8 ms·

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 wo

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?

Etheryte 1y ago
I 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 ago
  They are all equally crap. I'm convinced the people designing collaboration tools don't have to use them on a daily basis.
  - dieortin 1y ago
    I’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 ago
      Zoom + Slack
    - zelphirkalt 1y ago
      It 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.
      - cc81 1y ago
        What is it that is bad about it these days?
      - Etheryte 1y ago
        In the early Skype days, that tradeoff made sense. Internet speeds across the globe were far from fast so they spent more CPU cycles on compression so they could save on bandwidth.
    - Lio 1y ago
      Do they? Didn’t Microsoft force all its employees back to the office? That doesn’t sound like they have faith in Teams themselves. I use Teams every day and it can’t even do threading in channels properly. The spellchecker is unreliable and even copy and paste is occasionally patchy. It is not a good product. I’d switch to Slack given the choice.
      - alternatex 1y ago
        Teams is used in the Teams org that develops it in Microsoft yes. Source: I work on Teams free/consumer. Not to say that the developers working on it are satisfied with it..
  - supportengineer 1y ago
    The plague that is currently infesting our software industry is "Promo-Driven Culture". Employees are incentivized to get a promotion, not to make life better for anyone, except for their manager's promotion.
  - nicoburns 1y ago
    IME the call quality varies quite widely between video calling software. And being able to reliably hear and be heard with reasonable latency is pretty important!
  - dijit 1y ago
    Equally? Definitely not. Maybe it can be argued that it depends on how you use it, but meet is so far and away better for video calls and screen sharing, its not even funny. Jitsi is also an incredible improvement, and it is self hostable and free. Teams is likely the worst software that a company will force on all its employees- with that in mind, I guess some people can get stockholm syndrome? Some people who only jump from MSFT shops literally don’t know that there’s anything better. They went from Communicator to Lync to Skype for Business and now to Teams- and Teams is better than those just about.
    - qwertytyyuu 1y ago
      It seems you have had the fortune to not have had to suffered through jabber
      - dijit 1y ago
        Oh, I did… I quite liked it actually. :)
  - alternatex 1y ago
    When it comes to Teams, unfortunately we do. It's actually used across Microsoft in general. A company of this size requires Teams even if just for the sake of keeping up with security and compliance.
bitmasher9 1y ago
Doing research on a potential employer and filtering out opportunities based on preferred toolchains is a green flag not a red flag.
- Spooky23 1y ago
  Dev tools, sure. Self-selecting yourself out of the office/email toolset used by 90% of companies seems like a weird flex.
  - philipallstar 1y ago
    Teams is just so much more horrible than Slack and Zoom, and dev teams use Slack and/or Zoom.
    - Spooky23 1y ago
      Most customers of both use O365. The zoom fascination is pretty weird. It’s literally Webex 3.0 without Cisco bullshit. Slack is pretty awesome. It wouldn’t factor in selecting an employer, but that’s just me.
      - zelphirkalt 1y ago
        I definitely wouldn't call Slack "awesome". Self-hosted tools like Zulip are doing a better job. Slack is however, the smaller evil amongst MS Teams, Zoom, MS Outlook and similarly bad software. Like, if someone told me all communication, including text chat shall happen via MS Teams, I would seriously consider looking for another job. It is a recipe for absolute disaster and completely broken communication. If the same happened with Slack, I would dislike it, but I guess it is at least usable. Still garbage, but not as much garbage, as MS Teams.
        kapone 1y ago
        [flagged]
        1y ago
supportengineer 1y ago
Windows is a parasitic drag-on-the-team. Now, if Microsoft creates a Microsoft Linux desktop OS, that would be something.
- dpifke 1y ago
  That's basically WSL. My work laptop is Windows, and the only native applications I run on it are a web browser, Zoom, and the company's VPN software. Everything else runs inside WSL. I greatly prefer Debian to Homebrew, so if I can't run actual Linux, this is (to me) superior to trying to develop on a Mac.
  - illusive4080 1y ago
