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301 points lukeio | 5 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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ozim ◴[] No.46234324[source]
Yeah I make software that makes people feel something - rage - there are 2 types of software one that no one cares about and software that people use and voice their opinions about :)
replies(3): >>46234492 #>>46239891 #>>46240897 #
elcritch ◴[] No.46234492[source]
I was looking for this comment. For example Microsoft Teams and Office 365 make me feel something, but it’s not joy.
replies(1): >>46234646 #
1. mghackerlady ◴[] No.46234646[source]
I feel bad for the poor souls that are forced to work on software like that. It surely can't be fun
replies(3): >>46234751 #>>46234787 #>>46241497 #
2. logicchains ◴[] No.46234751[source]
They might be sadists having the time of their lives. There are few better opportunities in life to get away consequence free with causing pain to a huge amount of people, than working on Microsoft Teams. Not only get away with it consequence free; they're even getting paid for it!
replies(1): >>46234992 #
3. wyre ◴[] No.46234787[source]
H1-B visas? Their alternative surely isn't better.
4. mcny ◴[] No.46234992[source]
I have not met a single softie who defended the decision to make ctrl shift c the shortcut to start a call in a group chat when ctrl shift v is paste unformatted.

Especially given that the teams client doesn't allow disabling or editing keyboard shortcut.

Microsoft employees may be lazy but unlike Facebook employees (I refuse to call it meta), I don't think they are evil.

5. vineyardmike ◴[] No.46241497[source]
I never worked at MSFT, but I did work on a few extremely popular consumer-facing products across big tech that had a negative reputation. One product was super hated feature of a bigger and well-loved service (literally "why can't I turn this off") and the other was perceived to be super useful but poor-quality. I think I can understand the experience of those MSFT employees. They know the reputation, and they're sorry, but they need to work, and everyone fights with the product team.

At the former, I started right after school and was baffled no one I worked with ever used our product. I found it super demoralizing to build something so heavily used but unpopular, and eventually I quit out of frustration. I tried to change the product, and improve features, and frequently met with our product and UX people to no avail. We existed, of course, because sometimes popular free products need to serve business goals (thankfully not ads at least).

At the latter, we just had the challenge of building a complicated product, and with millions of users, you'll always get complaints. I had coworkers who would check reddit every morning and share all the complaints people had and really took it to heart. Of course, we could never properly debug or do anything for these random users, and "at scale" a 0.00001% error rate still meant a lot of disappointed people. It was still pretty demoralizing after a while but at least we could say people found us useful, even if it wasn't "fun".