8 ms·

Should you standardise tools in your company? Case of Miro vs. MS Whiteboard

29 points by hantonsen 3y ago

arkitaip 3y ago
> Recently, a decision was announced to decommission Miro as an official Telia tool. The replacement tools suggested was a combination of Microsoft Whiteboard, Microsoft Visio, Jira and Confluence. I can't even imagine a worse replacement than that shudders. How typical that great bespoke tools are rejected in favor of whatever poor features/products available through existing product licenses.
- crooked-v 3y ago
  Also, how many of the people doing the actual work at that company even want licenses to those tools in the first place?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
fjodir 3y ago
Just wait for the migration from Slack to MS Teams, makes me wanna stop working all together. Also, MS recently launched their Notion clone, so all Notion users in MS shops better prepare to migrate to a much worse alternative.
- kqr 3y ago
  I briefly led an underground incentive to use something other than Teams among the engineers at a previous employer. It gathered quite a bit of steam even though none of the alternatives proposed were great. Tells you what people think of Teams! (It petered out when my priorities shifted, though, so I guess that tells you how much bandwidth people actually have for caring about their instant messaging. (There had already been a successful underground movement to use something other than Teams for video conferencing.))
  - lbriner 3y ago
    Personally, I don't mind if a tool is rubbish as long as I can use the bits I need to use and the rest doesn't get in my way. I don't like Teams but mostly keep to chat and video calls and that works fine. Sure, there is other stuff that might be junk like files, tasks and apps but I just don't use that. That is the old adage about keeping the main thing the main thing. It depresses me how many major apps doesn't even do the basics well, either performance is terrible or the UX is over-complicated.
    - zokier 3y ago
      > It depresses me how many major apps doesn't even do the basics well, either performance is terrible or the UX is over-complicated Teams definitely falls in this category. It is dog-slow, but even worse for a chat application it randomly just drops messages(!) quietly(!!) which makes for very confusing discussion threads when different people have different sets of messages. That is arguably the very most basic feature that one can expect from chat, and Teams fumbles even it.
  - user_named 3y ago
    You didn't just propose Slack?
- esperent 3y ago
  I think MS Teams gets a bad rap that is doesn't deserve. I don't know if the experience has improved or something - maybe Teams used to be worse and people are reacting to how it used to be? I've also been using MS Loop a lot and it's pretty great actually. It's clearly still under development and missing a lot of features but leaving that aside, I don't think it's fair to dismiss it as a Notion clone. It's far simpler than Notion and for writing things like company handbooks that's a good thing, actually. Sometimes simpler is better. If you need all the tables as database stuff, then use Notion. If you need a simple and clean documentation source, well I've tried a lot of these kinds of apps over the years and Loop is shaping up to be one of the better ones IMO. I say this grudgingly, BTW. I strongly resisted choosing MS for our business. But as a small company in Vietnam we get an amazing value proposition from MS 365 that isn't even close to matched by anything else. We pay about $3.50 per user and we get Teams, video conferencing, office apps, Loop, Visio, Whiteboard, SharePoint (ok that one is genuinely quite bad), and also a load of business automation stuff in the form of Workflows that I'm still exploring. Oh and Shift scheduling. OneNote. About a hundred other things that I forget right now. Even still I resisted but the final straw was that automatic translation is included in Teams for free. As a bilingual team that's vital for us. By contrast, just Notion would be $8 per user. I think Slack is $6 per user. Not a lot for a western tech company, but we genuinely can't afford that. MS 365 wins by being "just good enough" at _loads_ of things, and way cheaper than the competition.
  - probably_wrong 3y ago
    MS Teams is... bad. Even if they were to solve the bugs and performance issues, and even if they actually implemented any of the features that the community has been asking for (push to talk comes to mind), the entire concept is flawed. Two problems with information are duplication (too many copies around, all of them slightly different) and finding where it is. MS Teams makes it easy to store duplicate data and hard to find it later: did you upload the data as a file in the "development" channel, or as a link in the "updates" wiki? Nobody knows, not even the search function. And with each new project manager creating five channels per project, two of which will actually see any activity... I think MS Teams wants to be everything for everyone and succeeds at neither.