    I agree that Debian beats Homebrew. But wouldn’t a persistent Debian container on Mac be better? WSL is nothing more than a container on the system, no? The Mac hardware is vastly superior to most Windows laptops, especially enterprise Windows laptops.
    - dpifke 1y ago
      With Windows 11, WSL has X and Wayland support, so you can run graphical applications as if they're native (e.g. share the same cut-and-paste buffer, switch between windows using alt+tab, and so on). It's also much easier to attach USB devices like Yubikeys to an already-running container than the last time I tried to do the same with Parallels. (That was quite a few years ago, so maybe it's gotten better.) You can also launch Windows applications from Linux, which is makes it trivial to control my (Windows-native) browser from within WSL. I strongly disagree about Mac hardware vs. Thinkpads or Framework, but to each their own.
    - spankibalt 1y ago
      > The Mac hardware is vastly superior to most Windows laptops, especially enterprise Windows laptops. Man alive, what you mean is normie "Apple-style" Windows laptops with a bit of an "enterprise" makeover. Mobile enterprise workhorses (e. g. Panasonic, Getac)? Apple has no hardware in this segment. Detachables with extended five-year warranties plus certified dual-OS support? Nothing. Some of you fruit afficionados need to get out more.
coolestguy 1y ago
"using the biggest software suite tailored for offices/IT environments is a red flag" honestly the things i read here sometimes hahaha
- zelphirkalt 1y ago
  If this is "tailored", then I don't even want to know what how bad other MS products are. Oh wait, we can see that in Windows in general. But then again MS Teams is worse. It's almost as if the more MS has its fingers on something, the worse it gets.
- epistasis 1y ago
  The idea that the most commonly purchased thing in the market is of mediocre quality should not be hard to accept, and neither should the idea that some people only want tk work with what they, personally, consider to be the best.
erikerikson 1y ago
As someone who has been accepting of MS houses and worked at a few, the heuristic holds up in my admittedly anecdotal experience. The Mac houses are fine and Linux houses have been best.
crmd 1y ago
The chairman of my last big company said I was “ungovernable” at one of our last board dinners, so I’m reluctantly inclined to agree with you.
- craigmcnamara 1y ago
  One of us! One of us! One of us!
- terminalshort 1y ago
  Yeah, when I hear "problem employee" from a higher up I think "I want that guy on my team." Sounds like someone who pisses off management, but is too valuable to fire.
  - lazide 1y ago
    Yup. If they weren’t indispensable, they’d be the ex-employee.
NeutralCrane 1y ago
Google is leaps and bounds preferable in my experience than Microsoft. I agree with the above. A Microsoft shop isn’t a guarantee the company culture is bad, but it’s correlated enough to be a flag.
- pjmlp 1y ago
  Until one needs to reach out to support.
  - lazide 1y ago
    G workspaces support has always been at least decent in my experience. MS support, less so. Oracle support took the cake however, but that was with a commercial support license and a weird bug triggered by a newly released feature (never do that!) in Oracle DB, many years ago. ORA-600 errors for the ‘win’.
  - joenot443 1y ago
    Google's support for their business clients is considered pretty top of class. The "Google lacks support" chorus we hear frequently is more associated with their free tier.
    - pjmlp 1y ago
      That wasn't my experience on the only project I took part on GCP.
    - ExoticPearTree 1y ago
      Where I am we're kind of Dual Stack for various reasons with GCP and Azure. Microsoft support has been very good. Google support was abysmal and very "you're dumb, we're smart because we're Google" style. And we pay money for support to both organizations.
stickfigure 1y ago
I currently work in a Microsoft shop that has Slack. Everyone uses Slack and all the Microsoft tools, including email, are crickets. This was never the case in the Google shops; we still used email. Outlook is objectively a terrible experience.
darkhorn 1y ago
Microsoft's softwares do not follow standards thus they hard to work with.
- phs318u 1y ago
  What? Are there UX "standards", the lack of which might impede an end-users experience of the product? Or are you referring to protocol and/or interoperability standards, which make it difficult for 3rd parties to integrate (though, looking at my current work desktop, I can see that Zoom integrates very well with Outlook).
  - darkhorn 1y ago
