3 ms·

OK, let's not mince words. It is so bad because you, all of you who suffer under this, don't give IT managers and decision makers enough shit for choosing this

by bborud 4y ago

OK, let's not mince words. It is so bad because you, all of you who suffer under this, don't give IT managers and decision makers enough shit for choosing this crap. You don't stand up for yourself, you don't refuse to use it, and you do nothing to improve your situation because you think you can't. Right now most of you are shaking your head. "It isn't that simple". "I can't do anything about this". "It isn't my place". You are wrong. You can do something about it, but it is going to take a bit of backbone and a bit of initiative. You may lack a backbone. Grow one. Don't whine. Whining accomplishes nothing and communicates that you have given up. You find better alternatives, recruit others to your cause and force badly run organizations to change -- essentially by leading a revolt. There is only so much a manager can do when employees say "no". And it is easier to say "no" when more people say "no". If you have ever been a manager you know perfectly well that if you can't get your people to do as you say, you are done. A leader who can't make people follow isn't a leader. It can be a career killer. Lots of managers have nightmares about this. You can use that to your advantage. If you don't want to use Teams: find an alternative, start using it, recruit others to your cause and stand up to whomever says "you can't".

Uehreka 4y ago
Yup. On my team at a previous company we just started a team Slack when the company moved to Teams. If people wanted to get in touch with us faster, they had to use Slack. If they wanted a meeting with us, we’d send them a Zoom link. It was passive aggressive for sure, but it allowed us to not have to use Teams as much. I’m sure there are some draconian companies that will actually fire you for refusing to fall in line on this stuff, but for many reasonable people, it’s pretty difficult to fire high performing people for something this trivial.
JeremyNT 4y ago
I've worked at the same place for years, and they switched to Teams a couple of years ago. I can't change their decision, but I can work for somebody else, and having to suffer through this crapware is pushing me in that direction. "Must use Teams" is a huge red flag for any potential job offer.
- prepend 4y ago
  I use alternate tools in addition to Teams. And I use my budget to pay for other tools.
  - JeremyNT 4y ago
    Sadly, I'm suffering from a top down "you must use Teams" mandate. I hate Teams, but here, I'm going to have to be on it anyway. Slack and other clones are better... but fragmenting communication between two different platforms (one of which must be Teams) is worse than just dumping everything into Teams and being done with it.
    - bborud 4y ago
      About a decade ago I started working in a company with about 30k employees (?) that had really stringent top-down mandates. You had to get a standard laptop, installed by our IT partner, with a 50Mb mail quota and all manner of seriously outdated MSFT tools. To add insult to injury, a fairly huge chunk of money would be charged to our budget per person for this. I'll get back to the cost issue. I did something no middle manager had done before me. I said "no". And my boss backed me up on it. I got called into meetings with people with long titles and yelled at. I was told that this was insubordination, unproductive behavior and whatnot. I calmly explained that this didn't change anything because the equipment, software and service levels were not of acceptable quality and especially not at the cost to our budget. The answer remained "no". Note that I was willing to be fired over this. I'd rather not have a job there than have to accept having to work with tools that would have made my day miserable. I made this perfectly clear. So our organization existed wholly outside the company's internal network. We leased a broadband connection, set up our own internal infrastructure behind a couple of firewalls, had qualified people configure the network infrastructure, set up mail, calendaring etc with a better service provider, set up collaboration tools internally etc. The cost? In the first year it was about the same as we would have paid for laptops, network, services etc in the existing regimen. The reason was that everyone got to pick their own computers - which were on the order of 6-7 times more expensive than the standard company laptop. All of our services were cheaper and orders of magnitude better. The second year we didn't have to buy everyone new computers so we had money to pay our own IT staff. People who worked for us, in our offices who you could walk over to and talk to. Stuff got done. (We still could have bought ourselves expensive laptops every 4 years and still spend less money than the standard IT setup in the company) Several things happened over the next years. Some of the systems were better integrated with the mothership. Employees from the rest of the company started to "bum rides" off of us. That is, they got accounts on our IT infrastructure, got access to our network etc. Because it allowed them to work more efficiently. There were clashes over security policy etc. These were resolved through reviews and formal approvals. Some of these were unnecessarily tense. Mostly because they laid bare the fact that the people who got upset about "the rebels" tended to be poorly qualified and had a habit of being bullies. Eventually the culture slid backwards as good leaders left the company and were replaced with people who didn't actually know how to build an effective culture. A lot of the "freeloaders" were kicked out, which I felt was unnecessary and shortsighted. (In my book this was just basic poor judgement: if you can improve collaboration by spending a few hundred dollars per year per person, that should be a trivial decision. You just do it). In parallel with this there was the production side. Rather than spending 6-9 months asking for virtual machines operated by incompetent consultants only available through a ticket system(), and with tons of paperwork to get anything done, we made use of AWS. A decade ago most of the IT leadership of the company had no idea what AWS was. It was obvious we wouldn't ask them for anything because they weren't qualified to help. We got started by ignoring two families of rules. IT procurement and how to pay for stuff. We used a credit card to buy AWS resources, which our boss then expensed. This meant that we were up and running 1-2 hours after making the decision. No twiddling thumbs for half a year while people have to go to meetings and write documents of exactly what we need, and pay a fortune for third rate service on obsolete hardware. This too went through a maturation process. I'm sure someone went through the formal procurement procedures (I wasn't involved in that). AWS started billing us via invoice. Since we are in Europe we also needed a few formal agreements on proper data handling by AWS etc. All of that happened. A few years later we were the biggest AWS customer in our region. The funny thing is that when I spoke to the Group CEO about this, he had no idea that it started as an act of insubordination and that we really hadn't given the IT organizations any choice. Because there is always someone ready to take credit for other people's results. I'm not saying that people should put their career on the line to do what we did. Because you kind of have to take that risk. But what I am saying is that unproductive top down mandates can be pushed back if you have people with some backbone. Even in companies where obedience is a big thing. () I'm sure lots of IT services companies do this, but the company that delivered IT services to my former employer had a policy of closing tickets as soon as they could. Even when issues were not resolved. They could then misrepresent these cases as "closed". I don't think anyone really called them out on this practice. This meant that any non-trivial problem had to be filed again and again and again.

