[HN Gopher] GitHub staff are required to use Teams by Sep 1, 2023
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GitHub staff are required to use Teams by Sep 1, 2023
Author : gslin
Score : 359 points
Date : 2023-02-13 14:35 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| samcat116 wrote:
| Teams isn't great compared to Slack for async text chats, however
| the video conferencing is actually quite good and I didn't have
| any real issues moving from Zoom to it.
| EFreethought wrote:
| We use Teams at my employer (major consulting firm spun out of
| a big accounting firm). The chat and video meetings work pretty
| well.
|
| I hate the "Teams" aspect of it, which is like group chat. A
| lot of people start new topics when they should be replying to
| an existing topic. Bad UI there. (Along the side you have
| "Activity", "Chat", "Teams", "Calendar", "Calls" and "Files".
| So you have something called "Teams" inside something called
| "Teams". More ambiguity is not what I need in my life.)
|
| But I really hate the fact that it is integrated with sharepit,
| which in my opinion really is the worst piece of software ever
| made. People love to add files and directory trees to it, and
| as far as I know there is no way to bookmark anything. Googling
| it just gives you links to bookmark messages.
| explorigin wrote:
| Background noise cancellation is pretty bad compared to zoom.
| Teams seems to flake out more when sharing desktops than zoom
| does (though I've had issues with both).
| testudovictoria wrote:
| I went from a company that used Google Hangouts, which is
| like using pen and paper relatively speaking, to trying to
| use Slack. Slack wasn't official, but it was an allowed form
| of communication. People who didn't have the vested
| interested just couldn't figure it out. So while I preferred
| Slack, having to hold everyone's hands through basic
| functionality was awful.
|
| Now I'm at a place that uses Teams. I don't think Teams is
| perfect, but I feel like Teams gets extra hate just because
| it's Teams. The best feature in my opinion is the group
| thread feature. Having people able to start a threaded
| conversation by default gives a lot of granular control over
| what notifications I receive by default.
| explorigin wrote:
| Coming from Slack, group threads is annoying. Teams gets
| extra hate because it's often forced upon engineers for
| cost-saving measures. Slack has a lot of nice features that
| help maintain a company's remote-work culture. Teams is
| just an organized collaboration tool. There's a huge
| difference.
|
| When Teams was forced upon us at my company, it was a trash
| product that I would be ashamed to release. It crashed a
| lot. It was slow. Background noise cancellation was non-
| existent. Scroll-back history was nearly impossible. Search
| was trash. Of these things, it's now more stable and has
| background noise cancellation, but it's still slower and
| more difficult to use with garbage search and a confusing
| interface to find the team you're looking for.
|
| Before we had teams, there was a lot of talk in the company
| of "breaking down the silos". Well teams has silos built-
| in. It literally makes it harder to find the right person
| or team to talk to just by how it's designed.
| Semaphor wrote:
| > Teams isn't great compared to Slack for async text chats
|
| It's slowly starting to become usable, though. After several
| years, you can now actually use the search function.
| dmonitor wrote:
| I don't think Teams even has a sound test. It just places a
| call with a microsoft bot that repeats the audio back.
| stavros wrote:
| And Slack isn't great compared to Zulip, but we make do.
| [deleted]
| thiht wrote:
| Is this front page worthy news for HN? That's just whining over a
| valid corporate policy.
|
| GitHub was bought by Microsoft, now GitHub employees have to use
| Microsoft tools. What's newsworthy here?
|
| Also is << 4 years old laptops >> supposed to be impressive? Like
| you're developing on a dinosaur or something? A 4 year old laptop
| for most development work is completely fine.
| locallost wrote:
| It's scratching someone's itch. And apparently a lot of
| people's. So why don't we try to find out what the issue is
| instead of yelling at clouds?
| jwineinger wrote:
| Cynical view: what additional % of Github headcount (after the
| 10% layoffs last week) are they hoping to get rid of with this?
| pelasaco wrote:
| Probably a not so cool answer: It is just a tool, that you will
| use while working. Not great, better than some other tools out
| there, maybe not the best tool. Good news: You just have to use
| it while working. In another hand, I'm thrilled to see which
| tools the smart people from GitHub will create around it!
| ShaneMcGowan wrote:
| How is this news
| anonyfox wrote:
| alright, so to shorten this discussion and jump right at the
| important next steps for us: what is the next place after github
| to go to with our open source projects? Is it even something
| without "git" but something else?
| packetlost wrote:
| My condolences to GitHub staff.
| jdlyga wrote:
| We used Teams for video occasionally back in 2019 before the
| pandemic. It was pretty unreliable, and had much better success
| with BlueJeans or Zoom. If there were more than a couple people
| on camera, Teams couldn't handle it the same way Zoom or
| BlueJeans could. I haven't taken a second look since then.
| twblalock wrote:
| Let's be honest, Slack sucks too. All of the solutions in this
| space suck.
|
| Similarly, Jira sucks, but all alternatives to Jira also suck.
|
| It seems kind of silly for Github to pay for another solution
| when they could use the in-house solution (which is Teams). This
| is what you have to compromise on when you let another company
| acquire you. People who don't like it need to leave -- that might
| not be how the world ought to work, but that's the reality and
| nothing anyone feels or says will change it.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| I don't use it for work, but I enjoy using Discord well enough
| for personal things (mostly gaming/tech, surprise surprise).
|
| Every time I go from Discord to (full screen) Google Chat I
| cringe, it just feels so much more clunky for some reason. And
| I work at Google, so if anything I should be biased in its
| favor.
| some_random wrote:
| Slack sucks, Mattermost sucks, Discord sucks, but don't act
| like Teams doesn't suck notably more than the competition.
| flangola7 wrote:
| Slack is excellent! What don't you like about it?
| twblalock wrote:
| UI glitches, threads not scaling past a certain amount of
| comments, frequent undesired logouts, weird jumbled ordering
| of messages on the mobile app that eventually sorts itself
| out but leads to hilarious misinterpretation of
| conversations...
|
| The worst part is how the phone app will scroll to the middle
| of the thread when I open one. I can understand how scrolling
| to either the top or bottom of the thread might make sense --
| but who on earth wants the middle?
| rwalle wrote:
| What's the problem with "4 yr old laptops"? My colleagues and I
| use Teams on computers 1-5 years old and haven't heard about any
| issues.
| bibinou wrote:
| it's a reference to the previous para:
|
| > Effective immediately, we will be moving laptop refreshes
| from three years to four years.
| cpuguy83 wrote:
| I think it's a dig at how resource hungry Teams is.
| top_sigrid wrote:
| Maybe that works well on Windows machines, on the Mac at least
| on the Intel-era some year-old Macs MS Teams is one of the most
| horrible, buggy, resource hungry, non-working app that one
| could imagine.
| bitwize wrote:
| As soon as the M1 dropped, Apple just stopped giving a shit
| about Intel Macs. The whole OS is slow, janky, and appears to
| have driver bugs on Intel.
| top_sigrid wrote:
| Teams was horrible before that. What you consider is not a
| reason for Teams being utterly crap on at least the Intel
| Macs - which I was talking of only as I have no Apple
| Silicon Mac to compare to.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| It's so bad it makes Slack look lightweight. Which is a real
| accomplishment.
| top_sigrid wrote:
| Actually true and a good way to put it
| ricktdotorg wrote:
| the best way to use Slack on any desktop/computer OS is:
| 1) login to Slack in a chrome browser tab and then -->
| Create Shortcut 2) uninstall Slack app
| creshal wrote:
| "4 year old laptop" can mean anything from "8 cores, 64 GB RAM,
| dedicated GPU" to "720p display, 4GB RAM, dual-core". If Github
| for whatever reason punished its employees with the latter,
| well. Teams is not the world's most optimized Electron app.
| dgellow wrote:
| 720p, 4GB in 2019?
| betaby wrote:
| Yes. Most of the laptops at my current jobs were 720p till
| 2023. I work for a huge enterprise (over 5k employees).
| dgellow wrote:
| Damn, that sucks. What model are they?
| betaby wrote:
| Dell Latitude, various models. Even today some Latitude
| models are 1366X768
| ecf wrote:
| > Teams on computers 1-5 years old and haven't heard about any
| issues.
|
| My 2019 Intel MacBook would sound like a jet engine taking off
| when opening IntelliJ. Apple's M2? Doesn't even get hot doing a
| full index and battery lasts 4-5x as long.
|
| The quality of life using an Apple Silicone laptop while
| traveling is so much better. Frankly, it's an embarrassment for
| Intel.
| vel0city wrote:
| Silicone is a polymer of siloxane which makes rubber-like
| substance such as silicone oil, silicone grease, or silicone
| caulk.
|
| Silicon is an element often used in semiconductor
| manufacturing.
|
| Neither Apple or Intel manufacture silicone in any major
| quantities.
| kimbernator wrote:
| How is it possible that Teams is still such a poor product? I
| really didn't like it when my job switched like 6 years ago, and
| I don't recall ever feeling that it improved in any meaningful
| way. I switched jobs to one using Slack and it's not perfect but
| it is a lot better.
|
| It's almost a meme at this point. In the presence of other
| clients that have gotten it "right" (or at least more "right"
| than teams) like Slack, Discord to an extent, and Zoom for video
| calling, how has Microsoft allowed this festering wound to
| languish? Surely they could afford to revamp this product and
| reap the rewards of people not hating using their tools?
| danudey wrote:
| I did the same. Teams on my brand new (in 2019) laptop with 32
| GB of RAM had vastly, _vastly_ worse performance than even the
| web version of Excel. Slack, when I started using it more than
| ten years ago, was vastly more usable than Teams is today, or
| will likely be in five years.
|
| > Surely they could afford to revamp this product and reap the
| rewards of people not hating using their tools?
|
| It's not a business priority. Management is sold on Teams by
| integration with their existing services, as well as security,
| compartmentalization, and so on. They're not sold on "this is a
| polished product that people enjoy using".
|
| And when you look at the spec sheet, Teams is an _awesome_
| piece of software. It can replace Zoom, phone calls, Slack,
| file sharing and collaboration, and so on. It can even replace
| e-mail to some extent, though if you 're working at a company
| that's mandating Teams there's a good chance that your company
| has a strong e-mail culture and people are still going to
| e-mail you all the time for no good reason.
|
| Anyway yeah, Teams is just the worst.
| mhardcastle wrote:
| I don't disagree with the limitations of Teams, but Microsoft
| improved their video call/conferencing software substantially
| when they moved from Skype for Business to Teams. At least
| things haven't been _entirely_ stagnant.
| drewda wrote:
| Yes, I will give Microsoft that -- MS Teams is so much better
| than Skype for Business/Lync, which was a horrible piece of
| video conferencing software.
| kypro wrote:
| The 3 companies I've worked for over the past 5 years have
| used Slack for chat and teams for meetings. and to be honest
| that's my preferred way to work too.
|
| Huddles are okay for internal 1-on-1 meetings, but Teams
| works well when you need to organise a large meeting
| (potentially with people outside your org).
|
| On the other hand Teams is awful for chat. Slack has put so
| much care and thought into messaging that their UX is close
| to perfect imo.
| jasonlotito wrote:
| They are still using Slack. This is for video conferencing
| only. I've heard that with regards to video conferencing, it's
| competitive with zoom.
| kimbernator wrote:
| I've been in a "mixed" slack/teams environment and it seems
| there was always a push to be a little more teams-y every
| month or so - given that Github is owned by MSFT, I wouldn't
| be surprised if that happened there, too.
| sofixa wrote:
| > I've heard that with regards to video conferencing, it's
| competitive with zoom.
|
| Did you hear that from a Microsoft salesperson? Only a person
| who hasn't used both regularly can say that. UX and features
| on Zoom are better.
|
| The mere fact that to this day Teams has wildly different
| features depending on how you join the call is a joke - for
| instance, joining from a browser on macOS results in no chat
| (the button simply isn't there).
| rhaway84773 wrote:
| If you asked someone who's new to Zoom if they're on mute
| or not, I bet they will have a 50% hit rate. Heck, I bet
| even someone who regularly uses Zoom would have the same
| success rate.
|
| The Zoom UI is atrocious.
| aaron_m04 wrote:
| That makes a huge difference. It's worth editing the title to
| add "for video conferencing".
| guluarte wrote:
| we use discord, it's is way better for real time communication
| than slack, for everything non-urgent we just use email
| rockostrich wrote:
| Doesn't discord have some pretty serious security flaws and
| questionable data collection policies for use as a private
| commercial messaging platform?
|
| For small teams that aren't too concerned about that it seems
| fine. Personally my group of a couple dozen friends and I use
| it for pretty much all of our communication because we don't
| care much about privacy in that context. But for any company
| larger than a couple dozen folks it seems like a pretty risky
| choice compared to Slack/Microsoft/Google/etc.
| guluarte wrote:
| it does, but sensite projects defenitly i wont use discord,
| neither slack nor zoom.
| AtNightWeCode wrote:
| Teams is built upon broken dreams, broken design, SharePoint
| and the MS screwed up user account model. Add to that new poor
| tech choices, poor security choices and you have a beast that
| can't be controlled.
|
| I think the Discord UX is worse but at least the product kinda
| works.
| ajross wrote:
| Is Teams such a poor product? I used it routinely at Intel
| (using the Linux client, even) and now only occasionally,
| but... it's just fine. Text and video chat is a pretty solved
| problem, and it seems like all the major players here are
| really very tolerable. Surely SeriousUsers with existing
| workflows are going to be disrupted by any switch, but there
| are no major holes in Teams.
| tech_tuna wrote:
| Have you used Outlook or Office 365 recently?
| mullingitover wrote:
| > How is it possible that Teams is still such a poor product?
|
| List of products Microsoft makes:
|
| - [bajillion item list of everything including the kitchen
| sink]
|
| List of products Slack makes:
|
| - Slack
|
| Microsoft _gives Teams away for free_ and to them it 's
| worthless. They have no incentive to make it great, just good
| enough that you'll look at the price of Slack, look at the
| price of Office 365, and say "ehh, we can save some money,
| Slack can't be _that_ good. " Making Teams not suck doesn't
| move their revenue dial one iota.
|
| (And sure, Slack is owned by Salesforce and they make a
| bajillion things, but Slack started as its own company that
| just made one thing, and made it well. They're at least
| coasting on that laser product focus)
| moonchrome wrote:
| >Making Teams not suck doesn't move their revenue dial one
| iota.
|
| That's not true, I would switch to Office 365 if it didn't
| suck. Having an entire suite fully integrated and under one
| license is a great value proposition - but the thing has to
| work. I've had to use Teams over the years and every time I
| get the same shitty experience I've had with it 5 years ago
| when I first tried it.
| matwood wrote:
| > I would switch to Office 365 if it didn't suck.
|
| From what? O365 collaboration is terrible. If you do joint
| document editing, O365 will drive you nuts after using
| something GSuite. What many do is have GSuite and then O365
| for people who need office products for various reasons.
| moonchrome wrote:
| That's my point - I would replace GSuite and Slack for
| O365 if the later wasn't so bad. I have the office 2019
| package when I need to use office apps.
| IceWreck wrote:
| What did GitHub staff use before ? Slack + Zoom ? Mattermost or
| something else ?
| shagie wrote:
| If I've read the histories and articles correctly, Slack for
| intracompany chat and Zoom for intra and inter company video.
|
| This is switching the intra and inter company video to Teams
| (which means that GitHub doesn't have to pay Zoom for video
| anymore).
|
| Intracompany text chat remains on Slack.
| ricktdotorg wrote:
| Slack [video] Huddles didn't cut the mustard for them?
|
| edit: ahh i see "inter-company". yeah, Slack huddles start to
| suck when guest accounts/other Slack instances or externals
| get involved. got it.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Borg or die
| jmclnx wrote:
| No surprise here, but I wish almost anyone else purchased github
| instead of Microsoft. One can hope the founders will eventually
| pull a "MySQL" --> "mariadb" :)
|
| I wonder when github developers will be forced to moved from
| Linux to Windows ?
| ss108 wrote:
| GitHub seems to be doing fine/the same, IMO. What negative
| consequences have there been for you as a user as a result of
| MSFT acquiring it?
| williamstein wrote:
| How might they do that given that Microsoft now owns all of the
| IP and GitHub is mostly closed source? It seems like a very
| different situation than the liberally open source MySQL.
| bombcar wrote:
| The problem is that what GitHub does is _relatively_
| reproducible (Gitlab, gitea, bitbucket? others do it) but the
| value GitHub provides is _free_ hosting for so much content.
|
| Anyone can make an image hosting site, making one
| _profitable_ long term is always the problem. For now, GitHub
| is winning because of the free side of their toolset.
| creshal wrote:
| I'm fairly sure Microsoft doesn't even have the ambition to
| make it profitable. Like Youtube for Google, or costco
| hotdogs, it's to get a foot in the door (or rather,
| customers' feet in your doors) to upsell people on all your
| other products.
| evancox100 wrote:
| Why do you think YouTube isn't profitable? Plenty of ads
| in it and bringing in something like $15 bln/year in
| revenue. Don't know exactly the COGS, etc., but hard to
| say they aren't making money. Android is probably a much
| better example than YouTube.
| sofixa wrote:
| > Why do you think YouTube isn't profitable? Plenty of
| ads in it and bringing in something like $15 bln/year in
| revenue
|
| The infrastructure to store and deliver _seamlessly_
| zettabytes of video all around the world surely doesn 't
| come cheaply.
| bombcar wrote:
| For Google it probably comes about as cheap as it can for
| anyone, and based on a cursory search, the revenue
| YouTube makes minus the cost of paying the content
| creators and employees leaves (probably) enough for the
| datacenters and decent profit.
|
| Though Google is likely doing accounting shenanigans with
| cross-company billing and charges YouTube "just enough"
| for the datacenter/cloud access that, on paper, it's
| barely breaking even (if only for tax advantages). But I
| don't have proof of that.
| jorams wrote:
| GitHub was a profitable bootstrapped business for 4 years
| before they decided to take a 100 million dollar investment
| and start bleeding money in pursuit of growth. Sourcehut is
| a profitable business even without requiring payment yet.
| The business model is not the problem. Network effects are.
| hackerman_fi wrote:
| Same way Gitlab and countless other services are built on top
| of Git, which is definitely not owned by MS :)
| yamtaddle wrote:
| In my dream future, libgit2 is the _official_
| implementation of Git, taking most of the pain out of
| trying to create a Github-like service (among other
| things).
| cpuguy83 wrote:
| Microsoft employee here. I was actually handed a MacBook Pro on
| day 1, I didn't even ask for it my manager at the time just
| assumed.
|
| There is a large community inside Microsoft using Linux as
| their daily driver.
| filmgirlcw wrote:
| Yup. I was given a Surface Book and a MacBook Pro when I
| joined Microsoft in 2017, and the Surface Book was just so I
| could do some testing for things in Azure and make sure it
| worked well-enough on Windows. My last year at Microsoft, I
| focused entirely on Linux and used a combination of devices
| and there was even an internal team focused on making it
| possible to use Linux as your daily driver with little
| impact.
|
| At GitHub (where I work now), it's standard-issue MacBook
| Pros.
|
| A lot of teams at Microsoft even used Slack internally before
| 2020. Compliance issues (and I'm sure cost) forced us onto
| Teams, which was unfortunate, but as a company, Microsoft was
| a lot more free/open than most other companies of its size
| with regards to what tools teams and individuals could use --
| especially when it comes to what you have to do to your own
| machines if you want to bring your own device to work (the
| InTune policies are completely and totally sane, more sane
| than when I worked for a company owned by Univision and
| Univision wanted me to call the help desk anytime I needed
| admin access or to install something outside of the Mac App
| Store -- things I frequently needed to do for my job).
|
| GitHub has completely separate IT systems. I can't/won't
| comment on what changes are happening for video calls, but I
| don't see this as some sky is falling moment.
| f154hfds wrote:
| Same here. Work for MSFT, use a Mac Pro for work. They did
| give me the option between surface and mac, and recommended
| me use the mac because we were working on unix OSes with some
| ability to build/test on Darwin directly.
|
| This was before M1 though, since we're building for x86-64
| arch exclusively I likely will never move to an M1 device.
| tayo42 wrote:
| That's interesting to hear. Is it only certain teams that can
| do that? It thought Microsoft it's doing some interesting
| things but I didn't think I could work there because I'd be
| starting to from scratch with Ms tech, like even having a
| workflow on my own computer
| cpuguy83 wrote:
| You need to be able to in-tune the device if you want to
| access company resources.
|
| Windows is definitely the happy path since support is
| pretty much baked into the OS. However there is support for
| both Mac and Linux.
| linuxlizard wrote:
| "There is a large community inside Microsoft using Linux as
| their daily driver. " That's pretty cool to hear! (100%
| honest. No sarcasm.)
