Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Should you standardise tools in your company? Case of Miro vs. MS Whiteboard

engineering.telia.no

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 70 posts

Re: Should you standardise tools in your company? Case of Miro vs. MS Whiteboard

#51

Post by gumby »

tobr wrote: post #16
gumby wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Either way, I don't see why the people doing the work should not be allowed to (collectively) choose their tools. Because in a big company you’ll find some things are documented in a combination of jira and confluence while another are in big figma boards and nobody knows where to look (my gf’s company has exactly this problem). Also in a big company you want to have two teams collaborate but one uses one tool set…

I don’t understand. Would it be sensible to require people using Figma to instead use Jira? Two tools with completely orthogonal use cases. It sounds like you’re describing a different problem.

It seems that at her company, some people do use Figma for internal documentation. SHM.

Re: Should you standardise tools in your company? Case of Miro vs. MS Whiteboard

#52

Post by codethief »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #44
submeta wrote: post #23

At a former company, our newly appointed CTO staunchly advocated for the use of IntelliJ, including Webstorm and Pycharm. Coming from a predominantly Java environment, this preference was understandable. However, our team was largely composed of Emacs or Vim users. This sparked a passionate debate, culminating in a disheartened CTO and an aggrieved development team that stubbornly stuck to their favored tools. Two ke…

I've always been an advocate of people using the tools that work best for them. But sometimes, there's better tools out there than $EDITOR, especially when working in large codebases. Like a recent PR where 4 out of 5 usages of a renamed variable also got renamed, but the last one didn't, and was in an area not covered by tests and it made it to main. (And yep, how it made it past review is a question I'll be asking.…

> (And yep, how it made it past review is a question I'll be asking...)

Given that refactoring support in VSCode is not exactly great, either, and that even Jetbrains products have countless bugs in their "Rename" feature, I'd rather ask: How did the change make it past your merge request pipelines?

Re: Should you standardise tools in your company? Case of Miro vs. MS Whiteboard

#53

Post by hitekker »

GavinAnderegg wrote: post #14

It seems odd that a post on the official company blog is showcasing disliked IT policy. This reads like an airing of dirty laundry, and I’m kinda surprised it was allowed to be published. I understand the “we have food at home” IT policy of using software you’re already paying for. On the other hand, it’s clear that the author isn’t sure who made the call to ditch Miro and wants Miro reinstated. I wonder if this blog…

People are using "Norwegian culture" as an excuse but simple & scary "office politics" looks more likely.

Compare this blog post where the author threatens to quit to the previous ones, which express happiness with Telia, and an eagerness to ape Bay Area DevRel trends.

https://engineering.telia.no/blog/dev-happiness-fika

https://engineering.telia.no/blog/my-first-months-in-telia

Their internal company culture does not seem to be in a good place.

Re: Should you standardise tools in your company? Case of Miro vs. MS Whiteboard

#54

Post by hantonsen »

hitekker wrote: post #53
GavinAnderegg wrote: post #14

It seems odd that a post on the official company blog is showcasing disliked IT policy. This reads like an airing of dirty laundry, and I’m kinda surprised it was allowed to be published. I understand the “we have food at home” IT policy of using software you’re already paying for. On the other hand, it’s clear that the author isn’t sure who made the call to ditch Miro and wants Miro reinstated. I wonder if this blog…

People are using "Norwegian culture" as an excuse but simple & scary "office politics" looks more likely. Compare this blog post where the author threatens to quit to the previous ones, which express happiness with Telia, and an eagerness to ape Bay Area DevRel trends. https://engineering.telia.no/blog/dev-happiness-fika https://engineering.telia.no/blog/my-first-months-in-telia Their internal company culture does no…

I’m not entirely sure where you get “threaten to quit” from. I am generally happy working at Telia, and the Happiness Fika that you link to is a great way to work with improving the workplace, in my experience.

The point of this post, is to discuss how decisions like these are being made, and what I think should be a part of that process, using the example of our current Miro discussion as framing.

The point of the ending paragraph is not to threaten to quit, but that some people quitting is one outcome that is probable when the company decides to cut out a tool that many people use and like.