by bborud 4y ago

Uehreka 4y ago

Yup. On my team at a previous company we just started a team Slack when the company moved to Teams. If people wanted to get in touch with us faster, they had to use Slack. If they wanted a meeting with us, we’d send them a Zoom link. It was passive aggressive for sure, but it allowed us to not have to use Teams as much. I’m sure there are some draconian companies that will actually fire you for refusing to fall in line on this stuff, but for many reasonable people, it’s pretty difficult to fire high performing people for something this trivial.

JeremyNT 4y ago

I've worked at the same place for years, and they switched to Teams a couple of years ago. I can't change their decision, but I can work for somebody else, and having to suffer through this crapware is pushing me in that direction. "Must use Teams" is a huge red flag for any potential job offer.

prepend 4y ago
I use alternate tools in addition to Teams. And I use my budget to pay for other tools.
- JeremyNT 4y ago
  Sadly, I'm suffering from a top down "you must use Teams" mandate. I hate Teams, but here, I'm going to have to be on it anyway. Slack and other clones are better... but fragmenting communication between two different platforms (one of which must be Teams) is worse than just dumping everything into Teams and being done with it.
  - bborud 4y ago
    About a decade ago I started working in a company with about 30k employees (?) that had really stringent top-down mandates. You had to get a standard laptop, installed by our IT partner, with a 50Mb mail quota and all manner of seriously outdated MSFT tools. To add insult to injury, a fairly huge chunk of money would be charged to our budget per person for this. I'll get back to the cost issue. I did something no middle manager had done before me. I said "no". And my boss backed me up on it. I got called into meetings with people with long titles and yelled at. I was told that this was insubordination, unproductive behavior and whatnot. I calmly explained that this didn't change anything because the equipment, software and service levels were not of acceptable quality and especially not at the cost to our budget. The answer remained "no". Note that I was willing to be fired over this. I'd rather not have a job there than have to accept having to work with tools that would have made my day miserable. I made this perfectly clear. So our organization existed wholly outside the company's internal network. We leased a broadband connection, set up our own internal infrastructure behind a couple of firewalls, had qualified people configure the network infrastructure, set up mail, calendaring etc with a better service provider, set up collaboration tools internally etc. The cost? In the first year it was about the same as we would have paid for laptops, network, services etc in the existing regimen. The reason was that everyone got to pick their own computers - which were on the order of 6-7 times more expensive than the standard company laptop. All of our services were cheaper and orders of magnitude better. The second year we didn't have to buy everyone new computers so we had money to pay our own IT staff. People who worked for us, in our offices who you could walk over to and talk to. Stuff got done. (We still could have bought ourselves expensive laptops every 4 years and still spend less money than the standard IT setup in the company) Several things happened over the next years. Some of the systems were better integrated with the mothership. Employees from the rest of the company started to "bum rides" off of us. That is, they got accounts on our IT infrastructure, got access to our network etc. Because it allowed them to work more efficiently. There were clashes over security policy etc. These were resolved through reviews and formal approvals. Some of these were unnecessarily tense. Mostly because they laid bare the fact that the people who got upset about "the rebels" tended to be poorly qualified and had a habit of being bullies. Eventually the culture slid backwards as good leaders left the company and were replaced with people who didn't actually know how to build an effective culture. A lot of the "freeloaders" were kicked out, which I felt was unnecessary and shortsighted. (In my book this was just basic poor judgement: if you can improve collaboration by spending a few hundred dollars per year per person, that should be a trivial decision. You just do it). In parallel with this there was the production side. Rather than spending 6-9 months asking for virtual machines operated by incompetent consultants only available through a ticket system(), and with tons of paperwork to get anything done, we made use of AWS. A decade ago most of the IT leadership of the company had no idea what AWS was. It was obvious we wouldn't ask them for anything because they weren't qualified to help. We got started by ignoring two families of rules. IT procurement and how to pay for stuff. We used a credit card to buy AWS resources, which our boss then expensed. This meant that we were up and running 1-2 hours after making the decision. No twiddling thumbs for half a year while people have to go to meetings and write documents of exactly what we need, and pay a fortune for third rate service on obsolete hardware. This too went through a maturation process. I'm sure someone went through the formal procurement procedures (I wasn't involved in that). AWS started billing us via invoice. Since we are in Europe we also needed a few formal agreements on proper data handling by AWS etc. All of that happened. A few years later we were the biggest AWS customer in our region. The funny thing is that when I spoke to the Group CEO about this, he had no idea that it started as an act of insubordination and that we really hadn't given the IT organizations any choice. Because there is always someone ready to take credit for other people's results. I'm not saying that people should put their career on the line to do what we did. Because you kind of have to take that risk. But what I am saying is that unproductive top down mandates can be pushed back if you have people with some backbone. Even in companies where obedience is a big thing. () I'm sure lots of IT services companies do this, but the company that delivered IT services to my former employer had a policy of closing tickets as soon as they could. Even when issues were not resolved. They could then misrepresent these cases as "closed". I don't think anyone really called them out on this practice. This meant that any non-trivial problem had to be filed again and again and again.