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| The GitHub founders are long gone from the company. Most were
| gone before the MS acquisition even happened.
| MikusR wrote:
| Why would they be forced to move to Windows if even Windows
| developers are not using Windows.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Teams iOS has gotten much worse lately, takes many more seconds
| to open things on the iPhone 14 pro max compared to my iPhone 12
| Pro Max.
|
| Something broke.
| ralmidani wrote:
| I'm extremely picky - as long as my livelihood is not threatened
| and I actually have options. For me, being forced to use Windows,
| Teams, Skype, Java/Spring, or Jira (among others) would be a
| dealbreaker (again, unless that job might be among the few
| available to help me feed my family).
|
| I spent some time learning in the structured environment of a
| large company, which I recommend everyone do for a first and/or
| second job.
|
| Now, at this point in my career, I tend to gravitate toward
| smaller companies; my current company (less than 40 employees)
| ordered me a high-spec Framework Laptop (I put Fedora on it) and
| $900 ultra-wide monitor without hesitation. I believe I was the
| first dev at the company to ask about a Sublime license (in a
| Slack message), and within minutes I got an email from SublimeHQ
| with the license key.
|
| Of course, YMMV, but if you want and are ready for flexibility,
| you might do best by avoiding big companies - and even startups
| where leadership has intense personalities and overly-strong
| opinions.
| kypro wrote:
| It's interesting you say this. I've always felt my flexibility
| was a strength and quite enjoy being asked to use new tools and
| software.
|
| To be honest I tend to look quite poorly on people unwilling to
| provide flexibility on the tools they work with. In my
| experience it can be quite disruptive when you have one highly
| opinionated team member who will refuse to work with a new tool
| because of a personal preference.
|
| I guess I'd get it if you were forced to use multiple tools you
| hated, but a single tool that isn't your preference? Can you
| not adapt at all?
|
| At this point in my career you could give me a Windows, Mac or
| Linux system and I literally couldn't care. But more
| importantly it would have almost no impact on my productivity.
| Same with using tools like Jira. I have preferences, but
| honestly whatever.
|
| Opinions like this remind me of people who can only speak
| English and don't see the need to learn other languages because
| "everyone speaks English anyway". Fair enough if that's how you
| feel, but I don't understand why it's something to be proud of.
| ralmidani wrote:
| I said I'm extremely picky, but the list of things I would be
| OK using is much longer than the list of things I would not
| work with unless circumstances forced me to. Maybe I should
| have also said I've learned and/or dabbled in/used Python,
| Ruby, C, C++, Java, JS (server-side and client-side),
| CoffeeScript, TypeScript, and Elixir. I currently have a
| strong preference for working with Elixir (and fortunately
| that's what we use at my day job), and on the other hand
| would actively avoid a job that required more than a trivial
| amount of C++, Java, or server-side Node.js. I would be OK
| with the rest (and probably also Rust and Go, although I
| haven't learned enough to be sure). For code hosting, I
| prefer GitLab and am OK with GitHub (for now at least). For
| tasks/issues I'm OK with Asana or GitHub and only avoid Jira.
| For IDEs I prefer Sublime but would be OK with whatever. For
| OSes, I prefer GNU/Linux, can live with MacOS for now (but
| the experience is degrading rapidly), and only really avoid
| Windows.
|
| I totally believe we should normalize devs having
| requirements for what kinds of jobs they will consider
| (including tech stack and tools, but also industry, company
| size, culture, location, etc). Especially if we're OK with
| companies having wishlists which are often far longer and
| more rigid.
|
| Also, for what it's worth, I speak/write English and Arabic
| natively, and have a genuine desire to learn Spanish,
| Kurdish, and Japanese.
| betaby wrote:
| MS Teams is virtually never an engineering decisions it
| seems. That's not a C# vs Java debate or Visual Studio vs
| JetBrains - not even comparable. Your argument about flexibly
| is moot in the context.
| guhidalg wrote:
| Before we lose ourselves in abstract generalities that don't
| mean anything, let's focus on the thread: communication
| applications.
|
| If you're comfortable working at a place that mandates Teams
| because it makes management's life easier, then you shouldn't
| have any problem adapting to new tools. You also shouldn't
| expect management to tolerate risky ventures; they have
| already signaled they do not tolerate non-compliant
| communication software. Therefore, you shouldn't have any
| problem doing the mediocre work that management expects out
| of you. That's ok! We all need to know where we stand in the
| risk/reward spectrum and using sub-optimal tools is a signal
| that you're operating in a low-risk environment.
|
| However if you are operating in a high-risk environment, like
| a startup, then you should be opinionated about everything
| because every decision influences your chances of success or
| failure. Using Teams instead of Slack may prevent you from
| hiring the talent that recognizes the signals of mediocrity.
| kypro wrote:
| I agree with this. I think we might be talking about
| different things?
|
| I was specifically referring to highly opinionated team
| members who refuse to work with anything but their
| preferred tools and software. I'm talking about the kind of
| people who refuse to use a Mac like everyone else on the
| team because they prefer Linux, or the kind of person who
| doesn't reply to their emails because they only use Slack.
| I find those people disruptive when the rest of the team
| agree to in work a certain way.
|
| You seem to be talking more about a company which is
| forcing its employees to adopt various tools they're not
| happy with and I think that's different - and I'd agree
| that's not a company I'd want to work for and something
| that should be pushed back on. But I don't think that's
| what the commenter I replied to was saying. The way I read
| their comment was that it didn't really matter if it was a
| top down decision from a manager or a team decision, if
| they couldn't use their preferred tools, they don't want to
| work there.
| boring_twenties wrote:
| There's a wide space between a tool being "not your
| preference" and being painful and frustrating to use.
| bigbottomenergy wrote:
| LOL, and day-to-day operations stay on Slack. Fucking kill me. Hi
| Microsoft, you had multiple managers literally making sure the
| last thing I heard out the door was "we'd rehire you anytime". I
| will never, ever work somewhere that uses Teams or Slack. Ever.
| I'm not alone, and I'm not even that good.
| [deleted]
| ralph84 wrote:
| Somewhat ironic that a company that's entire existence was based
| on the idea of giving developers great tools no longer values
| giving its own developers great tools. Only a matter of time
| before this new attitude towards developers shows up in the
| product.
| bdcravens wrote:
| Are there any examples of Github allowing its employees to use
| a competitor's tool when they had their own in-house tools?
| gautamdivgi wrote:
| My Teams works fine on my Mac without issues. Have been using
| it for over a year now.
|
| Fwiw - I don't understand why it's hated. It's a collaboration
| tool - mainly messaging and conferencing. It's been decent at
| that for me.
| mgkimsal wrote:
| For people who are not solely at one company -
| contractors/freelancers who perhaps need to support
| connectivity with multiple organizations - MS Teams is a huge
| hostile pita.
|
| I had 2 clients each using Teams, and I was working with
| each. But... I can't just be 'logged in' to two different
| Teams organizations. If I was in company A, I couldn't see
| anything from company B. Apparently you can do this in the
| phone app, but not the desktop version. I _could_ keep one
| company on desktop, and another on phone, and just monitor
| two, but... you can 't scale that.
|
| With slack, I'm just connected to 3-4-5 client orgs at a
| time, and can react/respond as needed within the same tool
| without needing to log in/out constantly.
|
| The last time I had to deal with this was last autumn -
| perhaps it's "fixed" now? Except... I don't think it's seen
| as a "bug" in the first place, so may never be "fixed".
|
| Also... just connecting to Teams would often just hang...
| wait... no indication anything is happening. If I got
| impatient, I'd have folks saying "oh... just calm down..."
| but then also wonder why I was "not in the meeting"...
| well... because... Teams can never tell me if it's going to
| take 90 seconds to join, or 39 seconds or... if it just will
| never resolve. Opening a secondary link in a web browser
| became my default, though I'd have to read a banner every
| time saying "you won't get the best experience - some
| features may not work!" except... it at least loaded.
| mrweasel wrote:
| > For people who are not solely at one company -
| contractors/freelancers who perhaps need to support
| connectivity with multiple organizations - MS Teams is a
| huge hostile pita.
|
| Bingo, that right there. Need to work with one team, but
| also quickly jump onto a meeting with another client... So
| bad. If you need to be available to two clients at the same
| time? No, that's not going to work.
|
| The UI is horrible, finding people is difficult at best.
| Chatting with someone and want to jump on a video call...
| well, that will take a few minutes to locate the right
| button. At least Google Chat just put a big old button
| right in your face so you can do a quick meeting. Google
| suite of product (Meet, Calendar and Chat) have their own
| issues, but it's so easy to do meetings, and it just works
| every time. For six months a number of us at the office
| were unable to make audio work on the desktop Mac app, and
| Firefox wasn't supported, so you needed Chrome to join a
| Teams meeting.
|
| You can't really complain about the audio or video quality
| in Teams, they got that mostly figured out. It's just that
| the desktop app has a horrible UI. I mean so does Slack,
| given the option I'd use neither.
| cauthon wrote:
| also the way it collapses long unread threads so you can
| only see the last couple messages, then marks the whole
| thread as read when you view those
|
| I missed messages and conversations all the time when I had
| to use it
| johndotsun wrote:
| The best solution I've found to connecting to multiple
| client orgs in Teams at a time is to use it exclusively in
| the browser, and use a new Chrome profile for each client
| to keep things separated and working.
|
| I don't use the local Teams client.
| vel0city wrote:
| I've been using it on Windows for well over a year. I can't
| speak to how well it works on Mac or Linux, could be a
| terrible experience, I dunno.
|
| In my opinion, its not the most ergonomic tool out there but
| its by far the most fully realized tool out there. There's
| lots of tools that are good for this or good for that, but
| mixing them in together gets to be a bit kludgy. Having
| calendars, live editing of documents, meetings, chat, and
| other tools all integrated into a single tool is extremely
| handy when done right, and Teams to me gets like 85% of the
| way there. There's some things it just doesn't do well (like
| the threaded messaging, kind of a mess, maybe we just don't
| do it right), there's things where its inconsistent
| (different features for meeting chats versus individual
| versus group chats), and overall it could stand to be a lot
| faster and responsive. But in the end, when someone shares a
| document in a call I've got it in chat history and in my
| OneDrive and can recall it straight from Excel or Word or
| whatever. When someone emails me a calendar invite, its in my
| Teams automatically. The first-party integrations are hard to
| beat.
|
| Do I prefer things like Mattermost for pure chat? Sure, but
| then its separated from the tools I use for document
| management and separated from what we'd use for video calls
| and separated from my calendar for meetings and separated
| from our actual org structure integrated into it and all
| kinds of stuff. In the end, I personally like all these
| things being well integrated, and can deal with not having
| all the custom emojis and a slightly more responsive chat
| client.
| shagie wrote:
| > like the threaded messaging, kind of a mess, maybe we
| just don't do it right
|
| I haven't found _any_ chat style application that does
| threaded messaging "right" with how I think it _should_
| work (I want real time USNET with thread level ACLs).
|
| That said, they're all _ok_ IF (and that 's a big if)
| everyone working with the accepts the "this is how they
| work" and use it as such with the appropriate level of
| technical literacy (and that's a big part of the big if).
|
| Slack is ok. Its one deep and for active channels it can
| solve the "get a thread you two" so that a conversation
| doesn't spill over into the main channel. However, that
| hurts discoverability of messages... and for less active
| channels is likely overkill.
|
| Zulip's is better than Slack with its topics... but is
| _way_ overkill for a bunch of friends.
|
| Teams has two styles with the team "here's a post,
| followups go on that" and "here's a group chat" which has
| no threading at all and tend to have new group chats forked
| for each new topic.
|
| Discord has threads which allow for the slack style "get a
| thread" and a bit more ACL on the thread (different
| permissioning model for the base application).
|
| All that said, I believe that the _real_ thing that is
| lacking isn 't threaded conversations but a strong chained
| reply-to feature. The best example of this I can find is
| Stack Overflow chat. For example, https://chat.stackoverflo
| w.com/transcript/message/55971002#5... which is a reply
| (you can see that arrow thing) that you can click on and
| then follow to the message that it was a reply of, which
| itself is a reply to another comment.
|
| And so, for me, it's not the _thread_ that is important as
| that is discoverable - but rather the "what is this
| replying to?" along with the ability to fork a new
| room/channel that handles a given topic (because everything
| in one room is a complete mess).
|
| Returning back to teams... it's ok. It serves the simplest
| interface acceptably. Every chat app would work better if
| everyone used it to its fullest... but as long as there's
| someone who doesn't use it "right" I'm going to suggest
| that Teams or Discord are probably the easiest to not use
| wrong (or set up to limit the 'how it can be used wrong is
| difficult').
| eklitzke wrote:
| Have you used the Google workspace tools? They also have
| tight integration of docs/meetings/chat/etc.
| vel0city wrote:
| I have, I used and admin'd Workspace for about a decade
| before changing to O365. There's some good integrations
| there and I was a big fan of the simplicity of Meet, but
| chat is where Google definitely falls apart. We never
| really got into the new Hangouts as we were already
| pretty integrated into our Mattermost instance and then
| we migrated to O365, so maybe its better today, but as
| far as organizational chat kind of things Google was very
| very behind and way more fragmented. Things like having
| chats for Meets and sharing documents in a chat then get
| integrated into Drive are things that Teams does well and
| last I saw Google still kind of didn't have a fully-baked
| solution, at least at the time.
|
| The other side of Workspace is dealing with users who
| _really_ want Office tooling for various reasons.
| Workspace and O365 still don 't seem to play nice
| together. Workspace document management is great for
| Workplace-formatted documents, O365 is great for Office-
| formatted documents, and things often get messy when
| trying to combine the two.
|
| I really liked Workspace and its really slick how
| integrated some of their document tools can be into
| Google Cloud so its easy to help team members who only
| really know spreadsheets get data in and out of cloud
| compute and UI builders and what not. But from last I saw
| of Hangouts they're still not as complete of a chat
| platform compared to Teams.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| > Things like having chats for Meets and sharing
| documents in a chat then get integrated into Drive are
| things that Teams does well and last I saw Google still
| kind of didn't have a fully-baked solution, at least at
| the time.
|
| I'm not sure what quality of integration Teams has - but
| Chat has had this integration for several months now.
| vel0city wrote:
| Here's an example in Teams. I'm in a call and someone
| shares a document in the chat. That chat is (somewhat)
| exactly like any other group chat in Teams, it appears in
| the same list as other chats I've had in my recents and
| is searchable in the same way. There's a couple of odd
| features that are or are not available from chats from
| meetings, but those are at the fringes of usages usually
| so _for the most part_ its the same as any other group
| chat and can be continued well after the call or persist
| through recurring meetings.
|
| Now, that document isn't just in that chat, its also in
| the OneDrive/Sharepoint and in the history of recently
| opened documents in something like Excel or Word or
| Powerpoint.
|
| Like I said, it may have improved in the last year or so
| (about when I had to change), but last I used Workspace
| the chat in Meet was practically ephemeral. If someone
| shared a link to a document in Meet, at the end of the
| Meet that link was practically gone. No additional
| permissions was granted, I wouldn't be able to quickly
| find it in a recent documents list, no chat history in my
| recent chats, the next time for the meeting there was no
| chat history, etc.
|
| The fact that Meet and Chat are still two separate
| "products" really points to that bifurcation of the two
| things. There's the video chat platform: Meet, and then
| there's the collaboration and chat tool: Chat. In the
| Google world if you want to talk by text you use one
| product, and if you want to talk by voice/video you use a
| different product, if you're wanting to schedule a
| meeting you use yet another product. But in the end a
| meeting is a meeting. Meetings can involve voice, video,
| text, documents, and more and usually benefit from
| scheduling. Needing multiple "products" means kludging
| things together or having things more un-linked. And in
| the Microsoft world there's a single tool that can do all
| of those things: Teams.
| Moissanite wrote:
| If you use it for a single company (ie one login) it is OK,
| but IMO a worse experience than Slack; MS get away with it
| because it is free.
|
| Where the true nightmare begins is when you need to login to
| multiple tenants/workspaces. You simply can't use multiple at
| the same time, and switching from one to the other is super
| slow and unreliable. I tried to do so today and Teams crashed
| 4 times, at which point I uninstalled it and decided to just
| use the web app instead.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Teams works relatively fine for me now that I upgraded to an
| M1 macbook pro. (Still occasionally crashes for no reason,
| but no apparent performance problems).
|
| A year ago I was still on a 2015 Macbook, and it was still
| doing just fine for me on everything _but Teams_ , Teams was
| a disaster, it would freeze and drop video all the time, or
| have perceptible delay between click and effect.
| rhaway84773 wrote:
| Teams is a bit of a resource (but Slack is no better) but
| there's nothing really wrong with it as a tool. In fact it
| works pretty well for group communications and is constantly
| adding new helpful features.
| sofixa wrote:
| Because it's by far the worst UX-wise. If you know better
| tools, it's just shit. To add insult to injury, it kind of
| sort of works, sometimes, but there are tons of small
| problems here and there all the time in many cases. I had to
| use it only for video calls for 3 years, and probably weekly
| there was something wrong like restart needed because it
| screwed up my audio.
| eganist wrote:
| > Because it's by far the worst
|
| _laughs in WebEx_
| avmich wrote:
| I for some time had way worse experience with GMeet.
| uncanneyvalley wrote:
| Me too. My outbound video always looks like crap, even
| with hardware acceleration on and nothing else open.
| dagmx wrote:
| I will take a meeting in WebEx any day over a meeting in
| Teams.
|
| Teams has the worst layouts for the videos, moves UI
| elements to inconvenient places, often has more
| stuttering...
