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.
If nothing else, Teams is horrendously inconsistent and one might naïvely think that MS would want to dogfood it better, with good statistics.
This HN article now has nearly 600 comments of people – mostly – griping about Teams. A large number of them are replied to with people saying "Oh, it's never done that for me!" or, alternatively, "Teams never works fully, but at least X works" being replied to by "X has literally never worked for me". They're all right. I've had vast numbers of random errors – like the application bars just disappearing, or a thousand and one "Sorry, Something Went Wrong™!" errors, but fundamentally, it's indescribably awful.
Periodically I'm asked to give feedback about how a call went. I always give one star. I'm not cruel and petty – it genuinely is always one star, where with my hardware, Zoom is pretty much real-time HD audio and video. People chop in or chop out, or I hear fan noise, or I wasn't able to join the link in Chrome because – well, it recognises that it's in Chrome but the version numbers don't match, and it thus asks me to download Chrome or Edge to join in Chrome – whatever. Microsoft must know that it's made a dog, and a very, very positive take would be that they want to make it better by having a larger base of competent developers to call upon to basically bug and betatest.
If I worked there, I'd have jumped ship at the acquisition, however...
Exactly, thank you so much for putting the experience into words. The random errors are just so... astoundingly random.
I've had problems with a headset on USB-C (Sennheiser EPOS). Teams would connect once, and then never again. Another time it would stop responding to any click. Then it would reload whenever changing team/channel. And then it would no longer show any notifications.
I haven't seen an app with that amount of apparently completely random errors, often not reproducible either. It's like a Bethesda game.
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.
In my Big Company (400,000+ employees) it is not permitted to use other systems to host meeting without authorization. Using unapproved software is strictly not allowed. There can be plenty of reasons including business data security, legal data retention, international data privacy laws, licensing agreements, etc.
I remember when Skype was considered controversial because indication of working status and access to employees after business hours was potential a violation of workers rights and privacy laws.
Huh, it was but I can't take credit for being clever about it, just simple order of magnitude estimation with a factor: e.g. I thought of a handful I was pretty sure were 500k+, rounded up to 10, then doubled as I know I don't know much about the space.
I’m trying to understand a world where employees at a large org will install a random comms client instead of just using what’s already installed. I worked at a place that used IBM sametime until they migrated off lotus notes. No one used anything else, because why? You’d need to convince every other person you wanted to talk to use it too, was much easier to just use the existing app.
Often these tools are adopted by smaller teams for their communication. So official company meetings would happen over teams, but bitching at Bob because he still hasn’t reviewed your PR would happen in Slack. It can make information management a nightmare, especially when users start sharing files with each other via Slack.
Most big co’s make it pretty clear to employees that it’s a pretty big no-no to discuss proprietary work through an unaudited 3rd party (especially a competitor).
Big Company can make it very difficult to use an alternative to the preferred tool. Blocking network traffic or restrictions on what binaries can be installed on corporate computers can be very effective at keeping the team using the same chat client.
I is not just video conferencing. Teams sux if you need many ad-hoc working groups based on topics or small teams. Meaning, they sux for exactly the kind of work developers do.
Yes. Zoom executives directly working for china to disrupt users calls that were anti-china. They later formally added Chinese-gov related takedowns in their TOS.
Before the pandemic, apple had to remove their Mac app because it was basically a virus.
Google and Amazon aren't perfect, but you can use their video calls without worrying that an executive will dislike the content of your call and mess with you. And they don't use anti-patterns to try and route you from the web app to installing a virus.
I'm too old to put up with software that doesn't work solely because it is closed-source and so doesn't accept patches :P Trying to get rid of the Discord client at the moment...
I think the biggest problem with Teams is the leadership's strategy.
They seem to be focusing on adding as many glossy features as quickly as possible. The quality, performance and consistency doesn't seem to be a point of consideration at all. Yet for a user who spends a lot of time in it each day, I really don't care about animated waves on top of my video, or this together mode. I just want it to work and not take ages to open, show stale status info until I click on a user, have choppy video, running my mac's fans on full blast, and be so cluttery that it's almost impossible to find back information we shared in chats in the past. And the worst thing for me: the information density is so low. These big bubbles around everything seem to care more about looking pretty than to actually show information and cause way too much scrolling. Slack does this so much better.
The Teams guys can learn so much from their VS Code colleagues. It's really weird how one company can produce one of the worst infamous electron apps and also the gold standard best one at the same time.
Ps and please, tell me what's going wrong. "Something went wrong" is ridiculous. And let me log into multiple tenants at the same time without switching.
Pro tip: go to settings. In general, there is a "Chat density" setting. Change that to "Compact". Wish this was the default because it is so much better!
It's CDD, checklist driven development. When you are competing against another product in the enterprise space the people making the decision probably won't be using what you are selling often but they will look at the list of features, so money spent adding new features is more important and higher prioritized than stability reliability or any other nonfunctional requirement.
The main selling point for teams is that it's free for existing M365 customers. Microsoft is aiming specifically at a "quick win" for IT managers to cut a competing product and replace it with something they're paying for anyway.
And usually the top would spend a lot of time in meeting themselves too, it's not something they won't be using themselves.
But I know what you mean, in our company the top execs have their own support team so they don't even know how bad our outsourced support is. A lot of production issues are streamlined for them because of this.
This resonates. Microsoft does this with a lot (not all) of their products. Its also my experience here in the Netherlands, especially how Microsoft does sales. Its always management who forces everybody to use these products against their will, especially as they come for free in their 365 package. Nevermind that is a pale imitation of an MVP version of their competitor.
For the decision makers, it doesn't really matter that the consequence is loss of work satisfaction and productivity. That is _their_ problem.
My regret is not finding out about this earlier in my career, in the future tooling will be an important consideration when choosing jobs, and I'll avoid orgs who are in an iron grip by Microsoft like the plague.
As someone who just moved to The Netherlands, this bugs me as well. Many of my interviews happened over Teams, which should have been red flag. Luckily, my IT department is small enough that we can use Discord for general chat and some video calls, if we don't need high resolution, but we still have to use Teams to interact with the rest of the company.
I recently tried edge to use the new Bing and I feel the same way. So many features, half of them buggy, and zero coherence throughout the app. (That said, few outright bugs although I assume I mostly have google to thank for that.) Not sure what it is about MS and features features features.