Personally I feel that the ability to be open about disagreements is a good sign for our culture.

Re: Should you standardise tools in your company? Case of Miro vs. MS Whiteboard

#55

Post by ianpenney »

merolish wrote: post #42
ianpenney wrote: post #13

If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. If you want to pass an IT audit, good fucking luck to you. I have about 20 years of experience dealing with this ranging from mostly harmonious all the way to civil war. 100 employees and 130 different SaaS tools. Got buy in from senior management to reduce footprint to lower cost and increase security and compliance only to get pushback from every…

Are there other popular tools you'd recommend/not recommend given cost/compliance concerns?

My advice here won't be one-size-fits all and there's far too much to cover against your company's mission to just give you a hot list of tools I like.

The biggest line of battle is going to be Google Workspace vs Office 365. I'm fine with them both, but not fine with giving them both to everyone. The problem is, if the majority of your company's documents and drive data is fractured over both MS and Google's clouds, it's going to be a nightmare to manage. Choose one and make them your identity provider and life partner. I understand the finance team probably needs a stand-alone Excel license, though.

The other very important part of standardization is hardware. This is something I had to get a bit ruthless about, because managing a fleet over an entirely remote trans-border workforce is expensive if you expect quick turnaround times on onboarding and an immediate replacement for that VIP who just cracked their screen.

I ended up setting up a rapid logistics operation using drop shipping.

Sales, marketing, etc get a 13" Macbook Air M1. Developers get a 16" M1 Pro because they justifiably need the performance.

No, we don't do custom orders. Not big enough to have spares of all kinds in stock (Apple supply chain lag was a real drag last year). Apple's MDM systems make those machines useless bricks to anyone outside the client's company. (If this sounds like something you need, reach out to me!)

I guess I'll just add that my biggest pet peeve with SaaS vendors is how they want you to pay for the super-duper-expensive package just to get SSO / SAML. That's ridiculous. It's not a cost center for you and it reduces both our risk. If I don't see at least "Sign in with Google" in your cheapest plan, I'm already pissed off as a customer and not going to be your change agent.

Re: Should you standardise tools in your company? Case of Miro vs. MS Whiteboard

#56

Post by TeMPOraL »

PeterStuer wrote: post #32
diarrhea wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Try convincing everyone that grammarly is a keystroke logger. Funny how it's not the opposite viewpoint that is scrutinized. Prove how it's not a keystroke logger, then Grammarly can be deployed. Until then, it's assumed to be malicious. That's how people treat for example ChatGPT as well.

Yet those same people happily use Office 365 without a second thought.

Microsoft is a serious corporation, i.e. a fat target for lawsuits. That makes them more trusted by default than random fly-by-night startups.

On top of that, any medium or large business using Microsoft tools will have a contract signed with them, one that covers SLA and data handling policies. In fact, this is pretty much the entire value proposition of Azure deployments of OpenAI models - from a corporate POV, OpenAI itself is a fly-by-night startup that can disappear any day, while leaking the company secrets your employees gave it all across the Internet. In contrast, Microsoft's ChatGPT (the very same models) comes with an SLA and data handling policies suitable for dealing with corporate secrets (with whole stack of audits and certifications behind them). That's why corporate will tell you to not use ChatGPT, but if you're lucky, they'll give you access to a copy of it on Azure.

Re: Should you standardise tools in your company? Case of Miro vs. MS Whiteboard

#57

Post by TeMPOraL »

bsuvc wrote: post #43
fjodir wrote: post #4

Just wait for the migration from Slack to MS Teams, makes me wanna stop working all together. Also, MS recently launched their Notion clone, so all Notion users in MS shops better prepare to migrate to a much worse alternative.

> MS Teams, makes me wanna stop working all together I think this is what some people just don't understand, especially executives or managers who are too far removed from individual contributors' day-to-day activities. The wrong choice of IT tools can suck the life out of your organization. Sure, on paper two tools can seem equivalent, but in reality, they are not the same.

I don't know, I may be the only person on the planet who actually likes Teams. Like, it's still a pile of shit like almost all software designed in the past 10+ years - but it's better and snappier and prettier than Slack ever was for me.

