5 ms·

At my company, the developers are all on fairly powerful MacBook Pros, and everyone else in the company has Windows laptops (I think generally Surface devices)

by hbn 5y ago

At my company, the developers are all on fairly powerful MacBook Pros, and everyone else in the company has Windows laptops (I think generally Surface devices) For the developers, Teams works... as good as Teams can. So not great, but it works most of the time (for me, anyway). For everyone else though, I hear nothing but issues. Constantly having to restart to make Teams work. And again, this is on Surface devices, so Microsoft is making the app, the OS, and the hardware! Even aside from the performance, I just think Teams is laid out horribly and it stifles communication. The redundancy between chats, group chats, and Teams channels (which are like a message board?) is just bizarre and constantly causes confusion. It's so much worse than Slack (which we used to use, and I used at a previous job) where all communication channels are listed along the left side, and you didn't have to dig through menus and trees of categorization to get to certain places to talk to your coworkers. And since Teams channels are sectioned off behind another screen from your chats (where you'll probably be most of the time), the only way to be aware of when someone posts in one of the channels is to turn on notifications for it. Which is very annoying! edit: oh also a recent update made it so when you paste a code snippet into the plaintext editor thing (whatever it's called, you activate it by typing 3 backticks), it strips all the whitespace from the left, meaning you lose all the code indentation. Just great