    This was 2 years ago; compression in Azure Front Door works only when you enable caching in Azure Front Door. This is made up rule by Microsoft. It is not standard. Also I was compressing my responses in my back-end but Azure Front Door was decompressing them. Why?!!!
monooso 1y ago
How can OP be a problematic employee when he's specifically decided never to become an employee of a company which uses such tools?
- mikkupikku 1y ago
  It seems like a sour grapes thing. "I can't have you as an employee? Well you must be a problem so I don't want you anyway."
827a 1y ago
Well, in my experience every Microsoft shop I've ever interacted with has been a problem employer. Why do you feel your angle has greater moral defensibility?
- carlmr 1y ago
  I can kind of see both points. OP doesn't like working for people that have bad tools mandated by the company. He uses a proxy measure to determine this beforehand. The other poster had problems with people like OP because they don't use the (bad) tools provided by the company. It doesn't sound wrong from either side. It's actually a win-win for both if they don't meet, which would mean OPs strategy is great for both. It might preclude OP from some opportunities though if the filter is too wide. I personally do think that if you mandate the wrong tools you will never get the best developers, because great developers are very picky about the tools they use. It can be a bit too extreme in some cases, but I've rarely seen anybody that is good at this job and not very opinionated in some way or the other. In most cases the problem is mandating though, if you give recommendation but allow deviations from that recommendation within reason you can usually get everybody to be happy.
rewgs 1y ago
> How does an aged post on this site go from +4 to -1 in the span of a few minutes? I just down-voted you, so I contributed to that. OP bent over backwards to make it clear that he didn't mean any offense, and you opened with "you sound like a problem employee."
- rcbdev 1y ago
  But, he truly does. That is not because they have caused any offence, it's just that this pattern of behaviour may indicate similar tendencies in other parts of the tech stack. For example, if OP for some reason stops liking a maintainer of, say, RabbitMQ or PostgreSQL, they might be penetrant about switching a finished project to a different stack without any tangible reason, causing completely unnecessary headaches for the team.
  - dijit 1y ago
    Using collaboration and productivity software as a proxy for how the company thinks about collaboration and productivity is, good, actually. He didn’t say he doesn’t like Satya or Gates or whatever, he was clear that he doesn’t like the solution. I just went back to a microsoft shop, and honestly while the company is great you can feel how the communication is stilted compared to my previous company. Those little edges, warts, unreliable loading moments and awkward loading times all sum up to people being disincentivised to create, edit and consume documents or even to chat. This inexplicably drives meeting culture as async communication just doesn’t happen. I totally understand why its primarily MSFT shops that have RTO mandates.
    - kenjackson 1y ago
      “I totally understand why it’s primarily MSFT shops that have RTO mandates.” That just seems factually incorrect. I’ve seen no correlation on RTO and tools used. Do you have data on this?
      - dijit 1y ago
        Only anecdotes across 20 or so companies (and: european ones). Companies that use Teams as primary communication software have all had strong and non-negotiable RTO mandates, companies that use o365 and Slack allow exceptions for certain individuals and teams, but have also had RTO requirements. Those that are using gsuite or are paying lip service to email and documents (excel, word etc) and using mostly Confluence and something like Slack for most communication are the only ones with proper flexible working. Now, I could be wrong, and there's no public data to back this up. If I think about how I would construct such a dataset I can't even fathom how; even if I was to check every company with an RTO mandates MX records there would be no way to control for the sheer dominance of O365, and, no way to tell who is only playing lip service to their productivity suites. I'd be interested in hearing other opinions, but like mentioned, it feels pretty universal. I haven't seen even a single exception to this, and I'm pretty old and I have friends across many companies.
dotancohen 1y ago
