶
If everyone else genuinely loved Teams, I could stomach using it even though I hate it. But regardless of what anyone says about it, it seems the rest of the company also hates it— it's a ghost town. There's no sense of community whatsoever.

My personal "sample size" is too small to be sure, but I worry that Teams usage is poisonous to collaboration and engineering culture.

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1. phatskat ◴[23 Oct 25 07:35 UTC] No.45679229[source]▶
When I did my orientation, we got set up on teams and they made a group chat for our cohort. I think I’ve used it…once in the two years I’ve been there? Otherwise, Teams is for meetings, thankfully the company managed to stick with Slack despite pretty much everything else being wrapped in the MS tendrils.

I do wonder if they tried to push teams for text chat before I got there and were shot down. Management seems fairly receptive to some amount of give and take when it comes to decisions about office tooling e.g. I was cited as “the reason” engineers still have access to Figma Dev Mode, and I can’t say we had more than a handful of vocal people pushing to keep it. Company size is somewhere between 200-500 iirc