- bsuvc 3y ago
  > MS Teams, makes me wanna stop working all together I think this is what some people just don't understand, especially executives or managers who are too far removed from individual contributors' day-to-day activities. The wrong choice of IT tools can suck the life out of your organization. Sure, on paper two tools can seem equivalent, but in reality, they are not the same.
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    I don't know, I may be the only person on the planet who actually likes Teams. Like, it's still a pile of shit like almost all software designed in the past 10+ years - but it's better and snappier and prettier than Slack ever was for me. Maybe the difference is that my employer fully embraced the Microsoft stack, with Office, Outlook/Exchange, SharePoint, and Teams forming a coherent and well-integrated whole.
kqr 3y ago
This reads like a really good review of Miro! Either way, I don't see why the people doing the work should not be allowed to (collectively) choose their tools. That way you get both collaboration (because they picked one thing together) and the most appropriate tool for the work to be done.
- coding_unit_1 3y ago
  There's a high chance a company will have already paid a large subscription fee to Microsoft for Office 365, and so they don't want to pay yet another licence fee on top for a tool that's already included with that. The people making these financial decisions are usually not the users of said tool.
- gumby 3y ago
  > Either way, I don't see why the people doing the work should not be allowed to (collectively) choose their tools. Because in a big company you’ll find some things are documented in a combination of jira and confluence while another are in big figma boards and nobody knows where to look (my gf’s company has exactly this problem). Also in a big company you want to have two teams collaborate but one uses one tool set and the other a different stack and there aren’t enough licenses for both. And so on. It’s like having each team use its own code formatting rules or coding standard.
  - tobr 3y ago
    I don’t understand. Would it be sensible to require people using Figma to instead use Jira? Two tools with completely orthogonal use cases. It sounds like you’re describing a different problem.
    - OJFord 3y ago
      GP said 'things are documented in' - while neither's an ideal tool for long-term product-oriented 'how its supposed to work' docs, both are definitely used like that. (You probably wouldn't choose either for that from the beginning, but you start using Jira for issue tracking/feature planning, of Figma for feature design, and end up with them holding a lasting record of how the feature is intended to be.)
adamm255 3y ago
“ Employee experience and productivity should be equally important in these discussions as cost and security. And if you are making a decision about available tools on behalf of others, you need to spend time to understand the needs of the people you are deciding on behalf of, if you want to make a good decision.” A - F*in - Men. We recently dropped Miro for LucidSpark as we already had LucidChart. It’s so much worse, I hate using it. But on paper it does the same stuff, just implemented poorly. Example being, no anti aliasing on drawn lines. Wtf?! Experience is king. Getting people to understand that when the mandate is save as much money as possible is the challenge.
- ianpenney 3y ago
  Sometimes the mandate is not just to save money, sometimes it’s about putting the business in a compliance posture that will enable you to land revenue from large enterprise customers who have security and data requirements. And then to not get sued into oblivion by their highly paid numerous lawyers.
conjectures 3y ago
It's 2023 and apparently neither of the two main whiteboarding tools allow you to freely choose background colour. So forgive me for not being excited for either. Keep things simple? Yeah, meet your new standard 6 key board, who needs the other 20 letters anyway: https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61C8GdWvptL._AC_SL1500_.jpg https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61C8GdWvptL._AC_SL1500_....
ianpenney 3y ago
