After all networked smartphones and computers were placed under control of the regime, resistance hackers relied on microcontrollers harvested from ordinary household devices like smart lamps and vape pens to slowly rebuild the covert but resilient mesh internetwork that became known as FreeNet.
When I think of what's out there I think of cheapy ARMs, maybe STM32 knock offs. Honestly the F103C8T6 is so prolific that's probably a solid chunk of all processors in existence. And then things like ESP32s. So to not see ARM or Tenscillica on there is a bit weird. But maybe I'm reading too much into it and it's more of a thought experiment
Looking at that list, collapse OS seems to cater to 8-bit only. It’s also aimes at “ built from scavenged parts” boards. I’ve often come across Hitachi h8, Blackfin, PIC, avr, the occasional ARM and other controllers in the wild. But they all have one thing in common: the flash is locked and inaccessible without some jtag tools. The only times you’ll see external flash (winbond & co) is with an fpga or a controller who’s had his otp memory configured with a bootloader.
I often re-purpose scavenged board because of their useful layout, but only after swapping the controller for a programmable one. The notion of scavenging the controllers themselves… far less practical as you think.
The iot devices are hacked on the application layer. You have a controller running some linux distro and you work your way in over tty/telnet/eth. That’s an entirely different ballgame than repurposing 8-bit avr or 32-bit STM microcontrollers.
Someone write a novel please. Not sure who will be more appropriate: Stross (more fun?), Stephenson (more of a slog through the first 600 pages, then an abrupt 180 and frenetic action in the last 100 with newly introduced, yet game-changing characters?).
> Stephenson (more of a slog through the first 600 pages, then an abrupt 180 and frenetic action in the last 100 with newly introduced, yet game-changing characters?).
With the six pages in the middle where he may as well say "Right, I had to learn a lot of algebra for compiler optimisation to make this bit work, so now you get to learn it too"
Agreed on the ridiculous page counts, but I don't find Stephenson's pages a slog. Exhausting, maybe. There's a lot going on. But he makes me laugh. I'd like to meet that guy.
It's not the greatest piece of fiction ever written, but Robert Evans of Behind the Bastards podcast has a pretty easy read[1]. It's also offered as a free audiobook read by him as a series of podcasts.
Might not be what you want if you want more technical & hacking versus dystopian capitalism collapse. But he gets bonus points for Texas getting nuked as a lore point.
If my 208V,200A service here in New York City were free for 4 hours a day, I might buy a ~30kW chiller to run during free time and store its output in a big thermos or ice cube.
Assuming a COP of 2.5 (small, air cooled), that would be around 300 kW or 1M BTU of cold storage per day, which is around 42 kBTU or 3.5 tons of raw cooling capacity running 24x7.
I imagine if commercial buildings with support for larger and vastly more efficient chillers did this we could take a huge chunk out of NYC’s ~50 TWh power bill.
Ok, I’ve convinced myself. ConEd, please update when the free electricity program is activated.
One of the first things I do after getting an inquiry from a recruiter or friend referral is lookup the MX record for the company’s email domain. It is an anonymous one-command check to see if they’re a Microsoft shop.
If they are, it’s enormous personal red flag. MSFT is very popular so I’m only speaking about my own experience, but I have learned over the course of 20 years that an MSFT IT stack is highly correlated with me hating the engineering culture of an organization.
I know I am excluding a lot of companies with great engineering culture where I would thrive and who just happen to use Outlook/Sharepoint/Teams, etc. but it has had such better predictive power of rotten tech culture than any line of questioning I have come up with during interviews that I still use it.
I don’t mean any disrespect to MSFT-centric engineers out there - it’s not you it’s me.
I’ve definitely noticed a correlation with low regard for labor (h1b abuse). But maybe that’s just a location thing, I’m in California where regard for labor, especially local talent, is non-existent. You know, move fast and break things like nascent tech worker unions and the state itself.
Companies more likely to want to save money on labor costs (employing many h1bs) are also likely to want to save money on Tooling costs, by using safe options like MSFT stuff, rather than finding better tools.
Also yes, due to availability and various other reasons, H1bs, particularly from India, seem more likely to use a MSFT stack.
It’s “do what everyone else does” style of corporate leadership.
“Nobody ever got fired for choosing MSFT” goes hand in hand with “if we don’t exploit the H1B system to get cheap coders who won’t sue us or try to organize then someone else will.”
Using FOSS, hiring citizens, treating employees well, actually innovating and producing great products, all hang together. Sadly, such companies and people are increasingly rare in tech, because the tech oligarchs fund bad people and bad products because they are often greedy egoists whose wealth is derived from being in the right place at the right time, or from what I call “moral arbitrage” (doing things others are too ethical to consider) rather than deriving wealth from actual talent or ingenuity. Ymmv
it's generally pretty remarkably bad. i think i agree. it sets a sort of psychological baseline culture that computers and their software should be shit, which is a pretty bad influence for people making software to be engaging with day in and day out.
ok, excluding things they have bought and not yet destroyed. what's good? (we'll accept that xbox is good, distinct and unrelated to the rest of their offerings)
Libreoffice Calc and Excel are probably your strongest argument, Excel runs the world after all.
