Doing research on a potential employer and filtering out opportunities based on preferred toolchains is a green flag not a red flag.
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.
The only issues I’ve found with Zulip is how it looks and training people to use it right. I’ve had a lot of comments that Zulip has ruined people because they realised how good it is only after they stopped using it, and can tell that everything is so much worse, but the whole time they used it- they hated it.
The other issue, if we can call it as such, is that there’s not that many native third party integrations, we had to write our own bots for some pretty basic things. But writing bots is so much easier in Zulip than Slack (and for Teams its a lesson in genuine masochism) so I give them a pass.
(1) host an up to date Zulip version
(2) setup or rent a Jitsi Meet or other open source / free software voice + video chat solution. Jitsi Meet might be a bit difficult to properly set up, compared to Zulip, because of extra things needed, like TURN server and in general the complexities of web RTC. Maybe renting that for some < 10 EUR is fine for a company.
(3) Configure Zulip to have for example `/jitsi` or `/meeting` for creating meetings right out of Zulip.
(4) Setup other integrations, that exist for Zulip.
(5) Setup backups for the Zulip database. It is just a postgres database. One can dump it and move the dump to a backup store.
If this is too much, for example because the company doesn't have the knowledge in their employees to manage this, then one can also rent Zulip hosted solutions.
Getting away from Salesforce alone is in my opinion already worth it.
It worked pretty well, I do wish Zulip had better ability to generate links from the video call button, it works really well with Jitsi this way.
Yes, though Zoom came first, Webex copied their UI during the covid Zoom craze.
Why? It's much better than Teams, if for no other reason than Teams just got deprecated on MacOS Monterey and that's really annoying. Or rather not for just that reason, but for the reason that Teams is Microsoft's 10th biggest priority, whereas video calling is Zoom's only priority, so they make a better product.
Including IRC.
Microsoft Office usage is highly predictive of lots and lots of other choices.
Job sites could do with this as a filter. Even more specifically, ‘Teams’.
Why subject yourself to something you know you’ll hate every day if you can avoid it?
Is that being entitled? Plenty of people don’t have such choices, sure!
If so, who cares? Live your life, make your decisions. Don’t let jealous people make your life miserable.
Personally, I’d rank it as:
1. Google meet (as good as a gvc program can get for actual meetings, near as I can tell). Best when you have a group of people who are somewhat co-ordinated and not malicious though.
2. Zoom (not great for actual meeting quality, like audio/video, but not bad - and has a lot of useful tools and workflow stuff, especially for larger groups of strangers. I get it)
3..24 - every other random product.
25. Teams (lots of random bugs, worse than zoom for actual meeting quality, tons of silly MS’isms when trying to actually use it, somehow doesn’t work well for groups of people working together OR for groups of strangers, etc).
MS is the king of the package deal and ‘check box sales’, so they are impossible to avoid for long however.
My personal "sample size" is too small to be sure, but I worry that Teams usage is poisonous to collaboration and engineering culture.
I do wonder if they tried to push teams for text chat before I got there and were shot down. Management seems fairly receptive to some amount of give and take when it comes to decisions about office tooling e.g. I was cited as “the reason” engineers still have access to Figma Dev Mode, and I can’t say we had more than a handful of vocal people pushing to keep it. Company size is somewhere between 200-500 iirc
Do you even read your ‘weekly digest’?
/s
The web client is pants, though.
Like, if a fighter jet pilot came and told all American jets are equally weak and overcomplicated and ineffective, it probably tells more about that pilot than about the jets.
I don't know if that's the case, but that would be the idea.
The fact that it's so widespread in our corporate culture is more indicative of how enshittified it is. Now, realistically, we might not be able to avoid it because of that, but let's not pretend that it's not shit.
Yes, it’s not great, but so what?
File hosting, web application hosting and integrating with Office.
It tells the company values price more than capability.
I asked in my company why we use SharePoint and the answer was name a better alternative. So I asked an better alternative to do what? I never got an answer.
I wouldn't be surprised if many people find that smaller companies are more fun/interesting to work at, so even if this were only filtering out large companies checking for MS could be helpful.
Developer’s quality of life might differ.
Hard to say what the actual office environment would end up like (plenty of toxic nerds out there), but I’ve worked for CEOs who were devs, and I even when they were terrible people, I never once hated the development part of the job.