|
| WebEx is clunky but far superior at what it's meant to
| do.
| btilly wrote:
| It has not been decent for me.
|
| Here is a specific complaint about messaging. If you want a
| tool for programmers to collaborate, don't have it
| automatically insert smart quotes when trying to quote code
| in messages.
|
| You have to search to figure out how to turn it off. And if
| you do, it will still turn that back on sometimes for no
| particularly good reason. And my being able to send them
| correctly doesn't help when someone else posts code and it
| gets converted on THEIR end.
|
| Yes, yes. You can just attach a file. But it is a
| collaboration speed bump telling people that they have to
| save snippets to a file, then share the file, rather than
| simply using cut and paste in the obvious way. Doubly so if
| you're interacting asynchronously and you're reading their
| message some time after they mangled it.
| akira2501 wrote:
| It's a "productivity tool" that actively wastes my time. If
| it _just_ did messaging and conferencing and had reasonable
| tools and _configuration_ around those options, I might not
| mind.. it's all the other useless cruft they insist on
| forcing into the product that never really works properly.
|
| Notifications. Someone put a thumbs up on my message. I get
| notified twice. Once in the cat and once in "Activity." You
| can hide "Activity" but that doesn't stop the notification.
| You can't configure this.
|
| One day teams decided that the window with the view of myself
| should be mirrored. There's no option to change this. If
| you're using your camera to show documents or other items,
| this is an absolute nightmare.
|
| The background video filters work once. If you join a second
| meeting, they never work again until you restart the browser.
| You can text chat but you can't video chat with yourself, so
| there's no good way to test your camera setup until you're
| going live.
|
| For several months my calendar lost the time column on the
| left side. I had to open each meeting to see what time it was
| actually set for. That randomly came back in December.
|
| Twice I've been trying to present something on a call when a
| dumb "hey check out this new feature" dialog popped up right
| into the middle of what I was doing. Once it captured the
| click, and then promptly crashed when it tried to open
| whatever thing it was hyping. Even if you're just chatting,
| the pop ups steal focus and interrupt what you are doing.
|
| Once a day teams will start using all the CPU and will stop
| showing chats or notifications. I have to actively watch the
| CPU on that machine to see if this is happening and I need a
| restart. Most often I find out when I get an email that shows
| me an unread teams message or someone asks why I didn't
| answer their call.
|
| The UI is garbage and there are zero keyboard shortcuts. It
| constantly asks me if I want to "replace the attachment"
| simply because I once uploaded a file with the same name to
| an entirely different chat.
|
| You can't forward a chat. You literally just have to copy and
| paste it to a different user. If you join them to an existing
| personal chat, it just creates a new specific chat for
| whatever ad hoc group you tried to create.
|
| The whole thing is a poorly thought out also ran set of
| extensions designed to stave off competition and it's all
| built on ancient Microsoft Exchange technology. I sincerely
| hate it.
| ehutch79 wrote:
| Ram usage for one, then there's the general slowness.
| Sometimes it just dies. It took the longest time to get an
| apple silicon native version. Compared to VSCode which is one
| of the best electron apps, Teams shows why you might want to
| go native instead.
|
| What it comes down to is that Teams is fine at best... but
| just that.
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| I find Teams to be just fine for instant messaging and
| conference calls. It's everything else that is awful. I hate
| the way it has files stored in a "Team" almost as much as
| SharePoint. I can never find what I'm looking for and
| ultimately have to ask and then create a browser favorite to
| every doc for $current_project.
| ssharp wrote:
| When I first started using teams, I saw the Files
| capability and thought it would be a pretty useful feature.
| In practice, the UX completely ruins any benefit of having
| files integrated into it.
| knewter wrote:
| You haven't used it on Linux perhaps, or perhaps you aren't
| aware that it was spying on Android users?
| larryfreeman wrote:
| We use Teams, Slack, and Zoom on Mac.
|
| Zoom is much easier to use than Teams for conference calls.
| When I use Teams for conference calls, I find the default
| never works for establishing a connection (I have found that
| connecting through the browser works fine -- but this is not
| the default way to connect -- it still takes some effort to
| pick the path that works).
|
| I have also found the user interface is non-intuitive. I had
| little trouble getting up to speed on zoom (from webex). I
| might have less problems with Team once I get used to its
| interface. At present, if anyone accidentally schedules a
| meeting with Team (which sometimes is the default conference
| call setting in our Outlook), they usually create a zoom
| conference call link which is used instead (usually, the
| notification for the zoom link goes out through slack -- for
| some reason, folks don't even chat over team to let folks
| know that the meeting has been changed to zoom).
|
| As far as the application itself, I find that Slack is much
| easier to use and has capabilities that have been very
| helpful. The Slack user interface was intuitive and I quickly
| got up to speed. For Teams, I use it when I need to (not all
| times at our company have slack) but everyone I know prefers
| slack. The slack ui is more intuitive and has features such
| as slacking to yourself which is useful for notetaking.
| Again, my opinion of Teams might change as I better learn the
| user interface.
| vlunkr wrote:
| I haven't used it much, but as an outsider it's pretty hard
| to judge how much the criticism is exaggerated. People also
| hate Slack with a burning hatred passion, while I've used it
| for many years with very few issues.
| unnouinceput wrote:
| We talk about Microsoft here? In what era M$ was based on such
| idea? In 80's when Bill&Co. did whatever they could to
| undermine OS/2, DR-DOS & LaTex? Or in 90's when Bill's lap dogs
| were threatening OEM manufactures to automatically include DOS
| and later Windows as default operating system in their systems?
| Or maybe it was 2000's when Ballmer did everything it could to
| stop Linux and later a rather spectacular fail to stop
| Android/iOS with their Nokia acquisition/spin-off of WinCE?
| Wait wait, you talk about maybe 2010's with Nadella's
| "Microsoft loves Linux" BS campaign only to try again to
| undermine it with WSL and now WSL2? And in latest years with a
| string of acquisitions, GitHub included, to have access to
| people's greatest single skill, I mean creativity. Because
| software is an art and you need creativity, something that in
| face of current AI progression will remain our single
| advantage.
|
| Lemme tell you something, the only thing that matters and ever
| mattered to Microsoft, regardless of decade was $$$. Nothing
| else. Everything else was just secondary effect.
| version_five wrote:
| Not that I disagree with the sentiment. But one could look at
| this an an opportunity to try and improve Teams. Sucks a bit
| short term for the people who have to use it, but if they can
| capture feedback (from a captive user group paid for their
| time) and improve it, everybody wins. I think is would be worse
| if they just kept polishing a turd in an ivory tower (so to
| speak) and let their employees use something else
| Rygian wrote:
| And here's me thinking that turd polishing was not location
| dependent.
| franga2000 wrote:
| I don't think lack of feedback is a problem, nor would
| Microsoft have any trouble assembling a paid group of testers
| to give them feedback if they needed it without subjecting
| Github employees to the not-even-all-that-polished turd that
| is Teams.
| [deleted]
| VeninVidiaVicii wrote:
| Well said. I am getting these eerie feelings todays tech giants
| are turning into modern-day IBM -- in that they are more just
| turning into generic businesses.
| runlevel1 wrote:
| By "generic" do you mean competing by means other than the
| strength of their product?
|
| Which companies do you have in mind? (Apart from Oracle.)
| bitwize wrote:
| What do you mean, GitHub doesn't value giving its developers
| great tools? All their work is done on Codespaces(tm)
| leveraging the power of Visual Studio Code(r) to make
| developers more productive!
| w0m wrote:
| That's overtly harsh take I think. Teams has issues; but asking
| employees of a company to use said companies tools internally
| isn't necessarily a _bad_ thing. Hard to improve without
| dogfooding.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| That's the problem: Microsoft isn't a company. They aren't a
| cohesive team working on a product. They are a corporation: a
| group of companies with separate trends writing on separate
| products.
|
| Is the GitHub team working on Teams now? I doubt it.
| number6 wrote:
| I hope they do. This can only improve Teams
| imperialdrive wrote:
| _Anything_ to make Teams better I would certainly
| appreciate bc it 's a daily annoyance to use in any
| meaningful way.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| Why? What value does Teams bring to GitHub? They are
| totally separate techs.
|
| I don't care at all about Teams. GitHub, on the other
| hand, is the host of many important projects. I would
| much rather the GitHub team be left alone to do their
| jobs.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Dogfooding means using your own product. The _Teams_ team
| does not work at GitHub, they work at Microsoft. Yes, I know
| the one owns the other, but the fact that this requirement
| needs to be made at all is testimony to the fact that they
| would much rather use a product by a competitor, that 's how
| broken it is.
| chx wrote:
| > Teams has issues;
|
| Issues like unable to switch teams without re-authenticating?
| Slack can do this, Discord can do this, both of them
| completely seamlessly but Teams just can't.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| So should they also force every subsidiary to use Windows,
| VSCode, Office 365, Azure, etc?
| Arainach wrote:
| Absent a strong business reason otherwise, absolutely.
|
| Azure: yes, all the major cloud providers should migrate
| all of their use to their cloud. If their cloud doesn't
| support something that's a problem for their users and they
| need to fix it ASAP.
|
| O365: Same thing.
|
| VSCode: Developer tools such as IDEs shouldn't be mandated
| (and weren't when I worked at MS) but if one is mandated it
| absolutely should be their version unless there's a strong
| technical reason otherwise (for instance, if they were
| using Java there are better choices).
|
| Windows: Again, most good shops don't mandate what your
| desktop environment is
| rhaway84773 wrote:
| Besides O365 the rest are not even the same thing. If
| half your company is on Teams, and half is on Slack, they
| can't communicate with each other.
|
| Mandating a single communication platform is absolutely
| the right move. And the fact that MS picked Teams as that
| single communication platform is beyond obvious. What
| else could they have chosen?
| mgkimsal wrote:
| > Mandating a single communication platform is absolutely
| the right move
|
| Is it, even if there will be productivity losses? Is
| making your teams less productive "absolutely the right
| move"?
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| Yes!
| evilduck wrote:
| If mandating the use of their own productivity tools
| causes them productivity losses, I'm happy to watch MS
| either come to terms with that and try to fix Teams or
| suffer the same losses that they inflict on the rest of
| the world.
|
| From an outsider's perspective of MS and Github, I think
| it's the right move.
| apnew wrote:
| Literally sitting here right now trying to figure out how to
| get simple things going compared to slack after being forced
| to move to teams from slack (not GitHub).
|
| I am all for dogfooding here, but if the dog-fooding is not
| improving the product it shows that the goal is to eat market
| because of lopsided ecosystem monopoly. Screw MS and MS
| Teams.
|
| eg. : We need a tag in a shared channel so that we can
| provide single point of support for other teams, instead of
| people having to tag the whole channel. Slack made is as easy
| as breeze to sync on-call person from PD -> a group.
| treesknees wrote:
| From the quote it appears the goal is to save money. From
| the numbers I found, GitHub could be paying upwards of
| $35k/month in licensing for Slack users. In a climate where
| companies are trying to shed expenses, wouldn't it make
| sense to bring that expense in-house?
| mgkimsal wrote:
| To people only focused on short term dollars, perhaps.
| But what impact will it have? Certainly an impact on
| productivity in short term, perhaps longer? Are there
| equivalent replacements for all the slack hooks people
| have in place now? How long will it take to become 'just
| as' productive in Teams? 1 month? 3 months?
|
| $35k... that's... under $500k/year in licensing they're
| paying? Will they take more than a $500k hit in
| productivity?
|
| By HN standards, $500k isn't even the loaded cost of one
| intern these days in SV, but... even in the 'normal'
| western business world... $500k/year is likely the cost
| of 2-3 engineering staff. Trying to eke that much savings
| in the short term seems short sighted.
| TylerE wrote:
| So you save about 1 employee cost per year, and make the
| other thousands miserable and less productive? Definition
| of penny wise, pound foolish.
| apnew wrote:
| I 100% agree with you about bringing that experience in-
| house.
|
| My comment was reaction to the fact that there is a
| forced migration without 1:1 parity in feature set. Most
| large orgs/teams in my experience heavily rely on
| automation that has been added over the period of time
| reduce the cognitive load that is accidental/side-effect.
| Now if you are going to force them to move; give them a
| migration path.
|
| Think of this in terms of API contracts. If half of the
| methods in your new version are not even available; why
| even make the new API public?
| mgkimsal wrote:
| > Hard to improve without dogfooding
|
| They've _been_ dogfooding and I don 't think most of us
| regular users have seen any measurable improvement for years.
| Apparently it's hard to improve _with_ dogfooding too?
| vhcr wrote:
| "Teams has issues" is an understatement, the app will
| sometimes notify you that you have a new message, and when
| you try to open it from the web page, it won't show up, but
| if you force refresh it will. Or it will show up on the
| mobile client, but not on the web one.
| ajb wrote:
| Slack also does that sometimes. In the app!
| danudey wrote:
| The number of times I've had to hold a conversation via
| Teams on my phone instead of on the desktop because the
| chat on the desktop just refused to update... ugh, geez.
| kqr wrote:
| The point of dogfooding isn't feeding your employees any old
| dog food. The point of dogfooding is that the dog food _you_
| make is so damn good your employees prefer it over making
| lunch boxes or eating out.
|
| (It doesn't have to be perfect, or course, just do
| _something_ better than its competitors to be attractive to
| use. I struggle to think of a single redeeming feature of
| Teams.)
| sircastor wrote:
| >The point of dogfooding is that the dog food you make is
| so damn good your employees prefer it over making lunch
| boxes or eating out.
|
| I don't know if I'm misunderstanding how you've put this,
| but I've only ever understood dogfooding to mean that you
| use your own product to find the bugs, improve the
| workflow, and encourage feature suggestions.
|
| Dog-fooding is not a reward for making the best product
| (though that makes life easier at work), it's a commitment
| to improving your own product, and showing that you are
| willing to live with your own product in order to make it
| better for your customers.
| rcme wrote:
| > I've only ever understood dogfooding to mean that you
| use your own product to find the bugs, improve the
| workflow, and encourage feature suggestions.
|
| I've only ever understood dogfooding to mean this as
| well, but I like GP's point. If you're forcing yourself
| to use the product to find bugs instead of using the
| product because it's a great product, then you have
| problems.
| teddyh wrote:
| Dogfooding explained by Joel Spolsky in 2001:
| https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/05/05/what-is-the-
| work-o...
| kqr wrote:
| I phrased it a little oddly. What I mean is that if not
| even my employees (who hopefully share my ideals and
| values) volunteer to use my software, I would take that
| as a strong signal that I've failed to find a sustainable
| niche in the market, and maybe the right approach is not
| to force it down people's throats and hope that they can
| dig me out of my hole, but rather to pivot and ask
| myself, "what should I have done differently to get a
| product people want to use, despite technical flaws?"
|
| So yes, dogfooding is there to get immediate feedback on
| technical flaws _of an otherwise desirable product_.
| Dogfooding is not there to fix a product--market
| mismatch. That needs to happen at a different level of
| development.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| Dogfooding works when affected employees have the ability
| to improve the product.
|
| You wouldn't want to eat dog food that wasn't prepared in
| sanitary conditions, so if you worked at a dog food plant
| and knew you'd be eating something that closed through that
| dirty grate, you'd clean it. You wouldn't want a program on
| your PC that regularly consumes an entire core while idle
| or that crashes when active, so you'd fix those issues if
| it was your software.
|
| People naturally want to fix problems that affect them and
| add features that would improve their daily use of a
| product. At a small company or startup, where people can do
| this, you should use your own products as much as possible.
|
| But if you are a Microsoft/GitHub employee with no access
| to the Teams code, not even access to a human being who
| works on Teams, there's no point. Use whatever meeting
| software lets you do your job best.
| belter wrote:
| Team has issues is the understatement of the year. A simple
| feature like screen freeze has been requested per use in the
| thread below hundreds of times...
|
| "Between different messaging boards (including the link
| above) this feature has been requested over 2000 times (1044
| times as of this writing on the link above alone). Could
| Microsoft chime in to let us know if this is going to be on
| the roadmap? Thanks."
|
| https://answers.microsoft.com/en-
| us/msteams/forum/all/pausin...
|
| The tool will say you are in the meeting but won't let you
| have access to the chat. A bug hitting regularly hundreds of
| persons.
|
| https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-
| teams/why-s...
|
| https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-
| teams/probl...
|
| I pity GitHub employees and would consider resigning :-)
| cyberge99 wrote:
| They don't even have something as simple as a key combo to
| mute and other basic functionality (macos).
| perfectstorm wrote:
| that's not true. CMD + Shift + M mutes and unmutes your
| mic. you can also press Option + Space to temporarily
| unmute yourself.
| Steltek wrote:
| Why is this such a hard thing to get right? WebEx
| seemingly has 4 different mute keybinds, depending on the
| style of meeting you're in. It's worse than nothing
| because you randomly mash keys, making it look like
| you're not paying attention.
| fcoury wrote:
| I am not trying to defend Teams, I hate it. But
| Cmd+Shift+M does that on Teams on macOS.
| macintux wrote:
| I was forced to memorize that keyboard shortcut because
| for the last several weeks Teams will randomly stop
| recognizing mouse clicks.
| TOMDM wrote:
| Stagnant feature requests are the least of Teams' problems.
|
| It's a slow buggy resource hog that crashes frequently.
|
| Features keep getting added but until they address the
| fundamentals, all they're doing is polishing a turd.
| chaostheory wrote:
| * * *
| rickstanley wrote:
| Nice, I can't even view the first link because I'm
| redirected to a stupid MS login and I have blocked scripts,
| not even a message shows, just plain black screen.
| creshal wrote:
| Dogfooding only has a purpose if someone cares about the
| dogs' feedback.
| weatherlight wrote:
| We don't use it for messaging, just calls that are in calendar
| invites, otherwise, We use slack for everything.
|
| It's not that teams is bad, per say. It's just that there are
| more ergonomic tools out there.
| nih0 wrote:
| poor souls
| DrBazza wrote:
| Teams is just bland. That's it really. We moved from Slack to
| Teams and we had a huge drop in inter-team communication to the
| point we moved back. For remote company it's hugely important.
|
| A lack of thread conversations was a huge issue too.
|
| The only plus side was video conferencing was rock solid and
| office integration was good, as expected.
| waffletower wrote:
| Wow, that would be enough for me to resign a position at Github.
| Teams is some seriously low-grade dog food. I always buy my dog
| _food_ that I could stomach eating myself. Taking the metaphor
| further than I ought to -- Microsoft ought to be reported for
| animal abuse.
| m00dy wrote:
| looking at this thread is probably greatest and cheapest way to
| get UX feedback.
| tootie wrote:
| Maybe I'm nuts, but I see almost zero appreciable difference
| between any of the most common chat or video conference
| platforms. They all have some little quirks or bonus features,
| but 99% of the time I'm only using the core features that they
| all do the same. Slack is absurdly expensive for what it does.
| Slack Pro is $12.50/person/mo. It's the same price for O365 which
| includes chat, video and the entire Office suite.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Nah, Zoom was wildly better than other options at first, but
| the rest these days are mostly OK enough to handle most day-to-
| day needs. And yeah, chat apps are pretty similar.
|
| ... except Teams, which manages to be possibly the single most
| confusing piece of software I've ever used. And I like Paradox
| games....
