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

engineering.telia.no

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

#61

Post by TeMPOraL »

tobr wrote: post #45
OJFord wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GP said 'things are documented in' - while neither's an ideal tool for long-term product-oriented 'how its supposed to work' docs, both are definitely used like that. (You probably wouldn't choose either for that from the beginning, but you start using Jira for issue tracking/feature planning, of Figma for feature design, and end up with them holding a lasting record of how the feature is intended to be.)

“You must use this tool for this specific collaborative process” is not the same thing as “You must not use this tool at all”.

As 'zokier pointed out[0], we live in the age of apps. If you're not allowed to use this tool for collaborative process, often enough you may just as well not use it at all - as moving data between apps is usually a manual process that's boring, time-consuming, and lossy. Modern apps are tools of control, not cooperation.

--

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36402497

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

#62

Post by Lacerda69 »

zokier wrote: post #35
Lacerda69 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a Norwegian company. Vast difference in terms of culture to the US.

Telia is Sweden-originated multi-national.

Ah got confused by the TLD; but anyway Sweden and Norway are very similar in this

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

#63

Post by TeMPOraL »

navane wrote: post #48

If anything this shows clueless people allowed to make decisions. Let teams flock around their tools. What's 10 bucks a month on an employees salary. Oh its not the cost, you think the difference in tools is what creates friction in your organisation? Maybe sit in on a couple of meetings, watch your people work, talk to them.

> What's 10 bucks a month on an employees salary.

And isn't my flashlight app for iPhone worth more than a Starbucks latte a month?

SaaS companies want you to think in terms of marginal cost - hoping you'll forget that all those subscriptions add up, and hoping you don't realize that this "10 bucks a month" establishes a relationship with the SaaS vendor that you don't really want to have. And especially in B2B, that relationship isn't going to have your team/company's best interest in mind.

Every now and then HN has a submission or discussion with advice for startups on how to sell to enterprise customers. Reading those, you may discover that this "only 10 bucks a month" subscription aimed at individual employees is a wedge - it's designed to establish a beachhead within the corporation, starting with a single person or a single team, and expanding until the point the vendor can send in their sales team and secure a fat deal, pointing out that their product is already widely used, and probably too hard to extricate at this point.

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

#64

Post by WirelessGigabit »

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.…

Check out the parent of the PR, rename in VS Code and see if it catches it.

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

#65

Post by WirelessGigabit »

> Employee experience and productivity should be equally important in these discussions as cost and security. And if you are making a decision about available tools on behalf of others, you need to spend time to understand the needs of the people you are deciding on behalf of, if you want to make a good decision.

I work in a larger company where only 20% is development. We are thrown in with the 'rest' of the people, and as such have insane restriction on tools, both online and on our computers.

The problem is that our voice is not large enough to get to the CTO.

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

#66

Post by regularfry »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #59
regularfry wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> all accessible through that unassuming search bar at the top.

And there's the problem. Slack also has that search bar, but it also has public activity so you have a chance of knowing what to search for. The discovery process is the public conversations.

> 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.

This is just not a problem. If you've got notifications on by default for busy public channels, you're going to have a bad time.

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

#67

Post by adamm255 »

WirelessGigabit wrote: post #65

> Employee experience and productivity should be equally important in these discussions as cost and security. And if you are making a decision about available tools on behalf of others, you need to spend time to understand the needs of the people you are deciding on behalf of, if you want to make a good decision. I work in a larger company where only 20% is development. We are thrown in with the 'rest' of the people,…

Does efficient operation of the dev team not directly impact revenue? If you can’t release effectively, causing delays, the CTO will notice when the CFO gets pissed!

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

#68

Post by EdwardDiego »

codethief wrote: post #52
EdwardDiego wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> an area not covered by tests

Also, Django magic makes it very hard for tooling to actually know if something exists or not.

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

#69

Post by merolish »

ianpenney wrote: post #55
merolish wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Thanks for your insights! Haven't had to think about these issues as an individual dev.

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

#70

Post by fulafel »

zokier wrote: post #37
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…

> 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.

MS knows that their sales effort target and most important customer is the IT department, not the users.
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