Fwiw, I do know quite a few companies outside the tech space that use, and even love teams. These are the ones where I have personally gotten to see how they use teams:
2 car sale companies. 1 Accounting shop. 1 ultra large company that owns multiple types of businesses across 4 different countries. A few real estate businesses. The vast majority of people using it have said they are happy and several have even been excited to show off their setups. All of them said that it allowed them to go remote during the pandemic and has helped them stay flexible once movement and office work started returning to normal.
The way they use it is also interesting. It’s not just chat. They integrate a whole host of apps directly into it including sales pipeline tools, document management, and project management. We are not talking about chat bots either. We are taking integrated apps+interfaces. All their meeting happen in MS teams itself. The multinational has a non trivial arrangements using multiple instances where some are separated for client convos and others are for different teams.
I use the term interesting because the way they use it is nothing like how I’ve ever seen any slack being used. And I don’t think I’ll ever see slack supporting that. Putting it out there because I think there’s a world of use cases for ms teams that doesn’t involve people being forced to use a bad thing.
Yes, that's how most people use MS Teams. It's extremely useful. The sharing space for documents is good. Collaborative editing in Office is good. Conferencing is good. Presenting from Powerpoint is good.
It's the same thing in every discussion involving Teams: most HN readers don't realise just how unusual the tools they use and what they want are with regards to the average job.
> most HN readers don't realise just how unusual the tools they use and what they want are with regards to the average job.
Probably because it literally doesn't matter what experience other have. The only thing that matters to me about a tool is if it's helping or hurting.
Teams does both, which I consider damning because there are other tools available that are much lighter on the "hurting" side.
But companies don't actually seem to care about things like that. They see that they are getting Teams "for free", and so that's what we're forced to use.
>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.
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."
Or it could just be that "this is the way we've always done it" / that Slack has enough inertia in the organisation that changing workflow, updating shortcuts, etc. is inconvenient and thus left until the last minute to change over.
I haven't used slack but broadly speaking Teams / Zoom / all of the other platforms I've used have been roughly the same, in that they all get the job of text and (usually) video communications done. Some might be a bit nicer to use than others but largely it doesn't matter which one you use as long as everyone is on the same platform.
In my previous workplaces I have used primarily Slack, with teams for larger video calls.
In my current work, it’s 100% teams. I’d be doing in my heels over swapping to teams as well if I was GitHub, using it for any kind of text communication is such a massive downgrade.
Given how human psychology works, Occam's razor would suggest the most likely explanation is "it's not sufficiently better to overcome the inertia of everyone already being accustomed to what they're using".
HN of all places should know better than to believe that people using one thing instead of another must mean the other thing is worse.
Even if they were paying 10$ per user, it's basically the salary of one non-lower level engineer to have cross-company communication they are already used to.
It's the premise of paying your competitors money to do something that you already are doing. Someone manager probably got a bonus out of this move.
And corporate espionage is more prevalent than you may think. Can you absolutely guarantee 100% that the competitor, like Zoom in China, isn't sniffing their video traffic or recordings to some of their most sensitive internal business discussions?
I have a surface pro 7,running windows 11. Video calls in teams will reliably cause an actual BSOD (blue screen of death for the younger readers) , and my other coworker with the same hardware experiences the same issue. I don't have issues in zoom or Google meet, but teams video calls will reliably cause an honest to God BSOD. The first couple of times it happened I was a little bit nostalgic, I hadn't seen that since XP and even with XP it was rare.
I don't know how I could have a better environment to run teams, I'm using Microsoft hardware, running a Microsoft camera driver, on a Microsoft OS, using a Microsoft messaging platform. Absolutely ridiculous, thankfully we only have one external vendor who uses teams. Ironically, that vendor is an oracle provider, so their whole existence just revolves around hideous software.
Teams makes no sense. The audio on it is objectively terrible for calls. Zoom is crystal clear [Its UI has issues though] but on teams I have to actually move my head closer to the computer speakers. Another interesting aspect of it is that it appears actually limit the volume. I plug in better speakers during a call and no change. On zoom it just auto sense the new speakers and boom louder.
I don't understand why teams constantly asks me if I want to upload a new version of a document when I upload a document, the answer is always yes, that's why I am uploading it. I dont care what you do with the original. I am sure there is a way to fix this but I don't have the energy to figure it out, I just want it to work like slack. Why does it have a separate notification area for people using emojis that makes me click outside of the chat to remove the notification?
The entire thing is so far removed from intuitive and "it just works" that I almost think its intentional.
You’ve mentioned this app before, last I checked there isn’t a usable client yet. Are you just hoping to get more FOSS devs on board or has something changed?
Yes, and I don't want to follow that because most of the companies restrict third party apps. This means that you can't have a custom client for a good percentage of the companies.
> it's telling that Microsoft has to require folks to use Teams.
Most people, when they get comfortable with something, are averse to change. Even if the thing they would change to is better than what they have, they still won't want to learn a new thing.
Not saying that's the case here. But without real data to lead a decision, people just do what they prefer, rather than what's better. (I use both Slack and Teams daily within my company, and while I prefer Slack, I could probably learn to deal with Teams)
A large organization may have to force a change in order to reap benefits. And there are significant benefits to unifying communications. There are also workarounds and alternative solutions, so you usually need to invest some serious time in evaluating a huge switch to know what's best. Or, you can just make a decision, pull the trigger, and live with the consequences (an "executive decision")
People love change. Look how Google, Amazon, and social media took the world by storm. And pocket calculators, smart phones, large screen TV's, the list goes on.
People like changes that benefit them. On the other hand, probably the #1 user request for enterprise software is: Please don't change anything. This tells you something about the software. Common reasons are:
* The last major change broke everything and we couldn't do our jobs for weeks.
* The new system has nobody to help us when there's a problem.
* All of our files / contacts / messages disappeared, or we can't find them any more.
* Meanwhile, we're still expected to keep up the pace of work.
Another way to put it is, people follow the path of least resistance. If they can still make an old thing work, and adopting the new thing seems like a chore, they'll keep the old thing. OTOH, if they see the new thing will greatly ease their life, the path of least resistance is the new thing.
Of course they mostly do this for short-term personal gains. For new solutions that seem like a chore to adopt and only have long-term gains, they won't want to.
Change is painful. It's costly, and comes with risk.
People will embrace it happily, though, when the benefit of doing so clearly exceeds the pain it brings. When you see people resisting change, it's because they don't see that great of a benefit.