mxuribe 5y ago
> ...The redundancy between chats, group chats, and Teams channels (which are like a message board?) is just bizarre and constantly causes confusion... Oh yeah, I'm with you! I'll admit that Slack's UX and UI is not my favorite either, but at least any challenges are in a single dimension (not like Teams in multiple, challenging dimensions)...Meanwhile Teams' is just awful. I mean, the Teams "rooms" (I guess i call them "rooms" because its annoying to call them "Teams Sites"?) almost exist like channels/rooms in good ol' IRC...but then Teams has channels underneath Teams Sites/rooms...?...Plus, if i want to chat with an indiviodual, those live in the separate "Chat" area...Ugh! To the valid point about slack, at least its all there on the left. I guess i could sort of see if there was drastically different functionality between Chats and Rooms/Sites...but i dont think so. So, why then separate them? As much as i dislike Microsoft as an organization overall (for their historic corporate behavior), they often don't jhave the worse UX ideas...But for Teams, ugh! I'm gpoing to pivot a little to matrix, and specifically the Element client...which is the most popular matrix web client. I'm an admitted matrix fanboy, so clearly i'm biased...but even Element has areas that are simpler for me to comprehend and utilize...Also, Element in my mind is still waaaaay early in its evolution, and still very much far from their UX being topnotch. But even in Element's infancy is leaps abovew what Teams is now after several years. I acknowledge that Teams "does more" (like embedding Office software, etc.)...and of course the underlying matrix protocol is NOT limited to chat...But, wow, is Teams sucky.
- easton 5y ago
  Teams is bad, but Element/Matrix is the only chat app I've used in maybe 10 years (outside of SMS) where I miss messages. I get a notification, want to read the entire message, open the app and it isn't there. I'm 99% sure it didn't get deleted, but I'll never know what it said. And since iOS makes the notification go away when you tap it, I can't even see what it was. Discord should just sell a white label version or start a subsidiary to sell to enterprise. Slack will probably get smushed by Salesforce, and short of Satya Nadella's personal laptop bursting into flames because of Teams, I doubt they'll slim down the client.
  - _rutinerad 5y ago
    You can see previous notifications by swiping up on the lock screen.
  - brokenmachine 5y ago
    I use Element on Android and it works perfectly. I don't say that lightly, I'm pretty hard to please in general. Element is one of the few pieces of software that I don't have a complaint about.
    - brokenmachine 5y ago
      Actually I just thought of the single problem that I have with it - it doesn't support multiple identities. https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues/2320 https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues/2320 Other than that it works great though.
  - mxuribe 5y ago
    > ...Element/Matrix is the only chat app I've used in maybe 10 years (outside of SMS) where I miss messages... That sure is odd...and not my experience at all. > ...short of Satya Nadella's personal laptop bursting into flames because of Teams, I doubt they'll slim down the client. Sadly, i think you're right.
    - 5y ago
kingosticks 5y ago
The code formatting is so badly broken now. It simply cannot have been tested. i just can't believe they want it to work like that. i also really hate that copy and pasting into a chat preserves the styling/formatting of the original. why would i want that? and the search... oh the search!
- rightbyte 5y ago
  Wait until you discover that copy and pasting from the chat might introduce no-break Unicode spaces that looks like spaces in most diff tools! I did the hard way.
  - JMS2021 5y ago
    Seen this. Docker Compose YML files with invisible spaces, because copied from a code block. That's the point of code blocks. No formatting. <pre> and all that. Caused us much pain.
- kyriakos 5y ago
  If you run teams on light mode and copy paste to someone who's running on dark mode he simply can't see your message cause it's text color is black on black background. The fact that this happens on a piece of software which natively supports dark mode tells a lot of the amount of testing that teams is getting before being pushed to users.
EMM_386 5y ago
> The redundancy between chats, group chats, and Teams channels (which are like a message board?) is just bizarre It really is, why do I get notifications in chat sometimes and not the Teams room that everyone is a part of? Why are people referencing others in these chat channels when that's what we discuss in the Teams channels? And I'm a senior software engineer!
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
ashton314 5y ago
Teams is like the most developer-hostile piece of burning rubbish that I have ever had the misfortune to have to use. Sending little code snippets is such an important part of development. If a company has mandated Teams for all communications, you know they cannot be “developer friendly”—some management level is making decisions about what the engineers need. While we’re bashing Teams—why are their notifications some awful custom window that doesn’t respect your OS notification settings?!??!
- month13 5y ago
  Teams at least is slightly better than Skype For Business, which would hijack copy paste to put the sender's name and for some reason insert zero-width characters between every space.
  - silverwind 5y ago
    Copying in Teams is messed up similarily where selecting message content also copies the timestamp and sender name even thought the selection shows otherwise.
    - mianos 5y ago
      It is worse than this, sometimes it does, sometimes it does not.
      - tragictrash 5y ago
        Today when I started typing, my cursor remained in the leftmost position and all of the characters appeared one by one to the right, effectively reversing all the text. I can't make this up.
        strangegecko 5y ago
        This has happened to me in Gmail before. May be a chrome issue?
sli 5y ago
We used Teams at my last job. It was unpopular and we didn't use it a whole lot since the building was small enough that we could just... ya know, yell. Then MS introduced that weird semi-forced threaded discussion feature that make following conversations a nightmare and nobody, not a single person in the whole company, sent a message over Teams ever again. We kept running it to appear online, but literally nobody actually used it. We did spend a fair amount of downtime talking about how much we hated Teams, though. And Azure DevOps. More than one person there considered it some of the worst software they've ever used, and they're right. It was a horrendous mess or awful UX (but tons and tons of charts for the managers to value far too highly). That was a year and a half ago or so, maybe it's better now. But at the time, having switched to that from Gitlab, it was atrocious and we avoided it as much as we could.
- m8s 5y ago
  I first had the pleasure of using Teams in 2016 or 2017, I forget exactly when, and at the time they didn’t have accessibility features. None. You couldn’t even increase the text size in the app. It was nigh unusable then. I left for a different job and within a year, Teams again reared its ugly head. I’ve thankfully moved on from that job too. Whatever cost savings Teams affords, the difference is more than lost in confusion, miscommunication, and frustration across the workplace. May I never have to use it again. Interestingly, my team now uses Discord for communication and we really love it.
  - yurishimo 5y ago
    How do you deal with backscroll? That’s been my biggest hang up with Discord but I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t use it much.
    - eatonphil 5y ago
      What is your issue with/what do you mean by backscroll? I've been using Discord for a few months now but still new.
      - 5y ago
bodge5000 5y ago
Back when I was using Ubuntu for work, teams used to crash my whole system 2-3 times a week. I know it was teams because it'd start with the mouse lagging, and then a few seconds later would just completely freeze up, but if I were fast enough to notice I could right click the teams icon and exit out of it before it had the chance, and then I'd be alright...for another day or so. Now I'm on Windows, and it doesn't seem to be a problem anymore (or at least it doesn't crash my system anymore, its still always top of the list for memory usage), but it is very irritating to use
anm89 5y ago
Favorite terrible teams UX: it only allows you to be logged in to one account but when you click log out, it takes you to a separate screen with all 1 of your sessions and asks you to select which account you'd like to sign out of as a separate step.
hnthrowaway0315 5y ago
From what I get, they are pushing users to use the "advanced editor" a.k.a. the format button. A few things ONLY work there: - Lists: A few months ago you can simply use markdown style lists in any chat and hitting enter would create a new list item instead of sending the whole message off. A few updates since Nov slowly stripped off this option for Chats, and then Channels. The only option to send lists is to use the format button. - As you said, code snippets, now they stripped off all indentations if you are not using the format button (and have to go through a tedious process to insert code)
thedangler 5y ago
I agree 100% with your review I work for an institution that has gone balls deep with MS products and it's driving me crazy considering they are always worrying about budgets and saving money. When I started everyone was communicating with email. Drove me nuts. I convinced the team I was assigned to, to drop emails and switched to hipchat ( loved it) then slack ( meh ) When covid hit, everyone needed to be on chat. Top brass told us we were not allowed to use anything but MS Teams. The devs hate it. It's run by the main IT dep so we have no control over how it works. I want to stage a revolt and install mattermost on one of our servers lol
- rdtwo 5y ago
  Matter most really sucks. It’s a really immature pruoduct. Discord can run circles around it and it’s not even very good