But, if it wasn’t for incompatibility and fear of incompatibility- I have a hard time thinking Calc is materially worse; I doubt theres a single workflow not possible in Calc- and if O365 utils get worse looking then Calc will win there too soon enough.
For everything else in the microsoft stack, either its “this thing does many things thus is incomparable to any one thing!” or its simply worse.
Even the best tools that I would actively defend (MSSQL) are only equivalent to other solutions (PGSQL) and almost never better than everything offered elsewhere.
My company uses a MSFT for domains, email, office work etc. but hands all the employees (not just engineers, HR as well) Macs. I don't know what kind of places you're working for but I'm not really interested in spending more time debugging your mattermost instance or email server instead of working on the core product I was hired to work on. I agree microsoft software is a plague but good luck convincing the people with the money to use something else lol
God, Teams is absolutely miserable. Video calling on Teams makes you appreciate just how well Zoom works.
Teams macOS client? Crashes on startup, even after clearing all of my user data.
Teams iOS client? You can join a call by a link, but you can't see the call UI because it's behind the login window.
Teams on Firefox? No video support for years, and most recently just glitches out and shows an empty page when trying to join.
Teams on Chrome? Tried joining a meeting, and was told by the organizers that they couldn't admit me because the button wasn't doing anything.
I've had all four of these things happen within the last month, and it's made me want to tear my hair out. I get that none of these are "Microsoft Edge/native Windows client", but they could at least pretend to care about other platforms...
Over the years I have used teams on Windows, Mac, iOS, Android and various Linux distros (where I was limited to Chrome and Firefox due to lack of an official client). While it is certainly not the greatest tool in the world, I have never encountered issues like these.
This varies widely by niche. My experience is that a solid majority of West Coast tech companies / startups use Gmail or other non-MS hosted solutions. Outlook or MS365 are a good indicator that the codebase may be older than some of the people writing it.
Silicon Valley in particular uses Google Workspace at a much higher rate than the rest of the world. If you count every one- or two-person startup as a company, Google probably does have a solid majority. If you count mailboxes, Microsoft still easily wins.
Note that MX records are misleading here. They have no false positives, but are full of false negatives --- daisy-chaining MTAs is common, and since Microsoft owns the mailbox, it's invariably last in the chain. So the MX record will show something like Proofpoint (pphosted) or Mimecast or an internal company host, when really it's Microsoft in the end.
> Now, if a company says they use SharePoint or Teams to store their documentation, run to the hills. Wikis or bust.
It's never just Teams or SharePoint or a wiki. It's almost always some abomination created by putting various bits of knowledge on all three. Also, corporate wikis suck because how your team classifies data is almost invariably different from how someone else wants to see it.
SharePoint, for all of its flaws, typically gets used by the major announcement-and-policy makers at a company, because they just want to use MS stuff (primarily out of ignorance of alternatives), so at least it's somewhat coherent for everyone in the company.
I've been at quite a few places that wouldn't touch the MS ecosystem with a twenty-foot pole, and history has proven that to be a wise decision on their part. It certainly has not cost them any business.
I’ve worked for six companies and only one of them uses Outlook. I think there is some availability bias by industry or job type. I know there are lots of companies that use Outlook, but you may be overestimating how many do, particularly among the companies more likely to be represented here (tech and/or startups).
Worked for a company that used Lotus Notes 10+ years ago and switched to 365 and outlook, hard to believe that an email client could be worse than Lotus Notes. Only worked for Google workspace companies since then.
I'm gonna be honest, you sound like a problem employee.
The companies not using Microsoft, are using Google. Which in my experience is equally or measurably worse.
Just personal data points, but every avowed Microsoft hater I've ever worked with has been... difficult. Like a-drag-on-the-team-because-he-refuses-to-use-company-tools difficult.
Edit: How does an aged post on this site go from +4 to -1 in the span of a few minutes?
My current gig is an MSFT shop and when I joined I was genuinely excited to find out just how far that universe had come in the 20+ years since I last worked in a corp environment that uses it. The Ballmer days are long behind and there's been some genuinely cool stuff coming out of MS since.
I don't think I was ready for how bad it is. Not going to go into an inventory of it all, but I'll admit I genuinely lost it when I discovered that the terminal -- the terminal! -- freezes after staying open several days, and you need to kill it and restart it.
The worst part, I think, is how the brokenness ends up permeating the engineering culture. Malfunction is just normalized. There's no reliability baseline; if it's broken to the point the amount of work you can do is zero, just open a ticket with support, who will add yet another bit of duct tape or just reboot something somewhere and ask you if the problem went away somehow.
I think possibly the coworkers who don't look away from the emperor's non-clothed-ness, and the higher standards that they drive, may be more valuable to have around than you imagine, if you can get past the bad emotions that their lucidity gives you.
Says it's unthinkably bad then proceeds to give only one example. There are several other issues you can list.
>the terminal -- the terminal! -- freezes after staying open several days, and you need to kill it and restart it.
I wonder when that issue ever happened since I'm always ssh'd into my homelab via the terminal for days and never had to restart it since it never froze.
>The worst part, I think, is how the brokenness ends up permeating the engineering culture. Malfunction is just normalized.
