Ask HN: Is it ok to reject a job because I don’t like their software? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is it ok to reject a job because I don’t like their software?

116 pointsdijit214 comments

Short of it: I’m not talking about the software I would write or produce, I’m talking about communication software.

I recently did some phone screens with another company in my industry, my industry is dominated by Microsoft products (mostly windows based software) but I have always had a seriously hard time digesting Teams.

It makes me bitterly angry when I work with it, the way pop ups work, the way things are (dis)organised, even the way copy/paste doesn’t seem to work the majority of the time.

I said on hacker news recently that I don’t think I can work with that software again, but a potential job offer that appears otherwise interesting had an interview conducted by teams.

Is it ok to send feedback that I don’t really want to work with that software? Is that extremely petty and spoiled?

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Not at all.

Every company I've ever worked for (contract or perm), everything has been correlated. If they use shit software, they're wanky about the budget (no you can't have a new keyboard ha ha ha), they have rigid processes (Scrum Master! everyone use this big board of tasks!), HR has a stick up their arse ("have you looked at section 1.7.a of the document surrounding...), etc.

Whereas at the places that are decent, it's like it all just clicks. Tell us what equipment you want, give us reasonable updates on the work you're doing, take sick leave if you're ill, general atmosphere of trust. Go in, get shit done, go to the pub, go home, fuck your wife/husband.

It's like some sort of cancer that everything just infects everything else with mediocrity. I've had zero counterexamples, everything is good or everything is shit, no in-between.

This is probably just a general principle though. Sports teams, friendship groups, companies, whatever. You have to trust each other but also aggressively remove mediocre elements or eventually you're just swimming in a pile of shit.

> they have rigid processes (Scrum Master! everyone use this big board of tasks!)

There's something wrong with scrum?

Scrum Master with capitals means that someone bought a course and that someone is probably in management, not product. All of Agile with capital comes from a distrust of management against their engineers, that management knows better how the engineers should be spending their time than they do.

To be fair, agile with lowercase does have some really good ideas in it. It’s the distrust that’s a problem, not the system that gets chosen.

Scrum is terrible and an abomination of what agile was supposed to be. Arbitrary sprints with perverse incentives that reduce taking riskier long term bets and prevent any sense of ownership for engineers. Works fine when you have junior engineers but competent professionals are much better served but ditching this crap.

I’ve worked with plenty of senior engineers who prefer it too. As I said in my own reply, I personally don’t. But I don’t think it’s right to frame it as determined by experience level. I do think, like OP, it’s good to prioritize finding team fit where there needn’t be conflict over things like this.

Edit: also, universally rejecting tools/processes is just as much a rejection of Agile principles as adopting them blindly. The whole idea is to choose what works for people doing the work.

I felt the same way when I had scrum imposed on me by an incompetent person. I have since come back around and implemented scrum myself to track some stuff I’m working on. It’s good for details.

I had this same experience by proxy and myself was very skeptical. I had asked people around me what they thought about scrum and almost universally people were unclear on what it was supposed to do for them and for each person there was a different complaint.

I read some books on it and overall surveyed it and found that in each of these cases they weren't really doing scrum and were never told why they'd be doing each part because no one bothered. I implemented scrum with my team after explaining exactly what benefits we wanted out of it (for the team mainly, but it also helps stakeholders) and it's a lot better than the pseudo-agile unstructured work we had before at the very least.

We're a part of the planning process, we know the basic motivations behind the things we're doing (user stories' "... so that..." section) and a much clearer picture of when a feature is done (acceptance criteria), our time evaluations are the only ones that matter and have nothing to do with some manager's idea of when something ought to be done.

I'm sure we'll adjust things as time passes and we recognize deficiencies, but I'm pretty happy with even the basic things we get out of it and some of our team members who were previously not happy with scrum are saying it's much better when you know why you're doing these things and when you actually do key parts of the process and don't rip out important bits.

It works really well for some, and really doesn’t for others. I’m in the latter camp, and my colleagues have generally been pretty evenly split. That said, as sibling reply said, “Scrum Master” can carry a lot more meaning than practicing Scrum… and I’d add that it can carry a lot more meaning than the role as a term too.

I won’t go on the whole rant about Agile cargo-cult stuff. I’m sure there’s more of it already posted, there certainly is plenty to be had around the net. But yeah, a lot of people hate Scrum. If you want a sincere personal take on why it doesn’t work well for me, I’m happy to share my take.

See related

https://youtu.be/vSnCeJEka_s - The death of Agile - Allen Holub

Probably not with Scrum, but with the Scrum Master. Scrum has a set of tools that helps managing teams and they guy is probably forcing everybody to do those things, because that's his role (or else, he wouldn't be needed).

Agile teams should be able to choose whatever tool fits them. Pair programming or stand-up meetings is not working or people are not satisfied? Scratch that off for now and try again later or in a different way.

In my experience, at least on macOS, Teams is about the least bad piece of Microsoft programming that I’ve had to deal with.

There are still some things that I think Teams does better than Slack, and some things that Teams does better than Zoom or any other video conferencing software I’ve used.

Yes, I would prefer to lead a Microsoft-free life, both professionally and personally. But Teams is probably the last piece of Microsoft code I would complain about.

I can’t speak for what it’s like on any other OS, however.

> In my experience, at least on macOS, Teams is about the least bad piece of Microsoft programming that I’ve had to deal with.

I concur. I think it’s fine for small group and individual communication. My opinion…it’s way better than Skype and probably on par with Slack for direct communication. I think where it fails spectacularly is trying to integrate its file sharing to one drive. This seems to be half baked and some evil product manager’s weird notion to try and eliminate a logical hierarchical file system design that has served us pretty well for the last 60 years.

That would be VS Code for me. Genuinely great software.

> But Teams is probably the last piece of Microsoft code I would complain about.

Really? I mean, even if you're restricting yourself to user-facing software, vscode doesn't prompt any hatred, and quite a lot of users have always seemed to like Outlook. Teams doesn't appear to be in the same league.

I’ve never used VSCode, or however that’s spelled. My preferred IDE is the original `vi`, but `vim` is usually okay.

I have never used vscode, but I can tell you that I hate it purely because Microsoft produced it. They do not get a free pass after all of the flagrantly evil shit they did trying to stop the rise of Linux. None of their products can be trusted, because Microsoft cannot be trusted.

Never forget, never forgive.

> Never forget, never forgive.

I'm highly sympathetic to that position, but it isn't useful in distinguishing between various Microsoft solutions, which was the topic of this subthread.

Xbox bought my forgiveness

Teams has been an awful experience for me on MacOS:

1. There's plenty of times I open the app and just see a blank screen in the chat window, I have to click away or close the app to get it to work again

2. There was a weird issue where I would get access to their internal debugging menus

3. Sometimes I paste an image and the image disappears. I get an error that they "lost my image". I'm not even sure how that is possible

4. Sometimes a single message will completely fail to load. Just recently this even happened with a code snippet

5. Scrolling a conversation loads in messages too slowly, and if you scroll back all you see are placeholder messages. It makes trying to find something in an old conversation incredibly frustrating

6. I never found the search to produce useful results

I would take Slack over Teams any day. The only Microsoft software I like is VSCode

We use slack extensively. Unfortunately, slack is designed for the use case where you can easily plug in third party or first party slack apps to provide a massive array of functionality that is not natively built into slack.

Guess what happens when you are functionally prevented from using virtually all third party or even first party slack apps, just because there is so many months and years of friction to get them through the approval process? And that’s assuming you can ever get them through the approval process?