| bombcar wrote:
| Zoom was amazingly batshit better than the competition
| (mainly gotomeeting) for actual conference calls _because of
| how easy it was for someone who had never used it to start_
| (which we later learned was because Zoom was pulling all
| sorts of clever bullshit to avoid installation dialogs).
|
| Once you're past the onboarding/installation hurdle, they all
| start to blend together.
| tootie wrote:
| WebEx used to own this market and is still going pretty
| strong. Ironically, WebEx has one really good feature that
| Zoom doesn't which is that you can actually zoom on a
| screenshare.
| boring_twenties wrote:
| I seem to be able to zoom in on screenshares in the
| windows, ios and android Zoom clients.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Quality (especially audio) and some other features were a
| lot better and (crucially) more reliable in the early days,
| too.
|
| But yeah, the light-ish touch installation (which, yeah,
| because of some bullshit) and single-purpose nature of it
| made it way less unpleasant to use if someone was like
| "let's Zoom" and you didn't have it. "We'll call you on
| Teams" (or any of these other huge do-everything tools) is
| a much bigger pain in the ass if you don't already have the
| thing they're going to call you on.
| iso1631 wrote:
| > Slack Pro is $12.50/person/mo. It's the same price for O365
| which includes chat, video and the entire Office suite.
|
| And how much is a junior engineer per month in a small European
| company, let alone a senior one in a FAANG?
| tootie wrote:
| If you're google, Microsoft of Amazon it's moot because
| you're eating your own dogfood. But regardless I think it's a
| myth to think that because a company has a lot of profit they
| won't pinch pennies. Every team has to aggressively manage
| their budget. If you have 40k employees then $5/mo adds up
| pretty fast.
| dmonitor wrote:
| Discord must be kicking themselves for going after the gamer
| market instead of offering a professional platform. It beats
| pretty much every other video conferencing app I've used.
| pxeger1 wrote:
| Assuming a new laptop costs about $2000, they'll be cutting costs
| by about $420k/yr. Is GitHub really making so little money that
| that's noticeable?
| jhallenworld wrote:
| This is like being acquired by IBM and being forced to use Lotus
| Notes and Sametime. You must eat your own dogfood..
| brundolf wrote:
| MS strategy for Teams adoption: buy up companies one by one and
| force them to use it
| pluijzer wrote:
| For my current project I have to use Teams on a Mac. Priblems
| that I encounter daily:
|
| 1. I am invisible in conference calls, quiting and starting Teams
| sometimes helps.
|
| 2. Messages refuse to load. I get a notification but no message
| appears.
|
| 3. Recent messages that were already loaded take ages to appear
| when switching chats
|
| 4. When switching chats I get put at a random place in the
| timeline.
|
| 5. Collegues do not receive my messages.
|
| 6. The text starts to jiggle a few pixels up and down. When this
| happens I cannot copy anything.
|
| 7. I get a missed call notification without having got the call.
|
| Speaking of text and copying, I really dislike how often when I
| select a specific part of the text and paste it, it contains the
| username and the timestamp, I want this 0% of the time. Also
| their seems to be a issue with the font rendering like it is the
| wrong DPI.
|
| The software contains so many rough edges, things like the
| alignment of text jumping all over the place because the diration
| of the call text changes size while counting.
|
| Truly, and honestly, this software makes me feel miserabel. I
| would be hesitant accepting a project that requires me to use
| Teams in the future.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| Props to Slack for _perfectly_ timing the market peak. They would
| be worth a fraction of what they got now.
| throwawaaarrgh wrote:
| Everyone who didn't get laid off now wishes they did
| say_it_as_it_is wrote:
| Who cares? Why is this front-page of HN?
| lpbonenfant wrote:
| I don't understand most of the negative comments in this thread
| along the lines of "if my company would require I use Teams I'd
| quite on the spot". Really? an IM client is what's going to make
| you quit? I always thought it was amusing that old developers
| were super anal about vim vs emacs and saw it as a tongue in
| cheek but now I realize most of those people are really serious
| and take these things quite emotionally...
| jspaetzel wrote:
| Clickbait title, try again please
| tiffanyh wrote:
| Why the negatively?
|
| Let's view the positive.
|
| Hopefully this dog-fooding will result in improvements to Team.
|
| Microsoft should be _commended_ for forcing their employees to
| use their own products. You'd be shocked at how few companies
| actually do.
| oneepic wrote:
| Keep in mind that dogfooding is one thing, and _actually making
| improvements based on it_ is another. In plain English, they
| still might not fix anything they find.
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| Lots of people saying that they think Teams is awful but not
| really saying why on here.
|
| I thought it works pretty well, really.
| killjoywashere wrote:
| I don't know much about Teams (we're a Google Workspace/Meet
| shop) but I know they are selling all sorts of crazy access
| rights packages because any given Teams group I meet with, if
| they send the invite, it's a different connection experience. You
| need an account. You need an account on their domain. You don't
| need an account, but you need a guest account. You need your own
| account with Microsoft. You need a user name. You don't need a
| username. It works on my phone, or not. It works in the browser,
| or not. It works in the desktop app, or not.
|
| What. The. Hell?!
| casenmgreen wrote:
| Yes.
|
| I once tried to use Teams on Linux.
|
| Eventually, I discovered buried in the package description text
| in Synaptic package manager that "this software only works with
| a corporate MS account".
|
| This information could not be found on-line, the error messages
| were completely incorrect, there was _negative_ on-line support
| - which is to say, there 's a public forum MS run which has a
| bunch of confused people asking what the hell is going on (they
| were having my problem) and being given wrong answers by "I
| don't work for MS, I just help out here on this forum".
| themoonisachees wrote:
| As a sysadmin who has had the displeasure of working on
| window server, this experience is consistent across most
| Microsoft products. Random forums, one guy asking for info
| but he doesn't work for ms, just knows a lot. Makes you
| wonder how he learned that in the first place.
| [deleted]
| freeqaz wrote:
| Teams for Linux, when I inspect it with htop, is actually running
| a process called "Skype" in the background.
|
| I think that explains some of the crappiness of the UX! (It has
| required some serious hacking to make it even functional for me.)
|
| Since then my team has swapped to using Discord for what we're
| doing. It sounds a bit weird to use a Gamer tool at work but it's
| actually been pretty great since we run an Open Source AI +
| Security community[0]. Having everybody in one place is great!
|
| For anybody else that's building dev tools or that's doing Open
| Source work, I'd really recommend Discord. The video quality is
| great for screen sharing (biggest problem with Google Meet) and
| the client is significantly better than Zoom (which chugs
| constantly on Linux). Plus it's cheap! (~$25/month for the whole
| dev team)
|
| 0: https://discord.gg/kheMFne2mW
| aprdm wrote:
| I use it in the web browser
| prmoustache wrote:
| I find it strange to associate open source and discord. I tend
| to dismiss any open source project that uses it.
| freeqaz wrote:
| I'm excited for Linen[0] to potentially replace Discord for
| our use case because unfortunately it doesn't feel like there
| is another tool that we could use besides Discord or Slack.
| (We were on Slack for a long time but we just couldn't get
| people to use it, and we've had a lot more success building a
| community since swapping to Discord.)
|
| What other tools do you recommend for Open Source communities
| to use?
|
| 0: https://www.linen.dev/ (They are going to be adding a
| 2-way sync soon that lets you post messages from the web into
| Slack, Discord, and even GitHub Discussions, so you can
| basically pick any platform and it doesn't matter. Kind of
| like the old IRC days!)
| christkv wrote:
| Next you must use office 365 for all documents and we will be
| moving to Sharepoint.
| bombcar wrote:
| The _single_ redeeming feature of Teams is that you can use it
| for documents and Sharepoint shit without ever having to
| actually open one drive or Sharepoint.
|
| Until it inevitably breaks.
| easton wrote:
| ...does GitHub not use Office 365 for documents? Seems silly to
| pay for a $12 or whatever per user GSuite license just for
| Drive and Docs when the rest of the company uses Office and its
| approximately free (or very cheap) since they work for MS.
|
| (Note: I know they have cheaper tiers of GSuite, I'm guessing
| with whatever security stuff MS infosec wants they'd have to go
| to a higher tier.)
| generalk wrote:
| Regardless of what you think of Teams -- I myself have had
| nothing but poor experiences over 2.5 years of using it daily --
| it's _telling_ that Microsoft has to require folks to use Teams.
|
| I'm sure this is just Microsoft unifying everyone on the same
| comms platform, but seriously, I don't know anyone who _chooses_
| Teams.
|
| I know non-tech folks who chose Outlook 365 because of
| familiarity and then end up on Teams because it's free, but
| there's a difference between "I chose an email/identity platform
| that I know and I guess I'll use its chat app too" and "I
| evaluated team chat offerings and Teams is our top pick."
|
| Hell, at my most recent company (which was founded on O365 before
| I arrived) I replaced Teams chat interface with self-hosted
| Mattermost (Slack's HIPAA-compliant tier is way too expensive for
| a startup) and it was roundly loved. We did still lean on Teams
| for its video chat, because most of our non-tech staff know how
| to schedule and join video meetings, but even then the top
| complaint I got was from folks on Windows laptops whose Teams
| plugin for Outlook somehow got corrupted (or something?) and
| suddenly Outlook's Teams integration was gone.
|
| Just an awful product all around -- said with no offense meant to
| the team building it.
|
| _Update_: I now notice the text "for the sole purpose of video
| conferencing" which lines up with my use case, but still -- of
| all the video apps I put Teams down with Webex as "bottom of the
| barrel choices" due to the constant performance and functionality
| issues.
| chaostheory wrote:
| Are your company's MS instances on premise or cloud based? The
| reason I ask is because nearly all of the negative experiences
| I've had with Microsoft stem from either their native apps or
| poorly configured on premise servers.
|
| This is anecdotal since there's no wide ranging data, but Teams
| works just fine where I work. Integration with Outlook is also
| great, but we have a O365 plan that is completely managed and
| run from the cloud.
| mfer wrote:
| On a regular basis I use Teams, Zoom, and Jitsi for video
| conferencing. Teams isn't the most troublesome of the set.
|
| > I'm sure this is just Microsoft unifying everyone on the same
| comms platform, but seriously, I don't know anyone who chooses
| Teams.
|
| In big companies like GitHub people don't typically choose
| their own video conference platform. It's picked for them.
|
| For Microsoft I can see a huge benefit to using Teams at
| GitHub. That's cost. Microsoft can use Teams at cost. That's a
| better price that those outside Microsoft can get it. It's a
| better deal than paying for Zoom. At a time when expenses are
| being cut it's hard to justify paying for a competitors
| platform.
| ragingroosevelt wrote:
| Sample size of 1, but...
|
| In my personal life, I got all my friends on Discord and we've
| been really happy with that. It's screen sharing seems tuned
| for video games, though, and sucks for sharing non-game
| applications. We all set up Teams accounts because it does so
| much better with screen sharing.
|
| I haven't tried Slack recently but I really disliked that I
| needed a different account on each server and the UI didn't
| seem to unify the servers together in a convenient way like
| discord does. I'm pretty sure this is for enterprise support
| reasons and that it is by design, but it's still annoying for
| use when I'm just trying to talk to all of my circles of
| friends in one place.
|
| At work we use Teams and I have zero complaints so far. We've
| been using it since either 2019 or 2020. It's so much better
| than Zoom + Mattermost or, before that Skype for Business /
| Lync. _shudder_
| denysvitali wrote:
| Shameless plug: that's why we started FossTeams [1].
|
| As most of us are forced to work with this thing, the least we
| can do is to find a workaround for the problem somehow...
|
| [1]: https://github.com/fossteams
| npteljes wrote:
| >it's telling that Microsoft has to require folks to use Teams.
|
| Not really I think, considering that MS bought GitHub, with all
| of its already existing culture. I see this move as them
| homogenizing the infrastructure. And also not willing to pay to
| another company for a product that's actually their
| competition.
| generalk wrote:
| Of course, and I can't fault Microsoft for that, even if
| (having been on the bad end of a similar acquisition and IT
| merge) it sucks for GitHub.
|
| My point was: GitHub as an organization didn't choose Teams
| willingly, and are still paying for Slack and only using
| Teams for video conferencing. Of all the explanations of why
| that might be, the easiest to land on is "because Teams just
| isn't that good."
| [deleted]
| jms703 wrote:
| > not willing to pay to another company for a product that's
| actually their competition.
|
| This. Companies are cutting costs. Teams may not be the best
| to use, but it doesn't make sense to have multiple chat
| solutions.
| jerrygenser wrote:
| Why did you need HIPAA Compliance for your chat app? Internal
| discussion about patients that include PHI?
| generalk wrote:
| Bingo. Nearly impossible for our staff to do their jobs and
| _not_ discuss something considered PHI.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| beebmam wrote:
| Teams is the worst business app, except for all the others (Zoom,
| Slack, etc).
|
| It's hard to take an argument against teams seriously when in the
| same breath they advocate for Zoom or Slack, both of which are
| complete nightmares and virtually toy applications.
| Aeolun wrote:
| You must have a completely different experience than me. Zoom
| for meetings anch Slack for chat sounds perfect to me.
| focom wrote:
| The main annoying thing is Teams has no markdown support. What
| they call markdown support is still a broken "wysiwyg"
| tristor wrote:
| MS Teams is so bad that if an employer forced me to use it, I'd
| resign immediately. I feel sorry for all the folks at Github
| being tortured in this way.
| duxup wrote:
| I'm convinced that the fonts in Teams just don't look right...
|
| The text controls also seem slightly smaller than needed.
| hkgjjgjfjfjfjf wrote:
| [dead]
| aspaviento wrote:
| Using it on the browser:
|
| - it's wonky
|
| - 1 on 1 calls not always share the screen and I need to hang up,
| refresh the browser and call again
|
| - translation stopped working both ways. Once a text is
| translated it doesn't go back to its original language
|
| - it's a mess if you make a lot of group calls with different
| people. You end up having trillions of opened chat. I ended up
| pinning the main ones to keep them at the top and ignore the
| rest.
|
| - code snippets are just awful. They are a box inside of a box
| and you always need to click on expand to see the code.
|
| - music when you are on hold can't be stopped which can make you
| crazy. I always hang up or mute the tab
|
| - group video calls don't have an option to see everybody in the
| same screen. Now it's like divided in pages
|
| And I could go on and on. Discord is thousands of times better
| than this.
| ukoki wrote:
| You forgot the worst one! When you copy a message in Teams, it
| "helpfully" adds a header so you end up pasting "[Tuesday
| 12:54] John Doe" into random form fields / your terminal / your
| browser location bar ten times a day
| polyvisual wrote:
| My lord, that behaviour drives me mad.
|
| The experience of using the editor for writing and editing is
| horrendous.
| casenmgreen wrote:
| Oh Gods yes - this.
|
| I stopped editing text in Teams. I wrote text in an editor
| outside of Teams, then pasted it into Teams.
| rwalle wrote:
| I doubt any employee actually cares about any of this and would
| bother to complain about it online. Other changes in the company
| have much more impact than which video conferencing software is
| used.
|
| (Person who wrote the tweet does not work at GitHub)
| BazookaMusic wrote:
| One thing to keep in mind is that there's a security angle to
| this as well. It is beneficial for a company to centralize all of
| its communication through one service which can be audited for
| security and also support all the features required to meet the
| internal Requirements. Having multiple tools multiplies the work
| needed to maintain security standards.
|
| Of course, I'm not saying that teams is more secure than
| competing products or that this will automatically improve
| security. The point is that it's a single option that's easier to
| manage.
|
| Outside of security, this also applies to cooperation between MS
| and Github teams. Teams helps with keeping common calendars,
| meeting invites, recordings and transcripts. Having more tools
| means that an adapter needs to exist between them and might be
| disincentivising communication, since engineers would prefer to
| work on their tasks rather than work around fixing soft problems.
| danudey wrote:
| Teams is great for functionality, and also the worst, most
| unperformant application I've ever had to use for work. Somehow
| even Word/Excel on the web are more performant than Teams
| itself has ever been. It's slow to switch from "chats" to "chat
| rooms", and then to switch from whichever chat/room you're on
| to the one you want to be on. Allegedly they're working on
| this, but there's no way they're going to make it usable any
| time soon.
|
| I felt constant frustration using Teams and have it miss
| keypresses, fail to focus the text input in chats (I had to
| manually do so every time I changed chats), and remove all
| formatting _and trim whitespace_ from code or text that I
| pasted, even if I pasted it into a code block (though for code
| blocks it only removed it when I send, so it looked fine until
| I hit enter). Trying to view or add integrations would often
| take several _minutes_ for the modal dialog to finish loading
| (during which I couldn 't use Teams).
|
| I also found frustrating sending files to people who then
| couldn't actually see them unless I manually granted them
| permissions. Why is this a thing?
|
| The QoL of developers at Github is going to drop significantly
| once they're forced onto Teams, because even after years and
| years it still feels like an early beta release where they
| haven't done a UX or optimization pass yet.
|
| My heart goes out to the Github team for this one.
| bdlowery wrote:
| They aren't centralizing their communication in teams. It's
| being used for video conferencing. Everything else remains in
| slack.
|
| Read the image in the tweet, it's only 100 words or so
| BazookaMusic wrote:
| It's unlikely that they won't use it for more eventually if
| this works. They're probably playing it safe by mentioning
| only video conferencing.
|
| As an example, if meetings are made in teams and people
| comment during the meetings, their input will be in teams.
| Further communication around the meetings is likely to stay
| in teams. They're making it inconvenient to use slack or
| other means.
| mathattack wrote:
| Seems natural to be forced to eat the owners dog food. At least
| they don't have to deal with the Microsoft sales reps.
| GiorgioG wrote:
| If only Slack hadn't completely dropped the ball on the "Huddle"
| experience. I can't tell you what's worse, Teams or Slack
| anymore.
| zcmack wrote:
| act like its so bad, they've been using ruby since inception.
| [deleted]
| penguin_booze wrote:
| Teams? OK, our thoughts are with you in these difficult times.
| Good luck.
| [deleted]
| revscat wrote:
| To everyone at GitHub: I'm so sorry. I don't mean this in a
| clever way, either. Teams is awful and it will make your lives
| worse to one degree or another.
| samiru wrote:
| I wonder if those who complain about Teams actually use it.
| They might not.
|
| My company forces us to use Google Chat. I would take Teams any
| day.
| mcguire wrote:
| Teams is better than whatever we had before. Couldn't cut-n-
| paste code into a chat because it turned all the punctuation
| into emojis.
| brightball wrote:
| Google Chat has improved a lot but it's definitely not there
| yet from a savvy users standpoint.
|
| I've seen it used with great success at smaller, non-
| technical companies though.
| 1270018080 wrote:
| I had to use Teams at my last job, now in interviews I ask
| every company if they use Teams or Slack. It's a good smoke
| test on whether the company pays a slight premium to improve
| the efficiency and quality of life of their employees, even
| if it doesn't directly show up on the balance sheet. Of
| course salary is more important than chat software, but I
| don't want my day to day experience to be miserable.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| I work with multiple organizations so have opportunity to use
| Teams and Zoom calls regularly. When using both regularly
| it's hard to start thinking that Teams is just fine. It seems
| like I might start to think Teams is fine if I only used
| Teams, but that would just be my standards lowering, not
| something I want to happen.