Microsoft didn't make the culture like that, the managers were always like that which made them choose Microsoft because they just choose the biggest corporate name brand supplier. It's your typical old-school MBA.
I've worked at all-MS shops and at all-Linux shops, and despite the issues with MS tech, the all-MS shops were far less toxic and pleasant to work at as people treated it as a 9-5 job instead of their own personal start-up project that needs to strictly conform to their world view, therefore the linux-shops I worked at tended to attract more of the toxic problem employees like your grandparent whos work life revolved around tech evangelism than pragmatism, which I didn't like since I just wanted to get work done and go home, not participate in some crusade at work to judge and shame choices of OS/IDE/languages/frameworks/tools the company should be using. As long as I get paid, I'll use any widely available tool, I don't really care.
> as long as I keep getting paid, nothing else matters
Mindset explains the other users complaint perfectly I guess. I suppose it comes to how one views and feels about work. Take pride in your work? Dont go MS shop. Don't care and are just there to get paid? MS shop.
that attitude explains why I can no longer edit calendar evemts in the android app unless I turn the phone sideways, and a deluge of other issues with MS products that reek of sloppy low effort work.
>Mindset explains the other users complaint perfectly I guess.
Yes, how dare SW engineers work to just put food on the table for their families, and not fight your imaginary tech revolution against MS-shops?
> Take pride in your work? Dont go MS shop.
Sorry buddy, but I work the SW equivalent of "putting the fries in the bag", my work has no impact on the tech issues in your life, and I don't live in The Valley, or the US, or some major international tech hub where hip, non-MS jobs fall from trees in order to make an impact, and so MS shops make the brunt of the jobs market where I live. Should I go homeless and hungry just to virtue signal on HN on how righteous I am via your self-defined Russian nesting doll of obscure purity tests?
>that attitude explains why [...]
Hate to break it to you, but some people on HN like you guys in this thread, are so over privileged with your career opportunities, that their delusions take over rationality and common sense views of the reality outside their bubble, and think the rest of the world must conform to your viewpoints or else they're somehow the "evil ones" responsible for the issues you perceive.
By all means feel free to have your own beliefs and values that differ from others, just don't try to virtue signal, judge others, or impose your view on others, as nobody likes such obnoxious arrogant people on their high horse thinking they're on the right side of history and everyone else is wrong. Live and let live, that's my life's mantra.
I don't have the opportunities you're talking about. You misunderstand who I am or what my background is. I don't come from the USA and in fact you literally couldn't pay me to go work in or for the USA. Not in my entire life has that ever been possible. USA has always been a last resort option for me. Not that I have the option, but to even consider it, it would need to be the last option left.
I'm not saying that you cannot work in an MS-shop. I am just saying that the attitudes I see reflected in the comments supporting MS-shops explain why MS-shop output looks the way it does.
Ultimately, it comes down to company culture not individual developers. I wouldn't hold devs accountable for what is a systemic issue, in fact I am grateful there are those devs who don't care about taking pride in their work who can survive in an MS-shop without it draining their reason for being. If not for them, positions in places where taking pride in your work doesn't come at personal cost would be far more competitive.
However, that doesn't mean it isn't worth calling out an emerging pattern of MS-shops being the kind of place incompatible with wanting to take pride in your work.
I’m an American living in the US. Worked at a startup acquired by a very large enterprise and I very much appreciate your attitude over the parent’s comments. I find it incredibly demoralizing that so many people feel the way they do and appreciate those who work for more than a paycheck. I quit my job (thankfully I was in a position that I was able to) because of this attitude being so prevalent.
You want to provide value to your customers and anything getting in the way of that should be a frustration, not something we just accept. Stagnation will lead to decline that is very difficult to reverse. I don’t know what you do, but thank you for your perspective and disposition and for admonishing the above attitude.
I do not disregard it, but I have no idea what to do about it and it gives me an existential concern about the future of the world with which I am familiar (America? The West?). I don’t think it is a healthy society if the people responsible for systems (critical, luxury, or otherwise) do not care about succession or improvement of the systems they build or maintain. Best case scenario, the problem the systems solve fail and someone else sees value in solving the problem, so they solve it again and re-discover the “why”. My guess is that the longer it takes for the failures to happen, the longer it will take to re-learn the “why”.
I don’t like that people just work for a paycheck. I understand why and it’s very hard to argue against people doing it and not caring when their managers or the companies they work for don’t care about them in return. The Cambrian Explosion of solved problems will lead to an deluge of catastrophes when a large percentage of those systems fail unless people take care to transmit the “why” to the future stewards of these systems.
That's a great point. I can be less diligant in my documentation than i'd like to be at times. This means somethimes the "why" of something isnt discussed. I need to stop doing that and find a way to add all the "whys" without overwhelming readers who just want answers. Maybe footnotes or appendicies.
While I appreciate the effort and strive to do so myself, I’m not sure this is entirely a matter of you trying harder/doing better. You can often explain the context well enough to a degree that is practical enough to solve the narrow case, but communication is lossy by nature, so descriptions of systems become impoverished. It is so hard not to make bad assumptions about the reader, especially if you look forward even 1 or 2 generations from now. It seems this is a large part of the role of the US Supreme Court and I’m certain that is not perfect even with days of deliberation. For technically enforced systems with faster feedback loops, higher volumes, and lower tolerances, there are necessarily more errors.