No, workflows are not sufficient. Not even within the same galaxy of sufficient.

This is the tech company profit center vs. traditional business cost center distinction, no?

I thought about my experiences and especially the sentence "everything is good or everything is shit, no in-between." doesn't really hold up. I can see that often, many things are good or many things are bad, but there are usually at least a couple of things that are really good.

Company uses shit software, are wanky about the budget and have slow HR? They have great flexibility in working hours, you're not stressed about progress, you get great freedom in how to implement things.

Company gives you slow hardware, sends you too many emails and makes you jump through hoops? The colleagues are great, they have good food and you get to work on interesting projects.

I kinda wish it was black and white, as it would make it a lot easier to sort out the companies that are subjectively shit. For me, it has usually been a mixed bag, with one or a few show stoppers that eventually made me move on. While there often has been a great deal of correlation, the mediocrity didn't infect _everything_.

I work at a place that does everything you admire in the “just clicks” paragraph, but our software selection process for corporate tools is absolute garbage and has delivered many years of abysmal experiences for staff.

That said, if you hate Teams, don’t work for someone that uses Teams without being prepared to buckle down and bear it. There’s no harm in turning down a job because they use Teams. It’ll look odd and you might not be considered in a future application as a result, even if they switch away from Teams, because “which chat product do we use” can seem a small thing to hiring managers and to other engineers. But having used terrible software, I certainly wouldn’t fault you in a hiring context.

I work at a place that does everything you admire in the “just clicks” hardware paragraph, but our software selection process l is absolute garbage and has delivered many years of abysmal experiences for staff.

So, if you hate e.g. Teams, don’t work for someone that uses Teams without being prepared to buckle down and bear it. There’s no harm in turning down a job because they use Teams. It’ll look odd and you might not be considered in a future application as a result, even if they switch away from Teams, because “which chat product do we use” can seem a small thing to hiring managers and to other engineers. But having used terrible software, I certainly wouldn’t fault someone in a hiring context. Better they walk away than be noisily resentful.

I believe the quality and design of software has an influence on people's level of productivity and experience at their job. If I had a preponderance of evidence that this is false, I would conclude that UX design and much of software engineering was pointless. I would then change careers. Assuming you agree with my belief, I suggest you ask yourself which experience would you rather choose:

A. For 2-3 years, you regularly spend 40+ hours a week feeling bitter and angry about the tools you use and the resulting social environment you are immersed in.

B. For 2-3 weeks you spend 5-15 minutes a week embarrassed because a few strangers think you are petty.

This is a really fair assessment of the situation here and can save a lot of people some real heartache in the long run.

You can obviously reject a job for any reason you like.

Personally, I decided some twenty years ago that I never wanted to work with Microsoft products again, and have since passed on quite a few opportunities because that. My stress levels went down significantly after making that decision, though. Asking to be comfortable with something you spend a majority of your wake time on is not unreasonable.

I'm in the same camp. Working in MS-free zones. Obviously I have technical biases that supported the switch. BUT, the main reason is the managements that insist on only using MS products tend to be less far welcoming of innovations and intolerant towards staff who question the status-quo and suggest improvements.

That's awesome. I'm curious, what platform(s)/software are you using in your day-to-day? No obligation to answer, just always interested to hear what kind of environments other people are working in! :)

Main machine is a desktop with 3 LCDs, Debian Bullseye quad core CPU, 32GB RAM, SSD for OS, 4TB spinning rust for files, etc. Several ancilliary servers running NetBSD. An old Samsung ChromeBook on the road and 2009 MBP (on its third battery) for very occasional use.

Software: LibreOffice, Gimp, FireFox/Chrome. Mostly develop in C, JS and Python.

> Is that extremely petty and spoiled?

When I interview, I put a price on every chore, inconvenience and petty indignity a given workplace will expose me to.

Then I subtract that from the salary and see if the offer is still competitive.

They want me to do a bunch of business travel by plane? I hate airports, so travelling once per year is equivalent to a 3% pay cut. They want me to browse the web without an ad blocker? That's about a 20% pay cut. I can't have local admin on my work machine? That's 8%. Join an on call rota that gets between 1 and 3 calls per week? 7%. I gotta take a company-issued phone? 5%.

You don't like Teams - but would you pay $10,000 a year to avoid using it? Because you were offered a job that paid $10,000 more and you rejected it because of Teams, that's what you're doing.

That way, I'm never turning down a job because I'm petty and spoiled. I'm turning down a job because unfortunately, the price wasn't right.

I agree, it's a cumulative thing. If they're stingy, make my day to day tooling a pain in the ass, AND expect a lot out of me? No way.

Is your on-call cut relative to on-call payments or reimbursement?

If a company told me they didn't pay a reasonable amount for on call I'd probably stop the interview.

Not parent, but I consider paying for on-call time to be table stakes. The extra hassle of being "always on" and never fully off work while on-call has a separate cost to me that is reflected in the salary offer.

Same as a long commute to the office/no remote work, irrespective of whether the employer covers the cost (car mileage, transit pass, whatever) it takes its own toll on me and will cost the employer a major salary bump for me to even entertain the idea.

Interesting take on the problem.

> I gotta take a company-issued phone? 5%.

It is such a relief not having a company mobile phone. I got a desk one, and it covers 95% of all needs. Also the microphone is infront of your mouth.

I thought so too, but sometimes the money gets normalized once you start working, and you forgot that you factored in your feelings for a distasteful experience. And that's when you start looking at other opportunities. Atleast that's how it was for me. I got into a Cryptocurrency job, and I loathe the field. I got a 3x hike doing it, but now I want to leave and find a saner pasture.

I often find no amount of money can really make someone happy. Is $10,000 extra a year really worth sacrificing your morals and psychology when in the end you'll just be pissed off everyday from the stupidity of the organization?

I'm not sure exactly what you meant by "morals", but I'll use Teams[1] for $50 million a year, thanks. I'm guessing you might also. After that it's just a matter of finding where the line is.

[1] Or put up with whatever such thing.

> They want me to browse the web without an ad blocker? That's about a 20% pay cut.

Is that a real example? I've encountered every other indignity you mentioned in the wild, but that one is brand new to me.

I used to work in adtech (specifically publishing) so although nobody ever told me I _couldn't_ browse the internet without an ad blocker, it was functionally impossible to do my job with an ad blocker installed on my browser.

I've never heard a company BANNING adblockers though.

For this reason I use chrome to perform my directly work relates tasks and another browser for everything else.

Why couldn't you just allowlist your company's network and partners ?

Not explicitly. But I've had interviewers tell me "no unauthorized software" and "I don't know if ad blockers are on the authorized list"

It is a thing. My company forbids any software that’s not provided by them, and their provided browser has addons disabled.

I browse using a second browser, but this is technically against the rules.

In general I'd say that's a poor reason to turn a place down but in this specific instance of Microsoft Teams I sympathize.

It won't just be Teams. There's Outlook too. And they each have their own calendar that people will use. And where there is the Microsoft stack there will be putty, WindowsN laptops and probably the drive encryption thing that occasionally bricks said laptop.

It might be limited to company broadcasts and similar though. If the dev effort is built on a Unix derivative and irc with Teams on a corporate laptop you can leave in a cupboard most days, not so bad.

I'd definitely prefer to use Outlook and Office over Gmail and Gdocs.

Then I'd say you're in a very small, shrinking minority.