> How does an aged post on this site go from +4 to -1 in the span of a few minutes? Oh, I can answer that one. It's happened consistently to me on HN when I post about a specific topic. First, the post looses two points at once. When I see that, I know it's going to continue losing points consistently until it settles into -2 to -4. There is some trigger that starts with a loss of two points, and then continues down.
- saltcured 1y ago
  Addressing the "aged" part, I think people forget that timezones exist and so different global audiences may wake up and add their votes on a long-running comment chain here.
Balinares 1y ago
My current gig is an MSFT shop and when I joined I was genuinely excited to find out just how far that universe had come in the 20+ years since I last worked in a corp environment that uses it. The Ballmer days are long behind and there's been some genuinely cool stuff coming out of MS since. I don't think I was ready for how bad it is. Not going to go into an inventory of it all, but I'll admit I genuinely lost it when I discovered that the terminal -- the terminal! -- freezes after staying open several days, and you need to kill it and restart it. The worst part, I think, is how the brokenness ends up permeating the engineering culture. Malfunction is just normalized. There's no reliability baseline; if it's broken to the point the amount of work you can do is zero, just open a ticket with support, who will add yet another bit of duct tape or just reboot something somewhere and ask you if the problem went away somehow. I think possibly the coworkers who don't look away from the emperor's non-clothed-ness, and the higher standards that they drive, may be more valuable to have around than you imagine, if you can get past the bad emotions that their lucidity gives you.
- jack_tripper 1y ago
  >I don't think I was ready for how bad it is. Says it's unthinkably bad then proceeds to give only one example. There are several other issues you can list. >the terminal -- the terminal! -- freezes after staying open several days, and you need to kill it and restart it. I wonder when that issue ever happened since I'm always ssh'd into my homelab via the terminal for days and never had to restart it since it never froze. >The worst part, I think, is how the brokenness ends up permeating the engineering culture. Malfunction is just normalized. Microsoft didn't make the culture like that, the managers were always like that which made them choose Microsoft because they just choose the biggest corporate name brand supplier. It's your typical old-school MBA. I've worked at all-MS shops and at all-Linux shops, and despite the issues with MS tech, the all-MS shops were far less toxic and pleasant to work at as people treated it as a 9-5 job instead of their own personal start-up project that needs to strictly conform to their world view, therefore the linux-shops I worked at tended to attract more of the toxic problem employees like your grandparent whos work life revolved around tech evangelism than pragmatism, which I didn't like since I just wanted to get work done and go home, not participate in some crusade at work to judge and shame choices of OS/IDE/languages/frameworks/tools the company should be using. As long as I get paid, I'll use any widely available tool, I don't really care.
A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 1y ago
<< you sound like a problem employee. To be fair, any employee that knows their worth and is not afraid to treat the relationship the same way as the company is a problem for the company ( and thus: 'problem employee' ).
computerthings 1y ago
[dead]
abc123abc123 1y ago
I disagree. He sounds like an excellent, intelligent, potentially attractive employee. People who signal that MS is sh*t are always worthwhile to listen to. They have character and principles, and they know bad and good software when they see it. Needless to say, in my company all microsoft products are banned and I would never hire microsoft fanboys.
tw04 1y ago
^^Microsoft may have its warts, but I don't know how someone can go from Excel to Google Sheets or Outlook to Gmail and think: this is just such a major upgrade I don't know how I existed in the past and I would never work someplace that uses Microsoft productivity tools. Excel in particular, for any power user, sheets just doesn't hold a candle to its functionality. Outside of the valley Microsoft must still have a 10:1 ratio of corporate use, I never run across a customer that has made the switch.
SergeAx 1y ago
I am not a Microsoft hater; in fact, I have been using Microsoft products since MS-DOS 3.3. But Outlook and its ecosystem are a horrible shit show and an indicator of terrible decision-making. Google Workspace is an infinitely better productivity framework; there's no space for discussion here.