|
| Zoom has issues as well but I don't regularly get to use
| better services than Zoom.
| TylerE wrote:
| I am forced to use Teams on a Mac. It's beyond horrible.
| Messages sometimes take an hour+ to appear.
|
| I would crawl through broken glass for google chat. Teams is
| sooooo bad.
| millzlane wrote:
| I'm using a 2017 2.3ghz i5 with 16gbs of ram.
|
| I'm in 7 different teams and have over over 15 pinned chats
| and IM's.
|
| The only delay I see is when comparing desktop app to the
| mobile app.
|
| Even video chats are bearable and work fine with even
| background effects turned on.
| TylerE wrote:
| So not on a mac then? Because only 1 mac was ever
| released with an i5, and it wasn't out in 2017.
| sokoloff wrote:
| The iMac18,1 (MMQA2LL/A) and MacBookPro14,1 (MPXT2LL/A)
| would like a word.
|
| https://www.sellyourmac.com/mac-product-
| guides/imac/mmqa2ll-...
|
| https://www.sellyourmac.com/mac-product-guides/macbook-
| pro/m...
| [deleted]
| ygjb wrote:
| I will be blunt. Teams is an awful user experience; I have
| been using online collaboration tools since the BBS days, and
| while I appreciate and understand why and what they are
| trying to build, it is bad software.
|
| Every single experience I have had as a teams user in
| professional settings, interacting with communities, and
| being required to use it for interactions with my childrens
| schools since the 2020 shutdowns has been awful.
|
| The platform is slow, and every time I have to use it, it
| feels completely obtuse in unique and frustrating ways. After
| nearly three years of weekly interactions, I regularly am
| confused by what I am meant to do, or how to resolve errors
| that occur; it is the single most frustrating online tool I
| have had to use, largely because the decision to use it is
| out of my hands.
|
| The absolutely sole saving grace for the tool is that I can
| now effectively use it with a web browser, instead of the
| invasive thick client application that I was required to when
| it was first rolled out.
|
| If my employer required me to use it, I would immediately
| find another job. It's that bad.
| lol768 wrote:
| > If my employer required me to use it, I would immediately
| find another job. It's that bad.
|
| Agree with this. I started adding clauses to my services
| contracts requiring that it not be used, to this end. One
| client moved over to Slack as a result.
| javier123454321 wrote:
| I simply don't understand this at all.
|
| I've used in 3 of my last workplaces. Two exclusively and
| one in addition to slack. No particular complaints for
| having internal meetings of any size. I literally do not
| know what you are talking about and feel like I am missing
| something.
| [deleted]
| addandsubtract wrote:
| I feel like a lot of it comes down to which system &
| client people use. If you're on PC or macOS and using the
| desktop client, you're probably having a good experience
| (as long as you only have one account). If you're on
| Linux or use the web version, you're probably going to
| have a bad time.
| rirze wrote:
| Mac OS desktop client is broken.
|
| My biggest complaint is missing notifications when the
| client is not focused. I can't imagine how a top tech
| company can create a chat client that doesn't fetch
| notifications when running in the background.
| chaostheory wrote:
| * * *
| charrondev wrote:
| Unfortunately the Mac client is similarly awful.
| Absolutely horrifically slow. We were using for a little
| while at my company after we were acquired and it had so
| much horrifically buggy or slow behaviour.
|
| - Switching between chats caused a big flicker of content
| loading in. I have no idea why this wasn't cached but it
| was annoying. - starting a meeting could sometimes takes
| 30+ seconds. - I frequently observed and issue where some
| hidden/invisible window would be opened in the background
| and keep taking focus every time a used the tab key to
| cycle through windows. - Delayed and sometimes missed
| notifications. Why they didn't use the native system
| notifications was beyond me. The notifications also did
| not respect the systems do not disturb window. Sometimes
| they would appear behind other content and would be
| missed. - massive resource consumption. Our 1 teams org
| would frequently be consuming > 3gb of memory on my
| system. People complain about slack but this is a whole
| other level.
| TylerE wrote:
| For meetings it's decent. It's the everything else that's
| the problem.
| dbancajas wrote:
| What is the specific complaint against it? Better yet can
| you come up with tools that you use instead of Teams? Is it
| xoom? Slack? Discord? MS is not my favorite company but my
| MS Teams experience has been relatively smooth.
| scott_w wrote:
| > The platform is slow
|
| > I regularly am confused by what I am meant to do, or
| how to resolve errors that occur;
|
| Just to provide two examples of specific complaints from
| the parent post.
| bombcar wrote:
| I am starting to fear that I am missing out on something
| major, because we've used Teams for _years_ now and it
| works fine (on macOS) for what we do - basic chat,
| multiplayer powerpoint, some video calling, etc.
|
| Maybe it's a team size thing, and Teams just blows monkey
| chunks when you're one of fifty thousand employees at a
| company?
| arcosdev wrote:
| I am forced to use it and it is hot garbage. It is a
| productivity killing anti-app.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| It's got the most confusing, designed-to-lose-stuff UI I've
| ever seen. And that includes major social media sites,
| Atlassian's whole... pile of _stuff_ , and (its closest
| competitor I've come across) a very "advanced" set of Asana
| projects and workflows.
| btilly wrote:
| On what basis do you insinuate that other people's dislike is
| based on ignorance? That's a shallow dismissal of the kind
| that https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html asks us
| not to do.
|
| Most of the time people's dislike is based on past bad
| experiences. If you think that those experiences may be out
| of date, indicate what has improved. If you like one product
| better than another, say why.
|
| Personally I have 25 years of bad experiences with Microsoft
| products breaking quoted code through inserting smart quotes,
| long dashes, and the like. It is beyond absurd to me that
| Teams tries to be a collaboration tool for teams which
| include programmers, and STILL gets this wrong. Other tools
| like Slack don't make this mistake. And decades of
| Microsoft's continuing this behavior makes me doubt that they
| will ever see this as something to change. They are too
| wedded to trying to be clever about formatting.
| [deleted]
| lampe3 wrote:
| Yes I use it daily at work and its as bad as people are
| saying here.
|
| Compared to any other Message software it is the worst.
|
| I would rather use Discord then Teams.
| e40 wrote:
| I've used Teams, Zoom and Meet. Teams is, by far, the worst
| options. I cringe every time I have to use it, because it's
| random whether I or one of my colleagues will not waste
| minutes at the start of the meeting getting something to
| work, or just joining.
|
| You see, MS has completely messed up the login for Teams. I
| have like 3 different MS accounts (Azure, Office365, etc).
| Some of my coworkers have many more than that, due to
| identities they use for contracts. I've tried Chrome, Edge,
| Firefox, etc. I've tried incognito windows. Sometimes it just
| doesn't work.
|
| Never had a single problem with Zoom or Meet, other than the
| default audio devices not being selected. That's easily
| fixed.
| matwood wrote:
| > My company forces us to use Google Chat. I would take Teams
| any day.
|
| For video or text chat or both? Meet + Slack is my preferred
| solution. IMO Google Meet is the easiest to use video meeting
| software. Click link and the person is dropped in the
| meeting. Slack is the best text chat.
|
| Zoom is fine.
|
| Teams is a dumpster fire on my mac. I have a couple external
| meetings that are Teams and I have to remember start trying
| to get on 5-10 minutes early. Otherwise I won't have time to
| force quit the client or restart my browser to make Teams
| work.
| samiru wrote:
| > For video or text chat or both?
|
| To keep things simple, I would like to use Teams for both.
|
| I do not recall any issues on using Teams on Windows. On
| Mac neither, but most of my work is done on Windows, so
| even I am a Mac user I do not have that much experience of
| using Teams on Mac.
|
| Edit. Even at the moment I am forced to use Google products
| at work for communication, I can't say that I have had any
| "issues" with those products either. I think the
| dislike/like is mostly about feeling. Maybe at some point
| in my working life I got used to Teams and that stuck?
| rozab wrote:
| It's fascinating how good the Google Meet experience is in
| contrast to how bad Google Chat is. Chat seems like such a
| simpler problem, but it's still missing basic features like
| working search
| gcapu wrote:
| I use it and I would be happy if Teams was able to do basic
| copy/paste. When you copy, it copies things you didn't select
| and doesn't copy some things you selected. When pasting, it
| auto-formats the text and does a terrible job at it. It's a
| disaster. I hope the Teams team is forced to use Teams.
| btilly wrote:
| Sadly they probably are forced to use Teams.
|
| But all of the product and prioritization decisions are
| made by product managers who view this as intended behavior
| and not a bug. And they are used to dismissing programmer
| concerns on this. Because most users don't care about it.
| X-Istence wrote:
| My company uses Teams... and I wouldn't wish it on my worst
| enemy.
|
| So here's at least one person who is using teams who
| complains about it.
|
| The shitty UI/UX is one thing, but some of the behaviors are
| incredibly frustrating. Here's some examples:
|
| - Sharing a single window makes Teams minimize the window
| with everyones video camera on it into a small window in the
| corner of your primary screen. I have a 49" wide screen, I
| can have that Teams window open (so I can see faces/people)
| and share a window at full-size for everyone else, STOP
| minimizing that window.
|
| - That small window sits in the bottom right corner of the
| primary screen, if you move it elsewhere, click on Teams for
| chat, and then foreground another app, it re-positions itself
| in the bottom right corner (thereby obscuring whatever app
| happens to be sitting there)
|
| - All of my meetings that were created through Outlook/Office
| 365 as a Teams meeting are labeled "untitled" and there is no
| way for me or anyone else to change the title of the meeting,
| its worse if the meeting is on a shared calendar
|
| - Teams notifications are the worst, it'll tell me I have 2
| messages, but I open the app and there is nothing, OR it's
| messages I've already seen
|
| - No easy integration for 3rd party chatbots and the like,
| which is a HUGE thing we use on Slack
|
| - Teams out of all of the apps (including all the security
| software corporate loves) uses the most energy and power, and
| is the primary reason that we all upgraded to M1's as fast as
| possible because then maybe we'd have a chance to use our
| laptops without carrying the power brick when in meetings
|
| - Tagging people in messages may or may not notify them...
|
| - Meetings allow you to add people to them, but once the
| meeting is over they get removed from the chat, even if
| you've tagged those people in the meeting chat with important
| information, you have to formally invite people to the
| meeting with the original meeting invite for them to "stick".
|
| - No way to copy/paste entire chat history/print chat
| history. I have so many screenshots of meetings/notes I need
| to keep and or share with others.
|
| Overall Teams is one of the worst products I've used, and I
| was using "Teams" in the Microsoft Lync on macOS during the
| Office Communicator days.
|
| The lack of native app is a real killer though, and unlike
| Slack which has done a LOT to improve how they use
| Electron/how much energy they use, Teams is the slowest and
| worst of them.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| > Sharing a single window makes Teams minimize the window
| with everyones video camera on it into a small window in
| the corner of your primary screen. I have a 49" wide
| screen, I can have that Teams window open (so I can see
| faces/people) and share a window at full-size for everyone
| else, STOP minimizing that window.
|
| Took me a while to figure this out, but, and if I
| understand what's going on and you didn't realize it you're
| going to smack yourself, but...
|
| Try clicking on that tiny window with everyone's video feed
| on it. It gets bigger again into a full (and resizable)
| window with everyone's video feed, while the window you are
| sharing is still being shared (and outlined in red).
|
| Apologies if I misunderstand or this doens't apply to you
| (I'm on MacOS), but it literally took me months of being
| frustrated with that situation before I realized clicking
| on the tiny window would restore it to a full window, so I
| figured that might be you too. I forget, maybe it requires
| a double-click.
| ddkto wrote:
| but when the video window pops up again, it's a different
| size than it was before. I usually have the video window
| expanded to half a screen (the other half is for taking
| notes). If I share the other monitor, the sequence is:
|
| 1. share monitor to Teams 2. click on the little window
| to make it big again 3. reposition the video window back
| to where it was before
|
| It's not clear to me the value of steps 2 and 3...
| X-Istence wrote:
| Yeah, the random resizing it does is also incredibly
| annoying. I also placed it where I wanted it so that it
| is to the left of the window I am sharing... I know where
| I want it, but Teams thinks it knows better.
| X-Istence wrote:
| > Try clicking on that tiny window with everyone's video
| feed on it. It gets bigger again into a full (and
| resizable) window with everyone's video feed, while the
| window you are sharing is still being shared (and
| outlined in red).
|
| Yup, until you click away from that window, suddenly its
| the little window in the corner again and it is no longer
| available in Mission Control, well the little tiny window
| is.
|
| So I end up clicking on that little window all the
| goddamn time just so I can see my co-workers and know who
| is talking.
|
| I don't want it to minimize at all. And I surely don't
| want it to sit in the bottom right corner and if I move
| it, move back there.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| I don't use mission control, but I'm able to have the
| bigger window stay open while I click in the window I'm
| sharing, and also click in other unrelated windows I'm
| not sharing.
|
| Not sure why it's different for me and you, but I'm not
| shocked, the software is definitely a mess.
|
| But I somehow don't have the particular problem you are
| having... anymore.
| ArchOversight wrote:
| It seems to be an issue when something covers part of the
| Teams window. I have the same issue as the parent poster.
|
| If a window is placed over top of the Teams window with
| all the floating faces, it minimizes itself into that
| small window...
| [deleted]
| tengwar2 wrote:
| It is telling that there is almost no overlap between your
| list of why you hate Teams, and my list of why I hate
| Teams.
|
| Burn it with fire.
|
| Salt the ground on which it stood.
| X-Istence wrote:
| That's because there's nothing redeemable about Teams. My
| list of annoyances are the things I dealt with this
| morning... I am sure that if you give me another hour or
| two I will have a whole new list of annoyances :P
| heleninboodler wrote:
| This is the real reason people hate it with such a
| passion. It's just got so many baffling/annoying
| misfeatures that you could make lists about it endlessly.
|
| Have they changed the thing where you only see a circle
| with people's initials during meetings and you have to
| click on them to see their actual names?
|
| Edit: note that zoom has some equally-baffling and
| irritating design choices, but at least it performs well
| and doesn't try to do nearly as much, so the list of
| things I hate about it stays small. It's also damning
| that the list of things I hate about it hasn't changed in
| the three years I've been using it heavily, but at this
| point I'm grudgingly comfortable with its "quirks."
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| > My company forces us to use Google Chat. I would take Teams
| any day.
|
| What are the shortcomings of Google Chat over Teams?
| brazzledazzle wrote:
| I use it and hate it for chat. For video calls it's better
| than WebEx but how much is that really saying? (Disclaimer: I
| haven't used WebEx in years, things may be better now)
| gnicholas wrote:
| I occasionally use Teams on my Mac and am dismayed that every
| time I open it, it reinstalls itself in my Login Items. In my
| book, that qualifies it as malware. I used the desktop
| version for a while, to see if they would update it and fix
| this bug. Turns it out it was a 'feature' not a 'bug'. Now I
| just use the web version, and plan to never reinstall the
| desktop software again.
| ccosmin wrote:
| I do use it a lot. Some of the infuriating things: * scrolling
| back past last day conversation doesn't work properly, you have
| to wait a few seconds then text is rendered in such a way that
| you lose track where you were * worse latency with each month
| for receiving messages. I'm logged on multiple machines and
| messages come with random delays * even after joining a call my
| other Teams instance will still ring for some time...
| tech_tuna wrote:
| You're being charitable.
| joostdevries wrote:
| I wonder if MS is aiming to use the conversations about software
| that employees are having in Teams meetings as training data for
| AI. To automate them away.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Note the mandate is just "for the sole purpose of video
| conferencing".
|
| That is, they're not replacing slack. Just, I think, what they
| used before/currently, is zoom.
|
| This came up on an earlier HN thread when MS/Github leadership
| was already telegraphing that.
|
| I _think_ github uses some significant "slack ops" integrations,
| so even if leadership would like to move off that too, it would
| probably be a lot harder and take longer and require some
| development/ops work.
| albertopv wrote:
| I use both slack and teams. Slack chat features are vastly
| superior, they work really well, we devs use only slack, but I
| prefer Teams for video conferences, it's not that slack doesn't
| work, but I found teams screen sharing or recording to be better.
| Also Teams is simpler for non dev people.
| emmanuel_1234 wrote:
| I don't get the hate for Teams. Working from home, it's the best
| tool I can think of:
|
| - because the app is so slow, our IT suggested to use the web
| version instead, as such it can't detect the away/available
| status properly, meaning no one can see if you're in front of
| your computer working on some other windows, or actually away
| from your computer - the web app keeps getting disconnected, and
| fails to deliver messages and notification in time. It also fails
| to indicate that it's failing. It's therfore customary for
| message to take several hours to be sent to/received by the other
| party. It's the perfect excuse for ignoring your colleagues for
| hours, and be like "Oops. Teams, am I right?", wether you were
| actually around, or again, doing something else entirely.
| vondur wrote:
| We have to use Teams here where I work, and for the most part
| it's okish. However, a long standing bug in the Mac version
| that's really annoying is using CMD+TAB to switch to the app
| really doesn't work. I think there is some sort of hidden window
| that the app spawns so when you try to switch to it, it
| technically does, but nothing is there. I've seen fixes that
| instruct you to use the native Mac notification system vs. the
| Teams app notifications, but the issue still persists.
| jFriedensreich wrote:
| might be good to add "for video conferencing", this actually
| might make sense as the horrible teams app can be closed outside
| of video calls and they still use slack for everything else.
| slacks video conferencing is seriously lacking in bad network
| conditions so slack even recommends using zoom there and zoom is
| very expensive at githubs scale. if they forced this on employees
| for team chat that would probably be reason to suspect the
| beginning of the end. i would certainly consider quitting over
| using teams for chat.
| ifyoubuildit wrote:
| Teams is dogshit in general, but the unforgivable part is that
| sometimes messages just don't show up until you restart the
| client.
|
| It's hard to know when this is happening, unless someone follows
| up on or refers to the missing message(s), but once you catch it
| a couple times it's hard to have any faith in the software at
| all.
|
| We've been told that this has been fixed, and it does seem more
| rare now, but I still end up restarting the app regularly out of
| caution. Which is a pretty pathetic thing for an enterprise tool
| from a company like ms.
| thepostman0 wrote:
| For me it is the amount of ram it demands. Most of the day it
| is an IRC client, for a small portion it does voice/video. How
| does it need a gig of RAM all day? This squeezes my computer
| towards e-waste, and I'll be damned if I throw this computer
| away for an IRC client. Screw you MSFT, get it fixed.
| kursus wrote:
| After two years of using Teams daily I still cruelly Slack for a
| ridiculously long list of reasons. Teams is a casual chat product
| as best it doesn't belong to enterprise world.
| aliqot wrote:
| Bit early for Act 3 of the tried-and-true microsoft EEE playbook.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| Slack isn't going anywhere, they're just getting rid of Zoom.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Hey Microsoft, why when I start sharing my screen, does that
| cause the chat section of teams to jump to the foreground. I'm
| explicitly trying to share something that isn't the teams window,
| so why does it try and shove itself in front of my face?