* The workflow to use your software is so unintuitive I've had to learn it by muscle memory
People don't mind when a nice discoverable UI adds some more features. They don't like it when a horrible poorly thought out one that they had to painfully learn is suddenly different. That button that used to be hidden in the edit menu? Now it's on a ribbon menu which has to be expanded. Good luck hunting!
An interesting lesson is to visit a user site and notice the step-by-step instructions, written out and taped to the sides of monitors, or pinned to cubicle walls. Those instructions were often hard-earned, either written by the user or shared among workers. That stuff becomes obsolete if the software changes. Likewise for online instructions, such as blogs that give instructions in the form of screen captures and text, and that are no longer valid. If the unofficial instructions are better than the official ones, or more legible than the GUI, then it's a step backwards for users.
For enterprise software, people don't like solving a problem twice. Responding to the change doesn't move forward current goals, so any change is bad -- the current problems have been mitigated, so even something that gets rid of the old problems at the expense of needing to to some work to integrate, with uncertainty about new problems is bad.
Really? 2.5 years of "nothing but poor experiences"? I have to ask: what the hell is wrong with your computer?
I started using Teams heavily in 2020 and yes, back then it was unequivocally the worst of the bunch. But I've seen it make great strides, and it's been many months, perhaps years since I've really had any problems with it. Audio, video, screen sharing, PSTN dial-in, whiteboard, call handoff between mobile app and desktop... it all works fine. I'm not using anything special. Just a run-of-the-mill MacBook Air. They started pushing out an Arm-native build for macOS last year and that really solved the slow perf and battery drain. As long as you stay reasonably current with updates, Teams works just fine.
It's just lazy at this point to bash Teams "because".
I have to ask: what the hell is wrong with your perception?
What other IM/AV applications have you used before, and on what hardware?
If you've never seen better, it's not surprising that you'd think Teams is good.
I vividly remember that 20 years ago there was MSN Messenger, and the experience was far better than that of Teams on hardware at least an order of magnitude less powerful. After that was (pre-MS) Skype, which was also not that bad.
Teams is an absolute pig in comparison. It works --- just barely. Audio and video calls are probably what it does best, and "best" is relative. For IM, it's beyond horrible.
Really? I use zoom for hours and it regularly eats my PC.
If teams works just barely there is something wrong with your setup. None of the chat/im applications work barely. They work, to a point, then crash/glitch/etc.
Let’s see, Slack IM notifications on mobile are garbage, I’m just going to assume that I will miss them at this point. Slack audio is an actual joke, we redirect it to teams…
Zoom, eats our computers. We screen share 3-4 hours someone’s screen will turn black because the video card driver will crash, daily.
Google, does mostly ok for calls without sharing and one person speaking. Limited support for physical devices, calls, etc. noise suppression is minimal so having more than one person unmuted is going to blow an ear drum. Limited features.
GoTo, as long as you are using it as a phone and not an app, you can make a call hurray!
Webex is crap end to end, but you will join a session and get through a call, mostly without blowing up. Feature rich? No.
Teams, let’s see random client gui crashes, but the call stays up so you can keep talking but can’t do anything? Probably weekly occurrence on the current release. Sensitive to https termination in networks and offload, oh hell yes. Forgets camera mappings just like slack every time? Yes and yes. Continues ringing on your phone if you pickup on desktop. Yes just like zoom, but at least it can transfer to desktop, most of the time.
I use all of them, for clients, daily, weekly, monthly. Teams by far is the most feature rich client. Somewhere in the middle of consistency, stability, etc.
Is it magical and poops unicorns? No but ya’ll need to stop being dramatic. They all work, mostly, some have cool features, some are dead in the water like slack, WebEx, GoTo, etc. MS is dumping tons of money into developing teams, they are going to break a lot of eggs, less than in 2020 but still enough to make a mess.
I ran teams on a fairly powerful i9-equipped MacBook Pro and it was unbearable. Couldn't even scroll up to older messages without it freezing up, the integrations with Office 365 were also really slow.
Umm, teams video will reliably cause my surface pro 7 to actually BSOD. Not exaggerating, having the video turned on will cause a no-shit BSOD on Microsoft hardware, and my coworker with the another surface also has that issue.
On my desktop with a no-name webcam with a generic driver I have no issues with teams, but the complaints about the software are rooted in actual problems. It's inconsistent, I've never seen a program that can have so many different bugs. We have 2 users who regularly use teams to communicate with an external vendor, they are on exactly identical Dell desktops. One has no issue at all, the other will see massive performance issues when teams is running in the background, somehow it is saturating disk read on a ssd. It would be hard to have more identical systems, they are running the same OS image with the same programs installed, the only thing that's different is the user account they are signed into. I finally just gave up and swapped the user's entire system with a spare, which resolved the issue but as far as I can tell there are no problems with that system. I pulled it out of spares 2 months ago for a new employee and they have not reported any issues at all, and I have followed up with them out of curiosity.
Teams is just super inconsistent, so the fact that it works on 1 computer for you doesn't in any way invalidate all the other problems people report with it.
Edit: unfortunate autocorrect typo substituting a slur for the worn 'new'
Nothing, because Zoom works completely fine while Teams is always struggling to make a connection, keep a connection, have good quality video and audio, and well even OPEN. There is a persistent problem on Macs where Teams refuses to open unless you delete an obscure file.
True, Teams isn't as awful as it was in 2020. But it's still pretty bad, and it's a bad that is foisted on many of us. That makes putting up with it even more irritating than it might otherwise be.
> I have to ask: what the hell is wrong with your computer?
For our org, it isn't the PC, it is the org controlling Teams and the firewall.
They have Teams configured somehow, that none of the subsidiaries can talk to each other, you can't talk to outside people or invite them, and the performance is really bad due to the way the clients and firewall are configured.
I'm guessing lots of orgs are in the the same boat because Teams is newer than Zoom, Web Ex, or Go to meeting, and for these legacy meeting clients the PCs, firewall, and org has had time to optimize for them.
Teams is more of an afterthought because it comes with 365.
I sort of agree, teams are working really well for us, a medeium sized globally dispersed team of developers.
I do have one pain-point: my phone discord sometimes does not understand that it should be quiet if I am active on a computer at the same time, and dings for very new chat message.
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
Conversely, my friend group is mostly on Discord for group chats, and it’s the least favourite chat program I regularly use.
I’m not interested in the constant upsells to their paid service, and I find the client fairly unpleasant to use with its lack of configurability (like I can’t even make the window as narrow as I want, there’s a minimum width to it that’s way too wide).