Etheryte 1y ago

I 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 ago
They are all equally crap. I'm convinced the people designing collaboration tools don't have to use them on a daily basis.
- dieortin 1y ago
  I’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 ago
    Zoom + Slack
  - zelphirkalt 1y ago
    It 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.
    - cc81 1y ago
      What is it that is bad about it these days?
    - Etheryte 1y ago
      In the early Skype days, that tradeoff made sense. Internet speeds across the globe were far from fast so they spent more CPU cycles on compression so they could save on bandwidth.
  - Lio 1y ago
    Do they? Didn’t Microsoft force all its employees back to the office? That doesn’t sound like they have faith in Teams themselves. I use Teams every day and it can’t even do threading in channels properly. The spellchecker is unreliable and even copy and paste is occasionally patchy. It is not a good product. I’d switch to Slack given the choice.
    - alternatex 1y ago
      Teams is used in the Teams org that develops it in Microsoft yes. Source: I work on Teams free/consumer. Not to say that the developers working on it are satisfied with it..
- supportengineer 1y ago
  The plague that is currently infesting our software industry is "Promo-Driven Culture". Employees are incentivized to get a promotion, not to make life better for anyone, except for their manager's promotion.
- nicoburns 1y ago
  IME the call quality varies quite widely between video calling software. And being able to reliably hear and be heard with reasonable latency is pretty important!
- dijit 1y ago
  Equally? Definitely not. Maybe it can be argued that it depends on how you use it, but meet is so far and away better for video calls and screen sharing, its not even funny. Jitsi is also an incredible improvement, and it is self hostable and free. Teams is likely the worst software that a company will force on all its employees- with that in mind, I guess some people can get stockholm syndrome? Some people who only jump from MSFT shops literally don’t know that there’s anything better. They went from Communicator to Lync to Skype for Business and now to Teams- and Teams is better than those just about.
  - qwertytyyuu 1y ago
    It seems you have had the fortune to not have had to suffered through jabber
    - dijit 1y ago
      Oh, I did… I quite liked it actually. :)
- alternatex 1y ago
  When it comes to Teams, unfortunately we do. It's actually used across Microsoft in general. A company of this size requires Teams even if just for the sake of keeping up with security and compliance.

bitmasher9 1y ago

Doing research on a potential employer and filtering out opportunities based on preferred toolchains is a green flag not a red flag.

Spooky23 1y ago
Dev tools, sure. Self-selecting yourself out of the office/email toolset used by 90% of companies seems like a weird flex.
- philipallstar 1y ago
  Teams is just so much more horrible than Slack and Zoom, and dev teams use Slack and/or Zoom.
  - Spooky23 1y ago
    Most customers of both use O365. The zoom fascination is pretty weird. It’s literally Webex 3.0 without Cisco bullshit. Slack is pretty awesome. It wouldn’t factor in selecting an employer, but that’s just me.
    - zelphirkalt 1y ago
      I definitely wouldn't call Slack "awesome". Self-hosted tools like Zulip are doing a better job. Slack is however, the smaller evil amongst MS Teams, Zoom, MS Outlook and similarly bad software. Like, if someone told me all communication, including text chat shall happen via MS Teams, I would seriously consider looking for another job. It is a recipe for absolute disaster and completely broken communication. If the same happened with Slack, I would dislike it, but I guess it is at least usable. Still garbage, but not as much garbage, as MS Teams.
      - kapone 1y ago
        [flagged]
      - 1y ago

supportengineer 1y ago

Windows is a parasitic drag-on-the-team. Now, if Microsoft creates a Microsoft Linux desktop OS, that would be something.