> I don't come from the USA and in fact you literally couldn't pay me to go work in or for the USA.
That's why I also said "international tech hubs" because that's were it's easier to find non-MS jobs outside the US. But it seems that passed over your head and you spent 3 sentences to go on a tangent on how much you hate the US even if the US wasn't my point.
>an emerging pattern of MS-shops being the kind of place incompatible with wanting to take pride in your work
There's plenty of non MS-shops that make SW just as bad, if not much more worse and evil than MS-shops (nefarious Facebook and Google spy-/ad-ware isn't done in a Microsoft shop). SW stack is just a tool and a tool does not define one's character just how whether you use DeWalt or Makita doesn't. Which is why I dislike your binary/black-or-white view on this topic as it screams ideological zealotry, short sightedness or even borderline discriminatory.
Taking "pride in your work" in the context of working for someone else's SW corporation, is mostly a luxury belief of privileged people who have the luxury of choice in the labor market, while for most folk, labor is done just as a way to pay bills, while taking pride is reserved for activities with hobbies, family, children and friends.
You don't need to "take pride in your work" to be a kind person and functioning member of society, but it seems it's just a virtue signaling purity test by the "holier than though" crowd of tech workers.
Companies that use Microsoft for one thing invariably use it for another, and then another, and then another, because they're "already paying for it". Their business model has always been like this.
Microsoft Office usage is highly predictive of lots and lots of other choices.
I’m fairly certain I’d deeply regret my life choices if I had to use teams daily. Occasional (mandatory) usage interacting with it for various gov’t usage, etc. has reinforced that view.
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.
If everyone else genuinely loved Teams, I could stomach using it even though I hate it. But regardless of what anyone says about it, it seems the rest of the company also hates it— it's a ghost town. There's no sense of community whatsoever.
My personal "sample size" is too small to be sure, but I worry that Teams usage is poisonous to collaboration and engineering culture.
When I did my orientation, we got set up on teams and they made a group chat for our cohort. I think I’ve used it…once in the two years I’ve been there? Otherwise, Teams is for meetings, thankfully the company managed to stick with Slack despite pretty much everything else being wrapped in the MS tendrils.
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
I’ve never been so constantly annoyed and confused in an email client than I am in Outlook. I miss actual important emails because the UI is a sea of junk.
When it was introduced Teams was pretty bad but these days it works just fine. I don't see that it being a decider really more than just historical preference.
We have Teams and Slack and I don’t ever see anyone push for a chat in teams. Most channels are a ghost town. To me, teams would be “fine” if it’s all we had, but when you see it next to Slack it’s a no-brainer for me. Teams UI is just baaaaad
A few years ago I worked at a company that actually used Telegram and Telegram Desktop. It was great. Available on mobile and desktop, all platforms, supports all the features we needed, new users get full history.
The best I've used, and I say this in all sincerity, is actually Facebook's work platform (but it's not a chat-first experience, obviously, and that's probably what made it better).
My company uses both outlook and slack. Teams is also used for scheduled meetings but never touched for chat. I personally don’t find teams to be significantly worse than zoom but I’d rather never use either.
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.
I definitely wouldn't call Slack "awesome". Self-hosted tools like Zulip are doing a better job. Slack is however, the smaller evil amongst MS Teams, Zoom, MS Outlook and similarly bad software. Like, if someone told me all communication, including text chat shall happen via MS Teams, I would seriously consider looking for another job. It is a recipe for absolute disaster and completely broken communication. If the same happened with Slack, I would dislike it, but I guess it is at least usable. Still garbage, but not as much garbage, as MS Teams.
What do you do to make Zulip better than Slack? A vanilla installation is not better, and scales worse with more users, more devices per user more mobile users and more integration sources. But, I’ve never been in a situation where I was forced to make Zulip an attractive communication tool to an organization; there must be a lot that is possible. Getting away from a Salesforce product is a good goal.
What I would do if hosting Zulip for a company, is:
(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.
I’ve never touched a scaling issue with Zulip, how many devices are we talking about here? Maybe I’ve just never touched the walls of scaling it. The architecture seems fine to scale if you self host though.
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.
I think the point is that GP red flagging all MS shops, which is more or less just sorting companies by headcount and flagging all from top, implies incompetency at GP's side than at the company side.
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.
> I think the point is that GP red flagging all MS shops, which is more or less just sorting companies by headcount
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.
It absolutely would. I can even tell you what type of laptop/dev equipment you’d likely get.
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.
SharePoint really is that bad though (and I say this as someone who used to develop for it as a platform).
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.
How about using tools that do their job great instead of one tool that can do them all but none of them good.
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.
Google is leaps and bounds preferable in my experience than Microsoft. I agree with the above. A Microsoft shop isn’t a guarantee the company culture is bad, but it’s correlated enough to be a flag.
G workspaces support has always been at least decent in my experience. MS support, less so.
Oracle support took the cake however, but that was with a commercial support license and a weird bug triggered by a newly released feature (never do that!) in Oracle DB, many years ago. ORA-600 errors for the ‘win’.
As someone who has been accepting of MS houses and worked at a few, the heuristic holds up in my admittedly anecdotal experience. The Mac houses are fine and Linux houses have been best.