And Discord’s pretty hostile to third-party clients, so I’m stuck using this client that I don’t like.
I use Slack with several customers and it must keep them separate. Nobody would use it if it merged different companies into a single chat. For non business usage, maybe a unified chat could make sense even if I prefer to keep different groups separate as with Whatsapp groups or Telegram channels.
we use discord at work and the only bad thing is the screen sharing, many times we can get away with it but if we can't we usually just jump on a free zoom call
We changed from teams to google meet when we otherwise do everything in 365 just for the video conferencing. Teams was so bad, it was costing us a lot of frustration and time, working mostly remote it seriously impeded our ability to do work.
We still use teams for chat, but it always bogs my mind how broken it is, especially for devs. The last time I used slack for work was maybe 7 years ago, I still miss that. Being forced to move to teams killed any sense of online community in the workplace, biggest example of how tools can actually shape culture.
>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.”
You literally just described the strategy for every Microsoft software ever. MS Word (vs Word Perfect) comes to mind
I used to work at LinkedIn (owned by microsoft) and about 2 years ago they announced engineering was switching from zoom/slack to teams. There was significant uproar and LinkedIn leadership ended up reversing the decision. To my knowledge LinkedIn engineering is still on zoom/slack.
Easy, MSFT throws it in for free when you buy other products. That's why there is no incentive to make it better. If you eliminate slack or anything else, you get to say "See, by buying Microsoft we're getting our needs met and saving money". Same thing for GitHub, that's just a freebee depending on your spend at this point.
I remember the first 1-2 years after the iPhone was released, I see Microsoft employees (I mostly see sales and presales folks) using their iPhones under the table or when the meeting attendees from other companies aren't around. Heard they were supposed to use them.
I get the option between Teams, Skype and Zoom. Teams by far is the best of the bunch, even on Linux. Skype is just a complete non-starter and Zoom's UI is so horrible it's surprising the company is valued as high as it is.
That's a lot of naivette. Corporations _require_ we use stuff everyday. And when that stuff is something you build yourself, it makes zero sense that github is still using something else.
Yep, it’s bundled with office 365 so I’m gonna assume that’s why most companies use it. Which is why we use it at work. I’m not a fan either. Desktop app just seems slow as hell on my Mac.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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 use the local Team for my employer organization and log in browser Teams for clients organization. Still, notifications are unreliable across organizations
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.
Moreover WebEx actually works ok for external consultants or service providers. Yes it's ugly, but it actually works. I've never had as many people involved as long with WebEx to finally allow joining a call after Enterprise IT just decided to implement a half baked DLP solution.
Welcome to Microsoft, where data loss prevention somehow means that your service provider isn't allowed to share his services with you in Teams.
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.
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.
> 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.stackoverflow.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').
I do agree, threaded chat seems challenging. I feel like I most liked Mattermost's setup where everything that was a reply to can be opened up side by side with the existing chat. Nothing is hidden by being in a separate thread, its obvious when something is a reply to, you can also just jump to the last reply to in order to get more context, etc. Obviously, tradeoffs with every style. Speech is messy no matter the medium it seems and everyone has their own yum.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
That for me is a huge drawback because it's constantly cluttering up a huge mess of different document versions in SharePoint and teams itself.
Try to search for the right one a few weeks later. Good luck :)
I don't experience this at all. Maybe our SharePoint/OneDrive is better managed, maybe something else is going on, but I have not yet encountered a single time of multiple versions unless someone was explicitly copy and pasting the file to make versioning in their own dumb system.
Which, the same dumb thing could be done in Google Workspace.
Don't have people copy and pasting the file all over the place and you won't have a thousand versions of important_numbers_v3_final_V2_DRAFT.xls.xlsx. Thats a people problem not a technical problem.
Our SharePoint was not really managed when we moved to Teams - we didn't use it (mostly because it's such a horrible product that has no clear vision behind it). But Teams started filling up stuff there all over the place.
In the end we did need to use it because we moved from another storage service to OneDrive (another "quick win") for a manager and OneDrive is really bad at team-owned storage, it's really for personally owned files only.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
The default settings give you a notification in the notifications list when you get a thumb's up in the chat you're currently reading. You'll have to switch views to clear that notification(!) beyond infuriating for such a small thing.
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.)
>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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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?
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Especially cloud devs prefer running Linux on their machines, or Mac (the latter is a bit more popular in our org). And developers is where the exodus starts. Because they build ecosystems.
The big selling point of WSL for businesses is endpoint management. It's really hard to manage Linux endpoints in particular if you have a mix of distributions. Windows is better at this despite active directory being a horrible mess of legacy crap and modern management not really ready for prime time.
In fact Linux is so bad at it that I see a lot of users wanting it so they can escape company management.
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.
What do you mean, GitHub doesn't value giving its developers great tools? All their work is done on Codespaces™ leveraging the power of Visual Studio Code® to make developers more productive!
If Microsoft is serious, this is a great chance for trickle up. Give an org that has been using Outlook Teams and they won't have any suggestions, give it to an org using Slack and the feedback will be immense. I admit to getting caught up in the Microsoft is innovating hype from recent news but would not be surprised if they finally start to really iterate and improve on their cruft going forward. Dogfooding in the GitHub org just makes a lot of sense.
Most terrible, shitty electron apps I've suffered through were orders of magnitudes more pleasant to use than teams. Teams seems to be actively A/B testing new ways to be a terrible experience.
It's not just electron, there's some kind of Heisenbug-driven-design going on in the backrooms of Microsoft.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
I've found Teams acceptable for video calls, including large-scale ones. Some of the Office integration is quite nice, e.g. PowerPoint Live. But what I really hate about it is the chat functionality. Very basic person-to-person DMs work ok, but it doesn't scale up to larger groups. Some UI complaints:
- When someone messages a group that you're part of, you get a notification. This makes it hard to distinguish between someone trying to get ahold of you, and the background chatter in a group. Slack just has better defaults here: it'll notify you for DMs, and use a more subtle message count for channel messages (unless someone @'s you).
- When someone calls you on Teams, it's like they're using a telephone from the 1990s. You could be in the middle of another meeting, and your computer will play a ringtone, because SOMEONE IS CALLING, URGENTLY!!! So you have to quickly excuse yourself from the current meeting and pick up the phone (and probably find out that it was nothing urgent anyway). Slack's UI for huddles are a lot better here, and the smooth jazz is just a nice touch :)
- If you set up a "team" within MS Teams, it's supposed to set up a place where people from that team can collaborate. The UI for it is just awful though, and I've never seen teams stay engaged through this. Slack channels are just far more intuitive, and remove a lot of the friction from collaborating with your teammates.