Outlook is garbage. Office is slow due to feature float that people don't even use. There's a reason Google Documents doesn't have mail mergers and the crap Word does - no one uses it.

Outlook works fine to me. Honestly, don't think it is any bad to reject any offer.

I agree it's NOT a valid reason to reject a job offer. That's just silly.

I don't feel like this is true. Do you really like Google Calendar? Cos that's the part of G-suite that I hate the most, and Outlook calendar is far, far better.

Mind you, I much prefer gmail search to outlook search, but Google Calendar is so annoying to use that I'll vote for MS tools (except Teams) every day of the week.

I've never compared the two. You might be a power user of the calendar, so Outlook's advanced functionality is important to you.

My needs are simple (by design) and so a simple solution is just that: simple.

My needs are not complicated, but I definitely found Google Calendar difficult to use (I use it personally on my Android, and it's definitely pretty annoying).

I'd prefer to use Google web based tools if possible, but Gcal is just really unintuitive, to me at least.

Me too and I'm surprised this is at all controversial.

Word is a native app with important features (structural elements, templates, macros etc), real time collaborative editing, fully customizable keybindings, bibliography management, mathematical equation editor with latex symbols, etc.

Google Docs is a slow, web-based, nerfed clone of it. If you just have to write the occasional memo then sure, Google Docs is serviceable. However if documents are an important part of my job, I want to be doing them in Word.

(I've even put emacs keybindings in it.)

HNers have strange hills they want to die on. Sure, all else being equal something like Teams vs Slack might make me switch to one company over another but it's not a dealbreaker by any means. Things like language or framework, I can understand (to a certain degree) but giving up an otherwise awesome job because of Slack vs Teams is ludicrous to me.

I agree. The only thing Teams and Slack really differ is probably the channels and threads.

And it is not that confusing.

Developers/sysadmins, and people for whom documents matter remotely that much, are two different groups of people.

It's a tool for tools.

Idk. The Outlook web client takes like 20 seconds to load.

I'd use a desktop client, but MS' SMTP server doesn't work, so I can only receive emails on my desktop, not send them.

Not to be pedantic, but Teams and Outlook share the same calendar. They each have a view of it, but it's the same content. Under the hood, teams just hits the OWA calendar API.

Maybe, if 'content' is defined appropriately. They do seem to agree on the times and existence of events in eventually consistent fashion.

One can show other people's calenders and the other won't. Meetings can be joined from one but not the other. The result of creating a new meeting is different depending on which entry point is used.

So I end up with both outlook/calender and teams/calender open, and frequently guess incorrectly which window to use for the operation because they look similar. The web app is a different slice of behaviour again.

This seems like something Microsoft had to go out of their way to achieve - write basically the same thing three times to basically the same spec and have them all look and behave somewhat differently. Though I concede the redundancy is useful when one is broken. Today one had audio and one didn't.

I dunno man, we're in a Windows world. I word at an MSP and I am a linux enthusiast at heart, but I had to adapt to this Windows world and Teams is a huge part of that.

Do I wish that we could just use... idk an internal IRC server? Yeah sure, that'd be great.

But Teams allows us to organize meetings and communicate EFFECTIVELY.

Sometimes adaptation is a huge part of this industry, in my opinion. I think that if you dislike Teams, and can not adapt, you may not be effective in this job market unless you free-lance or find some small startup that ... doesn't use any of the modern communication applications.

> we're in a Windows world

There are at least dozens of us linux workers here

Of course there are -- and thats great. But... the point is the same. Not many businesses these days are using a linux stack. Is it unfortunate? Yes. Do I like it? no. But working in IT in any capacity means that you have to adapt... thats my main point.

I frankly think you have it backwards. Practically the majority of business server+cloud software runs on Linux, unless you're a literal desktop janitor.

Perhaps this comment that I left elsewhere in this thread might interest you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30266721

This is terrible advice, easily the worst answer thus far.

Anyone who has any difficulty finding non-MS-bound openings is looking in the wrong places.

In Pittsburgh, I have not been able to find a company that lets software engineers use OS X or Linux. I'm actively looking so I'll be very happy to be proven wrong if anyone knows of a place.

Try Google? I am certain they have an office. Maybe automotive companies like Aurora. Or NLP related companies like Duolinguo.

> In Pittsburgh

i've never been, but that might be part of why.

You don't need to look in Pittsburgh anymore. Many, many companies now hire remote literally anywhere at all, particularly those located in New York City.

Not everyone works in software.

In mechanical and aero engineering, it’s 100% Windows.

> we're in a Windows world.

Teams runs on Linux, and almost any conceivable alternative runs on Windows. I don't see what Windows has to do with it, other than suggesting a general cultural tolerance for bad user experience.

I think he means that office365 absolutely dominates.

I’ve actually been evaluating email providers for a small business, and it turns out that if you need:

1) shared mailboxes (that multiple people can manage)

2) sane auth[entication|orization]

3) retention of deleted emails

then there are only 2 players in the game: Microsoft and Google… and once you pick one of them, it makes sense to also buy into the rest of their respective ecosystems, since everything is well-integrated.

The choice then ends up coming down to whether your users prefer Google Docs/Sheets/Mail or Microsoft Word/Excel/Outlook…

are there really no other alternatives?

did you also evaluate standalone email platforms?

is there just no commercial email provider with those features or is there not even any tech out there that solves those problems?

with shared mailboxes i assume you mean the ability for multiple people to access mails to an address and have everyone synced on responses without sharing login.

There really are no other [sane] alternatives ... unless you want to go to 50 vendors to save 50 cents per user per year on licensing (and waste 50 hours a month of everyone's time trying to get them use tools that don't integrate in any understandable/low-friction manner)

this is not about saving money, but about avoiding the behemoths that dominate the market. it would be rather disappointing if the options were so limited.

This is a business decision

Wasting 10s or 100s or 1000s of 1000s of hours of time across an organization is stupid just for the sake of "avoiding the behemoths that dominate the market"

sleeping better at night because the fate of my business does not depend on the whims of these companies is also a business decision

As a business owner, do you want to be concerned about one company's potential whims? Or 50?

i prefer 50 because the likelihood of them failing or denying service all at once is lower. much lower. this goes beyond email, but it would be insane to put put everything my business depends on into the hands of a single company.

That's not a rational business decision

The fewer the points of failure, the better

Your choice of 50 unrelated, unintegrated vendors introduces 50 single points of failure to business

That's incredibly stupid - unless you truly have no choice

It introduces a huge amount of unnecessary risk to the company, and immense overhead in additional personnel (product admins, contract management, vulnerability monitoring, end user time/training, etc)

It's why multicloud is mostly not a thing: outside of a few niche cases, running cloud workloads across multiple providers is more expensive than running it all in one. Sure GCP might have something that's cheaper than AWS, and AWS than Azure, and Azure than GCP - but now you have to manage data going into and out of three providers instead of one, three separate contracts, three sets of credential groups, etc

Re: shared mailboxes, yes, correct.

I've been doing a bit more research and I have to amend my previous comment: there's also Zoho, which has its own ecosystem.

Other than that, all of the standalone email providers seem to be running a standard Linux or Windows email stack (i.e. Postfix/Dovecot/Roundcube or Exchange Server). The Linux stack doesn't seem to be able to do it (well, either that or the providers don't offer it).

Exchange Server might be able to do it, but it looks hard to wrangle it together with other tools. Even the Exchange hosting providers just give up and resell MS365 at that point (e.g. https://www.combell.com/en/email-hosting/exchange-hosting, https://www.combell.com/en/work-online-office365).