If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. If you want to pass an IT audit, good fucking luck to you. I have about 20 years of experience dealing with this ranging from mostly harmonious all the way to civil war. 100 employees and 130 different SaaS tools. Got buy in from senior management to reduce footprint to lower cost and increase security and compliance only to get pushback from every middle manager that would bring up these same reasons why THEIR team is special. Ok Mr/Mrs Team lead… be careful what you wish for because TCO and full RP status is now on your head. And I know you don’t have the experience to assess the costs, risks and admin workload but you’ve managed to convince the CEO. Not my problem anymore. I’ll let the auditors know where to find you when it comes time. At least I was smart enough to know to keep Miro, though. They’re reasonably good at managing data over the course of staff churn and the flexible licensing is nice. Try convincing everyone that grammarly is a keystroke logger.
- diarrhea 3y ago
  > Try convincing everyone that grammarly is a keystroke logger. Funny how it's not the opposite viewpoint that is scrutinized. Prove how it's not a keystroke logger, then Grammarly can be deployed. Until then, it's assumed to be malicious. That's how people treat for example ChatGPT as well.
  - roenxi 3y ago
    I'm not sure if there is official research on this, but the 'opposite viewpoint' sounds expensive and more prone to failing in practice. Software companies generally struggle to get results even with a willingness to use any tool or practice that might improve productivity. It will only get worse if they add paperwork. And it isn't very risk-based. In most cases, the keylogger can be assumed to be entering via the OS, probably based on some NSA/GRU/Chinese MSS exploit being used for industrial espionage. Grammarly is a bit more niche. It is a threat. One day it will be an acute one, perhaps. But the risks and opportunities favour recklessness.
  - PeterStuer 3y ago
    Yet those same people happily use Office 365 without a second thought.
GavinAnderegg 3y ago
It seems odd that a post on the official company blog is showcasing disliked IT policy. This reads like an airing of dirty laundry, and I’m kinda surprised it was allowed to be published. I understand the “we have food at home” IT policy of using software you’re already paying for. On the other hand, it’s clear that the author isn’t sure who made the call to ditch Miro and wants Miro reinstated. I wonder if this blog post will convince people internally.
- Lacerda69 3y ago
  Read up a bit on Norwegian culture and it will make more sense. Very different from what you are used to in US culture.
- hitekker 3y ago
  People are using "Norwegian culture" as an excuse but simple & scary "office politics" looks more likely. Compare this blog post where the author threatens to quit to the previous ones, which express happiness with Telia, and an eagerness to ape Bay Area DevRel trends. https://engineering.telia.no/blog/dev-happiness-fika https://engineering.telia.no/blog/dev-happiness-fika https://engineering.telia.no/blog/my-first-months-in-telia https://engineering.telia.no/blog/my-first-months-in-telia Their internal company culture does not seem to be in a good place.
  - hantonsen 3y ago
    I’m not entirely sure where you get “threaten to quit” from. I am generally happy working at Telia, and the Happiness Fika that you link to is a great way to work with improving the workplace, in my experience. The point of this post, is to discuss how decisions like these are being made, and what I think should be a part of that process, using the example of our current Miro discussion as framing. The point of the ending paragraph is not to threaten to quit, but that some people quitting is one outcome that is probable when the company decides to cut out a tool that many people use and like. Personally I feel that the ability to be open about disagreements is a good sign for our culture.
user_named 3y ago
A bit of a strange post. How can you write so much about a decision to stop using a tool? And on the company blog? And threaten to quit at the end of the blog?
- Lacerda69 3y ago
  It's a Norwegian company. Vast difference in terms of culture to the US.
  - zokier 3y ago
    Telia is Sweden-originated multi-national.
    - Lacerda69 3y ago
      Ah got confused by the TLD; but anyway Sweden and Norway are very similar in this
submeta 3y ago
At a former company, our newly appointed CTO staunchly advocated for the use of IntelliJ, including Webstorm and Pycharm. Coming from a predominantly Java environment, this preference was understandable. However, our team was largely composed of Emacs or Vim users. This sparked a passionate debate, culminating in a disheartened CTO and an aggrieved development team that stubbornly stuck to their favored tools. Two key takeaways from this experience are: a) Avoid trying to impose your preferences onto your team, and b) don't attempt to strip away someone's preferred editor, especially if they are productive with it. A bit of humor added, these lessons highlight the importance of respecting individual tool choices in a team environment. :)
- EdwardDiego 3y ago
