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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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_.

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.

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.

There's something wrong with scrum?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

[1] Or put up with whatever such thing.

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've never heard a company BANNING adblockers though.

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

> 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.)

And it is not that confusing.

It's a tool for tools.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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…

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.

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"

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

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).

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

There are at least dozens of us linux workers here

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

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

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.

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.

- 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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

- 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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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)

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 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?

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.

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.

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

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...)

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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).

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

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.

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

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.

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

But your mileage will vary. You do you.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

>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.

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...

Seems legit to say no.

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.

So now you know:

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

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.

…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.