Depends where you are I guess. When I attend conferences these days--which to be fair tend to be open source-oriented although not exclusively--I see very little Windows in use and, to be honest, more MacOS than Linux in general.

To the topic at hand I've used Teams a couple times. Don't remember it being especially good or bad and probably wouldn't otherwise be a deal-breaker on a job I really wanted to take. But I probably prefer either Zoom or Google Meet.

OP didn't say this, but it's probably more that Teams rarely stands alone.

If they're using Teams then surely they are also using office365 and exchange & outlook and you probably are forced to use a MS account and a laptop running Windows and must use Outlook.

If they used Teams, but you didn't actually have to spend all day on Teams, and everything else was fine, you could work on your own linux machine and use thunderbird for email, and you just had to fire up the linux Teams occasionally, then that should be fine.

But if you have to be logged in all day, even if everything else is good, then it's effectively a large part of your life and you should seek to identify such things rather than just suffer them.

It's been over a decade since I've used Windows for anything other than testing that something works on Windows. Most software engineers I know are in a similar position.

I suppose if I wanted to work a a really big company, that would change, but the "Windows world" feels more like a historical relic than a present reality.

I think the argument for Teams falls apart when Slack, not IRC, is factored into the equation. The only argument that is justifiable for Teams is if you're on O365 is slots into your organization easily, outside of that Teams is pretty bad. It's main selling point seems to be "you already have it". It's as if MS execs pointed at Slack and said "engineers make us that" and gave them a weekend to do it. The UX on Slack is almost unusable. It's some of what Slack does but with about 5 more clicks needed per operation, assuming you can even do the operation.

Teams only show 4 streams at a time on Linux, the video/audio quality is mediocre and the video quality in the webclient is worse than the one using an Electron container, probably to force the app. Screensharing always tends to get stuck after a while, and they ignore any requests to start supporting Wayland, even while it takes minimal changes(update Electron).

Nowadays it's easy to setup your own conference server, and use webbased clients that don't require yet another Electron container. For instance, Galene(https://github.com/jech/galene) is an excellent resource-friendly SFU built on top of Pion(Golang).

Shameless plug: I'm the author of Pyrite(https://github.com/garage44/pyrite), an alternative WebRTC frontend for Galene

>Nowadays it's easy to setup your own conference server

Not something any normal business has any business worrying about

Want to do it for funsies on your own time? Cool

For work? No

That's not sane

If you don't have many of these outlier biases then you're probably ok turning down the work because of poor cultural fit. But if you have a few more like this, then yes it could come across as petty. Also it is no fun to work with some whose anger is often surprising and then contagious.

I said outlier above because I use Teams everyday and would never have thought anyone would dislike it let alone be angered by it. But some of the other comments echo your sentiment so perhaps there is something in my blindspot and I am glad for that.

Agree -- I just don't understand why Teams would make someone so angry.

There's so much more in Windows to be angry about, lmao. You must adapt to this Windows world that has been made for us -- it SUCKS, but... you adapt and you evolve and you learn ways to make your workflow work for you.

Or you could choose work at companies which primarily use OSX. They are common enough that this is feasible.

A lot of companies that use macOS still rely on O365 and teams.

What are the other options? Zoom? A lot of companies ban Zoom for security reasons and the connection to the CCP - even without that it's not really that much better than teams anyway.

I think gathertown is pretty cool, but really all of these video chat services work well enough for what you need them for.

Slack was probably my favorite of the bunch for non-video communication, but now that they've sold themselves to salesforce they'll probably wither away and die (or at best remain in stasis) like everything else that company acquires.

Your giving up does not mean others should. I have worked 40 years with practically no contact with anything MS-bound. (I have a few times had to chase down a bug in, uniquely, the MS port of a product; and used a full-screen Linux VM running on top of W7, elsewhere.)

All the highest-paid programming jobs are not MS-bound.

It's the worst software I use on a day to day basis and it's not close. Granted that's on Linux which likely isn't Microsoft's main focus but still nothing else does this much this badly.

We recently switched from Slack to Teams. IMO, it's the worst software that MS produced particularly when there is a baseline such as Slack that they can get inspired from.

- All the channels are named General for every Team I am part of and it shows several "General" channels in my pinned list. Unless someone mentions me, I simply miss those conversations in other channels.

- Search is pretty bad and it never works. Slack is pretty powerful and conversations in Slack are like KB.

- If a screenshot is shared, sometimes it takes forever to show when I click it.

- Every time I have to click 'New conversation' to post in a channel.

- I use a 34" monitor, when I expand Teams app - it hardly uses 50% of the real estate. Content is centered and lot of whitespace (or blackspace in dark mode :p)

I can go on and on.

Ironically my layout complaint is the polar opposite of yours, which is that I have smaller monitors and the minimum window size is really large, and for what? I would like to pop out a couple channels and have them always on-screen but they take up too much room.

The current minimum width is 2x my smartphone which is kinda weird considering the app runs fine on the phone itself.

I don't think you are disagreeing, necessarily. You can't make Teams windows small, but they also don't make good use of whatever space you give them.

I preferred Teams over Slack. Teams has a much better Giphy integration. Since distributing memes is the most productive thing you can do with such a chat platform, Giphy is a must.

Zoom in Linux. Holy smoldering dumpster fire. It's like schizophrenia manifest as software. Why can't it just stay out on a single virtual desktop?

And basically anything coming out of Atlassian. How do you actually make software that's so indelible, while still being overly complex and sloooow?

We all have software we hate, I'm sure. We must, right? Everyone uses slack

> And basically anything coming out of Atlassian. How do you actually make software that's so indelible, while still being overly complex and sloooow?

Simple: you make it super customizable with options, configuration, and plugins so managers and administrators can implement and mandate any sort of workflow they can dream up, no matter how nonsensical, counterproductive, or downright user-hostile it may be. Then you do the same for reporting and dashboards on whatever misleading metrics they want.

After that, the PTBs will cling to the illusion of control it gives them to their dying breath.

Work in tech, never used slack or teams

Discord does the `general` thing too, and it's annoying AF.

I'm fine with Windows, as long as you disable the Microsoft account and don't look much at the start menu it mostly gets out of the way, and doesn't have UI latency.

Teams, on the other hand, is an UI nightmare:

- It has noticeable UI latency even in the best computers.

- If you open a document within it, there is no way (that I know of) to get back to the chat to discuss something about the document, and then back to the document again. Once you go to a chat, the document is closed and you have to navigate the whole file system to find it again, click it, and wait for several seconds for it to open because lag.

- If you search for messages with a given word, it shows you a list of the messages but it doesn't allow you to click on each to look at the context, which is what I want to do like 99% of the time I search for a message in a chat app.

- If you have it set up to launch on startup, it will open private conversations and again, take a couple of seconds to close even if you're a fast clicker, because of its ubiquitous lag. Incredibly inconvenient if you use the laptop to give a presentation (of course I know that I can just set it to not open on startup, but I shouldn't need to do that. It makes sense to have it on startup 99% of the time as I almost always use it, just don't open a private chat and stick it in front of the screen with focus as the first thing you do!).

- The filesystem is a nightmare (not only Teams' fault, but the whole Office ecosystem): files associated to a team, vs. files on someone's OneDrive, vs. SharePoint. After 2 years of using it, I still don't get the difference between OneDrive and SharePoint and I'm still not able to find anything without stumbling around, and I'm supposed to be a tech guy.

