9 ms·
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 anony
by crmd 1y ago
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.
- unethical_ban 1y agoCompanies that don't use Outlook? All five of them? I've seen companies with varying levels of MS product integration but Outlook is pretty foundational. Now, if a company says they use SharePoint or Teams to store their documentation, run to the hills. Wikis or bust.
- nneonneo 1y agoGod, Teams is absolutely miserable. Video calling on Teams makes you appreciate just how well Zoom works. Teams macOS client? Crashes on startup, even after clearing all of my user data. Teams iOS client? You can join a call by a link, but you can't see the call UI because it's behind the login window. Teams on Firefox? No video support for years, and most recently just glitches out and shows an empty page when trying to join. Teams on Chrome? Tried joining a meeting, and was told by the organizers that they couldn't admit me because the button wasn't doing anything. I've had all four of these things happen within the last month, and it's made me want to tear my hair out. I get that none of these are "Microsoft Edge/native Windows client", but they could at least pretend to care about other platforms...
- sigmoid10 1y agoOver the years I have used teams on Windows, Mac, iOS, Android and various Linux distros (where I was limited to Chrome and Firefox due to lack of an official client). While it is certainly not the greatest tool in the world, I have never encountered issues like these.
- thomasjudge 1y agoThe Teams mac client is so awful I completely gave up on it
- Spooky23 1y agoYou’re probably doing something cute with your network filtering or EDR.
- lenerdenator 1y ago> Now, if a company says they use SharePoint or Teams to store their documentation, run to the hills. Wikis or bust. It's never just Teams or SharePoint or a wiki. It's almost always some abomination created by putting various bits of knowledge on all three. Also, corporate wikis suck because how your team classifies data is almost invariably different from how someone else wants to see it. SharePoint, for all of its flaws, typically gets used by the major announcement-and-policy makers at a company, because they just want to use MS stuff (primarily out of ignorance of alternatives), so at least it's somewhat coherent for everyone in the company.
- _whiteCaps_ 1y agoWild to see the different experiences here. I haven't worked for a company that uses Outlook in 20+ years. Recently it's all been gmail/google workspaces.
- frumplestlatz 1y agoSimilar experience; I haven’t had to use Outlook since the late 90s, and even then only for about a year. Every company I worked for before or since just used IMAP.
- fragmede 1y agoWhat did you have as the IMAP client?
- frumplestlatz 1y agoIn the 90s, mutt. After that, Apple Mail.
- _whiteCaps_ 1y agoThunderbird
- AlotOfReading 1y agoThis varies widely by niche. My experience is that a solid majority of West Coast tech companies / startups use Gmail or other non-MS hosted solutions. Outlook or MS365 are a good indicator that the codebase may be older than some of the people writing it.
- FreakLegion 1y agoSilicon Valley in particular uses Google Workspace at a much higher rate than the rest of the world. If you count every one- or two-person startup as a company, Google probably does have a solid majority. If you count mailboxes, Microsoft still easily wins. Note that MX records are misleading here. They have no false positives, but are full of false negatives --- daisy-chaining MTAs is common, and since Microsoft owns the mailbox, it's invariably last in the chain. So the MX record will show something like Proofpoint (pphosted) or Mimecast or an internal company host, when really it's Microsoft in the end.
- esseph 1y agoI've been at quite a few places that wouldn't touch the MS ecosystem with a twenty-foot pole, and history has proven that to be a wise decision on their part. It certainly has not cost them any business.
- NeutralCrane 1y agoI’ve worked for six companies and only one of them uses Outlook. I think there is some availability bias by industry or job type. I know there are lots of companies that use Outlook, but you may be overestimating how many do, particularly among the companies more likely to be represented here (tech and/or startups).
- unethical_ban 1y agoI tend to work at banks, multinationals and power. My direct employer uses GSuite (and Google docs as a source of record is as bad as a 2000s file share)
- bdangubic 1y agoLarge enterprises (1000+ employees): probably 70-80%+ Mid-sized businesses (100-1000 employees): around 60-70% Small businesses: more variable, maybe 40-60% this reply was written by “AI” :)
- Hikikomori 1y agoWorked for a company that used Lotus Notes 10+ years ago and switched to 365 and outlook, hard to believe that an email client could be worse than Lotus Notes. Only worked for Google workspace companies since then.
- pandemic_region 1y agoHow can you see from the MX record if it is Microsoft?
- janderson215 1y agomxtoolbox.com
- adamcblodgett 1y agoI love this tool so much. It makes so many difficult things easy, and it does it cheaply or free in almost every instance.
- kyrra 1y agoThe "dig" command can get them for you $ dig ycombinator.com mx ;; ANSWER SECTION: ycombinator.com. 300 IN MX 20 alt1.aspmx.l.google.com. ycombinator.com. 300 IN MX 10 aspmx.l.google.com. ycombinator.com. 300 IN MX 20 alt2.aspmx.l.google.com. ycombinator.com. 300 IN MX 30 aspmx4.googlemail.com.
- pixel16 1y agothis doesnt work if they use a 3rd party email filtering service like mimecast or proofpoint fyi.