| bamboozled wrote:
| Bing and the GPt fiasco now this...give me popcorn.
| Gravityloss wrote:
| Flowdock > Slack > Teams.
|
| Slack and Teams have this really bad idea of hiding all messages
| in threads and having the users click around to find them from
| threads.
|
| Has any tool copied Flowdock's threading implementation? They got
| it right.
| swasheck wrote:
| i was taken aback when i saw flowdock is owned by broadcom.
| seems a weird space in which to find a broadcom offering.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Teams is so horrific we banned it. If you force us to use teams
| you'll have to find another supplier. Seriously, it is
| incomprehensible that Microsoft would ship something so utterly
| broken. I know they don't have a reputation for writing good
| software but Teams is on another level, and I don't mean that in
| a positive way. I've _really_ tried to get it to work but it is
| so messed up that I don 't think it can be done. Meanwhile, even
| Zoom 'mostly works' (though we don't use that either). Eventually
| we standardized on Google 'meet', it works most of the time, we
| had a single issue in four years of intensive work and that was
| mostly related to a Google meet Chromebox auto-updating in the
| middle of a meeting (brilliant) and then never coming back up
| again. It serves well as a small PC now, we cancelled our
| subscription and just use laptops and desktops with webcams.
|
| What really bothers me about all this: we had the basics of these
| setups working in _1995_ , and since then enough time has past
| that this should be a complete non-issue. But there is no interop
| between the various systems, everybody tries to push their own
| little walled garden and it breaks randomly for no apparent
| reason. If the phone system had been built like this we'd still
| be living in a disconnected world.
| dheera wrote:
| Part of the reason is that when Teams (or any Microsoft
| product) has issues, people blame Microsoft.
|
| When any other product has issues, they blame whoever made the
| decision to use that product.
|
| When IT people pick Microsoft, it's not an optimization for
| quality. It's an optimization for liability. Nobody was ever
| fired for picking Microsoft.
| hulitu wrote:
| > Nobody was ever fired for picking Microsoft
|
| This was about IBM. From what i know, IBM does some
| interesting things (from a HW perspective).
|
| OTOH nothing MS does is interesting (except maybe as a
| challenge in network filtering)
| cloogshicer wrote:
| What makes me very angry about Google Meet is that you can't
| configure it so that guests can just join without asking.
|
| This means if you have a meeting with a lot of people, you
| constantly have to babysit the "Someone is asking to join" box,
| as people come in late.
|
| Also, this box has got to be the worst UI design I've seen in a
| while, since it even blocks yourself from muting/unmuting
| yourself and disabling the camera, until you make a decision
| about whether you want to admit the person.
| whatever1 wrote:
| How can the company who makes one of the best (if not the best)
| electron app (vscode), also ship one of the worst electron apps
| (Teams)?
|
| Can't they just set up a meeting and and take notes on how the
| other team did it?
| clepto wrote:
| They tried to setup a meeting to go over it but no one was
| able to join because Teams was broken
| [deleted]
| FpUser wrote:
| >"I know they don't have a reputation for writing good
| software"
|
| I think they have a problem that regular person supposed to
| hate MS and Windows. I also think MS is quite capable of and
| does produce good software be it their own OS, Visual Studio,
| Visual Studio Code, Word, Excel, Flight Simulator etc. etc.
| hulitu wrote:
| > I also think MS is quite capable of and does produce good
| software be it their own OS, Visual Studio, Visual Studio
| Code, Word, Excel, Flight Simulator etc. etc.
|
| All i can say: good luck using it.
|
| I did not have, any.
| FooBarWidget wrote:
| You think _Teams_ is horrific?
|
| At a certain large company who's all-in on Google Cloud, they
| use Google Chat. Everbody wants to use Slack but management
| thinks it's too expensive while Google Chat is free and comes
| with G Suite which they already paid for.
|
| You don't know what horrific means until you've used Google
| Chat. Teams is a delight compared to that.
| hulitu wrote:
| I hate to say it, but, my experience with Google chat was
| better. It was around 2016 so maybe they haven 't implemented
| web 3.0 stuff yet.
| skibidibipiti wrote:
| [dead]
| Dunedan wrote:
| I agree, the user experience of Microsoft Teams is beyond bad.
| Thankfully I don't have to use Microsoft Teams on a regular
| basis. However, some times when I had to, it wouldn't show any
| audio or video devices to select and consequently audio and
| video didn't work.
|
| Turns out that's the behavior Microsoft Teams exhibits under
| Linux when it can't add inotify watches for whatever reason.
|
| There is no visible error message of any kind in this case,
| just an empty list of audio and video devices. How on earth do
| they expect users to debug and fix that?
| Scubabear68 wrote:
| Our teams have found that it gets things done with the basics,
| but has no advanced anything. Chat is OK, video is OK, Files is
| OK, Channels are OK. But they are all basic. Things like wikis
| or anything more advanced is very primitive.
|
| Plus of course some things like File are a thin facade over the
| horror that is Sharepoint, and you occasionally have to drop
| down into that swamp.
|
| So not a horror show to me, but feels like ten years out of
| date or more.
| paxys wrote:
| > it is incomprehensible that Microsoft would ship something so
| utterly broken
|
| Is it though? Heck Microsoft shipping a high quality product is
| the exception. The entire company runs on half-assed software
| being pushed by sales teams to CIOs and others high up on the
| corporate ladder who evaluate it on the basis of dollar
| amounts, kickbacks and marking checkboxes and not factors like
| usability and user experience.
| pdmccormick wrote:
| I scanned the replies to see if this comment specifically had
| been made. Thank you.
| ljm wrote:
| I love how IRC was the fundamental solution to the problem, and
| technology improved it over the following decade or so with
| XMPP, and then the same technology conspired to extend it and
| extinguish it. Slack did it, Google did it, Teams never
| supported it in the first place...
|
| XMPP wasn't perfect but the solution to that has been walled
| gardens around real-time chat apps.
|
| Everybody wants to share when they're the underdog but when
| success hits them, they roll the red carpet back.
| brocha wrote:
| Every time I have opened Teams, I have had a problem. I have a
| "not simple" webcam/audio setup with virtual webcams and audio
| sources and half the time, Teams will show black and audio will
| not work, and the sources won't show up in the list.
|
| Not only that, every time I've gotten a Teams link for an
| interview, the desktop app tells me "this version is only for
| organizations" then the webapp refuses to load.
|
| A huge pain when every other client I've used (Discord, Webex,
| Zoom, Google Meet) works with minor tinkering.
| [deleted]
| mk89 wrote:
| What's the issue with zoom? I think it's one of the best
| software I have on my machine. It never ever stopped working
| since I have it installed, not even in meetings/webinars with
| 1000+ people. And the integration with Slack is really
| convenient, you can start a meeting in seconds anywhere you
| are.
| jacquesm wrote:
| On what operating system?
| larrik wrote:
| I used to use it (Zoom) constantly on Linux Mint, fwiw.
|
| I switched to Mac only because I couldn't get parts for a
| new desktop at the time. I miss Linux, though :/
| jacquesm wrote:
| Neat, so at least for some people it works.
| Macha wrote:
| Meet does not require a desktop client to work reliably (it
| does, however, require a Chromium browser).
|
| Zoom really tries to bury the browser link. First it says the
| meeting has launched, which it won't have if you don't have
| the client installed, then it tries to prompt you to download
| the desktop client, and only then does it reveal the web join
| link.
|
| Our security team has banned the installation of Zoom after
| some of their issues in 2020.
| bbarnett wrote:
| _Seriously, it is incomprehensible that Microsoft would ship
| something so utterly broken_
|
| It has to be said, what on earth do you mean?! This is
| Microsoft, they are famous for broken.
| wvenable wrote:
| It's so weird -- I use Teams all the time and I've never had a
| serious problem with it.
|
| It's not the greatest software ever made but it's certainly
| functional. It's definitely getting a lot of work done to it.
| blibble wrote:
| I tried hiding a channel once
|
| that was it, there's apparently no way to ever get it back
| unless I can remember its exact name (which I can't)
|
| I learnt my lesson
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Uh what? Every "Team" I have on the left side of my teams
| window has a "X hidden channels" message that I can click
| and that shows every single channel in the teams, including
| archived ones.
| blibble wrote:
| this is what I have to go through:
| https://allthings.how/how-to-hide-and-unhide-chat-in-
| microso...
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Oh hiding _CHATS_ , not channels. Yeah that's probably
| stupid.
| kenjackson wrote:
| We also use it every day.
|
| That said, I feel like I know a lot of devs who think there
| are a lot of things that are unusable (or the equivalent).
| Everything from Visual Studio to the display on their iPhone
| to modern cinema and science fiction in general to In-and-Out
| burgers. As a general rule, I discount their take on pretty
| much anything.
|
| Is Teams great? No. Its better than what I used before it
| though, and its probably gotten better faster than just about
| any other piece of software I've used. I struggle to generate
| any outrage at all about it one way or another.
| blibble wrote:
| > Is Teams great? No. Its better than what I used before it
| though
|
| dare I ask what you used before?
| ThaDood wrote:
| We went from HipChat to Teams and Teams is much better.
| HillRat wrote:
| Yeah, we also went HipChat + Skype -> Teams, and once one
| gets used to it, it's fine (and certainly better than
| XMPP hell). Teams' search was always problematic, but for
| our organizational use case (moderately long-lived chat
| rooms for the duration or sales or projects, with lots of
| conference calls), it was actually more usable than Slack
| or Zoom. Conversely, Slack seems much more effective for
| coordinating in-house tech teams handling ephemeral
| discussions. Horses for courses and all that.
| hulitu wrote:
| Did you use skype ?
| smcleod wrote:
| What on earth have you used before?! I struggle to think of
| anything worse than Teams, maybe Amazon chime but pretty
| much everything I've used over the years is a good step up
| from Teams.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| We used Webex, LogMeIn, GoToMeeting, and Zoom.
|
| I have yet to have a major complaint about Teams. It
| works, I have my meeting and I close it. I don't know
| what some of you want in a video conferencing app.
| ElectricalUnion wrote:
| > It works, I have my meeting and I close it.
|
| I wish that was true. Good for you. Not good for people
| expected to be "online" in it for longer.
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| Skype for business? Teams is way better than that.
|
| I mean its not great but I feel like on Windows at least
| (idk about Mac or Linux) it's just distinctly average.
|
| The only thing about teams that drove me crazy in the
| years of having to suffer it its search function and how
| the mobile app puts the logout action into settings (I
| lost my mind once trying to find it).
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Nah skype for business was the bomb. It worked exactly
| like 2005 MSN messenger, was simple, efficient, and
| screen sharing and video calling was hard so people
| wouldn't start a damn video call or ask me to join a
| video call for things that should be a damn email.
| culopatin wrote:
| Except that keeping track of chats was as much of a pain
| as it is in teams. Things that were absolutely not a
| problem in MSN messenger in 2004
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Every single chat I had in skype for business caused a
| transcript to be emailed to me.
| kdtsh wrote:
| Likewise, I don't particularly like it but it's fine. My
| biggest gripe is nonexistent official Linux support - I hate
| having to use a package maintained by one person on GitHub to
| get a desktop application for Linux, when this application is
| so critical for my day to day. But besides that it works
| fine.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| What do you mean?
|
| MS puts out debs and rpms for teams:
| https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/download-
| app
| stonogo wrote:
| Those were EOLed last year. Microsoft's current guidance
| is to use the PWA in Chrome or Edge.
|
| https://office365itpros.com/2022/09/19/teams-pwa-linux-
| clien...
|
| It's easy to miss, because it was only posted to the
| Office365 Message Center, and not announced anywhere
| else. Discussed here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32678839
| wvenable wrote:
| I use Teams in Chrome a lot. Given that it's an electron
| app, I'm not sure it matters that much that it's "native"
| vs. "web app".
| vinceguidry wrote:
| you do get the benefit of the app author's knowledge of
| how to tweak the chromium env to run it reasonably well.
| And of course the community support.
| MaKey wrote:
| The Linux app doesn't even support screen sharing when
| you're using Wayland. I was forced to try out the browser
| based variant (meeting link opened the web variant
| instantly instead of giving me the choice to use the app
| instead) and can now finally share my screen (even single
| windows!). Also I can now use backgrounds, which the app
| didn't support.
| bsder wrote:
| > Wayland
|
| Don't blame Teams for the fact that Linux can't sort out
| its Desktop GUI situation.
| gcbirzan wrote:
| Yes, the second graphical API that Linux supports in 30
| years, definitely Linux's problem.
| bsder wrote:
| The fact that screenshots and the security around them is
| still a flaming ball of garbage on Linux is not Teams'
| fault.
|
| The fact that Wayland still sucks after 15+ years is not
| Teams' fault.
|
| The fact that nobody unpaid want to work on X11, Wayland,
| and Linux GUI stuff is not Teams' fault.
| realworldperson wrote:
| [dead]
| FinalBriefing wrote:
| On a Mac, I got stuck in some sort of loop that prevented me
| from joining any calls, and even uninstalling the Teams app
| didn't fix it. I had to use my iPhone for every Teams call,
| and sometimes the Teams web app.
| symfoniq wrote:
| Same issues here on M1 MacBook Pro. Most of my company is
| Windows-based so I don't think they endure as much pain.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Teams is minimally usable, but its pretty much worst-in-class
| for...everything it does. It's two compelling selling points
| seem to be (1) that "nobody every got fired for buying IBM"
| now applies to Microsoft more than IBM, and (2) moreover,
| users don't actually buy Teams _qua_ Teams, they get a
| Microsoft 365 subscriptions for some of the things where
| Microsoft has not-worst-in-class solutions, and Teams comes
| along for the ride, and its hard (for decisionmakers who do
| meetings-which, perhaps for this reason, are the _least_
| inadequate feature of teams-and have underlings to do most of
| the hands-on work) to justify paying to get something good
| when you have something you're already paying for that fills
| the same 30,000' bullet-point description.
|
| And #1 is probably an even more compelling selling point if
| your company is a subsidiary of Microsoft.
| hydroreadsstuff wrote:
| Webex is worse. Sharepoint & powerpoint integration, large
| scale broadcast (300+?people uses different techniques) and
| transcripts are helpful. Haven't used the chat much, but it
| seems not good.
| wintogreen74 wrote:
| >> but its pretty much worst-in-class for...everything it
| does
|
| It has good outlook calendar integration; joining from a
| single click in my calendar view is much nicer than having
| to open the occurrence & find the zoom link.
| ElectricalUnion wrote:
| > It has good outlook calendar integration;
|
| It has enforced outlook calendar integration; by default
| you create a Teams meeting whenever you create a meeting,
| choosing to implement the meeting in a competing product
| is annoying at best.
| tristor wrote:
| Zoom and WebEx both have this if you install the plugins,
| as well.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| Don't know about zoom, but webex meetings get a "join"
| button in my outlook web client. I don't have any kind of
| plugin installed, and I even run this on Firefox on
| Linux.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| This works fine for me with Webex links from outlook,
| they send me to the right URL when I click join.
|
| But What trips me up is that we have a sister company,
| which also uses Teams. For some reason, when they send
| invites, I have to open the meeting details and click on
| the link to join. This happens in both Outlook and Teams'
| calendar module.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Yeah, "seamless integration with other Microsoft
| products" is a pretty big exception, I will admit.
| hackmiester wrote:
| But Zoom sends calendar invites that Google Workspace
| understands, so they automatically appear on my calendar
| and have this feature. And I don't even think either
| party did anything to facilitate it. It's just how
| iCalendar invites work.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Ha! "Joining from a single click in my calendar view" has
| a 50/50 chance of working, seemingly dependant on if MS'
| SSO is correctly sync'd behind the scenes when I click.
| wvenable wrote:
| What does it mean to be worst-in-class for text chat or
| video conferencing. Video conferences look and sound great.
| Text chat is text chat. What am I missing here that's so
| awful?
| ChymeraXYZ wrote:
| > What does it mean to be worst-in-class for text chat
|
| I expect a chat program to _show me_ all messages the
| have been sent in a chat, in so far the other party
| intends me to view them (have no been deleted etc.). That
| is not an expectation Teams manages to fulfill.
|
| I expect an edit (mine or someone elses) to be reflected
| on all my devices. That is not an expectation Teams
| manages to fulfill.
|
| I expect to do the same series of keystrokes in a blank
| "chat input" field and get the same result. That is not
| an expectation Teams manages to fulfill.
|
| I expect the text that I see as have been sent to appear
| the same (for a reasonable value of "same") on the other
| persons screen. That is not an expectation Teams manages
| to fulfill.
|
| I expect that if I scroll to the bottom, I will be able
| to make the last message intended to be visible, become
| readable and copyable. That is not an expectation Teams
| manages to fulfill.
|
| I expect that when I select a text and press "ctrl-c" or
| the local equivalent, the text now in my clipboard is
| _always_ predictable. That is not an expectation Teams
| manages to fulfill.
|
| And yes, I have personally seen and experienced each and
| every one of this things.
| andyferris wrote:
| Me too... it makes me so sad.
|
| I see it getting pushed a lot by companies using 365 and
| in particular all of Microsoft's security setup stuff
| (like Authenticator wanting to own your phone), so you
| have to confine your communications to within the walled
| garden.
|
| I think higher ups like the fact that it integrates with
| their outlook calendar (although the teams calendar
| itself fails to meet expectations for a calendar for the
| same reasons above - that is, like chat, I expect to see
| the latest updates to the calendar but they do not appear
| without an explicit refresh... like it's still 1999 or
| something).
| Infernal wrote:
| I also expect to get notified of incoming messages - it
| was not infrequent that I would restart Teams and get 3-5
| notifications of messages all at once, timestamped over
| the previous several hours.
|
| As best I could tell, my client would simply lose
| connection to the server entirely silently. Normally I
| would find out when trying to send a message to someone,
| and noticing the delivery animation/indicator was not
| appearing. Restart Teams and boom, here's a little pile
| of messages I'd missed.
| no_pomegranates wrote:
| Compared to Slack, it has much worse responsiveness,
| message editing, and search. It feels like there is 500ms
| latency on every click. I have a bunch of individual,
| detailed gripes with the message editing. And I'm
| generally not pleased with the quality of the search
| results.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Try sending some bot message to a text chat. Or a bot
| message in general.
|
| I could integrate with my Slack channel in a few hours.
| I've made multiple attempts with teams but it's just
| impenetrable (and as far as I've found you just cannot
| integrate with chat at all).
| [deleted]
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Teams regularly randomly gets worse in many metrics. I
| will start work one day and something will randomly work
| differently, with no warning.
|
| One good example is that teams now tries harder to
| autoformat code. It will refuse to treat something copied
| from an IDE as just text, automatically put it into some
| random quote style box, and the process of getting your
| cursor out of that box to continue writing your message
| changes and is inconsistent over time. If the recipient
| of that message then tries to copy and paste that code,
| the formatting and raw text content will have been
| changed in unexpected ways, and you have to manually fix
| it. This is such a stupidly simple and expected use for a
| chat app in software development workspaces yet it
| probably isn't an allowed use case at microsoft.