- Sometimes you drag a file on a chat to send it to the other person and it makes you explicitly set permissions (using a laggy UI, of course) so the other person can access the file. Why would I send a file to a private chat if I didn't want to show it to the other person?

- Calls don't scale. Quality degrades fast.

- Sometimes a "team" will go bold for no reason. I click on it, and there is nothing new. Or a chat window will go blank and only come back when someone types a new message.

Mind you, it has good things (I like the simplicity of partially typing a few names in the search box, having it autocomplete, click on the people and starting a group chat, for example) but the UI is a dumpster fire. I'm not anti-Microsoft as a whole (I like Windows, and kind of like Excel) and while I kind of tolerate it, there are plenty of reasons to get angry with it. And some of the issues above (like search not showing context, rendering it all but useless) are really basic, I don't know how they could even pass QA.

- Never noticed UI latency - and I use it mostly in a virtual desktop (Horizon Client)

- I have chat and documents open for collaboration all the time - how have you missed it?

- don't have it set to open on startup, perhaps? We're not allowed to have any apps open on startup that aren't of the handful of "approved" ones, so my first task every morning is [command] (I run VDI on my MBP) then click Outlook and Teams from my start menu. Takes about 10 seconds

- never had issues with the Teams/OneDrive integration ... and I've been using it for a couple years now day in, day out

- never saw a perms issue sharing/sending a file ... is it a restricted file type by your organization, perhaps?

- been in Teams calls with well over 500 people. Hardly a dropped sound.

- chat windows do age-out after a certain period of inactivity; they're still "there", but they're not in the most-recent list any more

I especially like the task cards you can create and monitor - and how comments/updates create their own chat threads, so you can tag someone via chat, and it'll bring them to the task card just by dint of replying to the conversation ... THAT was brilliant

I also like that when you create a meeting in Teams, it auto-creates the Teams room/links for everyone invited. Whereas if you make it in Outlook, you either need the Teams plugin enabled, or you need to manually add the conferencing info after the fact

For what it’s worth, there’s bias in the other direction too. I’ve only used Teams once: an intro for a role I wasn’t seeking and wasn’t particularly well defined yet, so we didn’t do much other than have a quick chat. I found it ridiculously painful to use the software, compared to Slack and Zoom (both of which I hate in different ways), or Google Meet (which is otherwise excellent, except why does it need to melt my entire computer?).

You’re used to using it, you know its quirks, capabilities and workarounds. That’s an important bias to recognize too.

Teams is terrible to use for occasional use with personal login. I always had issues using it until I figured out that I need to empty the app cache before joining a meeting. Whenever I see a Teams link in an invite, I join 5 minutes ahead of time to clear my cache and test my audio and video.

But I am told that there is no such problem in Teams with enterprise SSO. Also I have other friends who are quite happy with it. Personally, I can empathize more with OP. MS Teams is a terrible software which seems out of place among the modern era clients.

I used Teams with enterprise SSO. No problem at all.

The only place I ever see people dump on Teams is HN

Everyone I know in the real world is between "it's a tool, I use it" and "this is pretty great"

I'm mostly in the "this is pretty great" camp - especially when you look at the integrated versioning of shared files, screensharing, and video/audio conferencing

I think it's fine. As a hiring manager, I would want to know if there are internal company things that are turning away potential hires.

Personally, I stay far, far away from places where I'd be required to use Windows, Teams, etc., not because I can't stand most of the stuff that Microsoft churns out, but because it's an indicator that the company doesn't give a single fuck about whether or not they're adding unnecessary friction to my job. I want to spend my time and energy doing the job I was hired for, not working around whatever crapware corporate IT decides to foist on me. Without fail, every time I've compromised on this stance, the company has ended up being an absolute dumpster fire.

I think the exception is where using Windows makes sense, which is for legacy .NET development, needing VS, of which there is a lot of companies.

Of course. I have no interest in roles like that though, so for my purposes, it’s still generally a good measure.

Seriously, get over yourself and grow up. You will always have to make compromises in the workplace, either on this or some other aspect of the environment because you are not the center of the universe. Ultimately the choice of video conferencing software used by your employer is so utterly trivial a matter when compared to basically every other aspect of your work life that rejecting a job based on this is idiotic. Especially given we're talking about teams which you will probably STILL have to interact with whenever you communicate with other organisations since it's one of the market leaders.

One of the few sensible replies on here. The level of entitlement on this thread is mind boggling.

We're mostly dev or ops here, probably at least average ones. Entitlement is the default state for us.

But anybody should be entitled to refuse a job interview for any reason he wants.

> Ultimately the choice of video conferencing software used by your employer is so utterly trivial

I don't believe this to be the case, I am not mandated to run a particular editor (for example), but teams is mandated to be open and running at all times in order to talk to people, and alternative channels are verboten.

> Especially given we're talking about teams which you will probably STILL have to interact with whenever you communicate with other organisations since it's one of the market leaders.

Foregoing all interaction is different than running it as the primary and sole communication platform.

One of the biggest 'internal surveys' in bigger tech companies are about workflows and hampers.

This really boils down to concerns on deployment efforts, but when you can't get the basic comm channels reasonable, absolutely there is a big issue.

You need to set your standards higher and realize the impacts of basic amenities being junk.

Remember that while HR might use teams for interviews, that doesn't necessarily mean that it's used internally. I'd recommend to ask about their internal communication software before making a decision.

Thank you, I will clarify this with them!

i feel like if HR is using teams for interviews... there's a 95% chance it's using teams internally too. The same could not be said for zoom or google meet; where internally teams might be whats used. So to me I think it's a great leading indicator to run (not walk) away.

I think you should relay that feedback, but in a polite way. Let them know you’re interested, but that you’re concerned that some of the tools won’t let you be effective. Just don’t make assumptions when you give that feedback.

The reason I suggest this is you don’t know what you don’t know. The company might switch off of Teams tomorrow or perhaps some director doesn’t like it and has a plan for a replacement. Perhaps it opens up a conversation on how you can do it better. And lastly, maybe you’re wrong, or you can find a workaround. This is one of the hardest things I struggle with, but from time to time I’ve formed opinions and then reversed them after learning a new way to do things.

Tell them! It does seem a bit petty to me re Teams, but who cares what I think. Enterprise software has a broken feedback loop which is why it's so bad. We need more people leaving jobs over it imo so that cios/ctos start factoring in the impact of crappy enterprise software on their employees. People failing to speak up is why we have to deal with so much crap at work. Consumer software that's no good just doesn't get bought (microsoft seems to have found a way around this, but you see my point)

Yes, it's okay. No, it's not petty and spoiled.

You don't need anybody's permission to reject a job for any reason. Don't let people pressure you into serious commitments. If you don't want to work with Teams for $X, don't do it. You shouldn't care what other people will think of you for not taking a job.

The opinions of people who would judge you for this decision are not worth considering.

For your purposes, I think it's 100% okay to decline a job for (almost) anything. Think about it- they can turn you down for (almost) anything, legally protected reasons notwithstanding, right?

I agree with some other respondents that it's probably best not to go into detail if they ask- a simple "I don't think I'm a good fit for your environment at this time" should suffice. I wouldn't mention Teams, specifically, unless they really press for details (they almost never do).

Side note: ditto, Teams irritates the p** out of me on all platforms as well, as do the Android versions of most of the O365 suite.

Turn down the job for whatever reason you like (internally). If they ask you why, the correct answer is "I found a better fit, thanks. Best of luck with your future endeavors".

I’ve heard of people turning down job offers because the employer uses Jira, and I sympathise with that position.