- neilv 1y agoAnother red flag! :)
- ExoticPearTree 1y agoProofpoint, definitely a very big red flag.
- fujigawa 1y agoI'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?
- Etheryte 1y agoI don't know man, you're gonna have a very tough crowd if you're gonna try and convince anyone that Teams is as good as Google Meet.
- fujigawa 1y agoThey are all equally crap. I'm convinced the people designing collaboration tools don't have to use them on a daily basis.
- dieortin 1y agoI’m sure the people who designed Teams and Meet use their own products on a daily basis. And if those are crap, what’s a better alternative?
- NeutralCrane 1y agoZoom + Slack
- zelphirkalt 1y agoIt is funny, that even a Slack Huddle, something that's not even the core of Slack's function, is better than anything one gets with MS Teams. MS Teams is so laughably bad, I think I have never used a worse chat/voice chat/video chat program. Probably not even Skype in its single core days was worse, even though it ate one third of my single core CPU, just to have a call back then.
- supportengineer 1y agoIf a company provides a Mac laptop, that to me is a green flag, if it provides a Windows laptop, that is a red flag. The best company I ever worked at, provided every software engineer both a Mac laptop and a Linux desktop as standard equipment.
- dataflow 1y agoWhat if they provide both?
- gubicle 1y agoMy calculations tell me that would be a yellow flag.
- SapporoChris 1y agoMy knowledge of colors tells me red and green make brown.
- Yokolos 1y agoWhat does a brown flag tell us?
- mrheosuper 1y agoproceed with caution
- pezezin 1y ago#ffff00 is a pretty bright yellow color.
- FireBeyond 1y agoMy employer provides a Mac laptop with the Office suite. Red flag, green flag, or yellow?
- jojobas 1y agoToo bad Microsoft shops run the world. All the factories and shops, nearly every commercial backoffice runs windows, office/exchange and what not.
- a-dub 1y agothe software is so bad it's literally a national security risk.
- mrsmrtss 1y agoWhile I may agree on Sharepoint, not everything from Microsoft is bad. Often the alternatives are even worse.
- dijit 1y agoReally? Libreoffice Calc and Excel are probably your strongest argument, Excel runs the world after all. But, if it wasn’t for incompatibility and fear of incompatibility- I have a hard time thinking Calc is materially worse; I doubt theres a single workflow not possible in Calc- and if O365 utils get worse looking then Calc will win there too soon enough. For everything else in the microsoft stack, either its “this thing does many things thus is incomparable to any one thing!” or its simply worse. Even the best tools that I would actively defend (MSSQL) are only equivalent to other solutions (PGSQL) and almost never better than everything offered elsewhere.
- a-dub 1y agook, 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)
- jojobas 1y agoIs there a one stop solution for email, calendars, bookings etc that could run on premise?
- notmyjob 1y agoI’ve definitely noticed a correlation with low regard for labor (h1b abuse). But maybe that’s just a location thing, I’m in California where regard for labor, especially local talent, is non-existent. You know, move fast and break things like nascent tech worker unions and the state itself.
- kapone 1y agoWTF is this even supposed to mean? H1Bs use Microsoft products more than others? Or they do it because they have to…or what?? Please explain yourself.
- Thorentis 1y agoCompanies more likely to want to save money on labor costs (employing many h1bs) are also likely to want to save money on Tooling costs, by using safe options like MSFT stuff, rather than finding better tools. Also yes, due to availability and various other reasons, H1bs, particularly from India, seem more likely to use a MSFT stack.
- array_key_first 1y agoMSFT tools aren't even cheap - they're very expensive. Many FOSS tools are just better and cheaper. End of the day, even RHEL is cheaper.
- notmyjob 1y agoIt’s “do what everyone else does” style of corporate leadership. “Nobody ever got fired for choosing MSFT” goes hand in hand with “if we don’t exploit the H1B system to get cheap coders who won’t sue us or try to organize then someone else will.” Using FOSS, hiring citizens, treating employees well, actually innovating and producing great products, all hang together. Sadly, such companies and people are increasingly rare in tech, because the tech oligarchs fund bad people and bad products because they are often greedy egoists whose wealth is derived from being in the right place at the right time, or from what I call “moral arbitrage” (doing things others are too ethical to consider) rather than deriving wealth from actual talent or ingenuity. Ymmv
- a-dub 1y agoit's generally pretty remarkably bad. i think i agree. it sets a sort of psychological baseline culture that computers and their software should be shit, which is a pretty bad influence for people making software to be engaging with day in and day out.
- waterTanuki 1y agoMy company uses a MSFT for domains, email, office work etc. but hands all the employees (not just engineers, HR as well) Macs. I don't know what kind of places you're working for but I'm not really interested in spending more time debugging your mattermost instance or email server instead of working on the core product I was hired to work on. I agree microsoft software is a plague but good luck convincing the people with the money to use something else lol
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- craigmcnamara 1y agoHard agree. I've worked both kinds of places, I'm never working in an MS environment again for less than 7 figures.
- terminalshort 1y agoAnd companies that use MS aren't paying 7 figures for anything below VP
- NoPicklez 1y agoI have to disagree here, that is such an enormous broad brush