There are more issues, e.g. Teams isn't friendly to my laptop's fan, and it keeps screwing up my bluetooth settings. Although I'm not sure if Apple is actually to blame for those ones.
I appreciate this comment because it is one of the few I have found that succinctly puts a finger on why people hate Teams so much. People say it's awful but they don't explain why.
I concur. It is truly awful. For what it's worth I use the features Save message and Pin if I think I might need to get back to it. But they are crutches for sure.
Decent isn't good enough though. It runs slowly, meetings lag periodically (at least on Mac), and the "everything else" is the part that is mandatory (accessing and reviewing assignments with my kids at school, accessing and collaborating on documents, etc).
I have lost track of the number of times we bailed on Teams for even meetings when interacting with teachers or the other organizations I work with (as a volunteer which makes the tooling issues even more frustrating), in favour of another service, or collaborating in a google doc instead.
I'm with you - I don't love teams, but it's certainly no worse than Skype. We use it constantly for meetings, chat and calls in our team of ~20, and across the broader organisation. There were some teething problems when it was first rolled out, but I think that was mostly our infra guys getting things configured correctly.
Our dev team uses Slack for chat, but that's only because we can't connected to the corporate Teams from our dev environment.
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.
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.
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.
The web client has been far more stable and useable than the desktop client. Someone can correct me, but the desktop client doesn’t even seem like it’s fully native even on Windows.
Huh. I'm on a Windows PC using the desktop client with one account, and I don't have a good experience with it. I was thinking about trying out the web version in the hopes it might be an improvement, but I guess not.
> 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.
> If my employer required me to use it, I would immediately find another job.
There are many hills I'm willing to die on, but the use of Teams isn't one of them. Obviously, since I'm forced to use it at my current position and haven't quit over it.
I do avoid touching it to the greatest degree possible, though.
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.
I have no objections to Microsoft as a company, I primarily use Windows on my personal devices since I am an avid gamer, and I enjoy several of the tools Microsoft publishes (VS Code, Visual Studio, most of the office suite).
The software is confusing, and at least, in my experience, doesn't have a consistent user experience or do a good job of guiding the user in how to use it.
The way it is used varies significantly between the four main user accounts I interact with (son's secondary school account, daughters primary school account, one non-profit I work with, one business that I work with).
As an alternative, I frequently find myself using Google Drive for document collaboration and sharing, and use Zoom or virtually any other video conferencing software.
Don't get me wrong, I would like it to be better, but I have also had the luxury of spending at least two extended afternoons speaking with product/program managers involved in it during a social event, and they seemed pretty ambivalent to my feedback. It's not a tool designed for users of the software, it's designed for organizational owners to mandate specific policies or behaviours, and for business owners that's fine. I just happened to have spent too much of my career working on empowering and improving user-focused and user-centric tools to care about using those bad tools unless I absolutely have to.
- ms teams on my windows laptop turns it into a raging heater. While i dont even have my webcam on.
- ms teams is so multi-functional you can do anything with it. Office suite, create polls (that are very laggy). It is so bloated there’s clearly no straightforward UX flows. Buttons all over the place. Desktop UI feels terribly slow.
- typing in chat boxes is laggy as hell.
I’m not alone. My colleagues experience similar issues as me.
Opposite experience: I use Teams every single workday and have never experienced the lagginess or laptop heating you describe. I’ve never heard of any coworkers having these issue either.
It’s so strange that so many people can have completely different experiences with the same software.
I think it's also the varying differences of experience in using different tools/platforms to communicate. For example, someone coming from Zoom may notice how laggy Teams is compared to Zoom. I definitely felt this way, once I experienced the alternatives to Teams, I just couldn't wait to stop using it.
Why does it need to have excel implemented into it? Why is the search function still there if it literally doesn't do searching. Why does it take 20 seconds to open a PDF?
Many more issues and questions stand out if you've previously used a platform where none of those are issues.
My complaint? Well, back when I had to use it (between jobs now), I found the app (Mac M1-base laptop) to be slow and painful to use. But using Teams via a website? Way faster, which I found odd because I think both are web based (I think the "app" just contains its own instance of Chrome).
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?
It’s been a year since I’ve used teams but my biggest gripe is search. Conversations are contextual. My work often requires me to find conversations that happens months ago. When unused Skype I could god into my email and recover it that way.
With teams , back when I used it, you could search no problem. What you couldn’t do is go back to a conversation and get the context. I’m not sure how on earth you ship a search feature without the ability to go back to that message In a chat application.
My experience is similar to yours — including at a company of over 50,000 employees.
I’m baffled as to how so many people here on HN have such horror stories with Teams, while I’ve not experienced nor heard of anything remotely so bad at the companies I’ve worked.
I don't know how on the Mac it works for you, because I've tried using it for years and its terrible on audio and video calling, and that's if it opens (which most of the time it doesn't, requiring removing some obscure cache file).
The majority of my issues are around its user interface. A gazillion problems there, from discoverability problems to basic things like the inability to shrink the window down to a reasonable size.
But there are other issues, too. In meetings (about 12 people at a time), the video gets terrible. People randomly getting kicked out of the meetings are a fairly common experience. At least 3 days a week, people have problems joining the meeting.
We tend to budget the first ten minutes of every meeting as disposable time, so that whatever the problem of the day with Teams is can be worked out enough that we can finally get everyone in the meeting.
We use TeamViewer for online meetings. Lets you share your screen. It's also used for support on customer sites. Works very reliably. We use Teams or WebEx only when interacting with customers and they demand those applications.
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.
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.
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
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."
> 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?
This one is inexplicable. I don't know my coworkers by their initials, I know them by their names. I know it sounds like a simple mental mapping, but first off, it apparently isn't because I see initials and then I have to go mentally step through names to figure out who it could match, and second, I have multiple team members whose initials are JS, you fucking idiots. Is this like a fun puzzle to some people? I don't get it at all. There is room for the names. Just display the names.
In fact, if you really want to beat zoom, show me a nice compact list of people in the meeting, with their names, with a sound meter, with their mute status, sorted by who spoke most recently. Make this something I can see in my main meeting window, for a fairly large number of people (let's say at least 25) without paging through them. Let it go to multiple columns if necessary and I give it space. Do NOT do the zoom thing and make them all get really big so I can still only see 8.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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...