  I've always been an advocate of people using the tools that work best for them. But sometimes, there's better tools out there than $EDITOR, especially when working in large codebases. Like a recent PR where 4 out of 5 usages of a renamed variable also got renamed, but the last one didn't, and was in an area not covered by tests and it made it to main. (And yep, how it made it past review is a question I'll be asking...) The dev had switched from VS Code to Neovim recently and I'm reasonably certain that's related. I'm very comfortable riding motorcycles, but for taking my kids to school, I tend to use a car. Horses for courses.
  - codethief 3y ago
    > (And yep, how it made it past review is a question I'll be asking...) Given that refactoring support in VSCode is not exactly great, either, and that even Jetbrains products have countless bugs in their "Rename" feature, I'd rather ask: How did the change make it past your merge request pipelines?
    - EdwardDiego 3y ago
      > an area not covered by tests Also, Django magic makes it very hard for tooling to actually know if something exists or not.
  - 3y ago
verytrivial 3y ago
I'm in a Very Large Company that just yoinked Jira and replaced it with GitLab Issues. I can't even tell how badly it's going because no-one knows what going on with any project now. People are literally copying and pasting hand-edited Excel summaries of sub-projects in emails and asking people to edit in place and reply. It's hilarious. It's super standardised, though.
- dathinab 3y ago
  do you think it's an issue of gitlab or of the transition? As far I know Jira and GitLab issues initially can look kinda similar (depending on how Jira is used) but are very different in what works well with them so Jira to GitLab transition seems rather risky. And while I haven't used GitLab issues a lot, GitHub issues are kinda terrible and Jira isn't better either (but bad in different ways; with github actions you can try to "fix" GitHub but in practice this doesn't work that well my experience and can't fix the most important issues)
  - verytrivial 3y ago
    GitLab Issues, especially as exposed by the UI is just ludicrisouly primitive vs Jira. They're trying to cover the GitHub use case regarding basically 'context for merge requests'. There's no planning, reporting, sane linking, reports, no query language, no batch updates, and visibility model means Issues edits are also basically committers, so good-bye segregation. It's just chalk and cheese. Someone invariably says 'with the REST API you can do ...' which now means we have hundreds of teams reimplementing the out-of-the-box Jira features in mutually incompatible ways for their own consumption. All of that dev time is gone. I honestly hope the shareholders don't find out.
navane 3y ago
If anything this shows clueless people allowed to make decisions. Let teams flock around their tools. What's 10 bucks a month on an employees salary. Oh its not the cost, you think the difference in tools is what creates friction in your organisation? Maybe sit in on a couple of meetings, watch your people work, talk to them.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  > What's 10 bucks a month on an employees salary. And isn't my flashlight app for iPhone worth more than a Starbucks latte a month? SaaS companies want you to think in terms of marginal cost - hoping you'll forget that all those subscriptions add up, and hoping you don't realize that this "10 bucks a month" establishes a relationship with the SaaS vendor that you don't really want to have. And especially in B2B, that relationship isn't going to have your team/company's best interest in mind. Every now and then HN has a submission or discussion with advice for startups on how to sell to enterprise customers. Reading those, you may discover that this "only 10 bucks a month" subscription aimed at individual employees is a wedge - it's designed to establish a beachhead within the corporation, starting with a single person or a single team, and expanding until the point the vendor can send in their sales team and secure a fat deal, pointing out that their product is already widely used, and probably too hard to extricate at this point.
WirelessGigabit 3y ago
> Employee experience and productivity should be equally important in these discussions as cost and security. And if you are making a decision about available tools on behalf of others, you need to spend time to understand the needs of the people you are deciding on behalf of, if you want to make a good decision. I work in a larger company where only 20% is development. We are thrown in with the 'rest' of the people, and as such have insane restriction on tools, both online and on our computers. The problem is that our voice is not large enough to get to the CTO.
- adamm255 3y ago
  Does efficient operation of the dev team not directly impact revenue? If you can’t release effectively, causing delays, the CTO will notice when the CFO gets pissed!