by hbn 5y ago

mxuribe 5y ago

> ...The redundancy between chats, group chats, and Teams channels (which are like a message board?) is just bizarre and constantly causes confusion... Oh yeah, I'm with you! I'll admit that Slack's UX and UI is not my favorite either, but at least any challenges are in a single dimension (not like Teams in multiple, challenging dimensions)...Meanwhile Teams' is just awful. I mean, the Teams "rooms" (I guess i call them "rooms" because its annoying to call them "Teams Sites"?) almost exist like channels/rooms in good ol' IRC...but then Teams has channels underneath Teams Sites/rooms...?...Plus, if i want to chat with an indiviodual, those live in the separate "Chat" area...Ugh! To the valid point about slack, at least its all there on the left. I guess i could sort of see if there was drastically different functionality between Chats and Rooms/Sites...but i dont think so. So, why then separate them? As much as i dislike Microsoft as an organization overall (for their historic corporate behavior), they often don't jhave the worse UX ideas...But for Teams, ugh! I'm gpoing to pivot a little to matrix, and specifically the Element client...which is the most popular matrix web client. I'm an admitted matrix fanboy, so clearly i'm biased...but even Element has areas that are simpler for me to comprehend and utilize...Also, Element in my mind is still waaaaay early in its evolution, and still very much far from their UX being topnotch. But even in Element's infancy is leaps abovew what Teams is now after several years. I acknowledge that Teams "does more" (like embedding Office software, etc.)...and of course the underlying matrix protocol is NOT limited to chat...But, wow, is Teams sucky.

easton 5y ago
Teams is bad, but Element/Matrix is the only chat app I've used in maybe 10 years (outside of SMS) where I miss messages. I get a notification, want to read the entire message, open the app and it isn't there. I'm 99% sure it didn't get deleted, but I'll never know what it said. And since iOS makes the notification go away when you tap it, I can't even see what it was. Discord should just sell a white label version or start a subsidiary to sell to enterprise. Slack will probably get smushed by Salesforce, and short of Satya Nadella's personal laptop bursting into flames because of Teams, I doubt they'll slim down the client.
- _rutinerad 5y ago
  You can see previous notifications by swiping up on the lock screen.
- brokenmachine 5y ago
  I use Element on Android and it works perfectly. I don't say that lightly, I'm pretty hard to please in general. Element is one of the few pieces of software that I don't have a complaint about.
  - brokenmachine 5y ago
    Actually I just thought of the single problem that I have with it - it doesn't support multiple identities. https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues/2320 https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues/2320 Other than that it works great though.
- mxuribe 5y ago
  > ...Element/Matrix is the only chat app I've used in maybe 10 years (outside of SMS) where I miss messages... That sure is odd...and not my experience at all. > ...short of Satya Nadella's personal laptop bursting into flames because of Teams, I doubt they'll slim down the client. Sadly, i think you're right.
  - 5y ago

kingosticks 5y ago

The code formatting is so badly broken now. It simply cannot have been tested. i just can't believe they want it to work like that. i also really hate that copy and pasting into a chat preserves the styling/formatting of the original. why would i want that? and the search... oh the search!

rightbyte 5y ago
Wait until you discover that copy and pasting from the chat might introduce no-break Unicode spaces that looks like spaces in most diff tools! I did the hard way.
- JMS2021 5y ago
  Seen this. Docker Compose YML files with invisible spaces, because copied from a code block. That's the point of code blocks. No formatting. <pre> and all that. Caused us much pain.
kyriakos 5y ago
If you run teams on light mode and copy paste to someone who's running on dark mode he simply can't see your message cause it's text color is black on black background. The fact that this happens on a piece of software which natively supports dark mode tells a lot of the amount of testing that teams is getting before being pushed to users.