dpifke 1y ago
That's basically WSL. My work laptop is Windows, and the only native applications I run on it are a web browser, Zoom, and the company's VPN software. Everything else runs inside WSL. I greatly prefer Debian to Homebrew, so if I can't run actual Linux, this is (to me) superior to trying to develop on a Mac.
- illusive4080 1y ago
  I agree that Debian beats Homebrew. But wouldn’t a persistent Debian container on Mac be better? WSL is nothing more than a container on the system, no? The Mac hardware is vastly superior to most Windows laptops, especially enterprise Windows laptops.
  - dpifke 1y ago
    With Windows 11, WSL has X and Wayland support, so you can run graphical applications as if they're native (e.g. share the same cut-and-paste buffer, switch between windows using alt+tab, and so on). It's also much easier to attach USB devices like Yubikeys to an already-running container than the last time I tried to do the same with Parallels. (That was quite a few years ago, so maybe it's gotten better.) You can also launch Windows applications from Linux, which is makes it trivial to control my (Windows-native) browser from within WSL. I strongly disagree about Mac hardware vs. Thinkpads or Framework, but to each their own.
  - spankibalt 1y ago
    > The Mac hardware is vastly superior to most Windows laptops, especially enterprise Windows laptops. Man alive, what you mean is normie "Apple-style" Windows laptops with a bit of an "enterprise" makeover. Mobile enterprise workhorses (e. g. Panasonic, Getac)? Apple has no hardware in this segment. Detachables with extended five-year warranties plus certified dual-OS support? Nothing. Some of you fruit afficionados need to get out more.

coolestguy 1y ago

"using the biggest software suite tailored for offices/IT environments is a red flag" honestly the things i read here sometimes hahaha

zelphirkalt 1y ago
If this is "tailored", then I don't even want to know what how bad other MS products are. Oh wait, we can see that in Windows in general. But then again MS Teams is worse. It's almost as if the more MS has its fingers on something, the worse it gets.
epistasis 1y ago
The idea that the most commonly purchased thing in the market is of mediocre quality should not be hard to accept, and neither should the idea that some people only want tk work with what they, personally, consider to be the best.

erikerikson 1y ago

As someone who has been accepting of MS houses and worked at a few, the heuristic holds up in my admittedly anecdotal experience. The Mac houses are fine and Linux houses have been best.

crmd 1y ago

The chairman of my last big company said I was “ungovernable” at one of our last board dinners, so I’m reluctantly inclined to agree with you.

craigmcnamara 1y ago
One of us! One of us! One of us!
terminalshort 1y ago
Yeah, when I hear "problem employee" from a higher up I think "I want that guy on my team." Sounds like someone who pisses off management, but is too valuable to fire.
- lazide 1y ago
  Yup. If they weren’t indispensable, they’d be the ex-employee.

NeutralCrane 1y ago

Google is leaps and bounds preferable in my experience than Microsoft. I agree with the above. A Microsoft shop isn’t a guarantee the company culture is bad, but it’s correlated enough to be a flag.

pjmlp 1y ago
Until one needs to reach out to support.
- lazide 1y ago
  G workspaces support has always been at least decent in my experience. MS support, less so. Oracle support took the cake however, but that was with a commercial support license and a weird bug triggered by a newly released feature (never do that!) in Oracle DB, many years ago. ORA-600 errors for the ‘win’.
- joenot443 1y ago
  Google's support for their business clients is considered pretty top of class. The "Google lacks support" chorus we hear frequently is more associated with their free tier.
  - pjmlp 1y ago
    That wasn't my experience on the only project I took part on GCP.
  - ExoticPearTree 1y ago
    Where I am we're kind of Dual Stack for various reasons with GCP and Azure. Microsoft support has been very good. Google support was abysmal and very "you're dumb, we're smart because we're Google" style. And we pay money for support to both organizations.

stickfigure 1y ago

I currently work in a Microsoft shop that has Slack. Everyone uses Slack and all the Microsoft tools, including email, are crickets. This was never the case in the Google shops; we still used email. Outlook is objectively a terrible experience.

darkhorn 1y ago

Microsoft's softwares do not follow standards thus they hard to work with.

