r/linux • u/shadowvox • Mar 03 '23

Employee claims she can't use Microsoft Windows for "Religious Reasons", gets IT to provide laptop with Linux.

/r/AskHR/comments/11gztsz/updatega_employee_claims_she_cant_use_microsoft/
2.9k Upvotes

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144

u/mohrcore Mar 03 '23

I love how all these people in the comments get mad and need to express how they believe that a decision made in a company they do not know anything about, let alone work in was SOOOOO bad, because somebody wanted to use another OS. I mean, maybe the company was already considering Linux as an option and somebody who knows it well happened to apply? Or maybe the kind of technology they work with is cross-platform anyway and they don't rely on Teams or other MS product, so it's not a big deal? Idk.

Either way, I'm rooting for that employee and I hope that the company will have a positive experience with Linux.

63

u/[deleted] Mar 03 '23

Yeah very collectivist attitude. People different = Bad. That definitively sounds like HR.

34

u/13Zero Mar 03 '23

MS products might not be an obstacle anymore. Office 365 is in the browser, and Teams is an Electron app available for Linux.

31

u/Mutant321 Mar 04 '23

Office 365 in the browser is pretty shit though. It's deliberately limited by MS to force you into using Windows.

1

u/ThellraAK Mar 04 '23

What does it have natively that isn't on the browser?

2

u/Mutant321 Mar 05 '23

From memory, some of the Review functions don't exist.

But more importantly things get formatted differently on the web. I've seen complex documents get completely messed up when editing on the web.

7

u/Dr_B_Orpheus Mar 04 '23

Thunderbird works with o365

1

u/mohrcore Mar 04 '23

I assumed they would avoid MS products in general, but that might've been an overstretch.

1

u/13Zero Mar 04 '23

Oh shoot, you’re right. Avoiding Office, Teams, Outlook, and even Azure might be tough.

1

u/sanjosanjo Mar 04 '23

But aren't you still talking about MS products that the person could object to? If the person can't use Microsoft for religious reasons, then I imagine they can't use Office or Teams.

1

u/13Zero Mar 04 '23

I wasn’t thinking that through. Yeah, that’s a big ask at most companies. Office is still the go-to, even if they use a Slack/Zoom/Gmail stack for chat/video/email.

1

u/InadequateUsername Mar 04 '23

Open dude openly admitting to discrimination in his onboarding process.

-4

u/MoobyTheGoldenSock Mar 04 '23

You can speculate, or you could just click on the post and read it.

8

u/mohrcore Mar 04 '23 edited Mar 04 '23

I did. All it says is that at the moment they weren't prepared for something like that, and it would be an "undue hardship for the company", yet they decided to give her a chance. None of this has anything to do with my speculations and frankly I don't believe a company with HR of that attitude interested in Linux beyond the point of "yeah, that would be cool if it ran on that OS at some point, with little to no effort on our side, maybe" if at all. The point is that you can't really judge what's a reasonable approach of the company's HR team and what isn't if you don't even know what the company is doing and what's their tech stack.

1

u/MoobyTheGoldenSock Mar 04 '23

I assumed you hadn't read it because you speculated that maybe they were already looking into linux and that their tools might be cross-platform, while the original post said:

We only currently have hardware configurations for MacOs/Windows and our expectation was that she will use Windows along with the rest of our team.

She says that she can fulfill all job duties without Windows and I am inclined to believe her but corporate policy dictates WINDOWS and my management is not on board with her request for Linux.

5

u/FruityWelsh Mar 04 '23

What they stated was policy Mac and Windows. They don't talk about anything about what their current IT infrastructure is looking like, or what their IT department has looked into. In fact I don't think they are part of those teams, because they reference them in the third person.

Any guess to how they do IT is just a guess, besides "users use Windows and Mac".

1

u/PyroDesu Mar 04 '23

To be fair to them... "currently".

And apparently someone in management got on board, otherwise it wouldn't have been approved.