Yeah, when I hear "problem employee" from a higher up I think "I want that guy on my team." Sounds like someone who pisses off management, but is too valuable to fire.
Well, in my experience every Microsoft shop I've ever interacted with has been a problem employer. Why do you feel your angle has greater moral defensibility?
OP doesn't like working for people that have bad tools mandated by the company. He uses a proxy measure to determine this beforehand.
The other poster had problems with people like OP because they don't use the (bad) tools provided by the company.
It doesn't sound wrong from either side. It's actually a win-win for both if they don't meet, which would mean OPs strategy is great for both. It might preclude OP from some opportunities though if the filter is too wide.
I personally do think that if you mandate the wrong tools you will never get the best developers, because great developers are very picky about the tools they use. It can be a bit too extreme in some cases, but I've rarely seen anybody that is good at this job and not very opinionated in some way or the other.
In most cases the problem is mandating though, if you give recommendation but allow deviations from that recommendation within reason you can usually get everybody to be happy.
IME the call quality varies quite widely between video calling software. And being able to reliably hear and be heard with reasonable latency is pretty important!
Maybe it can be argued that it depends on how you use it, but meet is so far and away better for video calls and screen sharing, its not even funny.
Jitsi is also an incredible improvement, and it is self hostable and free.
Teams is likely the worst software that a company will force on all its employees- with that in mind, I guess some people can get stockholm syndrome? Some people who only jump from MSFT shops literally don’t know that there’s anything better. They went from Communicator to Lync to Skype for Business and now to Teams- and Teams is better than those just about.
The plague that is currently infesting our software industry is "Promo-Driven Culture". Employees are incentivized to get a promotion, not to make life better for anyone, except for their manager's promotion.
When it comes to Teams, unfortunately we do. It's actually used across Microsoft in general. A company of this size requires Teams even if just for the sake of keeping up with security and compliance.
It is funny, that even a Slack Huddle, something that's not even the core of Slack's function, is better than anything one gets with MS Teams. MS Teams is so laughably bad, I think I have never used a worse chat/voice chat/video chat program. Probably not even Skype in its single core days was worse, even though it ate one third of my single core CPU, just to have a call back then.
In the early Skype days, that tradeoff made sense. Internet speeds across the globe were far from fast so they spent more CPU cycles on compression so they could save on bandwidth.
Do they? Didn’t Microsoft force all its employees back to the office?
That doesn’t sound like they have faith in Teams themselves.
I use Teams every day and it can’t even do threading in channels properly. The spellchecker is unreliable and even copy and paste is occasionally patchy.
It is not a good product. I’d switch to Slack given the choice.
My work laptop is Windows, and the only native applications I run on it are a web browser, Zoom, and the company's VPN software. Everything else runs inside WSL.
I greatly prefer Debian to Homebrew, so if I can't run actual Linux, this is (to me) superior to trying to develop on a Mac.
I agree that Debian beats Homebrew. But wouldn’t a persistent Debian container on Mac be better? WSL is nothing more than a container on the system, no?
The Mac hardware is vastly superior to most Windows laptops, especially enterprise Windows laptops.
> The Mac hardware is vastly superior to most Windows laptops, especially enterprise Windows laptops.
Man alive, what you mean is normie "Apple-style" Windows laptops with a bit of an "enterprise" makeover. Mobile enterprise workhorses (e. g. Panasonic, Getac)? Apple has no hardware in this segment. Detachables with extended five-year warranties plus certified dual-OS support? Nothing. Some of you fruit afficionados need to get out more.
With Windows 11, WSL has X and Wayland support, so you can run graphical applications as if they're native (e.g. share the same cut-and-paste buffer, switch between windows using alt+tab, and so on). It's also much easier to attach USB devices like Yubikeys to an already-running container than the last time I tried to do the same with Parallels. (That was quite a few years ago, so maybe it's gotten better.) You can also launch Windows applications from Linux, which is makes it trivial to control my (Windows-native) browser from within WSL.
I strongly disagree about Mac hardware vs. Thinkpads or Framework, but to each their own.
Not in my industry. And workstations, mobile or otherwise, on the clock? You work with what's certified and available. But to be fair, "Apple people", praise the Great Maker, are utterly irrelevant here. Hardware- and software-wise.
But, he truly does. That is not because they have caused any offence, it's just that this pattern of behaviour may indicate similar tendencies in other parts of the tech stack.
For example, if OP for some reason stops liking a maintainer of, say, RabbitMQ or PostgreSQL, they might be penetrant about switching a finished project to a different stack without any tangible reason, causing completely unnecessary headaches for the team.
Using collaboration and productivity software as a proxy for how the company thinks about collaboration and productivity is, good, actually.
He didn’t say he doesn’t like Satya or Gates or whatever, he was clear that he doesn’t like the solution.
I just went back to a microsoft shop, and honestly while the company is great you can feel how the communication is stilted compared to my previous company. Those little edges, warts, unreliable loading moments and awkward loading times all sum up to people being disincentivised to create, edit and consume documents or even to chat.
This inexplicably drives meeting culture as async communication just doesn’t happen. I totally understand why its primarily MSFT shops that have RTO mandates.