29 points by hantonsen 3y ago

> Recently, a decision was announced to decommission Miro as an official Telia tool. The replacement tools suggested was a combination of Microsoft Whiteboard, Microsoft Visio, Jira and Confluence. I can't even imagine a worse replacement than that shudders. How typical that great bespoke tools are rejected in favor of whatever poor features/products available through existing product licenses.

crooked-v 3y ago
Also, how many of the people doing the actual work at that company even want licenses to those tools in the first place?

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

fjodir 3y ago

Just wait for the migration from Slack to MS Teams, makes me wanna stop working all together. Also, MS recently launched their Notion clone, so all Notion users in MS shops better prepare to migrate to a much worse alternative.

kqr 3y ago
I briefly led an underground incentive to use something other than Teams among the engineers at a previous employer. It gathered quite a bit of steam even though none of the alternatives proposed were great. Tells you what people think of Teams! (It petered out when my priorities shifted, though, so I guess that tells you how much bandwidth people actually have for caring about their instant messaging. (There had already been a successful underground movement to use something other than Teams for video conferencing.))
- lbriner 3y ago
  Personally, I don't mind if a tool is rubbish as long as I can use the bits I need to use and the rest doesn't get in my way. I don't like Teams but mostly keep to chat and video calls and that works fine. Sure, there is other stuff that might be junk like files, tasks and apps but I just don't use that. That is the old adage about keeping the main thing the main thing. It depresses me how many major apps doesn't even do the basics well, either performance is terrible or the UX is over-complicated.
  - zokier 3y ago
    > It depresses me how many major apps doesn't even do the basics well, either performance is terrible or the UX is over-complicated Teams definitely falls in this category. It is dog-slow, but even worse for a chat application it randomly just drops messages(!) quietly(!!) which makes for very confusing discussion threads when different people have different sets of messages. That is arguably the very most basic feature that one can expect from chat, and Teams fumbles even it.
- user_named 3y ago
  You didn't just propose Slack?
esperent 3y ago
I think MS Teams gets a bad rap that is doesn't deserve. I don't know if the experience has improved or something - maybe Teams used to be worse and people are reacting to how it used to be? I've also been using MS Loop a lot and it's pretty great actually. It's clearly still under development and missing a lot of features but leaving that aside, I don't think it's fair to dismiss it as a Notion clone. It's far simpler than Notion and for writing things like company handbooks that's a good thing, actually. Sometimes simpler is better. If you need all the tables as database stuff, then use Notion. If you need a simple and clean documentation source, well I've tried a lot of these kinds of apps over the years and Loop is shaping up to be one of the better ones IMO. I say this grudgingly, BTW. I strongly resisted choosing MS for our business. But as a small company in Vietnam we get an amazing value proposition from MS 365 that isn't even close to matched by anything else. We pay about $3.50 per user and we get Teams, video conferencing, office apps, Loop, Visio, Whiteboard, SharePoint (ok that one is genuinely quite bad), and also a load of business automation stuff in the form of Workflows that I'm still exploring. Oh and Shift scheduling. OneNote. About a hundred other things that I forget right now. Even still I resisted but the final straw was that automatic translation is included in Teams for free. As a bilingual team that's vital for us. By contrast, just Notion would be $8 per user. I think Slack is $6 per user. Not a lot for a western tech company, but we genuinely can't afford that. MS 365 wins by being "just good enough" at _loads_ of things, and way cheaper than the competition.
- probably_wrong 3y ago
  MS Teams is... bad. Even if they were to solve the bugs and performance issues, and even if they actually implemented any of the features that the community has been asking for (push to talk comes to mind), the entire concept is flawed. Two problems with information are duplication (too many copies around, all of them slightly different) and finding where it is. MS Teams makes it easy to store duplicate data and hard to find it later: did you upload the data as a file in the "development" channel, or as a link in the "updates" wiki? Nobody knows, not even the search function. And with each new project manager creating five channels per project, two of which will actually see any activity... I think MS Teams wants to be everything for everyone and succeeds at neither.
bsuvc 3y ago
> MS Teams, makes me wanna stop working all together I think this is what some people just don't understand, especially executives or managers who are too far removed from individual contributors' day-to-day activities. The wrong choice of IT tools can suck the life out of your organization. Sure, on paper two tools can seem equivalent, but in reality, they are not the same.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  I don't know, I may be the only person on the planet who actually likes Teams. Like, it's still a pile of shit like almost all software designed in the past 10+ years - but it's better and snappier and prettier than Slack ever was for me. Maybe the difference is that my employer fully embraced the Microsoft stack, with Office, Outlook/Exchange, SharePoint, and Teams forming a coherent and well-integrated whole.