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.
> 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.
Ironically I have had the exact opposite experience, it's interesting to see how the app behaves so randomly.
I used Teams on Windows for work last year and the performance was horrible on a relatively beefy workstation machine, getting into a call or loading a chat would have a visible lag or delay.
But using it on my personal Mac it was a fairly okay experience, just a run of the mill app I would say.
Perhaps the difference is O365 (Enterprise) Teams versus Teams for Life (Personal)?
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
Have you tried using it via a web browser? https://teams.microsoft.com (If I recall correctly---it's been several months since I've had to use it). I found it worked much faster than the actual Mac app.
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?
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.
My favorite: when you use dark mode and the person on the other side the default light theme, text that you write will appear black on their screen and white on yours (so far so good). Now if you copy & paste text that they have written, it will appear white to you and white to them, making it impossible for them to see.
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.
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.
> You see, MS has completely messed up the login for Teams.
This is my single biggest complaint.
Teams with your small group of people on the same Microsoft365 account? Decent, it works, whatever.
Try to invite someone outside your group to chat, even if you give licenses away like candy? Hell. Absolute hell. End up giving up and make an actual account on your tenant? They can't easily switch between them, and it's hell to ever figure out why.
Completely unusable. They could have made the email of chat and fucked it up.
Multi-line code blocks are impossible on the Linux client. And Android (just confirmed). I have to use this feature about 10 times a day and triple backticks works about 1% of the time so you know what i do? I copy a multi-line code block from another chat and edit the text. Garbage.
I can add a code snippet but that thing is bloody awful. What's with the huge title over the snippet and truncating the text to a few lines even if it's only 2 lines longer? Gah.
Also, separating "chats" and "teams" into two places in the UI? Why? It's confusing. I occasionally click on the teams section and see a bunch of unread messages they I did't get notifications for.
I think. Because notifications are garbage. I'll be told that there's a message in a chat. Now I have to click on it and pray that it brings me to the right place. With slack the notification used to contain the sender and part of the message. Half the time I could eyeball the notification and get 100% of that i need without context switching.
Edit: my team is insisting on slack. We're ditching teams as a chat tool. Might keep it for video stuff but that depends how slack video conferencing works. (Used to use Zoom and Slack before)
For anyone finding this, code blocks do work. But unlike every other editor I've ever used, it's not three backticks that activate it. It's three backticks and a space.
Why in hell would I think of adding unwanted whitespace after the backticks? Anyways, that's the fix.
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.
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.
Discord
Slack
Mattermost
<chasm>
IRC
Email
<chasm>
Hangouts
Teams
<chasm>
Linq / Skype For Work
Teams so fundamentally misses what the point of a good office/team oriented chat looks like that it’s worse than useless. They would be better off just splitting off the video calls (which are pretty good but drop the annoying corner thing) and just starting over with a Slack clone.
I’m fine with using Teams for the actual scheduled meeting video calls.
It isn’t amazing — but has been relatively reliable for me. The app takes up too much memory, but Slack video calls have had a lot of issues also (although Huddles has improved things a lot).
My contention with using teams would be for team text chat. No thank you, it is terrible. I’d rather use Slack or really any alternative.
When these forced teams migrations happen, what I’ve seen most people do is some core subset of the dev team has an unofficial Discord, free Slack, or Telegram channel that they use for chat instead.
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.
Did Google chat decide the reverse the scrolling of one of the chat tabs without notice so everyone wasted a day scrolling down to get to the latest message only to find they were going to older messages.
But they didn't reverse the other tab, so depending on context you may need to scroll up or down. What a crappy UX which still occasionally catches me out.
Teams also wants you to create a "team" for a group chat, but this also creates a sharepoint site and other pointless tabs for documents to go in. Now you have probably just lost discoverability of requirements.
I've used Google chat and it was a pretty rubbish chat. However Teams is not just bad software, it's user hostile.
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.
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)
Teams is terrible on Linux. Maybe it sucks less on other platforms. Academia standardized on zoom+slack in like 2016 in part because of excellent cross-platform support.
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…
Is there a single high level engineer (like, whatever L9 is at Google where you make millions of dollars for being a savant) working on Teams? If not, why not? A ton of its problems seem fixable. Discord/WhatsApp and Teams are both Electron apps from what I can tell. Discord/WhatsApp very usable, so it's not like Teams is doomed from the get go without a full rewrite.
Is the entire thing written by a team who don't care/don't know any better/can't do any better?
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?
> 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)
>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.
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.
I don't quite know what I'm doing right but half my day is spent in Teams and the other half is in documents with 4-6 other people working in them at the same time and I can't remember the last time we had a real issue.
I can understand Teams being a pain in multi-tenancy setups but even that is something which I've noticed is being improved recently.
In what ways does Teams "suck?" Slack is wildly more expensive, so it's hard for people to see the value in paying so much for it. How does Teams negatively impact the bottom line for a company?
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.
> 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).
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.
What?! This has to be a glitch or something. How can something so basic be simply missing this long? Teams is not a new product. I just checked. It's 5 years old.
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.
My current company had the same thing happen on acquisition, we had to ditch Zoom for Teams for video, but could stay on Slack. I find Teams video absolutely fine. It just works and I never think about it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But also, the volume is too low in Teams and has been since forever. Slack, Zoom, Meet and so on has this working.
Most fun thing about Teams is that it works so poorly with different accounts that everybody waits for just that guy that logs in with a non-guest account and let the herd in.
How is it possible SAP is still such a poor product after almost 4 decades? Time does not cure all ills with software. The powers that purchase software are not swayed by arguments about user experience or even efficiency.
SAP is just a swamp of legacy. Companies have customized and integrated so much during the decades (often in unsupported ways by people that have long gone) that any meaningful improvement will cause millions worth of redevelopment on their enterprise clients' side. And every little problem introduced has the potential to crash entire companies for days.
All they can do is put a bit more lipstick on the pig.
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.
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)
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!)
Sounded interesting but I'm immediately turned off by the wall of channels in their screenshot. They can't even show 3 letters worth of alphabetic searching in a full screen of text. I think discord has it's faults but they're working to reduce the wild growth of new channels and seem to cope with large communities in a somewhat decent manner.
- 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.