| Microsoft fired their QA department, so any code path in
| any app not regularly used by Microsoft staff internally
| is pretty much garanteed to wander, be inconsistent,
| randomly break, and change in unnecessary ways.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| Admittedly, I haven't been at a company that uses Teams
| since 2021: but I had to request an upgrade from an
| otherwise working computer since teams would max out the
| CPU so hard that it would throttle and occasionally
| shutdown. It was an older computer (2015 macbook) but was
| otherwise fine for dev tasks, and other
| videoconferencing.
| Aloha wrote:
| I've been wondering the sam thing for a while, while I
| dont like teams much, I like it better than all of the
| direct alternatives.
| imron wrote:
| Here's an example:
|
| Let's say there's a chat message with a sentence or two I
| want to copy/paste elsewhere. I highlight just the text I
| want and hit copy, and then when I go to paste, Teams has
| 'helpfully' copied not just the highlighted text but also
| the rest of the message and the metadata such as who
| wrote the message and the time stamp.
|
| Every day using teams I encounter things like this that
| frustrate and annoy me.
|
| It's also one of the few tools I answer customer surveys
| on so I can share the annoyances back with Microsoft -
| and at least some of them seem to slowly get fixed (eg
| clicking show message from the search results now takes
| you to the message in context whereas previously it would
| just show the message by itself in the center of the
| screen with no way to see the surrounding conversation).
|
| Anyway, yes, in my experience Teams is definitely worst-
| in-class.
| wvenable wrote:
| I just tested this in Teams right now and it only copies
| the text I highlighted. I tried it both on the native
| client and in Chrome. If you select multiple messages, it
| will copy the whole message with one line of meta data
| but that seems pretty reasonable to me as that is also
| highlighted.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > What does it mean to be worst-in-class for text chat
|
| Poor discoverability of, basically, everything, paste
| doesn't support standard options like pasting text only
| without formatting, so cutting and pasting from format
| documents takes either manual format correction or using
| a third app to paste without formatting and the cut again
| to avoid the ransom-note look. Formatting that supports
| Markdown _entry_ (kind of), but only Word-style WYSIWIG
| editing. Teams text chat is a major let down coming from,
| say, Slack.
| stedaniels wrote:
| What platform are you on? Doesn't CTRL+SHIFT+V work for
| you?
| andyferris wrote:
| Ctrl-shift-V definitely does something different to
| Ctrl-V but it will still "helpfully" autoformat your
| input (mostly adjust indentation - removing white space
| for example) which kinda defeats the purpose in almost
| all circumstances beyond pasting a single line of
| english.
| runamok wrote:
| Nope. Most Microsoft apps don't support this standard. I
| think for teams you have to add alt or something or
| other. I think this is macs only. Cmd shift opt v
| https://businesstechplanet.com/how-to-paste-without-
| formatti...
|
| Word has some ribbon bullshit:
| https://www.howtogeek.com/679956/how-to-paste-text-
| without-f...
| Zetice wrote:
| Those don't really come across as deal breakers though,
| just preferences.
|
| It may not be to your liking but isn't it a bit dramatic
| to say "worst-in-class" without including the "for me"
| caveat?
| jacquesm wrote:
| For me the ability to seamlessly start a meeting, pull in
| 10 participants from different organizations by just
| sharing a URL and be off to the races a few minutes later
| is what makes the difference. If I have to spend even a
| couple of minutes debugging audio/video issues, dealing
| with people that can't seem to join, people that are
| trying to install a client that they then can't get to
| work, people that need to make IDs for some proprietary
| system and so on then it's a non-starter for me.
|
| I'm fine with asking the meeting organizer to have an
| account but the participants should just be able to use
| the web client with a minimum of hassle.
| wvenable wrote:
| I've never had a problem sharing a URL to get outside
| people in a meeting with Teams and, of course, it works
| in the browser. Are you sure this is still a problem?
| chrisfrantz wrote:
| Teams has never worked reliably for me when sent a link
| from orgs that use Teams. Half the time we end up in my
| Zoom call and the people on the call always gripe about
| having to use Teams for the first few minutes.
| prmoustache wrote:
| The issues sometimes aren't about teams but microsoft
| authentication. You are sometimes forced to use incognito
| mode or cannot join.
|
| Plus it doesn't work on any browser, even if said browser
| has capability to run it, or on mobile, unless you
| install their app.
| cge wrote:
| This has been such a problem that, going to a significant
| scientific conference that was online during the
| pandemic, and had organizers who insisted on using Teams,
| the organizers asked everyone to provide a personal email
| address in addition to their academic one, because they
| had had too many problems in the past with people being
| unable to log in to their Teams system if their email
| address was associated with another university's Office
| 365 system.
|
| They proceeded to primarily use Teams as a chatroom to
| let people know when the Zoom meetings were starting.
| boring_twenties wrote:
| > the ability to seamlessly start a meeting
|
| Must be nice. For me it simply refuses to start or join
| any meeting, gives a useless error message about trying
| again later.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| For chats, it is embarrassingly slow at rendering.
| Seemingly only maintains the last ~two dozen messages in
| memory, if you scroll back in history, you have to
| painfully wait for it to retrieve the text and then
| render it. Weird rendering bugs frequently.
|
| Meanwhile, I remember reading full ebooks on my Pentium
| which were rendered as a single HTML file with zero lag.
| hulitu wrote:
| Scrolling through history of a chat is masochistic. You
| get a web scrollbar and finding individual messages, even
| if you know where they are is a lottery.
| amaccuish wrote:
| I have the same problem with Slack, unsure why Microsoft
| needed to copy the pitiful performance. That the Slack
| mobile apps mirror the non-existent reliability of the
| desktop clients is actually pretty amazing.
| LeSaucy wrote:
| Search is horrendous. There are strings that I am
| guaranteed to have written and it is unable to find them,
| nevermind the ui for it is absolutely unusable.
| ElectricalUnion wrote:
| Going backwards in Teams is bad. Searching is a special
| case of going backwards and it sucks even worse.
|
| It rolls back to the past, but lags, so it ends up
| showing you the wrong part of the history, rolling back
| to the present or a indeterminate past all while not
| showing what you searched for.
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| Search is easily the worst. Video performance was pretty
| Terrible pre-covid but seems to have improved to the
| point of not usually a problem.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > For chats, it is embarrassingly slow at rendering
|
| To be fair, despite all the other ways that Slack runs
| rings around Teams, rendering speed isn't one of them.
|
| But, yeah, you'd think this would be an easy opportunity
| for a big win for Teams.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Switching from Teams to Slack the first thing I noticed
| was the crazy good rendering speed of Slack. Teams you
| just lost your sense of where you were in your history it
| took so long. Slack slams it on the screen almost
| instantly.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Switching from Teams to Slack the first thing I noticed
| was the crazy good rendering speed of Slack.
|
| Huh, going the other way, I didn't notice it get much
| worse; Slack seemed slow, and so did Teams, but not
| overwhelmingly slower. Might not have been "rendering"
| proper, could have been network topology of our orgs
| installations of each and more latency to Slack than
| Teams, or something like that.
| foepys wrote:
| The desktop app is crap.
|
| I dare you to scroll up in a chat with links, images, or
| gifs. It's so yanky, it's impossible to find anything.
|
| Or search for a message you know is in a specific
| context. You will not be able to open the message in its
| context, only the message itself. Useless.
|
| Or call somebody and then try to use the media keys on
| your keyboard. They won't work and instead play the Teams
| ringtone twice (or sometimes infinitely).
|
| Or check the online status of your contacts. Spoiler:
| they are accurate only 50% of the time, sometimes showing
| a different status of a person on the same screen (e.g.
| contact list and chat).
|
| Or try to switch chats quickly. It is so unnervingly
| slow.
|
| Or try to react to a new message with an emoji with 125%
| scaling on. You cannot do it because the selection popup
| is like 30 pixels high because it opens downwards, not
| upwards.
|
| Or try to share a 2560x1440 or higher screen with more
| than 0.5 fps over a gigabit connection.
|
| Or try to remotely control another PC over Teams screen
| share and press Ctrl+, or Ctrl+Shift+Space or simply Tab.
| All those are getting caught by Teams, sometimes they are
| forwarded, sometimes not, but they always call a function
| in Teams and open various menus. All those are integral
| shortcuts in Microsoft Visual Studio, by the way.
|
| Or try to copy text of a message you got, you will always
| have the name of the sender and timestamp in the
| clipboard, which requires me to paste it into a text
| editor first to copy and paste only the text into e.g. a
| single line search bar.
|
| Or try to compile and just use Teams at the same time.
| MSN was more performant on a 450 MHz PC 20 years ago.
| flir wrote:
| If you go Away, it stops bothering to show you new
| incoming messages. It gets especially confused on Mac
| with Universal Control.
| caf wrote:
| Somehow Microsoft have managed to recreate the analogue,
| circuit-switched telephone network phenomenon of a "bad
| line" in the digital, packet-switched world of MS Teams.
| Occasionally I'll connect to a meeting and my audio will
| be just be unusably bad; quit the meeting and rejoin and
| it'll be fine...
| giantrobot wrote:
| If I get a message on Teams and bring the window forward, the
| text box isn't active so if I start typing a reply nothing
| happens. Now I need to use the cursor to select the box. So
| fuck me if I tab to Teams to reply to a message.
|
| When joining a video/audio meeting, even though the "Join"
| button is colored like it's active, hitting enter will pull
| up some part of the audio or video config instead of joining
| the meeting.
|
| Messages will remain "unread" until a tab is selected and
| then clicked in. I have to interact with the fucking tab with
| the cursor before it will recognize I read a stupid message.
|
| These UI issues are amateur hour shit. I run into them dozens
| of times a day because my fingers are on the keyboard and I
| like to use keyboard shortcuts. Using Teams requires not just
| a mental context switch but a physical adjustment to simply
| send a reply or just mark a message as read.
|
| This is all besides Teams spinning up my fans with 300% CPU
| usage for _reasons_.
| hulitu wrote:
| Welcome to the new UX/UI/Web x.0 whatever.
|
| Why, in the name of ... , when only 1 (one) input field is
| displayed on the screen, why it is not active ? 20 years
| ago this was the standard. What happened ?
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| > When joining a video/audio meeting, even though the
| "Join" button is colored like it's active, hitting enter
| will pull up some part of the audio or video config instead
| of joining the meeting.
|
| This gets me every time. Even more so recently when, for
| some reason, it started to take its sweet time actually
| joining meetings.
|
| Someone will invite me to join, I'd click join in the popup
| and go about my business. Since it's slow, I'm not too
| bothered if I don't hear anything right away. Then the
| person will message me along the lines of "so... are you
| joining or what?
| anthomtb wrote:
| Teams has been fine enough for me. Video connects instantly,
| audio drop outs are rare and the "mute incoming video"
| setting is a god send (when your cat is kissing you its
| butthole is pointing at me).
|
| I only use Teams on an iPhone or company-issued Windows
| laptop, and almost exclusively for calls within my
| organization. Maybe some of the issues crop up on Linux
| and/or reaching outside of your LAN/VPN?
| xattt wrote:
| Your definition of broken is likely different than the GP.
| wvenable wrote:
| Broken means "doesn't work". I've used Teams for 2 years
| now for conferencing, chat, desktop sharing, etc. It works
| just fine.
|
| I think a lot of Microsoft hate is clouding judgement here.
| People _want_ Teams to suck.
| xattt wrote:
| My broken is fixing something all the time in order to
| get it to work correctly.
|
| Why does Teams occasionally load up with the usual icons
| showing the broken image icon? Why did my organization
| create a special "Fix Teams" utility?
| hackmiester wrote:
| My org does not use Teams at all. But I get invited to
| external Teams meetings sometimes.
|
| As a result, Teams is on my computer, adds itself to the
| startup items, then opens up to a login window every time
| I turn on my computer. The X button does not work to
| close the window. I have to open Task Manager and kill it
| every time. I can disable it in startup items, but it
| puts itself back there, next time I join a Teams meeting.
|
| Also, if I am using my computer in the closed position,
| it still chooses the integrated webcam and microphone
| every time, even sometimes switching to them randomly
| during a meeting.
|
| Of course, I am running on an unusual setup that I'm sure
| Microsoft didn't think to test: I am running Microsoft
| Teams on Microsoft Windows 10 on a Microsoft Surface Pro
| computer.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| You can use Teams from your browser, no need to install
| it.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I simply can not get it to work. Note that we are on
| Linux/Chromebooks depending on the person in the team and
| this alone seems to be a major barrier for something that
| should be a non-issue. Every two bit video chat site in
| the world seems to have this figured out.
| phpisthebest wrote:
| >>I simply can not get it to work.
|
| Seems like that is something you should have stated in
| the first comment.
|
| >>Linux/Chromebooks depending on the person in the team
| and this alone seems to be a major barrier
|
| Something like les than 1% of the world uses Linux on the
| desktop. Dont get me wrong I love Linux, I used it as my
| primary desktop from 2005 until around 2012 when I went
| back to Windows (windows 10)
|
| But calling problems on linux a "major issue" seems to
| over state the usage of Linux Desktop
|
| further depending on when you tried it, and what client
| you were using that is likely the root cause
|
| The Linux Desktop client always sucked, so much is no
| longer a thing, 100% a web app now. The web App teams
| should work just fine.
| jacquesm wrote:
| 1% of the world -> you are missing out on whole orgs that
| use Chromebooks.
|
| I'm sure that if you use the whole Windows enchilada that
| it may work, but given that Microsoft has shipped a Linux
| desktop client[1] I would expect that thing to simply
| work.
|
| It doesn't. Besides wanting to run all the time even when
| you're not in a teams meeting. Video conferencing is all
| about seamless integration, it should get out of the way
| as much as possible and as soon as the tool becomes the
| focal point of the meeting in my book you've failed to
| deliver.
|
| [1] https://petri.com/microsoft-replace-teams-linux-
| client-progr...
|
| And they retired it, apparently because they agreed with
| my assessment or it isn't worth their trouble.
| blibble wrote:
| > but given that Microsoft has shipped a Linux desktop
| client[1] I would expect that thing to simply work.
|
| this is the entire Microsoft business model:
| 1. identify a competitor's product 2. clone it,
| but only spend enough engineering effort to make it sound
| plausible enough to tick the required boxes for
| evaluation by someone won't have to use it 3.
| bundle it with your other products (so no need to compete
| on quality)
| blibble wrote:
| > I simply can not get it to work. Note that we are on
| Linux/Chromebooks
|
| I'm sure Microsoft will get right on improving that
|
| "DOS aint done 'til Lotus won't run"
| zdragnar wrote:
| Weird, I've used teams on a chromebook before, no problem
| with the basic functionality we used (i.e. video call).
| jvdvegt wrote:
| I'm using it on my cheap Acer laptop with Ubuntu and
| Wayland daily, and the website works as intended (the
| Linux app is horrible).
| [deleted]
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| I actually like a lot of microsoft products, even though
| I own several thousand dollars worth of Apple hardware.
|
| I happily use windows 10 for most personal computing (I
| haven't upgraded, so no comment on 11), VScode, github,
| word, excel, whatever...
|
| Teams, though, is one MS product that genuinely never
| worked for me. Last company I was at used it, and they
| had to upgrade my work machine since teams needed more
| CPU (old machine was an i5 macbook with 8gb). Google/zoom
| was fine, but running teams would regularly overheat my
| computer.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| >I think a lot of Microsoft hate is clouding judgement
| here. People want Teams to suck.
|
| Agreed. It's as bandwagon as I've seen anything else.
| FFS, I half expect to see M$ written about.
|
| It works fine, have your meeting and get back to work.
| What is it that people are trying to do in Teams?
| phpisthebest wrote:
| Pretty sure the GP definition of broke is not really what
| broke means. I know it is all the rage these days to just
| redefine terms to make them often mean the exact opposite
| of what the rest of the planet understands them to mean
|
| But we have to have shared definitions for words or
| communications just breaks down
|
| It can not be "your definition of broke is different from
| mine" if that is the case then language is just noise and
| we need to stop communicating
| ctvo wrote:
| > Pretty sure the GP definition of broke is not really
| what broke means. I know it is all the rage these days to
| just redefine terms to make them often mean the exact
| opposite of what the rest of the planet understands them
| to mean
|
| After they explained to you it was broken in their
| official client for their officially supported operating
| system, you moved the goal post to it's only broken in
| the client, try the web app instead:
|
| > The Linux Desktop client always sucked, so much is no
| longer a thing, 100% a web app now. The web App teams
| should work just fine.
|
| Just stop.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Do you realize I'm the idiot that came up with live video
| in the browser to begin with?
|
| When I say it is broken I'm pretty serious about it: we
| spent a full day because there was one customer that
| positively insisted that we had to use their Teams setup
| rather than what we normally use and in the end we just
| gave up, it isn't worth the stress to me if there is a
| viable alternative (or even several). But of course if
| you think that I'm redefining the meaning of the word
| 'broken' just for the heck of it then you're free to
| continue to do so.
| LeonB wrote:
| > Do you realize I'm the idiot who came up with live
| video in the browser to begin with
|
| Ok - that really surprised me and from anyone else I
| would've dismissed it as hyperbole... after some digging
| I ended up reading this incredible story --
|
| https://jacquesmattheij.com/story-behind-wwcom-
| camaradescom/
|
| Amazing adventure!
| phpisthebest wrote:
| >> we spent a full day because there was one customer
| that positively insisted that we had to use their Teams
| setup rather
|
| So you tried it once, as a guest and then banned the
| entire things with out understand the permissions systems
| or any other possible causes?
|
| Understand that as a Admin I have the power to block
| Guests from Joining, Block some features from Guest, and
| so alot of things that is not commonly possible under
| other platforms. Often these security settings are
| aggressive by default, for example we had an issue with
| one client needing to connect to one of our teams room,
| teams and the room worked fine but because the security
| settings the Guest could not connect, everyone else could
| but the guest could not
|
| This is not something that can be fixed by the guest, nor
| it is problem with teams as a technology, it is the
| security controls built into the platform
|
| >Do you realize I'm the idiot that came up with live
| video in the browser to begin with?
|
| and I am a guy that wrote PHP code in the 90's and love
| it... so....
| jacquesm wrote:
| > So you tried it once, as a guest and then banned the
| entire things with out understand the permissions systems
| or any other possible causes?
|
| That's not what I wrote. I wrote that because someone
| insisted we said, ok, fine let's invest a bunch of time
| and solve this _and we could not_.
|
| Before then we had tried multiple times and even now
| every now and then we get a teams invitation but I just
| point blank refuse them. Enough time wasted.
|
| Check TFA: this is a Microsoft subsidiary that needs to
| be forced to use the solution provided by the mothership.
| That push really wouldn't be necessary if the people at
| GitHub believed that Teams served their needs well.
| hulitu wrote:
| I had to restart Windows because Teams will not join
| meetings. If that is not broken than what ? (killing it
| with process explorer did not help)
| roncesvalles wrote:
| If you're a company of 10 or 20 people, you won't notice the
| problems. It starts to break at medium-sized business scale
| (anything over, say, 100 employees). You start to notice
| limitations in the UI/UX but also just constant bugs in
| calling functionality, split meetings, super laggy large
| meetings, slow navigation, and broken search.
|
| It just feels like it wasn't built for serious scale from the
| ground up, like some after-thought Todo List app that was
| thrown in with Office 365 to tick a checkbox.
