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!
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ?
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.
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).
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
"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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
...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.
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.
"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.
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)
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?
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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'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 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.
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.
- 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?
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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
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)?
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.
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.
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'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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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?
724 comments
[ 6.8 ms ] story [ 314 ms ] threadEdit: for those who may think I’m overreacting to a small change in tooling, I offer this classic essay [1]. It explains the reasoning behind leaving much better than I could!
[1] https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...
If you want an optimal teams experience download edge and run the webapp in it.
https://www.omglinux.com/the-official-microsoft-teams-app-fo...
https://office365itpros.com/2022/09/19/teams-pwa-linux-clien...
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.
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.
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?
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.
A good reminder why I shouldn’t come to hacker news anymore.
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.
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.
They are only using it for video conferencing. day to day collab still on slack...
Video-conferencing wise, I always have more problems with slack than with zoom/teams.
collaborating with anyone at ms already meant you were using teams to some extent.
(former github developer)
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.
If they're already using Slack, Slack has video conferencing and they are trying to reduce costs, why not centralize everything in Slack or Teams?
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.
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.
Is it better now?
There seem to be plenty of commenters combining Slack and Zoom so seems not. That's a redundancy right there that Teams solves.
Does teams allow you to draw on the screen?
i mean; no one can really tell you what to do with your sharpie.
(but yes; that's been baked in for a while)
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
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.
So it they can easily create a meeting without using the Teams client, then it might be just fine.
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.
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.
It’s slowly starting to become usable, though. After several years, you can now actually use the search function.
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.
I wonder when github developers will be forced to moved from Linux to Windows ?
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.
The infrastructure to store and deliver seamlessly zettabytes of video all around the world surely doesn't come cheaply.
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.
There is a large community inside Microsoft using Linux as their daily driver.
Windows is definitely the happy path since support is pretty much baked into the OS. However there is support for both Mac and Linux.
This was before M1 though, since we're building for x86-64 arch exclusively I likely will never move to an M1 device.
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.
Which companies do you have in mind? (Apart from Oracle.)
(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.)
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.
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 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.
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.
Is the GitHub team working on Teams now? I doubt it.
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.
"Between different messaging boards (including the link above) this feature has been requested over 2000 times (1044 times as of this writing on the link above alone). Could Microsoft chime in to let us know if this is going to be on the roadmap? Thanks."
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msteams/forum/all/pausin...
The tool will say you are in the meeting but won't let you have access to the chat. A bug hitting regularly hundreds of persons.
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams/why-s...
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams/probl...
I pity GitHub employees and would consider resigning :-)
It's a slow buggy resource hog that crashes frequently.
Features keep getting added but until they address the fundamentals, all they're doing is polishing a turd.
Have you tried the web version of Teams? It’s not ideal, but I have found it to be more stable than the desktop version.
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
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?
Is it, even if there will be productivity losses? Is making your teams less productive "absolutely the right move"?
From an outsider's perspective of MS and Github, I think it's the right move.
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.
$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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
Fwiw - I don’t understand why it’s hated. It’s a collaboration tool - mainly messaging and conferencing. It’s been decent at that for me.
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.
laughs in WebEx
Teams has the worst layouts for the videos, moves UI elements to inconvenient places, often has more stuttering…
WebEx is clunky but far superior at what it’s meant to do.
Welcome to Microsoft, where data loss prevention somehow means that your service provider isn't allowed to share his services with you in Teams.
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.
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').
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.
I'm not sure what quality of integration Teams has - but Chat has had this integration for several months now.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
What it comes down to is that Teams is fine at best... but just that.
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.
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.
I missed messages and conversations all the time when I had to use it
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.
I don't use the local Teams client.
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.
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.
It's not that teams is bad, per say. It's just that there are more ergonomic tools out there.
It's not just electron, there's some kind of Heisenbug-driven-design going on in the backrooms of Microsoft.
... except Teams, which manages to be possibly the single most confusing piece of software I've ever used. And I like Paradox games....
Once you're past the onboarding/installation hurdle, they all start to blend together.
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.
And how much is a junior engineer per month in a small European company, let alone a senior one in a FAANG?
(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.)
Until it inevitably breaks.
> Effective immediately, we will be moving laptop refreshes from three years to four years.
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.
Silicon is an element often used in semiconductor manufacturing.
Neither Apple or Intel manufacture silicone in any major quantities.
(Person who wrote the tweet does not work at GitHub)
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?
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).
The Zoom UI is atrocious.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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 can understand Teams being a pain in multi-tenancy setups but even that is something which I've noticed is being improved recently.
> Surely they could afford to revamp this product and reap the rewards of people not hating using their tools?
It's not a business priority. Management is sold on Teams by integration with their existing services, as well as security, compartmentalization, and so on. They're not sold on "this is a polished product that people enjoy using".
And when you look at the spec sheet, Teams is an awesome piece of software. It can replace Zoom, phone calls, Slack, file sharing and collaboration, and so on. It can even replace e-mail to some extent, though if you're working at a company that's mandating Teams there's a good chance that your company has a strong e-mail culture and people are still going to e-mail you all the time for no good reason.
Anyway yeah, Teams is just the worst.
I think the Discord UX is worse but at least the product kinda works.
All they can do is put a bit more lipstick on the pig.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Read the image in the tweet, it’s only 100 words or so
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.
My company forces us to use Google Chat. I would take Teams any day.
I would crawl through broken glass for google chat. Teams is sooooo bad.
I'm in 7 different teams and have over over 15 pinned chats and IM's.
The only delay I see is when comparing desktop app to the mobile app.
Even video chats are bearable and work fine with even background effects turned on.
https://www.sellyourmac.com/mac-product-guides/imac/mmqa2ll-...
https://www.sellyourmac.com/mac-product-guides/macbook-pro/m...
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 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.
- 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.
I’m always baffled by the HN hatred for Teams and the horrible experiences others have had — because I’ve experienced nothing even remotely similar.
- 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.
Our dev team uses Slack for chat, but that's only because we can't connected to the corporate Teams from our dev environment.
It just doesn't do that lol.
I don't use zoom, I use teams. Try again perhaps.
This is wrong, it works 33% of the time.
> I regularly am confused by what I am meant to do, or how to resolve errors that occur;
Just to provide two examples of specific complaints from the parent post.
- 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.
It’s so strange that so many people can have completely different experiences with the same software.
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.
Maybe it's a team size thing, and Teams just blows monkey chunks when you're one of fifty thousand employees at a company?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Just crap.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
If a window is placed over top of the Teams window with all the floating faces, it minimizes itself into that small window...
Burn it with fire.
Salt the ground on which it stood.
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."
Honestly, I'll take a program with a bunch of consistent downsides over one that has fewer downsides but comes up with new ones in each version.
Nope.
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.
I've seen it used with great success at smaller, non-technical companies though.
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.
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.
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 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)?
Zoom has issues as well but I don't regularly get to use better services than Zoom.
Compared to any other Message software it is the worst.
I would rather use Discord then Teams.
What are the shortcomings of Google Chat over Teams?
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.
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.
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.
I do use Teams when a vender uses it, and it's just so so bad.
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 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)
Why in hell would I think of adding unwanted whitespace after the backticks? Anyways, that's the fix.
I would only pick Teams over Webex and Skype.
Is the entire thing written by a team who don't care/don't know any better/can't do any better?