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
...I would seriously consider bytecode manipulation to remove this "feature" from the executable. And I haven't touched even assembly in almost 20 years.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
YouTube was burning money for years. They might actually be making money now with the rise in memberships and superchats (and more aggressive ads), but it took what, ten years to get there?
Youtube was founded 15 years ago, and might, possibly be profitable now… but I still doubt it. Between the eternally escalating storage and bandwidth requirements, political pressure to involve more humans in content moderation keeps rising too.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Now, an electron app doesn't have to be terrible. The tech makes it really easy to make turds, but if you spend the time optimizing it, it can be very good. See VS Code for example.
I think Microsoft should acquire the company that makes VS Code and let those guys teach the Teams devs how to do it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hi ralmidani, I recognize being picky like that with tech choices.
My friend and I are developing a product to enhance the job search process. Especially for devs that want to be very specific on what tech they do and don't prefer to work with.
May we ask you a couple of questions? I know you're not searching for a job (kudos on finding an Elixir job) but I think your input would be valuable.
I sent you a message on Keybase and requested connecting on LinkedIn. If you’re not active on either, my full name can be found here: https://github.com/ralmidani
Put a dot between the two parts of my name, take out the dash, and send to proton with .me at the end.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
It's really unremarkable that the company that built Teams would eventually require all employees at their acquisitions to use it over a competitor. Leading aside the obvious cost benefit, even the howls from users are useful: now your PM know what to build next.
But the real deal with something like Teams is that it is not just a chat and call app. The vision is clear: Teams is where people will spend their days. The app integration with workflows like approval of vacation or invoices; the third party plugin ecosystem; the deep support for regulated markets like banking and government...it feels like a glacier that is going to grind slowly but eventually reshape the landscape.
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...
It's a tool that people use day-in, day-out for all their communication with colleagues. If it's unpleasant to use, the majority of your work becomes a constant reminder of that unpleasantness.
Exactly, if my chat, my email, my git server, etc. are unpleasant it will make my workflow unpleasant and so will my job as whole.
I have changed jobs due tooling being a pain before.
I'd never quit on the spot though, I'd silently search for another job.
It's a collaboration tool, not just some IM client. After 6 years of using Slack I have to use Teams now on a project I lead. Oh boy, it's so much worse. I completely agree that it can make you leave, especially when you are responsible for efficient collaboration and tool like this is constantly in the way. It discourages communication between teammates, channels and threads are a mess so everyone rather DM people directly (so transparency suffers a lot). Everyone regardless of the OS have problems getting notifications, the threads are a joke, so are the reactions. It's so hard to find anything there, channels (teams?), a message, a user. I haven't seen an integrations/bots/apps in teams, maybe they are there, but in Slack they were so useful and easy to add, that they were used so much.
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.
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.
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.
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....
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
"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.
> 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.
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.
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.
This is my current list of complaints. If I'm wrong about anything and there are settings that I can change, enlighten me.
Copy + Paste sucks and isn't consistent. On my machine, if you copy a message, it includes a header, indicating who said it and when. I can't change this behavior in settings, and, infuriatingly, this doesn't happen on other people's machines in my organization.
My biggest complaint is that the screen sharing functionality is broken in surprising and interesting ways. Let me count them.
One: I cannot always reliably control another person's machine.
Two: When I type on another person's machine, the input is in the controlled machine's keyboard.
Three: when I hit a hotkey (ctrl+n in Excel for a new workbook) when I am controlling another person's machine, the hotkey fires twice: once in the controlled application, and once in Teams itself. Again, there is no setting for this.
Four: I have at least one person in my organization whose Teams freezes when you try to remotely control his machine.
Lastly, I have Teams on my phone and on my work laptop. Calls ring on both devices. I have no desire to ring on my phone and AFAIK there isn't a setting to force it to ring only on certain devices.
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.
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.
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.
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?
I use Teams a lot with some Zoom. I've also used all the competing tools - Slack, whatever the current Google branding gives, among others. They all kinda suck. But hang on, am I asking too much? Is this suckiness because it's hard to do well? Oh, and add in that we all need to use it, all day, every day, so _any_ friction really annoys.
Distributed, connected collaboration in real-time, at (massive) scale - it's a big functional domain. Offering video, chat, document storage, sharing and collaboration, as well as project management and integration into a plethora of other apps and tools. This is surely a hard space.
Just look at apps that inhabit much, much simpler function spaces - say, Twitter, given the start point of the discussion. It doesn't get that glare of all day, everyday work use. It doesn't have the function and criticality to people's day. Twitter is down? It's just not a thing 99.9% of people will freak out over. Post-pandemic, Teams or Zoom is down means loss of a sales, key workshops stranding participants, distributed Teams losing comms during critical releases, and the list goes on.
Unpopular opinion number one: Teams is not that bad. At least it can do video calls properly which is not something I would say of Slack.
Unpopular opinion number two: Pidgin was better and I don't why we all decided as an industry to go to these ridiculously heavy memory hog electron based clients. I use Slack from Pidgin to this day: https://github.com/dylex/slack-libpurple
What most people in this thread don't realize is that Teams, like most products sold to CIO, don't have to be good for it to succeed.
Instead of an stellar ux, Microsoft is focusing on what sells it - that seamless centered experience that unifies SharePoint, Power, replaces slack and Discord and everything else in a single app.
It sucks, but it sells, because people buying it aren't the core users.
...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.)
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.
Having read a number of GitHub incident reviews I'm really curious how this will impact ChatOps. They're one of the first companies I saw that seemed to use ChatOps for almost everything, including things like updating BGP routing. Do they have 7 months to migrate everything to Teams or will they keep some Slack workspaces around just for ChatOps?
Dissenting opinion? I'm a Linux person through and through, my entire household runs on Linux. But at work we have Windows laptops, to run the Windows office tools - most of the real work is done remotely on Linux machines.
I'm not particularly fond of Outlook. It just somehow doesn't "think" like I do. It does work. But I like Teams. We use it for most 1:1 calls, all kinds of impromptu meetings, scheduled meetings, remote screen-shared co-work, and of course text chats. It may be a bloated monster but that's on capable laptop that's doing little real work so that doesn't matter. It has some minor bugs but they aren't a big source of frustation in the bigger picture.
I tried it on my Linux machine once. It was a bloated, slow Electron app. Maybe the Windows one is "more native" or the computer is that much better, but... no issues.
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.
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.
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.