phs318u 1y ago
What? Are there UX "standards", the lack of which might impede an end-users experience of the product? Or are you referring to protocol and/or interoperability standards, which make it difficult for 3rd parties to integrate (though, looking at my current work desktop, I can see that Zoom integrates very well with Outlook).
- darkhorn 1y ago
  This was 2 years ago; compression in Azure Front Door works only when you enable caching in Azure Front Door. This is made up rule by Microsoft. It is not standard. Also I was compressing my responses in my back-end but Azure Front Door was decompressing them. Why?!!!

monooso 1y ago

How can OP be a problematic employee when he's specifically decided never to become an employee of a company which uses such tools?

mikkupikku 1y ago
It seems like a sour grapes thing. "I can't have you as an employee? Well you must be a problem so I don't want you anyway."

827a 1y ago

Well, in my experience every Microsoft shop I've ever interacted with has been a problem employer. Why do you feel your angle has greater moral defensibility?

carlmr 1y ago
I can kind of see both points. OP doesn't like working for people that have bad tools mandated by the company. He uses a proxy measure to determine this beforehand. The other poster had problems with people like OP because they don't use the (bad) tools provided by the company. It doesn't sound wrong from either side. It's actually a win-win for both if they don't meet, which would mean OPs strategy is great for both. It might preclude OP from some opportunities though if the filter is too wide. I personally do think that if you mandate the wrong tools you will never get the best developers, because great developers are very picky about the tools they use. It can be a bit too extreme in some cases, but I've rarely seen anybody that is good at this job and not very opinionated in some way or the other. In most cases the problem is mandating though, if you give recommendation but allow deviations from that recommendation within reason you can usually get everybody to be happy.

rewgs 1y ago

> How does an aged post on this site go from +4 to -1 in the span of a few minutes? I just down-voted you, so I contributed to that. OP bent over backwards to make it clear that he didn't mean any offense, and you opened with "you sound like a problem employee."

rcbdev 1y ago
But, he truly does. That is not because they have caused any offence, it's just that this pattern of behaviour may indicate similar tendencies in other parts of the tech stack. For example, if OP for some reason stops liking a maintainer of, say, RabbitMQ or PostgreSQL, they might be penetrant about switching a finished project to a different stack without any tangible reason, causing completely unnecessary headaches for the team.
- dijit 1y ago
  Using collaboration and productivity software as a proxy for how the company thinks about collaboration and productivity is, good, actually. He didn’t say he doesn’t like Satya or Gates or whatever, he was clear that he doesn’t like the solution. I just went back to a microsoft shop, and honestly while the company is great you can feel how the communication is stilted compared to my previous company. Those little edges, warts, unreliable loading moments and awkward loading times all sum up to people being disincentivised to create, edit and consume documents or even to chat. This inexplicably drives meeting culture as async communication just doesn’t happen. I totally understand why its primarily MSFT shops that have RTO mandates.
  - kenjackson 1y ago
    “I totally understand why it’s primarily MSFT shops that have RTO mandates.” That just seems factually incorrect. I’ve seen no correlation on RTO and tools used. Do you have data on this?
    - dijit 1y ago
      Only anecdotes across 20 or so companies (and: european ones). Companies that use Teams as primary communication software have all had strong and non-negotiable RTO mandates, companies that use o365 and Slack allow exceptions for certain individuals and teams, but have also had RTO requirements. Those that are using gsuite or are paying lip service to email and documents (excel, word etc) and using mostly Confluence and something like Slack for most communication are the only ones with proper flexible working. Now, I could be wrong, and there's no public data to back this up. If I think about how I would construct such a dataset I can't even fathom how; even if I was to check every company with an RTO mandates MX records there would be no way to control for the sheer dominance of O365, and, no way to tell who is only playing lip service to their productivity suites. I'd be interested in hearing other opinions, but like mentioned, it feels pretty universal. I haven't seen even a single exception to this, and I'm pretty old and I have friends across many companies.

dotancohen 1y ago

> How does an aged post on this site go from +4 to -1 in the span of a few minutes? Oh, I can answer that one. It's happened consistently to me on HN when I post about a specific topic. First, the post looses two points at once. When I see that, I know it's going to continue losing points consistently until it settles into -2 to -4. There is some trigger that starts with a loss of two points, and then continues down.

saltcured 1y ago
Addressing the "aged" part, I think people forget that timezones exist and so different global audiences may wake up and add their votes on a long-running comment chain here.