Only anecdotes across 20 or so companies (and: european ones).
Companies that use Teams as primary communication software have all had strong and non-negotiable RTO mandates, companies that use o365 and Slack allow exceptions for certain individuals and teams, but have also had RTO requirements.
Those that are using gsuite or are paying lip service to email and documents (excel, word etc) and using mostly Confluence and something like Slack for most communication are the only ones with proper flexible working.
Now, I could be wrong, and there's no public data to back this up. If I think about how I would construct such a dataset I can't even fathom how; even if I was to check every company with an RTO mandates MX records there would be no way to control for the sheer dominance of O365, and, no way to tell who is only playing lip service to their productivity suites.
I'd be interested in hearing other opinions, but like mentioned, it feels pretty universal. I haven't seen even a single exception to this, and I'm pretty old and I have friends across many companies.
To be fair, any employee that knows their worth and is not afraid to treat the relationship the same way as the company is a problem for the company ( and thus: 'problem employee' ).
I disagree. He sounds like an excellent, intelligent, potentially attractive employee.
People who signal that MS is sh*t are always worthwhile to listen to. They have character and principles, and they know bad and good software when they see it.
Needless to say, in my company all microsoft products are banned and I would never hire microsoft fanboys.
^^Microsoft may have its warts, but I don't know how someone can go from Excel to Google Sheets or Outlook to Gmail and think: this is just such a major upgrade I don't know how I existed in the past and I would never work someplace that uses Microsoft productivity tools.
Excel in particular, for any power user, sheets just doesn't hold a candle to its functionality. Outside of the valley Microsoft must still have a 10:1 ratio of corporate use, I never run across a customer that has made the switch.
> How does an aged post on this site go from +4 to -1 in the span of a few minutes?
Oh, I can answer that one. It's happened consistently to me on HN when I post about a specific topic.
First, the post looses two points at once. When I see that, I know it's going to continue losing points consistently until it settles into -2 to -4. There is some trigger that starts with a loss of two points, and then continues down.
Addressing the "aged" part, I think people forget that timezones exist and so different global audiences may wake up and add their votes on a long-running comment chain here.
I am not a Microsoft hater; in fact, I have been using Microsoft products since MS-DOS 3.3. But Outlook and its ecosystem are a horrible shit show and an indicator of terrible decision-making.
Google Workspace is an infinitely better productivity framework; there's no space for discussion here.
I currently work in a Microsoft shop that has Slack. Everyone uses Slack and all the Microsoft tools, including email, are crickets. This was never the case in the Google shops; we still used email.
What? Are there UX "standards", the lack of which might impede an end-users experience of the product? Or are you referring to protocol and/or interoperability standards, which make it difficult for 3rd parties to integrate (though, looking at my current work desktop, I can see that Zoom integrates very well with Outlook).
This was 2 years ago; compression in Azure Front Door works only when you enable caching in Azure Front Door. This is made up rule by Microsoft. It is not standard.
Also I was compressing my responses in my back-end but Azure Front Door was decompressing them. Why?!!!
The idea that the most commonly purchased thing in the market is of mediocre quality should not be hard to accept, and neither should the idea that some people only want tk work with what they, personally, consider to be the best.
If this is "tailored", then I don't even want to know what how bad other MS products are. Oh wait, we can see that in Windows in general. But then again MS Teams is worse. It's almost as if the more MS has its fingers on something, the worse it gets.
The quote is from Steve Jobs and is absolutely true. As soon as the first bozo infects your team, they will start hiring other bozos, and after a while your org has regressed to the mean. Therefore you should hold a ridiculously high bar for hiring. A temporarily empty seat is preferable to a non-A player.
I wish to understand the virtue of Amazon culture.
It seems that at L6 and below workers are a Taylorism-style fungible widget driven to convert salary into work product, guided to create the most output for the longest time before mentally breaking down, then being swiftly replaced, with L7 and above being so incredibly political that keeping the snakes and vultures from eating your team is a full time job at every level of senior management.
It never made sense to me how such a ruthless and inhumane culture is sustainable in the long run.
I would love to hear positive counter perspectives from Amazonians because the anecdotes from my L6-L10 friends describe what sounds like an inhumane hell on earth.
> It never made sense to me how such a ruthless and inhumane culture is sustainable in the long run.
It’s pretty simple, actually. Once such a dominant market position is achieved, you can get away with almost anything, whether with customers or employees. This is true of all the BigTech companies.
I think there's more to it. When you're dominant, you make money whatever. Think of Amazon et al. as huge spigots of money. Now, it becomes optimal to fight for more of that money coming your way. It's like the resource curse for countries. Nobody gains from growing the pie; they gain from stealing the pie. At some point, parasites and parasitic behaviours invade.
> It never made sense to me how such a ruthless and inhumane culture is sustainable in the long run.
It doesn't need to be sustainable in the long run: just needs to get to the next quarter and there continues to be enough desperate people in the US or India willing to be ground up in the machine for a chance to buy a house in a major metro
(Source: I was at Amazon for 10 years, finally quit last month)
I think it comes down to demand and supply for jobs.