EMM_386 5y ago

> The redundancy between chats, group chats, and Teams channels (which are like a message board?) is just bizarre It really is, why do I get notifications in chat sometimes and not the Teams room that everyone is a part of? Why are people referencing others in these chat channels when that's what we discuss in the Teams channels? And I'm a senior software engineer!

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

ashton314 5y ago

Teams is like the most developer-hostile piece of burning rubbish that I have ever had the misfortune to have to use. Sending little code snippets is such an important part of development. If a company has mandated Teams for all communications, you know they cannot be “developer friendly”—some management level is making decisions about what the engineers need. While we’re bashing Teams—why are their notifications some awful custom window that doesn’t respect your OS notification settings?!??!

month13 5y ago
Teams at least is slightly better than Skype For Business, which would hijack copy paste to put the sender's name and for some reason insert zero-width characters between every space.
- silverwind 5y ago
  Copying in Teams is messed up similarily where selecting message content also copies the timestamp and sender name even thought the selection shows otherwise.
  - mianos 5y ago
    It is worse than this, sometimes it does, sometimes it does not.
    - tragictrash 5y ago
      Today when I started typing, my cursor remained in the leftmost position and all of the characters appeared one by one to the right, effectively reversing all the text. I can't make this up.
      - strangegecko 5y ago
        This has happened to me in Gmail before. May be a chrome issue?

sli 5y ago

We used Teams at my last job. It was unpopular and we didn't use it a whole lot since the building was small enough that we could just... ya know, yell. Then MS introduced that weird semi-forced threaded discussion feature that make following conversations a nightmare and nobody, not a single person in the whole company, sent a message over Teams ever again. We kept running it to appear online, but literally nobody actually used it. We did spend a fair amount of downtime talking about how much we hated Teams, though. And Azure DevOps. More than one person there considered it some of the worst software they've ever used, and they're right. It was a horrendous mess or awful UX (but tons and tons of charts for the managers to value far too highly). That was a year and a half ago or so, maybe it's better now. But at the time, having switched to that from Gitlab, it was atrocious and we avoided it as much as we could.

m8s 5y ago
I first had the pleasure of using Teams in 2016 or 2017, I forget exactly when, and at the time they didn’t have accessibility features. None. You couldn’t even increase the text size in the app. It was nigh unusable then. I left for a different job and within a year, Teams again reared its ugly head. I’ve thankfully moved on from that job too. Whatever cost savings Teams affords, the difference is more than lost in confusion, miscommunication, and frustration across the workplace. May I never have to use it again. Interestingly, my team now uses Discord for communication and we really love it.
- yurishimo 5y ago
  How do you deal with backscroll? That’s been my biggest hang up with Discord but I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t use it much.
  - eatonphil 5y ago
    What is your issue with/what do you mean by backscroll? I've been using Discord for a few months now but still new.
    - 5y ago

bodge5000 5y ago

Back when I was using Ubuntu for work, teams used to crash my whole system 2-3 times a week. I know it was teams because it'd start with the mouse lagging, and then a few seconds later would just completely freeze up, but if I were fast enough to notice I could right click the teams icon and exit out of it before it had the chance, and then I'd be alright...for another day or so. Now I'm on Windows, and it doesn't seem to be a problem anymore (or at least it doesn't crash my system anymore, its still always top of the list for memory usage), but it is very irritating to use

anm89 5y ago

Favorite terrible teams UX: it only allows you to be logged in to one account but when you click log out, it takes you to a separate screen with all 1 of your sessions and asks you to select which account you'd like to sign out of as a separate step.

hnthrowaway0315 5y ago

From what I get, they are pushing users to use the "advanced editor" a.k.a. the format button. A few things ONLY work there: - Lists: A few months ago you can simply use markdown style lists in any chat and hitting enter would create a new list item instead of sending the whole message off. A few updates since Nov slowly stripped off this option for Chats, and then Channels. The only option to send lists is to use the format button. - As you said, code snippets, now they stripped off all indentations if you are not using the format button (and have to go through a tedious process to insert code)

thedangler 5y ago

I agree 100% with your review I work for an institution that has gone balls deep with MS products and it's driving me crazy considering they are always worrying about budgets and saving money. When I started everyone was communicating with email. Drove me nuts. I convinced the team I was assigned to, to drop emails and switched to hipchat ( loved it) then slack ( meh ) When covid hit, everyone needed to be on chat. Top brass told us we were not allowed to use anything but MS Teams. The devs hate it. It's run by the main IT dep so we have no control over how it works. I want to stage a revolt and install mattermost on one of our servers lol

rdtwo 5y ago
Matter most really sucks. It’s a really immature pruoduct. Discord can run circles around it and it’s not even very good