Balinares 1y ago

My current gig is an MSFT shop and when I joined I was genuinely excited to find out just how far that universe had come in the 20+ years since I last worked in a corp environment that uses it. The Ballmer days are long behind and there's been some genuinely cool stuff coming out of MS since. I don't think I was ready for how bad it is. Not going to go into an inventory of it all, but I'll admit I genuinely lost it when I discovered that the terminal -- the terminal! -- freezes after staying open several days, and you need to kill it and restart it. The worst part, I think, is how the brokenness ends up permeating the engineering culture. Malfunction is just normalized. There's no reliability baseline; if it's broken to the point the amount of work you can do is zero, just open a ticket with support, who will add yet another bit of duct tape or just reboot something somewhere and ask you if the problem went away somehow. I think possibly the coworkers who don't look away from the emperor's non-clothed-ness, and the higher standards that they drive, may be more valuable to have around than you imagine, if you can get past the bad emotions that their lucidity gives you.

jack_tripper 1y ago
>I don't think I was ready for how bad it is. Says it's unthinkably bad then proceeds to give only one example. There are several other issues you can list. >the terminal -- the terminal! -- freezes after staying open several days, and you need to kill it and restart it. I wonder when that issue ever happened since I'm always ssh'd into my homelab via the terminal for days and never had to restart it since it never froze. >The worst part, I think, is how the brokenness ends up permeating the engineering culture. Malfunction is just normalized. Microsoft didn't make the culture like that, the managers were always like that which made them choose Microsoft because they just choose the biggest corporate name brand supplier. It's your typical old-school MBA. I've worked at all-MS shops and at all-Linux shops, and despite the issues with MS tech, the all-MS shops were far less toxic and pleasant to work at as people treated it as a 9-5 job instead of their own personal start-up project that needs to strictly conform to their world view, therefore the linux-shops I worked at tended to attract more of the toxic problem employees like your grandparent whos work life revolved around tech evangelism than pragmatism, which I didn't like since I just wanted to get work done and go home, not participate in some crusade at work to judge and shame choices of OS/IDE/languages/frameworks/tools the company should be using. As long as I get paid, I'll use any widely available tool, I don't really care.

A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 1y ago

<< you sound like a problem employee. To be fair, any employee that knows their worth and is not afraid to treat the relationship the same way as the company is a problem for the company ( and thus: 'problem employee' ).

computerthings 1y ago

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abc123abc123 1y ago

I disagree. He sounds like an excellent, intelligent, potentially attractive employee. People who signal that MS is sh*t are always worthwhile to listen to. They have character and principles, and they know bad and good software when they see it. Needless to say, in my company all microsoft products are banned and I would never hire microsoft fanboys.

tw04 1y ago

^^Microsoft may have its warts, but I don't know how someone can go from Excel to Google Sheets or Outlook to Gmail and think: this is just such a major upgrade I don't know how I existed in the past and I would never work someplace that uses Microsoft productivity tools. Excel in particular, for any power user, sheets just doesn't hold a candle to its functionality. Outside of the valley Microsoft must still have a 10:1 ratio of corporate use, I never run across a customer that has made the switch.

SergeAx 1y ago

I am not a Microsoft hater; in fact, I have been using Microsoft products since MS-DOS 3.3. But Outlook and its ecosystem are a horrible shit show and an indicator of terrible decision-making. Google Workspace is an infinitely better productivity framework; there's no space for discussion here.