The only time Amazon was forced to change its ways was during Covid hiring boom where they couldn't compete in the talent market. They were forced to increases their salary bands and the culture was also a bit easy during that time. But starting mid 2022 it's been an employer's market and Amazon is making sure to juice every bit out of its employees while it can
It's not as conscious as that, its an emergent outcome of the snake pit.
Engineers have to spend an inordinate amount of time on "managing up", which means they have very little time and attention to do what would otherwise be a reasonable workload. Additionally, good engineers hate and despise this so it contributes a lot to the burnout.
People cite this figure a lot, but its a little misleading because when you own your own servers a lot of the expenses that are typically hosting actually fall under a different category.
If you use AWS, the people hired to manage the servers is part of the price tag. When you own your own you have to actually hire those people.
I mean, it's not like you can get away with running with zero SREs if you're running in the cloud. The personnel costs for on-prem hosting are vastly exaggerated, especially if you contract out the actual annoying work to a colo.
Smart hands is more expensive than having dedicated datacenter staff, and the dedicated staff do a considerably better job. It's worth noting that WMF runs _very_ lean in terms of its datacenter staff.
You're also ignoring the need for infrastructure/network engineers, software engineers, fundraising engineers, product managers, community managers, managers, HR, legal, finance/accounting, fundraisers, etc.
1. I think their spending is a good thing. Charitable scholarships for kids and initiatives to have a more educated populous in general are things that I am happy to donate to.
2. As stated in the article, hosting is still a relatively simple expenditure compared to the rest of their operation. If Wikipedia really eats a huge loss, falling back to just hosting wouldn't be unrealistic, especially since the actual operations of Wikipedia are mostly volunteer run anyways. In the absolute worst case, their free data exports would lead to someone making a successor that can be moved to more or less seamlessly.
The only real argument in my eyes is that their donation campaigns can seem manipulative. I still think it's fine at the end of the day given that Wikipedia is a free service and donating at all is entirely optional.
AFAIK, they don't do any scholarships or really do any educational activities. By far their biggest spending item is just $105 million for salaries, mainly for all of its leadership, which is a majority of its expenses.
The second biggest line item is grants at $25 million, primarily for users to travel to meet up.
Then $10 million for legal fees, $7 million for Wikipedia-hosted travel.
I think it's pretty unethical to say you have to donate to keep Wikipedia running when you're practically paying for C-suite raises and politically-aligned contributors' vacations.
Paying the travel for a bunch of highly active volunteer contributors to meet up ocassionally and hash out complex community issues pays massive dividends. It keeps the site moving forward. Its also pretty cheap when you consider how much free labour those volunteers provide.
Whenever people criticize wikimedia finances, i think they miss the forest for the trees. I actually think there is a lot to potentially crticize, but in my opinion everyone goes for the wrong things.
What are the rights things to criticize in your opinion?
Also, asking out of ignorance, what things need to move forward? I thought wikipedia is a solved problem, the only work i would expect it to need is maintenance work, security patches etc.
> What are the rights things to criticize in your opinion?
I think criticism should be based on looking at what they were trying to accomplish by spending the money, was it a worthwhile thing to try and do and was the solution executed effectively.
Just saying they spent $X, X is a big number, it must be wasteful without considering the value that is attempting to be purchssed with that money is a bit meaningless.
> Also, asking out of ignorance, what things need to move forward? I thought wikipedia is a solved problem, the only work i would expect it to need is maintenance work, security patches etc.
I think the person who i was responding to was referring to volunteer travel not staff travel (which of course also happens but i believe would be a different budget line item). This would be mostly for people who write the articles but also for people who do moderation activity. In person meetings can help resolve intractable disputes, share best practises, figure out complex disagreements, build relationships. All the same reasons that real companies fly their staff to expensive offsites.
Software is never done, there are always going to be things that come up and things to be improved. Some of them may be worth it some not.
As an example, there are changes coming to how ip addresses are handled, especially for logged out users. Nobody is exactly saying why, but im 99% sure its GDPR compliance related. That is a big project due to some deeply held assumptions, and probably critical.
A more mid-tier example might be, last year WMF rolled out a (caching) server precense in Brazil. The goal was to reduce latency for South American users. Is that worth it? It was probably a fair bit of money. If WMF was broke it wouldn't be, but given they do have some money, it seems like a reasonable improvement to me. Reasonable minds could probably disagree of course.
And an example of stupid projects might be WMF's ill-fated attempt at making an AI summarizer. That was a pure waste of money.
I guess my point it, WMF is a pretty big entity, some of the things they do are good, some are stupid, and i think people should criticize the projects they embark on rather than the big sum of money taken out of context.
Isn't it true that only around 10% of Wikipedia massive budget is used to actually run the core website? The rest goes to bloated initiatives in the Wikimedia foundations orbit.
Page 21 of their 2024 annual report[1] has expenses listed. About $3,000,000 for web hosting, about $100,000,000 for salaries and benefits out of $178,000,000 total.
How many people are needed to maintain instagram, facebook, etc? Wikipedia isn't just a collection of static content. The page contents include static and dynamic content (via a lua scriptable set of templates), semantic data (wikidata), multimedia management (wikimedia commons), editing tools (WYSIWYG editing, with full support of the wiki markup and templating), global caching infrastructure, multiple datacenters for HA/DR, etc.
