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Comment by georgeecollins | Hacker News Reader

Teams is a pain in the neck! If you make an office calendar appointment for a zoom, Microsoft "helps" you by creating a teams invite in the text of the invitation that gets sent out. So there is always a chance someone you invite will click on the wrong link to be in the meeting. If you ever click on this link yourself teams will install on your system and try in the run in the background every time you boot your computer.

This is just hostile to the consumer. If I want teams I can install it.

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Teams on iOS used to chew through batteries like candy. It's supposedly better, but I really should have paid more attention to my battery life when I uninstalled it after leaving my last job.

As of now, I don't notice the battery impact of having it running on my iPhone 14.

Yeah it went from an active problem to not one. But that could still mean 2 hours and I’m not sure I’d notice.

This is a convenience feature in Outlook that is enabled only if you have a Teams licence, specifically that when you create a meeting in Outlook, it sets it as an online meeting.

You can turn this off, but last I checked can also set it to stuff like Google Meet, Zoom, WebEx, Facetime, etc if you have the relevant plug-in for Outlook.

That remembers me a virus that was adding himself to every e-mail sent by outlook. What was its name again ?

> You can turn this off

Why the fuck would I want to do that?

"Oh sorry, I accidentally joined the Teams meeting instead of the Zoom meeting, nobody was there for 15 minutes so I left"

I got sufficiently pissed off that this that I ranted about it: https://blog.dijit.sh/teams-microsoft-monopoly/

It would automatically reactivate that "teams" toggle.

For every one of you, there is probably one of me: That loves that feature!

Honestly, Microsoft blurring the lines between meetings and calendar invites was great, in my opinion. I was sad the day they took away some of that functionality (made it a non-default setting). Queue the calendar "meetings" where everyone is scrambling to find a Teams meeting link but it's nowhere to be found because the creator forgot to tick it as a Teams meeting, and everyone only noticed like 1 minute before the meeting starts.

It’s not only Teams. If I send a meeting invite from my gmail with a Zoom link, it gets replaced with a Google Meet link.

I have to Slack a Zoom link to everyone before the meeting every week.

My company uses Gmail and zoom and zoom is integrated into the new event screen. I've never seen a meet link on anything.

I have never seen this either. I am usually not a heavy zoom user, but I went through a relatively busy zoom stint the last 6 months or so - with links both in free gmail and in google workspace.

I have the opposite problem with my hodgepodge of things, where Zoom links get put in where I want Meet links.

If you want Teams you can install it.

And if Microsoft wants Teams, Microsoft can install it. Perfect logic according to growth-oriented project managers!

The only thing I can think of when reading this is the "damn, you live like this?" meme. I can't imagine using OS that does this to you and not being angry all the time (I'm not tribalistic, Linux has its own set of infuriating problems, but at least it feels like I'm in control).

This is specifically an Outlook issue, not Windows. The problem is the enterprise addiction to Outlook/Exchange that prevents employees from choosing a different email client.

Many workplaces will restrict your choice of operating system and email client.

I ask about the tools I will be using during the interview process. There are several that I refuse to work with and will end the interview at the next possible polite point if they are required. Microsoft Windows is on my blacklist.

The entire point of private retirement accounts and transferable skills is that you aren't required to stick with one employer. If your employer requires you to use bad tools then find a better employer.

>then find a better employer

What a clueless and entitled point of view.

Entire industries are almost exclusively Microsoft (basically all those that make the modern civilized world work: medical, transportation, semiconductor, logistics, automotive, industrial, architecture, infrastructure, CAD, etc).

Your choice then is unemployment. Not everyone is an app/web developer who can freely choose employers based on stacks and tools, end even then, not in a bear market. Most people wishing not to be homeless don't have the choice of saying no to employment just because they use Windows.

Your comment is the equivalent of "let them eat cake".

On the flip side, your comment is "Thank You Sir May I Have Another?"

If no one complains, not even the entitled who have some power, then the screws continue to tighten down.

>On the flip side, your comment is "Thank You Sir May I Have Another?"

I never said that. I said in many industries that choice is none existent other than unemployment and people care more about employment than they do about OS martyring.

Sure. But just because that's true of some industries doesn't make it true of all industries. Your comment comes across like rejecting hx8's practice because it could not be universal.

Even your use of 'martyring' is bizarre. My avoidance of Windows for the last 20 years is a mild discomfort, not martyrdom.