Over the years I've worked with a number of different bug/task trackers. I've largely found them to be about equally good/bad but with different pain points in each. Can you tell me why you think Jira is bad and what alternative is better?

I'm sure everyone has their own reasons for disliking Jira. Personally, I find it to be slow and overly complex/rigid. It seems to encourage less competent middle manager PHB types to obsess over minutiae like all the various possible configurations, filters, workflows, etc, and miss the point of empathetic communication between humans.

I just want a minimal, digital KanBan board that my colleagues can use for collaboratively organising work with the least amount of friction. I think Trello works rather well for that. I'm sure there are others too.

Oh lets throw perforce in there too. Ugh. I had an easier time when I first learned git.

Perforce is actually growing on me.

I think what changed was having a built in “checkout this file” in my editor… because my biggest issue was friction of checking out files, and losing context by the time I had done that.

But the shelving/fetching/reconciling/diffing works pretty decently.

Swarm could use a bit more love though.

That is fine, if you can afford to be picky. I will not use BMC Remedy or HP Service Manager and would absolutely drop out of an application if I detected them. Life is too short to click a million more tiny 'form fill' buttons.

Man, I used Remedy 20 years ago. I can't believe it still exists. If I saw that in an IT stack today, I'd be running the other direction too!

Yes, it is okay.

Software developers are so severely in demand that you can reject a job on whatever you fancy because frankly you can. You have a unique opportunity to make your life as enjoyable as possible and whilst most people don't have the luck of having this much choice over their job happiness you happen to be one of the few privileged people who can so make use of it.

Secondly, I 100% understand where you come from.

I cannot work with Teams either.

In fact I'm a bit like you and actively try to avoid companies which use these softwares:

- SharePoint

- Teams

- Azure

- Azure DevOps

- Atlassian stuff

Why even ask the question? Reject a job for whatever reason you want. If it’s because of teams…so be it

It is okay to reject a job for literally any reason at all, no matter how petty it might seem or even be. And we’re almost all spoiled here. It’s okay to recognize that, but you shouldn’t let that make you feel you have to take work you wouldn’t find rewarding if you don’t need it.

You can send that feedback, but I doubt it’ll make much difference other than making your reasoning known… unless they’re already seriously considering a change.

Just thank them for the time but you have selected another position. Don't explain unless they hire you as a management coach.

Is your anger petty and spoiled? In absolute terms, yes, obviously.

E.g., I regularly saw a guy working at a rental car desk and commented on his always sunny disposition. He said he came to the country* with the promise of an IT job but it was a lie. Now, he can't get out and his boss told him to always smile or he'd be jobless (and thus homeless with a high likelihood of starvation).

Are you Spoiled, Petty? Yes, but many of us are.

Doesn't mean you should take the job. Just be grateful for your circumstances.

*I won't divulge the country. Don't bother guessing.

Honestly, remembering this can be a useful coping mechanism.

Even most of us here have had jobs at some point in our lives that were torture by comparison to what we do now.

My worst day of software beats the hell out of being a valet at a cheap hotel.

The software suite is part of the work environment, _especially_ in a remote world. If a work environment is obviously going to make me miserable, and I'm able to identify that _before I even start_, I'm not going to take that job.

I would just decline the offer without explanation. If pressed for an explanation, be honest but diplomatic about it.

  > Is it ok to reject a job because I don’t like their software?

Definitely yes. Orgs using outdated/user hostile/plain bad software is a definite red flag when judging fit.

  > Is it ok to send feedback that I don’t really want to work with that software?

What purpose would it serve? Either the person has influence over it or they don't. And either they want to change it to something better or they don't. But even if it's yes to both, unless they are a tiny company they are going to be stuck with it for the foreseeable, if only because of organisational inertia.

Feedback might eventually help the next guy, which might be you.

It's perfectly OK to turn down a job for any reason you obviously feel strongly about.

On the other hand, if you want to give a reason at all, it's best to articulate something 'appropriate' even if that is not the actual reason.

(I've been forced to spend my days on Teams because of the pandemic and I really don't like it, either, btw)

That said, giving Teams as the reason, if you think you can do it without repercussions, would be a service to the profession.

To be honest with you, it sounds diva'ish to me, and I've been known to be something of a diva myself.

It's entirely reasonable for a company conducting meetings with outside people to use some kind of wide-spread software, like teams, this software, regardless of your personal opinion, pretty much "just works" and so they save themselves and their interviewees a lot of pain by using it.

I think you should arrange for a conversation with them and talk with them about tools and the software you would be forced to use (and how often/much) and what alternatives are available/acceptable for you to use for the bulk of your work.

Where I am, the systems are running $OS and the official docs talk of $EDITOR, but they have virtualbox and vmware available for you to install, and if linux and vim is your deal, you can go ahead and use that.

It's ok to send feedback, but understand that it's probably not going to change anything at the organization in question, except brand you as the 'Anti-Teams Crank'.

It's also perfectly ok to reject a position based on anything at all; the UCC suite they use is a perfectly reasonable reason, considering how much time you'll likely have to spend using it. Hell, I rejected an offer because the office was in an old building and the wooden floors creaked like mad.

However, given the weight of your opinions and the emotional response you have to an environment that doesn't suit your needs, have you thought about starting your own company?

Turn down a job for any reason you want - you have nothing to feel bad / guilty about. But honestly, don't go into detail / give that reason. It sounds unreasonable, and could hurt your reputation (people tawk).

If you have a long enough career is Software Dev, you will almost certainly at some point end of using a software product you personally don't like. Learning to compromise / pick your battles is a career skill like any other.

Apologies if this sounds overly critical, but as a hiring manager, I would consider it a bullet dodged. Drawing hard lines in the sand over small things like this would be a red flag for me.

Just say you reject, no need to explain - I believe this is the way of the least drama.

If the job is great in other ways, then it is the wrong priorities to let that decide it I would say. But if you are undecided, perhaps this is the way you find you are not too keen on it.

The job is great in all ways, except my chair has a wire that pokes me in the leg all day e ery day. It's $250k and interesting worthwhile work that isn't based on scamming anyone. But I can't get a different chair and there is no kind of special pants that can armor against that wire. I just have to be poked, every day, all day.

No one can say what are "wrong priorities" for anyone else. If a job where you had to suffer a bad smell would not bother you enough, good for you, but you can't tell anyone else "it's just a little smell it doesn't matter".

Just like no one else can tell you you are wrong for tolerating things they find intolerable.

Actually, if anything, there is actually a small right that goes the other way. Everyone who tolerates indignities makes life harder and more miserable for everyone else. But I'm pretty sure you would reject any such argument that anyone has any right to say that your priorities are wrong.

Except you would not sit on a chair that pokes you in the leg, you would work with a piece of software that milions of people use, and manages to get by with. By all means, reject the job offer, but the comparison is ludicrous.

Millions of people eat McDonalds.

The difference is being force fed McDonald’s vs eating it because you enjoy it.

If you eat McDonald’s. It doesn’t mean I have to. If you use teams, I have to.

What? I was pointing out that "millions of people do x" means nothing. Millions of people may indeed actually like using Teams.

Yes to saying no. No to saying why.

It's perfectly acceptable to have an intense dislike for a piece of software, and to go so far as to discard potential roles to avoid it. But I think people may think you're a bit weird if you come out and say it. Also, I doubt it'll make any difference (decisions to use Zoom vs Teams usually come from above, and I doubt the hiring manager would feel comfortable telling his manager that they lost a candidate due to a software that the higher-ups chose...)