kqr 3y ago

This reads like a really good review of Miro! Either way, I don't see why the people doing the work should not be allowed to (collectively) choose their tools. That way you get both collaboration (because they picked one thing together) and the most appropriate tool for the work to be done.

coding_unit_1 3y ago
There's a high chance a company will have already paid a large subscription fee to Microsoft for Office 365, and so they don't want to pay yet another licence fee on top for a tool that's already included with that. The people making these financial decisions are usually not the users of said tool.
gumby 3y ago
> Either way, I don't see why the people doing the work should not be allowed to (collectively) choose their tools. Because in a big company you’ll find some things are documented in a combination of jira and confluence while another are in big figma boards and nobody knows where to look (my gf’s company has exactly this problem). Also in a big company you want to have two teams collaborate but one uses one tool set and the other a different stack and there aren’t enough licenses for both. And so on. It’s like having each team use its own code formatting rules or coding standard.
- tobr 3y ago
  I don’t understand. Would it be sensible to require people using Figma to instead use Jira? Two tools with completely orthogonal use cases. It sounds like you’re describing a different problem.
  - OJFord 3y ago
    GP said 'things are documented in' - while neither's an ideal tool for long-term product-oriented 'how its supposed to work' docs, both are definitely used like that. (You probably wouldn't choose either for that from the beginning, but you start using Jira for issue tracking/feature planning, of Figma for feature design, and end up with them holding a lasting record of how the feature is intended to be.)

adamm255 3y ago

“ Employee experience and productivity should be equally important in these discussions as cost and security. And if you are making a decision about available tools on behalf of others, you need to spend time to understand the needs of the people you are deciding on behalf of, if you want to make a good decision.” A - F*in - Men. We recently dropped Miro for LucidSpark as we already had LucidChart. It’s so much worse, I hate using it. But on paper it does the same stuff, just implemented poorly. Example being, no anti aliasing on drawn lines. Wtf?! Experience is king. Getting people to understand that when the mandate is save as much money as possible is the challenge.

ianpenney 3y ago
Sometimes the mandate is not just to save money, sometimes it’s about putting the business in a compliance posture that will enable you to land revenue from large enterprise customers who have security and data requirements. And then to not get sued into oblivion by their highly paid numerous lawyers.

conjectures 3y ago

It's 2023 and apparently neither of the two main whiteboarding tools allow you to freely choose background colour. So forgive me for not being excited for either. Keep things simple? Yeah, meet your new standard 6 key board, who needs the other 20 letters anyway: https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61C8GdWvptL._AC_SL1500_.jpg https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61C8GdWvptL._AC_SL1500_....

ianpenney 3y ago

If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. If you want to pass an IT audit, good fucking luck to you. I have about 20 years of experience dealing with this ranging from mostly harmonious all the way to civil war. 100 employees and 130 different SaaS tools. Got buy in from senior management to reduce footprint to lower cost and increase security and compliance only to get pushback from every middle manager that would bring up these same reasons why THEIR team is special. Ok Mr/Mrs Team lead… be careful what you wish for because TCO and full RP status is now on your head. And I know you don’t have the experience to assess the costs, risks and admin workload but you’ve managed to convince the CEO. Not my problem anymore. I’ll let the auditors know where to find you when it comes time. At least I was smart enough to know to keep Miro, though. They’re reasonably good at managing data over the course of staff churn and the flexible licensing is nice. Try convincing everyone that grammarly is a keystroke logger.

