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Comment by antihero | Hacker News Reader

When a company’s initial interview is on Teams I see it as a bad sign. If a company forces you to use Windows for your dev machine it’s a red flag.

If a company forces you to use a Citrix instance for your dev machine honestly run away screaming and take your sanity with you.

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I've had a few interviews that use Teams, but I've always just used the browser version, and it worked fine on a Mac and Linux last time I tried it.

You can do that, but if you get the job you’ll likely be having to use it for a lot more stuff. It’s a sign of a culture that wants to bundle stuff up and manage it in the corporate way as opposed to using the tools that people want to use to do their job.

So what product should they have been using instead? Meet, which is a Google bundle? Or the China owned Zoom, or god forbid Webex?

We used WebEx a lot at Apple. It was pretty terrible when I first started with a really bizarre client, but when it was updated to the more modern one in ~2019/2020, I didn't think it was so bad, more or less like every other VoIP program.

I still kind of viscerally hate it because I associate it with the boring and useless meetings that the middle-managers at Apple loved to schedule to justify their existence in the company, but that's not really WebEx's fault.

Slack, Meet, Zoom.

Teams tries to be the default chat app and video app and sucks at both.

I just had an interview last week on Teams and I couldn't join the meeting from a browser where I was already logged in. It just somehow redirected me back to the main Teams page, with no errors mentioned whatsoever.

I had to paste the meeting link into an incognito window to successfully join. This was on Linux.

The funny thing is, this likely wasn't due to any nefarious machinations by Microsoft but rather the total and complete incompetence which has been at their core since their founding.

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