You might end up at a Teams-less job but find you are forced to use some other software there that is much worse than teams but which you never heard about. Perhaps it’s an awful time reporting thing. Or just SharePoint or Jira? There is always a poison.

But yes, I’d avoid saying why. Sadly, because when I argue “if we pick tech X people might leave or not join” no one believes me. Because obviously people won’t say why they don’t take job offers or quit jobs, if that is the reason.

It is definitely okay OP. I love GNU/Linux to a point that I refuse to work for any company where I have to use a Windows machine. I can tolerate a Mac, but I'm willing to take slightly lesser money for a Thinkpad running Ubuntu/Whatever. I also cannot stomach the Atlassian software, so I won't work with those either. BitBucket is a travesty that is only matched by Jira and surpassed by Confluence.

If you were going to work in a machine shop, and you found out that they buy all their tools from the bargain bin at Low Cost Tools, it would be totally reasonable to back out for that reason.

As software engineers, our productivity tools are key to our success, and it's totally reasonable to demand good tools.

I believe it is poor form for a company to dictate what software it will use to videoconference with you during an interview. Now you're not just a bit nervous about the interview, you're also stressed that the mic and the camera and the connection will all work on some software that you just installed and have never used before.

A more humane solution would be for the company to ask the interviewee which videoconferencing software they prefer, and accommodate that. Decent-sized companies could easily set up a few computers in a spare room loaded with Zoom, Teams, Skype, 8x8, Webex, etc and have the interviewer use that computer with universal compatibility with the interviewees' application of choice

I've never seen this happen, however.

For a job a few years ago, I was open to Teams, and the latest MS ecosystem. I was excited to finally get a chance to use outlook. (turns out they rewrote it and did away with everything that made outlook appealing)

It really is such a painful experience all in all, and so hostile to user experience, that I cannot do it again. And it's only gotten worse... and will continue to get worse - because the order of priority is microsoft -> your company -> you.

So the answer is YES. Tell them you don't use MS products and that it's not a fit.

Teams made me bitterly angry too, and it really doesn't have to be that way! Work somewhere with great tools, and you'll have much better chances of also working with great people.

I am inquisitive about what kind of enterprise communication software you think is good.

MS Teams is not perfect but it's not that bad either. I have used Teams, Slack, even Discord a little bit. I don't think anyone of them is above average.

I started my career on IRC, that was pretty good but needed a little bit of discipline and a good pastebin to work effectively.

I have used Skype for Business (formerly Lync, former-formerly Office Communicator) and that was in some ways worse than teams.

I have also used XMPP for internal communications and that was infinitely better than Skype for Business for the things you would want a chat program to be good at.

Slack is good enough, significantly better than teams but definitely what I could consider a baseline, it improves on IRC in a meaningful way in many areas and is a bit superfluous in others. (though, I suppose many people would consider the things I prefer superfluous, so, hum)

Zulip is quite exceptional, I highly recommend trying it.

I use Slack/Zoom at my current employment and it's perfectly serviceable, on MacOS, Linux and Windows.

Depends on what other options you have.

If you have 6 months saved up and already have a job, no rush to get a new one.

If your 3 months behind on rent, then take whatever job regardless of the stack.

Teams is tolerable. It would be silly to pass up an otherwise good opportunity over it

It's petty and spoiled.

Look at the job on the whole-- consider the pay, the work you'd be doing, your place in the organization, etc.

In the grand scheme of things, the software they use is a tiny part of it, and one you might even be able to change from the inside.

Also, Microsoft for all it's fault is pretty good at writing software. Maybe you're looking at it incorrectly. Or maybe they'll have a nice upgrade soon.

I wouldn't turn down an otherwise good job because of it. When the economy inevitably zig-zags (as it always does) and jobs are harder to come by, you might remember this moment either happily or not so happily.

I agree that it’s spoiled but they are a free being and they can choose whatever they want. You and I wouldn’t reject the job, but they can.

However I don’t think the feedback on their communication software really means anything to them. The recruiter it’s probably going to chuckle at that and move on to the next person thinking “wow we dodged a bullet”. It doesn’t matter what they think anyway because OP will be moving on as well.

What pisses me off is incompetent HR outsourcing everything to a patchwork of disconnected third-party websites. Once you are "onboarded", that stuff tends to recede into the distant background, luckily.

If it's just for video conferencing, have you considered getting a dedicated device/smartphone just for teams ? Would free your main computer and let you work efficiently when you don't need it.

All communication with people would be done via teams (that isn’t face to face) and that would include all meetings.

If you shared your concerns with them respectfully, how would they react? There are multiple possibilities, but it will also tell you about the people that you're going to work with. If they handle your answer poorly, it might inform you that they're harder to work with. On the other hand, there's another extreme where they will say "We feel exactly the same way and maybe this is a good opportunity to switch". You just never know - if I were hiring you, I would want to know if there was something keeping you on the fence.

It's a mistake of large consequences to imagine other people think the way you do.

If someone invites you out to a sushi dinner, you are free to decline simply because you do not eat sushi; but you should also consider your audience when communicating your rejection of their offer.

It's fine.

I've quit three jobs at this point because they made me use software I don't like.

I'm just about to go back to a company that 15 years ago wouldn't use the software I wanted. So, I left for another company that did. Now a days it's industry standard and the whole department there works solely in that software. And thanks to the pandemic we're all remote and I don't have to move. AND they're hiring for my exact position. I'm so excited.

1. It sounds pretty to me but I’m not you and if you have other options then so what.

2. Make sure you’re not just looking for excuses to cover up insecurity or imposter syndrome.

3. Do not tell them (because of 1).

You can just say no. You are not obligated to say why. It's not like the recruiter is going to be able to do anything about it. Even if they passed that message up it's not like they anyone going to be like "OMG, dijit declined our offer because of Teams, we better change that ASAP".

I hate Teams also but honestly if you are hung up on this, I wouldn't want to hire you anyway.

I'd say you're well within your rights to reject it for any reason, but particularly if you WFH you will interface with it a lot.

And teams is kind of annoying for those reasons and more, although for me it is a tolerable pain.

But you also have to weigh up whether the pros of the role outweigh that con as well, otherwise you might be doing yourself a disservice by focusing on that one issue.

I'm not sure what people think is so terrible about Teams. Is your communication software causing you to transcend space and time? Teams works, I can chat the person or group I want instantly, call them, see my calendar. All with keyboard shortcuts, no mouse required.

Is using Teams more painful than the positive side of this gig, proportional to its importance to your life?

I see your sentiment repeated a lot, usually from people who have only ever known Microsoft chat software. (this is not a judgement, just an oft-true observation)

I might recommend trying something else for internal communications for a while.

After 2 weeks you will understand what I mean.

I can explain it the following way: Imagine someone replaced your keyboard with a touchscreen, and that touch screen would sometimes display keys in the wrong order, or not register keystrokes.

On the one hand, you've lost tactile feedback of what you're typing, which is already a minor annoyance, on the other it's inconsistent even when it's working, and randomly so. Everyone insists it's superior because it was free and anyway: everyones using it.. and after all "it's just like any other keyboard".

But you know. I know. Bad tools are awful, inconsistent tools are worse.

Yes. It is ok to reject a job for any reason, or even without one.

(It is also ok to reject a candidate for any reason, or even without one.)

I think this is a risky take. Any company you work for will use dozens of tools and it is possible you will dislike one or many of them. Having said that, I'm tired of using Macs, and would love to work for a company that issues a Linux laptop :-). Unfortunately they seem to be hard to come by these days.