diarrhea 3y ago
> Try convincing everyone that grammarly is a keystroke logger. Funny how it's not the opposite viewpoint that is scrutinized. Prove how it's not a keystroke logger, then Grammarly can be deployed. Until then, it's assumed to be malicious. That's how people treat for example ChatGPT as well.
- roenxi 3y ago
  I'm not sure if there is official research on this, but the 'opposite viewpoint' sounds expensive and more prone to failing in practice. Software companies generally struggle to get results even with a willingness to use any tool or practice that might improve productivity. It will only get worse if they add paperwork. And it isn't very risk-based. In most cases, the keylogger can be assumed to be entering via the OS, probably based on some NSA/GRU/Chinese MSS exploit being used for industrial espionage. Grammarly is a bit more niche. It is a threat. One day it will be an acute one, perhaps. But the risks and opportunities favour recklessness.
- PeterStuer 3y ago
  Yet those same people happily use Office 365 without a second thought.

GavinAnderegg 3y ago

It seems odd that a post on the official company blog is showcasing disliked IT policy. This reads like an airing of dirty laundry, and I’m kinda surprised it was allowed to be published. I understand the “we have food at home” IT policy of using software you’re already paying for. On the other hand, it’s clear that the author isn’t sure who made the call to ditch Miro and wants Miro reinstated. I wonder if this blog post will convince people internally.

Lacerda69 3y ago
Read up a bit on Norwegian culture and it will make more sense. Very different from what you are used to in US culture.
hitekker 3y ago
People are using "Norwegian culture" as an excuse but simple & scary "office politics" looks more likely. Compare this blog post where the author threatens to quit to the previous ones, which express happiness with Telia, and an eagerness to ape Bay Area DevRel trends. https://engineering.telia.no/blog/dev-happiness-fika https://engineering.telia.no/blog/dev-happiness-fika https://engineering.telia.no/blog/my-first-months-in-telia https://engineering.telia.no/blog/my-first-months-in-telia Their internal company culture does not seem to be in a good place.
- hantonsen 3y ago
  I’m not entirely sure where you get “threaten to quit” from. I am generally happy working at Telia, and the Happiness Fika that you link to is a great way to work with improving the workplace, in my experience. The point of this post, is to discuss how decisions like these are being made, and what I think should be a part of that process, using the example of our current Miro discussion as framing. The point of the ending paragraph is not to threaten to quit, but that some people quitting is one outcome that is probable when the company decides to cut out a tool that many people use and like. Personally I feel that the ability to be open about disagreements is a good sign for our culture.

user_named 3y ago

A bit of a strange post. How can you write so much about a decision to stop using a tool? And on the company blog? And threaten to quit at the end of the blog?

Lacerda69 3y ago
It's a Norwegian company. Vast difference in terms of culture to the US.
- zokier 3y ago
  Telia is Sweden-originated multi-national.
  - Lacerda69 3y ago
    Ah got confused by the TLD; but anyway Sweden and Norway are very similar in this

submeta 3y ago

At a former company, our newly appointed CTO staunchly advocated for the use of IntelliJ, including Webstorm and Pycharm. Coming from a predominantly Java environment, this preference was understandable. However, our team was largely composed of Emacs or Vim users. This sparked a passionate debate, culminating in a disheartened CTO and an aggrieved development team that stubbornly stuck to their favored tools. Two key takeaways from this experience are: a) Avoid trying to impose your preferences onto your team, and b) don't attempt to strip away someone's preferred editor, especially if they are productive with it. A bit of humor added, these lessons highlight the importance of respecting individual tool choices in a team environment. :)