Maybe the difference is that my employer fully embraced the Microsoft stack, with Office, Outlook/Exchange, SharePoint, and Teams forming a coherent and well-integrated whole.

Re: Should you standardise tools in your company? Case of Miro vs. MS Whiteboard

#58

Post by TeMPOraL »

paleotrope wrote: post #39
probably_wrong wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MS Teams is... bad. Even if they were to solve the bugs and performance issues, and even if they actually implemented any of the features that the community has been asking for (push to talk comes to mind), the entire concept is flawed. Two problems with information are duplication (too many copies around, all of them slightly different) and finding where it is. MS Teams makes it easy to store duplicate data and hard…

You are absolutely right about the documentation aspect. We are about four years into Teams and no one can find anything. Massive numbers of dead channels. Files and things all over the place. Notification hell. One particular bad aspect is people started recording meetings. No one has any idea where these things get put. There are links that are shared but where are the actual files. I use a OneNote to keep track of…

> We are about four years into Teams and no one can find anything. Massive numbers of dead channels. Files and things all over the place. Notification hell. (...) No one has any idea where these things get put. There are links that are shared but where are the actual files.

Isn't this what SharePoint is for? As in, Teams integrates with it, so all the recordings, and planning boards, and file uploads, and yes - chats too, end up being stored there - where it is indexed and searchable (subject to your IT dept. competence and company access policies).

I have a feeling that most of the complaints about Teams come from people using it standalone, vs. a small part of a whole suite of tools Microsoft sells to businesses. This of course doesn't excuse Teams being shitty in those cases - but perhaps explains why I, and some others, tend to have almost no negative experience with Teams.

Re: Should you standardise tools in your company? Case of Miro vs. MS Whiteboard

#59

Post by TeMPOraL »

regularfry wrote: post #46
esperent wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think MS Teams gets a bad rap that is doesn't deserve. I don't know if the experience has improved or something - maybe Teams used to be worse and people are reacting to how it used to be? I've also been using MS Loop a lot and it's pretty great actually. It's clearly still under development and missing a lot of features but leaving that aside, I don't think it's fair to dismiss it as a Notion clone. It's far simpl…

Teams is designed for a world where the problem that Slack solves is viewed as a feature. Looking at them as comparable instant messaging tools is to completely miss the point. The underlying philosophy with Teams is top-down control: the assumption is that the organisation structure can adequately predict what communication patterns between its members should be allowed. The underlying assumption with Slack is that…

Arguably, those differences come from size of the core/target market. Slack targeted small companies and startup. Teams targets corporations.

A lot of its design decisions make sense in this context: for example, the reason "you have to invite, to be invited, to already know who to speak to" in Teams is that because you can't exactly fit 10 000 employees and an unbounded number of contractors and external parties in a vertical list, and tell the users to scroll through it. At this size, you need some discovery / matching process to even figure out who to write.

This also drives many of the "barriers" in Teams - you can't expose everyone to everyone else by default, because the CPU (and the notification counter) would have trouble keeping up. Instead, with everything being need-to-know by default, a new employee is going to start in a small, cozy team space, and gradually expand their list of contacts and team memberships. However, they're not actually isolated - the megacorp is still there, thousands of teams, tens of thousands of people, all accessible through that unassuming search bar at the top.

Re: Should you standardise tools in your company? Case of Miro vs. MS Whiteboard

#60

Post by cpill »

probably_wrong wrote: post #50
zokier wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think MS Teams wants to be everything for everyone and succeeds at neither. Teams wants to be Slack killer and making sure people stay in MS ecosystem, and it is succeeding in it. You can call the concept flawed, but it is a response to strong demand in the market.

Obviously I don't speak for everyone, but the Fortune 500 company I worked for at the time was presented with two options: either migrate your Skype infrastructure to Teams, or... actually, no, you don't get to choose. Migrate or else. I don't doubt that the plan is to keep people in the MS ecosystem and I don't dispute that it's working. But let's not claim that Teams' popularity has anything to do with its technolo…

isn't this what Micro$oft have always done. The big behemoth bully picking off the little guys with there "Too big to fail" approach to business. relying on the fact that large companies think and dream in grey than in color.
Post reply on HN