It's ok to reject a job for just about any reason, including a bad vibe. Do I happen to agree with your priorities? Absolutely not. Do I think you should try to find a job that clicks with you, especially in an incredibly favorable market like this one, definitely yes.

I’m a macOS and Linux guy working on Teams / Windows and loving it. It annoys me every time someone in the org sets a Zoom meeting. Teams meetings are so much better. Integration into Outlook and Drive and OneNote is a huge step forward.

But your mileage will vary. You do you.

It is, software are just tools.

I complain all the time about C and UNIX, yet it might come as a surprise that I have used many flavours of commercial UNIXes since 1993, and used C more times that I care to count.

There is more to a job than whatever tooling they might be using.

Yes it's okay to reject a job if you don't like the software they use. It's your life, your decision what you're willing to put up with. End of discussion.

Sure, perfectly reasonable. But if UX matters that much to you, have you considered that you might find more meaning and fulfillment in working as a UX designer than as a programmer? UX design still pays pretty decently, you know

You're free to do it, but is it good idea?

I previously used Skype for Remote work and I must say that Teams are pretty decent.

All those integrations - Outlook invitation + accept button + instantly it being in Calendar on Teams + reminder about meetings.

I like it.

I wouldn't communicate it to the employer, but at the end of the day you're not obligated to work for anybody and can choose to reject an offer for any reason that suits you.

I've got to say, while I'm not the biggest fan of teams, I've been using it daily for the last 5 years on all platforms: iOS, Android, Windows and macOS and while it isn't without its shortcomings, I can't imagine it enraging me enough to quit a job or pass up an opportunity. Sending this feedback to a potential employer seems kind of ridiculous too. I think I'd be more flabbergasted than anything to read that a candidate who seemed like a fit decided to pass on the job because they hated Teams with such fervor.

Mine regularly crashes on me during meetings, it freezes up and fails to load convos or attachments, and the notifications don't seem to work for me. It truly holds me back in some form or another when Slack did not.

It's a matter of tooling, will the company provide the tools that are best for the worker? Or will they provide tools that are cheap to acquire but not as good as others. It's not a good sign if they start skimping on tools.

If I were to leave my position I have now, it would primarily be because I spend at least an hour of my day dealing with Teams problems or waiting for Teams to load something.

The answer is somewhere between who cares quit your bitchin, and fck no our jobs are in demand why work with sht software if you don’t have to.

I hate teams too.

I'd be hesitate to take any data job without a Datagrip license. Unless the job is interesting of course.

Jetbrains personal licenses can be used for work, as long as you’re not financially compensated for the software purchase.

That's a good point.

Yeah it's petty and spoiled. You could just get used to it but choose to be spiteful. It's just a chat/video tool, who cares where the buttons are?

OTOH if you feel that strong about it how do a bunch of random strangers get to invalidate your feelings? The strong emotions that makes you decline a job is a good indicatior that you give a fuck. Try to move in that direction and you may find motivation and purpose.

I can’t get used to it, that’s the major problem. My previous company used communicator then lync then Skype for business and then teams. I worked there for a few years with teams as the “primary” conversation platform (though my team also used slack- but that meant you couldn’t contact anyone outside of my team using slack ofc)

No doubt Teams improves some things from Skype for business, but the issue is that the UI is generally inconsistent with itself and notifies people randomly. “You might like x”

Maybe it was mismanaged, maybe my org was too big (20,000 people), maybe the groups were setup wrong.

But when I am in a chat with someone and I can’t type to reply because I get pop ups that steal my keyboard focus, or I have to dig through a bunch of IM chats I’ve been having to find the right conversation to continue. Or I post something accidentally in a discussion group and it posts as if it’s a forum post and due to the rules of that group I can’t edit or delete it… then get notified of all the replies… I get frustrated.

>notifies people randomly. “You might like x”

>pop ups that steal my keyboard focus

FWIW, my company uses Teams, and I've never seen a pop up or auto suggestion or the like. I'd be interested in hearing if anyone else has the same experiences that you do. Maybe we're not power users? It is mostly an IM and video conferencing/web meeting thing for us.

same, never heard of that behavior and I use Teams daily

The pop-up notification thing was likely because I was on Linux. It would generate a toast which was an "important" window, which would then steal focus.

The suggested content was very jarring, basically it worked as if someone had highlighted me in a post; but they had not highlighted me. Teams gave me advance notice that this might happen by telling me explicitly that they'd be suggesting content I might be interested in.

I found a blog article about the functionality here: https://office365itpros.com/2020/03/26/teams-trending-sugges...

It doesn’t make sense for a workshop that builds cool tools to use tools that aren’t cool at all.

Seems legit to say no.

Ha where I work they are going to force Microsoft’s antivirus client onto Linux workstations.

If you feel that strongly about Teams imagine when you are forced to use truly bad software.

Oh. I have used absolutely astonishingly awful software.

The thing about awful software is: it usually has the opposite of network effects, nobody wants to use it, so people find work arounds.

In a few companies I have learned low level interactions with particular bits of software so that I don’t actually need to use the software directly.

In others I have reverse engineered the file formats of software so I can serialise and deserialise the contents of the proprietary file format.

But teams can’t be worked around, is expected to be used often (all day, really, for almost all communication) and has astonishing network effects.

That is precisely the best reason to reject a job.

The more I read this, the more I'm convinced OP is trolling...

btw. teams is one of the fewer ucc suites out there that ALSO work on linux. of course it's not perfect, but it's less worse than other stuff.

No, it really isn't. It's a steaming pile. Even zoom is better.

I've had to use Teams on linux. The first time I started early to get it setup, installed and get in the meeting. I was actually pretty impressed. It just worked.

Fast forward 2 months or so later and I have another Teams meeting on my calendar. It worked last time, so I'm expecting to just hop on. It took me 30 minutes to get into it. I have no idea how it went from working fine to the steaming pile that it is, but I hope to never use it again.

I've gone to just running Teams on Chromium on Linux. Much faster than the Desktop app, and audio works on it reliably. Unfortunately on the app my audio input would cut out every few minutes and require the app to be restarted. Never figured out why, and found a lot of others with similar issues.

My current job uses slack (and zoom for outside or very large meetings). It works quite well actually, even on Linux.

slack is not an ucc product. (zoom is tough) (ucc also includes "legacy" phone)

Pretending to understand the discussion I googled about "ucc products".

So now you know:

Our Products

    view all.
    whole bean coffee.
    ground coffee.
    drip coffee.
    instant coffee.
    ready-to-drink.
    Coffee Capsule.
    Drip Pod.

I think this is the definition. Though I had not heard or seen the term before.

https://www.techtarget.com/searchunifiedcommunications/defin...

To my mind slack firmly fits this definition but it does sound very enterprisey and perhaps there are other definitions.

Ucc is unified collaboration colab, the Term is dying and means, chat, phone, conferencing in a single suite

This is a really great example of how it's never just Teams. You're also going to have to pretend that phrases like "UCC suites" are real and helpful.

It's perfectly ok to reject job for any reason.

Bleep.

My first impulse is to say “Really? Pffft… Cmon thats not a real problem. Grow up.” because that would not bother me at all. I would not make the choice you are making for myself.

…which is projection. My first impulse is not worth listening to because your decision is not about me. It is about you and your career. So my feeling of wanting to roll my eyes a bit at it is totally irrelevant.

Your decision sounds like a wise one for you.

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