There's also the need to support the staff and volunteer developers, which includes wikimedia cloud services, git hosting, config management and orchestration, CI, community hosted tool/bot services, etc.
WMF has ~600 employees, and that's quite lean, for a service of their complexity.
That includes all of the Wikimedia websites and non-profit activities though, not just the functioning of Wikipedia.org proper. That is a much lower percentage of the total.
Infrastructure has long been a tiny portion of wikipedias costs.
I think Wikipedia even makes it easy to export all of its data, I don’t think AI scrapers would be a significant new cost
These are two very different cost factors. Scrapers don't use the available data dumps, that's why they scrape. They are also kind of dumb as they get lost in link structures constantly, which leads to unecessary traffic spikes.
I don't know -- as I said in another comment, my Wikipedia usage has gone down 90% thanks to LLMs.
But that means I'm still using it. Especially for more reference stuff like lists of episodes, filmographies, etc. As well as equations, math techniques, etc.
If you're the kind of person who donates to Wikipedia, you're probably still using it some even if less, and continue to recognize its importance. Possibly even more, as a kind of collaboratively-edited authority like Wikipedia only becomes more important as AI "slop" becomes more prevalent across blogs etc.
But were you originally convinced to donate by one of those giant Jimmy Wales banners that come up once a year? People won't see them anymore if they're using AI summaries.
scraping Wikipedia feels like the stupidest possible move. You can in fact download the entire encyclopedia at any time and take all the time in the world parsing offline.
For such purposes, I'd naively just setup some weekly job to download Wikipedia and then run a "scrape" on that. Even weekly may be overkill; a monthly snapshot may do more than enough.
You can download twice-monthly database dumps, but they consist of the raw wikitext, so you need to do a bunch of extra work to render templates and stuff. Meanwhile, if you write a generic scraper, it can connect to Wikipedia like it connects to any other website and get the correctly-rendered HTML. People who aren't interested in Wikipedia specifically but want to download pretty much the entire internet unsurprisingly choose the latter option.
as somebody that has wrassled with the wikipedia dumps a number of times, i don't understand why wiki doesn't release some sort of sdk that gives you the 'official' parse
I have wrestled with it too. I believe it's because wikitext is an ad-hoc format that evolved so that the only 100% correct parser/renderer is the MediaWiki implementation. It's like asking for an SDK that correctly parses Perl. Only Perl can do that.
There are a bunch of mainly-compatible third party parsers in various languages. The best one I've found so far is Sweble but even it mishandles a small percentage of rare cases.
This. I tried that a few years ago and fell off my chair when I started to realized how DYI the thing is. It's a bunch of unofficial scripts and half-assed out of date help pages.
At the time I though, well it's a bunch of hippies with a small budget, who can blame them? Now I learn that there is 600 of them with a budget in the hundreds of millions??
there are more complex tests in that benchmark. my point was, a decent server can serve tens or hundreds of thousands requests per second when it's a few kilobytes of static content from a RAM database.
as long as your web service isn't horribly mismanaged, even to a $5 VPS the bot traffic is infinitesimal background radiation.
> As Miller puts it, “With fewer visits to Wikipedia, fewer volunteers may grow and enrich the content, and fewer individual donors may support this work.”
Contributors are a tiny % of users. I'm sure they've got some room for improvement on incentivizing new contributors. But Wikipedia is a gift to humanity and I hope we find new ways for them to be paid for their contributions to AI.
> It means that now, people are paying for their AI subscriptions
Most people are not paying a cent. And the people that are, are paying for stuff like coding assistance or classification, not the kind of info you get on Wikipedia.
Looking up Wikipedia-style information on LLM's is not a driving factor in paid subscriptions to ChatGPT etc.
If nobody uses Wikipedia they won't get any donations, and unfortunately they wasted the last two decades blowing literally hundreds of millions of dollars on random community and outreach programs instead of building an endowment in case something exactly like this happened.
No really, it was in the news a few years ago but nothing changed as far as I know.
As 432 Park shows, unregulated development here in nyc does not increase the supply of homes for people to live in but rather the supply of abstract assets for wealthy people to launder and store wealth, for which there seems to be a nearly endless international demand.
Housing can either be an affordable resource for people to live in, or an asset that’s likely to appreciate faster than the rate of inflation. There are strong arguments for both. As New Yorkers we need to make our vote in November count and decide which is the priority.
I grew up reading The Economist, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come find the idea that corporations have the right to use their money to form trade associations and directly lobby the government insane. I can understand how business owners may want to spend personal money to make the case of their personal business interests to their legislators, but the idea of Nestle, S.A. and PepsiCo, Inc. being afforded speech rights and allowed to meddle in the “human affairs” of government no longer makes sense to me.
I once had a board member who was also on the board of Ryan Air, and he casually told me a story about when their CEO gave a presentation on adding a credit card -powered interlock on the cabin lavatories. He told them, “They’re my planes and if you have the nerve to shit in them you should have to pay for the cleanup”.
My colleague thought he was portraying the CEO as a cool guy and decisive manager, but I thought the guy sounds like a sociopath.
i heard from an airport employee once that they wanted to keep the airplane started in between flights. This was specifically so they can skip the preflight checks. Thankfully they were not allowed to