Webex/Outlook/Teams/Zoom/Slack/Gmail - None of these are any inferior or superior to each other (maybe not at the start when the product was launched - there could be big feature/usability gap - but once they are matured which most of these - not much differentiators to matter) and literally none of these products to be used at any corporations are evaluated by their technical or usability excellence - it is simply vetoed or decided by the corporation CEO know which vendor's CEO/CFO well and what both companies agree to barter (use my product and in exchange I will use your product in my company kind of thing). For a end user in any company - unless you are super advance user or some niche feature - any of these software should just work well for day to day usage.
But it's not like... "Get a notification on your laptop and then get another on your phone for the same event that you can't clear until you look at your phone" bad... like it used to be.
I don't know... like I did like hitting "Join Meeting" right from Outlook, and having that work.
Slack is fine, but it's tedious to integrate with Outlook or Google Calendar. "Go to the Teams Channel and Join the Hangout" is a lot worse than just clicking, "Join Meeting."
But the posts says both will stay in use? That seems like the worst option.
Switching off Slack too... so tedious to setup all those integrations again with Teams (some of which won't work). Just all of it seems foolish.
Teams for sure is a worse experience than slack. Why Microsoft chose to separate teams and chats in the UI is one of the biggest wastes of time each day. Several seconds to switch between them. Arg... Wish someone had a more viable FedRAMP compliant competitor to office365.
- Teams essentially requires a GPU for good performance, we don't have dedicated GPUs on our machines, so sharing your screen brings the machine to a crawl. Exactly what you don't want when demonstrating anything.
- All communication is at the same level, so you can't reply to a single comment, without disrupting the flow of conversation. (It'd be nice to have thread replies like on Hacker News)
- Tabbed conversations are missing, MSN messenger had it, Lync and Skype for Business had it. It was one of the most efficient ways of maintaining conversations between frequent contacts.
I really hope that Github being forced to used Teams results in things in things like performance being finally addressed.
It may not have all the features I would like, but it works well enough. It doesn't have political censorship (like Zoom has - admittedly only in rare cases). And while Zoom may offer more polish (and Teams could, if MS bothered to fix the UX bugs) - Jitsi is quite usable, and with our support, in terms of both use, QA and possible donations it could improve even further and be fully on par with the commercial offerings.
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)
MS Teams has been the worst tool of its type I've ever been forced to use. Emphasis on forced.
Historically the UX of most (but not all) Microsoft software has been bad, so I was not surprised.
For the same project I was forced to use Azure's login system the first time: another clownshow.
It was a sad day when Microsoft acquired two of my favorite things, GitHub and Minecraft, because I bet that the awful "Microsoftness" would creep in and degrade them. At least the Teams mandate at GitHub is only for internal comms. But it tells me that bad taste and bad judgment is still there.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It took me half an hour to get it installed and signed in. Most of that was trying to sign in. I think to a required Microsoft account. Who has a "Microsoft account"? I couldn't just use an email address. There had to be a Microsoft account tied to it. Or something.
To me, it's a red flag if a company uses MS teams.
I never really understood the reasoning behind mandating a particular communication platform for everyone. Why not just rely on email for communication between groups and let individual groups decide what communication platforms they use within the group. As long as the platform is hosted on-premise, I don't really see the issue.
For those having to endure Teams, try it from Pidgin, where you can at least e.g. customize what notifications you get and using interface that doesn't use half your RAM: https://github.com/EionRobb/purple-teams
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!
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.
Same thing happened at LinkedIn after the Microsoft acquisition. LinkedIn was using gmail, Google was quick to let the g suite contract die, so the timeline to move from gmail to Outlook was accelerated. Engineers at LinkedIn were livid about being forced to move off gmail.
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.
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?
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.
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?
I guess my comment is against the grain. But I do enjoy Teams. More over, I (as consultant) moved three orgs onto Teams and the clients are happy. Its fantastic integration and communication platform. Enjoy!
We have slack huddles at work or the option to use teams. The performance of teams isn’t great (even on a modern computer) but it generally is alright - lots of people hate it though. Interesting
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.
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.
Teams screen sharing annotation is abysmal. Other than that I can live with it, but as an engineer, not being able to annotate a live screen is really frustrating.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Pasting code in teams requires 4 clicks and there is no keyboard shortcut. How is this expected to be used by developers is beyond me.
Also try to right click on an open image and click copy. Then paste in another application (even a Microsoft one). Comes out as a base64 string. This been broken for years.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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...
>> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well, fortunately I don't use Teams every minute of my day. When I need it it works mostly fine.
Of course if you use Windows, on other platforms Teams works completely unreliably or doesn't work at all. But that is another issue. I gave up using Linux at work on bare metal and started using a VM (not only for Teams). On macOS it works but not as good as Windows (I have some coworkers that has a mac, they loose notifications a lot)
That's a fair point. I think if I had to be on a chat/video app every minute of the day, I'd hang myself. For the average use that I have, it's fine. If I had to use it ceaselessly, I might have a different opinion.
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.
> 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?
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 ?
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.
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.
That always frustrated me, even more-so considering how that volunteer-built package I mentioned (https://github.com/IsmaelMartinez/teams-for-linux - an Electron build of the web app, nothing flashy but does the job just fine) does support screen sharing. I haven’t checked whether it supports backgrounds as I only use voice when on calls, but I’m guessing it does if the browser variant does.
Linux ‘sorted out’ its display server protocol years ago, it’s Wayland. Fedora has been on Wayland by default since 31. Ubuntu has been on Wayland by default since 21.4. Debian has been on Wayland by default since 11. Distributions that don’t have an implementation of Wayland enabled by default are hold-outs at this point.
It’s somewhat understandable that developers for Microsoft might not be fully across the status of display servers and their respective implementations in Linux, but it’s a reasonable rule of thumb to assume that Wayland is the way to go for any new projects since 2021 at the very latest. If you build your app for X today it’s probably going to be running under XWayland anyway.
Huh, didn't know that. Although the old client still works well, and I actually like the meeting screen better, since it allows me to set the incoming video to full screen, which works great for screen sharing.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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)
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.
I will try that next time. I don't think that occurred to me because the Zoom app experience is very good. What I have been doing instead is joining from the Teams app on my phone unless I must share content.
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.
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
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.
>> 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....
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Yes, agreed that is a nuisance. But fortunately that is just a click, it gets a bit frustrating when there are > 10 participants and when people join late.
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.
>"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.
> 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.
Lack of interoperability in chat and video conferencing reminds me what a miracle it is that email has worked so reliably and consistently for 40 years.
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.