There is a long history of using one's privilege to help those with less privilege. If hx8 "entitlement" changes the workplace to allow Ubuntu as an alternative to MS Windows, then those with less privilege may be able to follow.

By rejecting hx8's practice, you close off that pathway.

My last Windows OS is Windows XP and I've never been unemployed.

Going through the Windows stack has significant disadvantages to your career as well. Those companies are likely to pay less than their competitors, they are usually less modern and offer less remote options or modern development organizations. It's a lose, lose choice.

>My last Windows OS is Windows XP and I've never been unemployed.

Like I said, not every office worker is a front-end dev. In other industries you have no choice but unemployment. Your lack of empathy towards other classes is showing.

>Going through the Windows stack has significant disadvantages to your career as well.

I don't know many but I've never met a .NET or SharePoint dev who's unemployed. On the contrary. All those crusty non-IT corporations seem to pay very well for others to fix their Microsoft stack. Maybe take your head out of the sand and see the real world.

I'm not a front-end dev either. It's not about "empathy", it's a market, you either play along the market or you suffer from it.

Show me the employees suffering.

It's in your own example, you are less likely to find remote working, modern development practices or competitive salary at your average SharePoint gig compared to your average fullstack, devops or data engineering job.

I don't think you know the meaning of the world suffering.

And data science and IT infra/support are different career choices that differ around skills and education rather than choice of OS vendor. Those jobs are not interchangeable.

Sure, if they are happy with those tradeoffs, that's good for them.

Even if otherwise, it's not like you can move from .NET dev to DS jobs on a whim whithout any kind of experience or specialization.

And where I live .NET jobs are far more abundant and better paid than DS jobs which are few and have loads of coopetition from newgrads due to all they hype they genrated.

That's exactly what I meant by suffering from the market yeah. That's another reason why I'm not working on windows. I'm enjoying higher salaries and better working conditions thanks to that.

Also development is a global market nowadays so that makes it even worse for this kind of jobs since they don't usually offer a remote option. It's telling that you say "where I live", where I live there's just no development job at all actually.

You still haven't proven how those people making a living on .NET/Microsoft stacks careers are suffering. Habe you actually seen people suffering, like from war and poverty?

Also, dvelopment careers being "global" is mostly in theory. In practice it doesn't work everywhere. Some countries don't have global remote work opportunities due to tax and labor laws making that very difficult meaning you're stuck with what the local market offers. And those few global remote jobs get hundreds of applications so actually getting one is almost impossible especially in the current bear market.

There's no shortage of full stack developers globally willing to work for cheap. Competing globally in this race to the bottom is no good if you work in a high CoL area unless you score a high paying FaNG or scale-up but getting such jobs is insanely competitive that's not realistic for most people I know.

That's some hyperbole right there, I'm just saying that they get paid less than they could and generally have worse working condition that they could have, that's all. Again, that's okay if they are aware of this tradeoff.

> There's no shortage of full stack developers globally willing to work for cheap.

That has to be the worst argument here, even Microsoft themselves outsources their own .NET work to India.

Parent comment here, chiming in days after this thread.

My primary purpose in making my comment was to help employees that feel stuck using bad tools. I hope my advice helps to encourage people to look for better opportunities, and to consider the software they will be using in those opportunities. I have given dozens of technical interviews, and no one has ever asked me "what is your development setup like?" as part of the interview. I wanted to share with other people my little trick.

Maybe my comment smells of privilege, but this is a privilege anyone can claim. After all, all tech workers have transferable skills and access to private retirement accounts.

If those requirements make you uncomfortable daily: "Damn, you live like this?"

And when it comes to non-technical roles, that "many" turns into "almost all".

Yes, this. linux sucks in a lot of ways. But it sucks for boring reasons I can deal with, like lack of resources, incompetence or even just ideas I disagree with. You know, just the every day inevitabilites that come with interacting with other human beings, even when they're doing their best.

But what is infinitely worse than that is, on top of all of those things still happening, also having a random chance of waking up every morning to discover that someone has very deliberately, specifically decided to make my life worse, not out of personal conviction, but because it makes a line go up somewhere in a board room on the other side of the world. That I can not deal with.

You mean like how Outlook injects an ad into nearly every email I receive encouraging me to use Copilot for sales even though I'm not in sales and think Copilot is, in classic Microsoft form, buggy, bloated, and nearly unusable beta software that they're plaguing on their customers and charging them for the privilege?

That’s interesting. Can’t say I get those.

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