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

116 points by dijit ↗ HN
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?

219 comments

[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 245 ms ] thread
mytailorisrich
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)

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

piousfraud
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.

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

ncmncm
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.

db579
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.
kc10
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.

jabroni_salad
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.

NumberWangMan
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.
jnwatson
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.
igetspam
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

webmaven
> 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.

two_poles_here
Discord does the `general` thing too, and it's annoying AF.
Al-Khwarizmi
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.

warrenm
- 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

eyelidlessness
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.

xkgt
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.

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

oceanplexian
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.

piousfraud
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.

arwineap
> we're in a Windows world

There are at least dozens of us linux workers here

piousfraud
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.
ncmncm
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.

PascLeRasc
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.
kyawzazaw
Try Google? I am certain they have an office. Maybe automotive companies like Aurora. Or NLP related companies like Duolinguo.
meesterdude
> In Pittsburgh

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

ncmncm
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.
benhurmarcel
Not everyone works in software.

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

1shooner
> 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.

goalieca
I think he means that office365 absolutely dominates.
Tijdreiziger
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…

em-bee
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.

warrenm
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)
em-bee
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.
warrenm
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"

em-bee
sleeping better at night because the fate of my business does not depend on the whims of these companies is also a business decision
warrenm
As a business owner, do you want to be concerned about one company's potential whims? Or 50?
em-bee
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.
warrenm
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

Tijdreiziger
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).

ghaff
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.

Brian_K_White
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.

gensym
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.

engineerDave
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.
jvanveen
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

warrenm
>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

usea
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.

ninefathom
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.

merb
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.
zaktoo2
No, it really isn't. It's a steaming pile. Even zoom is better.
twothamendment
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.

marcolussetti
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.
dijit
My current job uses slack (and zoom for outside or very large meetings). It works quite well actually, even on Linux.
merb
slack is not an ucc product. (zoom is tough) (ucc also includes "legacy" phone)
alophawen
Pretending to understand the discussion I googled about "ucc products".

So now you know:

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

dijit
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.

floxy
>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.

cirrus3
same, never heard of that behavior and I use Teams daily
dijit
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...

version_five
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)
afarrell
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.

ozfive
This is a really fair assessment of the situation here and can save a lot of people some real heartache in the long run.
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rizkeyz
Just say you reject, no need to explain - I believe this is the way of the least drama.
FastEatSlow
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.
dijit
Thank you, I will clarify this with them!
meesterdude
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.
Aissen
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.
dijit
All communication with people would be done via teams (that isn’t face to face) and that would include all meetings.
mcronce
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.

killjoywashere
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".
mongol
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.
Brian_K_White
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.

mongol
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.
Brian_K_White
Millions of people eat McDonalds.
dijit
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.

Brian_K_White
What? I was pointing out that "millions of people do x" means nothing. Millions of people may indeed actually like using Teams.
yakshaving_jgt
I’ve heard of people turning down job offers because the employer uses Jira, and I sympathise with that position.
fredophile
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?
yakshaving_jgt
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.

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

scbrg
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.

GianFabien
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.
amatecha
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! :)
GianFabien
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.

tester756
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.

jabroni_salad
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.
buttocks
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!
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wly_cdgr
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
Andrew_nenakhov
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.)