EdwardDiego 3y ago
I've always been an advocate of people using the tools that work best for them. But sometimes, there's better tools out there than $EDITOR, especially when working in large codebases. Like a recent PR where 4 out of 5 usages of a renamed variable also got renamed, but the last one didn't, and was in an area not covered by tests and it made it to main. (And yep, how it made it past review is a question I'll be asking...) The dev had switched from VS Code to Neovim recently and I'm reasonably certain that's related. I'm very comfortable riding motorcycles, but for taking my kids to school, I tend to use a car. Horses for courses.
- codethief 3y ago
  > (And yep, how it made it past review is a question I'll be asking...) Given that refactoring support in VSCode is not exactly great, either, and that even Jetbrains products have countless bugs in their "Rename" feature, I'd rather ask: How did the change make it past your merge request pipelines?
  - EdwardDiego 3y ago
    > an area not covered by tests Also, Django magic makes it very hard for tooling to actually know if something exists or not.
- 3y ago

verytrivial 3y ago

I'm in a Very Large Company that just yoinked Jira and replaced it with GitLab Issues. I can't even tell how badly it's going because no-one knows what going on with any project now. People are literally copying and pasting hand-edited Excel summaries of sub-projects in emails and asking people to edit in place and reply. It's hilarious. It's super standardised, though.

dathinab 3y ago
do you think it's an issue of gitlab or of the transition? As far I know Jira and GitLab issues initially can look kinda similar (depending on how Jira is used) but are very different in what works well with them so Jira to GitLab transition seems rather risky. And while I haven't used GitLab issues a lot, GitHub issues are kinda terrible and Jira isn't better either (but bad in different ways; with github actions you can try to "fix" GitHub but in practice this doesn't work that well my experience and can't fix the most important issues)
- verytrivial 3y ago
  GitLab Issues, especially as exposed by the UI is just ludicrisouly primitive vs Jira. They're trying to cover the GitHub use case regarding basically 'context for merge requests'. There's no planning, reporting, sane linking, reports, no query language, no batch updates, and visibility model means Issues edits are also basically committers, so good-bye segregation. It's just chalk and cheese. Someone invariably says 'with the REST API you can do ...' which now means we have hundreds of teams reimplementing the out-of-the-box Jira features in mutually incompatible ways for their own consumption. All of that dev time is gone. I honestly hope the shareholders don't find out.

navane 3y ago

If anything this shows clueless people allowed to make decisions. Let teams flock around their tools. What's 10 bucks a month on an employees salary. Oh its not the cost, you think the difference in tools is what creates friction in your organisation? Maybe sit in on a couple of meetings, watch your people work, talk to them.

TeMPOraL 3y ago
> What's 10 bucks a month on an employees salary. And isn't my flashlight app for iPhone worth more than a Starbucks latte a month? SaaS companies want you to think in terms of marginal cost - hoping you'll forget that all those subscriptions add up, and hoping you don't realize that this "10 bucks a month" establishes a relationship with the SaaS vendor that you don't really want to have. And especially in B2B, that relationship isn't going to have your team/company's best interest in mind. Every now and then HN has a submission or discussion with advice for startups on how to sell to enterprise customers. Reading those, you may discover that this "only 10 bucks a month" subscription aimed at individual employees is a wedge - it's designed to establish a beachhead within the corporation, starting with a single person or a single team, and expanding until the point the vendor can send in their sales team and secure a fat deal, pointing out that their product is already widely used, and probably too hard to extricate at this point.

WirelessGigabit 3y ago

> Employee experience and productivity should be equally important in these discussions as cost and security. And if you are making a decision about available tools on behalf of others, you need to spend time to understand the needs of the people you are deciding on behalf of, if you want to make a good decision. I work in a larger company where only 20% is development. We are thrown in with the 'rest' of the people, and as such have insane restriction on tools, both online and on our computers. The problem is that our voice is not large enough to get to the CTO.

adamm255 3y ago
Does efficient operation of the dev team not directly impact revenue? If you can’t release effectively, causing delays, the CTO will notice when the CFO gets pissed!