| mmcnl wrote:
| I use it daily in an organization with >10k employees.
| Never really have any issues?
| alerighi wrote:
| It works mostly fine. It doesn't have the prettiest
| interface, for example message editing is not great, and
| search is not great (though it got better than 1 year ago
| that was unusable). Anther stupid thing is that handling
| multiple organizations (for example if you are added as
| external collaborator to another company Teams) is basically
| broken, you don't receive messages from one if you don't
| switch to it most of the time.
|
| Sure there are systems that work probably better but Teams is
| fine, also the alternatives either don't have all the
| features of Teams or they are difficult to use/setup. A pro
| of Teams is that if you already have Office365 is mostly well
| integrated with the other tools (mail, calendar, Office,
| AzureAD authentication) and you have to manage accounts only
| in one tool (I can from the horrible AzureAD administration
| console create a user and it has a mail, Teams, Office, and
| can login into the company computers).
|
| To me the reason to have Teams is just that you don't have to
| introduce another tool, have another account, etc. Of course
| if you decided to use GSuite instead of Microsoft one makes
| perfectly sense to use Google Meet, but GSuite doesn't yet
| have all the feature of Office365 and it's more expensive,
| and like it or not you have to deal with .docx documents when
| interfacing with other companies.
| Aeolun wrote:
| It works mostly fine. It's also the application I use
| basically every minute of the day. 'Mostly fine' just
| doesn't cut it.
|
| When we're talking about an IDE I can just bring my own,
| but for chat it doesn't work like that.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| This comment and the grandparent both ring true for my and my
| experience. When using Teams as basically an IRC replacement
| it worked fine and didn't have any serious issues, when folks
| started using it to try to host meetings across sites and
| share interactivity it really struggled unsuccessfully.
|
| I agree with Jacques that all the pieces (except for high
| speed networking) were in place in the last century I
| expected this to develop more than it has.
|
| Given the stuff that ML can do TODAY, it should totally be
| possible to give the "presenter" a view of the audience where
| you use a combination of the pre-computed model for people's
| faces, and a client doing pose estimation from the web cam.
| If I'm looking at the presentation on my screen, that
| information should allow the presenter's view to see me
| looking at them. If I'm looking away it could show me looking
| down or something. If I leave and go to the bathroom or
| something it could show my seat being empty. Similarly,
| raising a hand should present on the speakers screen as my
| raising my hand in the audience, calling on me with the mouse
| should unmute my microphone until the presenter moves the
| mouse/pointer off my face in the audience.
|
| Early, EARLY, on in the Java group the idea had been worked
| on to provide a "visual environment" for doing things, and of
| course "Snowcrash" came out at the same time and everyone was
| doing their own "metaverse." I was looking at the problem and
| realized that to be successful we'd have to emulate some of
| the physics that keep us sane in group settings today. (like
| everyone can't hear everyone else talking in a room usually).
| David Rosenthal did a study for NIST, as I recall, on the
| network implications of something like the metaverse and
| concluded that it would take a terabit of network
| connectivity to "host" a live concert in the metaverse with
| the same "feel" as being there in person. (so everyone gets a
| view from their POV, voices travel 10 - 30' in a cone from
| the direction of the mouth, sound from the stage follows the
| acoustics of the modeled room etc. And then that analysis is
| followed by trimming things out to reduce bandwidth until you
| reach the "present day" bandwidth numbers and describing that
| reduced experience. He got back to Zoom like meetings with
| something like 1mbps/10gbps for the participant/network
| ratio.
|
| So summarizing; Often people approach the problem without
| realizing the complexity of what they are trying to do, in
| part because meetups/communication in "real life" has so much
| of the complexity taken care of by physics and the fact that
| you learned what worked as a toddler before you could think
| so it just "is" in your brain. Stepping outside of that
| mindset requires deliberate effort. There are likely
| opportunities here that are not being exploited because of
| this mindset.
| stuaxo wrote:
| The Linux version of Teams was very broken for ages, but
| instead of fixing it, they dropped it.
|
| So much for the cross platform Microsoft.
| briffle wrote:
| their markdown code block formatting is mostly working this
| week. 2 weeks ago, it didn't handle new lines correctly, for
| about a month. a few weeks before that, it stripped any
| whitespace from the start of a line for a few weeks, and a few
| months before that, you couldn't only copy what was in a
| markdown code block, you had to copy the entire message,
| including sender and timestamp.
|
| These 3 problems have resurfaced over and over for the last few
| years.
| xmodem wrote:
| My team had a meeting with Github sales and product a few weeks
| back. After I secured a booking of the special Teams-capable
| meeting room and arrived 10 minutes early to make sure
| everything was set up in time, we spent the first 10 minutes of
| the 30 minute meeting with 2 people from Github unable to join.
| At that point I generated a Google meet link, put it in the
| email thread and we were up and running a minute later.
|
| I've found Meet to just work about 98% of the time. My biggest
| complaint is the framerate. I'm not sure what it actually is
| but it feels like 15fps.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Ah good point, yes, framerate can be an issue, but I've long
| ago decided to not worry too much about the video but to
| concentrate on the audio instead, I have a much lower
| tolerance for audio drop-outs than for video issues.
| larrik wrote:
| My supervisor and I once had a Teams meeting on the calendar
| that was created via Outlook. We both joined, and wound up in
| different meetings with the same id, wondering where the other
| person was...
|
| We never scheduled a meeting for Teams again.
| ratchetbob wrote:
| I wish the Github team was forced to use Teams day to day... the
| Github <> Teams integration is TERRIBLE. (and the slack "daily
| report" was so good)
| chongli wrote:
| That's plenty of time to dust off the resume and start pounding
| the pavement! Very generous of Microsoft to give so much notice!
|
| _Edit: for those who may think I'm overreacting to a small
| change in tooling, I offer this classic essay [1]. It explains
| the reasoning behind leaving much better than I could!_
|
| [1] https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-
| ear...
| slantedview wrote:
| Changing jobs over video conferencing software would be
| extreme.
| gregors wrote:
| I've known several people not take a job because of Teams....
| tinus_hn wrote:
| Alternatively, tell such an employer you require a company
| issued phone with Teams on it.
| markdestouches wrote:
| But this isn't just about video conferencing software. I
| think it's pretty reasonable to assume that Microsoft is
| going to keep pushing in the same direction
| kneebonian wrote:
| You'd think but if where I work ever mandated I had to stop
| using Linux I'd start looking elsewhere. I have to spend 8
| hours a day using a tool and I get frustrated with suboptimal
| tools, why subject myself to that on top of everything else I
| have to do.
| kahrl wrote:
| Now, I could be wrong here, but I'm pretty sure an
| operating system and conferencing software are two
| different things.
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| Unless you're in video meetings most of your day. (Not
| judging)
| input_sh wrote:
| For what it's worth, Teams is also available as a
| .deb/.rpm, which is I'd say unique for something with
| Microsoft in its name.
| vortext wrote:
| The Teams desktop client on Linux has been retired.
|
| https://www.omglinux.com/the-official-microsoft-teams-
| app-fo...
|
| https://office365itpros.com/2022/09/19/teams-pwa-linux-
| clien...
| kneebonian wrote:
| The teams .deb/.rpm sucks, and is an unmaintained
| electron app when MS temporarily "loving Linux".
|
| If you want an optimal teams experience download edge and
| run the webapp in it.
| modo_mario wrote:
| They said they'd keep supporting skype on Linux too when
| worries about that popped up on purchase then broke that
| promise within less than a year. Github desktop was also
| soon to be officially supported with basically all the
| legwork done. Nice that there's a community fork.
| ralmidani wrote:
| I like your take and agree 100%. With the addition that
| referring to Windows 11 as "suboptimal" might be the
| understatement of the century.
| calmoo wrote:
| I did exactly this - AMA.
| akdor1154 wrote:
| For me it would be a clear sign that my employer does not
| give a shit about me when making tooling decisions. And that
| situation is definitely one that would have me eyeing the
| exits.
| bombcar wrote:
| It's like "leave when the free soda disappears" - people who
| have "been around long enough" learn to notice the signs that
| tell them it might be time to start looking.
|
| Others (and this is entirely valid in my opinion) see and
| notice and decide to ride it down all the way to the ground;
| this can be valuable also as a dying company is likely to
| promote anyone who remains; title inflation is a real thing.
|
| Or another way to look at it - it's kinda extreme that a
| single straw would break a camel's back.
| aliqot wrote:
| I'd love to hear more about these "leave when the free soda
| disappears" signs. I think a lot of us can benefit from the
| unmoderated experiences of others who've been in this
| situation. When "lifers" start disappearing that's a big
| indicator the show's over.
| bombcar wrote:
| https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-
| ear... is the one I was thinking of
|
| Note that it doesn't even have to be malicious at all;
| it's just a sign that the company is switching from the
| company you started working at to something else. Not
| everyone is up for that kind of change. Imagine the
| difference between working at the plucky startup trying
| to do X and working at any of the huge companies those
| startups can become.
| flappyeagle wrote:
| No it's not. I work remotely. I am on slack and zoom 3-4
| hours a day. It's basically my virtual office.
|
| Imagine if there was a company policy that made your office
| annoyingly uncomfortable after it was totally fine before. Is
| it extreme to consider other options?
| rwalle wrote:
| I would be really surprised if more than 1 out of 1000
| employees does that in real life just because of a change in
| the corporate tools.
| kahrl wrote:
| [flagged]
| [deleted]
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Extremely-unpleasant tools can definitely contribute to
| leaving a company. I agree that it's a silly reason on its
| own, but it can be one factor of many--I mean, _of course_
| QOL at work is a factor in stay /leave decisions.
| [deleted]
| imperialdrive wrote:
| You must not have to use Teams much at work. It really is
| that bad!
| kahrl wrote:
| I daresay you have little career experience, and must be an
| extremely entitled, fragile person if you think it "really
| is that bad."
|
| I have been using it at my company since 2017 when it
| REALLY WAS that bad. We were even coming from Slack. But it
| has been years since I was actually inconvenienced by it.
|
| In it's current state, it is NOT an inconvenience that
| rises to the level of leaving a company. _I 'm saying it
| would be idiotic, childish, and extremely entitled to leave
| Microsoft over the company's choice of video conferencing
| software._
|
| And this is coming non-Microsoft employees with no skin,
| complaining about a company policy they will never have to
| experience.
| AndrewVos wrote:
| What's a spectrumite?
| kahrl wrote:
| It was an admittedly childish insult directed at anyone who
| got their panties in a bunch about the choice of video
| conferencing software _at a company they don 't even work
| for._
| aliqot wrote:
| I understood it as a reference to those claiming autism
| spectrum.
| AndrewVos wrote:
| In that case, what a sad, pathetic weak-minded little man
| he is.
|
| A good reminder why I shouldn't come to hacker news
| anymore.
| aliqot wrote:
| What I said was a guess based on my contextual perception
| of the unknown term 'spectrumite', not a literal
| explanation.
| AndrewVos wrote:
| No I think you're right.
| kahrl wrote:
| I think you understood exactly what I meant the first
| time, but then feigned ignorance in order to be able to
| virtual signal and say the same tired old line "this is
| why I don't come here anymore" as you continue to lurk.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| Tech layoffs are exploding and there is a looming recession and
| maybe world war, and you're gonna quit over the work-chat
| software?
|
| At least the layoffs meant people got severances; this is
| walking for $0 and _maybe_ the ability to find a different
| office productivity suite. I mean vote with your feet and all,
| but if this came up in an interview I 'd probably laugh at you.
| chongli wrote:
| There's a big difference between pulling a George Costanza
| and quietly talking to recruiters at other companies. Don't
| make a scene, just look for a better job and give notice when
| you get an offer.
| flappyeagle wrote:
| Yes many people would quit over being forcing to use tools
| that make their lives harder day to day.
|
| It's the difference over picking up a recruiter call vs
| ignoring. Or spending 15 min to fix up a resume.
|
| There are degrees before flipping a table and walking out.
| Forcing people to use teams when they are accustomed to
| better software pushes everyone marginally in that direction.
| aldarisbm wrote:
| uh.. i dont see the problem?
|
| They are only using it for video conferencing. day to day collab
| still on slack...
| ketchupdebugger wrote:
| Its like forced conversion. It only benefits MSFT. Teams get to
| claim github as a customer, and MSFT saves some money. This
| might be small, but usually this opens the door to a whole
| suite of software being shoved down github's work/tech stack.
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| This way they also don't send all their internal company
| communications to a third party, which would be extra stupid
| when you have your own in-house conferencing software to use
| instead.
| cpuguy83 wrote:
| I mean... it's a pretty hard sell to say "Hey boss person,
| can we use our competitor's software to discuss company
| business?"
|
| My team also used Slack when I joined and were eventually
| required to move to Teams. We aren't forbidden from using
| Slack, I'm in multiple Slacks collaborating with various OSS
| projects and foundations every day.
| aldarisbm wrote:
| I'm all for dogfooding, the only meaningful difference
| between slack and Teams to me, is the search for actual
| information that I know I've encountered in the past (it's
| easier on slack IMO), and the awesome way to interact/thread
| with conversations in a natural way.
|
| Video-conferencing wise, I always have more problems with
| slack than with zoom/teams.
| tkone wrote:
| this already happened to some extent. the "blessed" way to
| develop github is in vscode (from ms), using codespaces (from
| ms), running on azure (from ms). vim/emacs users can use the
| terminal (although the codespace and port forwarding, at
| first, had to be done via vscode exclusively) but your entire
| toolstack needs to be installed each time you launch a new
| one.
|
| collaborating with anyone at ms already meant you were using
| teams to some extent.
|
| (former github developer)
| capableweb wrote:
| > They are only using it for video conferencing. day to day
| collab still on slack...
|
| If they're already using Slack, Slack has video conferencing
| and they are trying to reduce costs, why not centralize
| everything in Slack or Teams?
| bgm1975 wrote:
| I suspect they're not replacing Slack's video capabilities
| with this move. They are replacing Zoom's.
| aldarisbm wrote:
| Not sure, I dont work at Microsoft, but if my company did 70%
| of what slack does, sometimes significantly better (IAM). I
| would too, want my employees to use my software, and with
| that raise problems and make it better.
|
| I understand the frustration of some people, but this is by
| no means something oppresive at all. A lot of companies use
| "X" office suite, and use zoom for calls , etc. It's okay for
| everything to not be centralized, always.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Slack _has_ video conferencing. Every redundant tool a company
| makes workers use makes work less pleasant.
|
| I'd expect at some point they'll push them the rest of the way
| onto Teams, to reduce that redundancy. Which will be even
| worse, because Teams is so incredibly bad.
| lttlrck wrote:
| Slack video conferencing was absolutely awful and one of the
| main reasons we switched to Teams a couple of years back.
|
| Is it better now?
|
| There seem to be plenty of commenters combining Slack and
| Zoom so seems not. That's a redundancy right there that Teams
| solves.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| It used to be god-awful but has been pretty OK for the last
| year or two. Not as good as Zoom, but close enough for many
| use-cases. I haven't tried it for really _giant_ "rooms"
| but 99% of the time those would be better as a broadcast,
| anyway.
| aldarisbm wrote:
| Slack's video conferencing is archaic compared to something
| like zoom (maybe not teams), but out of all of the video
| conferencing tools, slack is the worst.
| OJFord wrote:
| It's _at least_ a decade ahead of Zoom on Linux. The latter
| 's like using 00s Skype.
| meitros wrote:
| "for the sole purpose of video conferencing". They're still using
| slack for day-to-day...
| nkotov wrote:
| I had to use Teams for a couple of months with a client. It's
| not great but it's not terrible. I do miss days of Zoom but I
| opened it recently and found apps listed during the call of
| sudden - felt like bloatware.
| ss108 wrote:
| Not sure what you missed about Zoom. It's works, but doesn't
| feel smooth and seems to have a very big footprint for
| something with a specific use-case.
|
| In particular, my day job is at a big corpo office space
| style place, and the software that requires the most updates
| is Zoom. I don't get why. It's also a lot less simple to use
| than Google Meet
| cassianoleal wrote:
| One of my clients insist on using Zoom. I have never
| installed it (after so many security issues in the earlier
| days, I'd rather not risk it). I just use it from the
| browser.
|
| Every time I click to open a meeting it downloads the
| installer, which IMO is a horrible dark pattern. I despise
| them as a company, and don't find their product anything
| special.
|
| That said, using it on the browser has an effectively null
| footprint and doesn't require updates.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| So the official meetings will be in teams and the important
| meetings in Slack huddles?
|
| Does teams allow you to draw on the screen?
| w0m wrote:
| > Does teams allow you to draw on the screen?
|
| i mean; no one can really tell you what to do with your
| sharpie.
|
| (but yes; that's been baked in for a while)
| procinct wrote:
| Only on a freeze frame of the screen though. Not like in a
| slack huddle.
| staircasebug wrote:
| Step 1 towards, "we will be using Teams for day-to-day
| collaboration".
| chasd00 wrote:
| Embrace Teams for video conferencing, Extend Teams to day-to-
| day collaboration, Extinguish Slack. That's not how Embrace-
| Extend-Extinquish worked traditionally but it still fits.
| pknomad wrote:
| This is why I'm so happy to be in all *nix ecosystem for
| our infra. Some microsoft products work really well but
| they all have this tendency to metastasize and you'll get
| vendor locked to MS.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Yeah, that was interesting. I wonder if Teams have acquired the
| feature that Google Meet have to extremely simply setup a
| meeting and just do it all in the browser. The quality of the
| video and audio is fine in Teams, it's all the surrounding
| stuff that's wonky.
|
| So it they can easily create a meeting without using the Teams
| client, then it might be just fine.
| bgm1975 wrote:
| I guess it could have been worse. It could have been Skype for
| Business.
| bombcar wrote:
| Nobody tell him what the underlying technology of Teams
| calling is.
| OJFord wrote:
| Which implies they were using some third tool, Zoom say, right?
| (I mean, assuming the cost-saving isn't switching to free-tier
| Slack!) Seems weird to me to introduce Teams as the mandatory
| change rather than switch it to be done in Slack, which they
| already have.
| dustedcodes wrote:
| Immediate resignation reason and turns out the ones who got
| recently laid off are the real winners as they walk away with a
| severance package at least.
| barbazoo wrote:
| That would be a rather silly reason to quit over, wouldn't it?
| dannyobrien wrote:
| I think it's probably a variant on
| https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-
| ear...
| bob1029 wrote:
| I see some super hot takes in here. Teams is not ideal, but it
| does seem to work for us. In total, I spend about 3-4 hours in
| the actual Teams UI per week, so maybe I don't have enough
| exposure to lose my mind over this.
|
| We've used other messaging tools in the past - Mattermost, Slack,
| Skype, etc. For better or worse, Teams seems to be sticking and
| we are all way too busy to worry about whatever horrific
| implications this brings.
|
| One thing I'd consider in all of this: Products like Teams are
| entirely about connecting other people (and businesses) to you. A
| vast majority of the decision to use that product is going to
| come from non-developers and other assholes in a typical org
| chart. Your front-line, minimum-wage employees are not going to
| have the patience or skills to configure their own federated IRC
| instances in order to correspond with your development team.
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