32 ms·

GitHub staff are required to use Teams by Sep 1, 2023

• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• samcat116 4y ago
  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.
  • explorigin 4y ago
    Background noise cancellation is pretty bad compared to zoom. Teams seems to flake out more when sharing desktops than zoom does (though I've had issues with both).
    • testudovictoria 4y ago
      I went from a company that used Google Hangouts, which is like using pen and paper relatively speaking, to trying to use Slack. Slack wasn't official, but it was an allowed form of communication. People who didn't have the vested interested just couldn't figure it out. So while I preferred Slack, having to hold everyone's hands through basic functionality was awful. Now I'm at a place that uses Teams. I don't think Teams is perfect, but I feel like Teams gets extra hate just because it's Teams. The best feature in my opinion is the group thread feature. Having people able to start a threaded conversation by default gives a lot of granular control over what notifications I receive by default.
      • explorigin 4y ago
        Coming from Slack, group threads is annoying. Teams gets extra hate because it's often forced upon engineers for cost-saving measures. Slack has a lot of nice features that help maintain a company's remote-work culture. Teams is just an organized collaboration tool. There's a huge difference. When Teams was forced upon us at my company, it was a trash product that I would be ashamed to release. It crashed a lot. It was slow. Background noise cancellation was non-existent. Scroll-back history was nearly impossible. Search was trash. Of these things, it's now more stable and has background noise cancellation, but it's still slower and more difficult to use with garbage search and a confusing interface to find the team you're looking for. Before we had teams, there was a lot of talk in the company of "breaking down the silos". Well teams has silos built-in. It literally makes it harder to find the right person or team to talk to just by how it's designed.
  • Semaphor 4y ago
    > Teams isn’t great compared to Slack for async text chats It’s slowly starting to become usable, though. After several years, you can now actually use the search function.
  • stavros 4y ago
    And Slack isn't great compared to Zulip, but we make do.
  • dmonitor 4y ago
    I don't think Teams even has a sound test. It just places a call with a microsoft bot that repeats the audio back.
  • EFreethought 4y ago
    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.
• chongli 4y ago
  That’s plenty of time to dust off the resume and start pounding the pavement! Very generous of Microsoft to give so much notice! Edit: for those who may think I’m overreacting to a small change in tooling, I offer this classic essay [1]. It explains the reasoning behind leaving much better than I could! [1] https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-earth-%e2%80%93-soda%e2%80%99s-are-no-longer-free/ https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...
  • slantedview 4y ago
    Changing jobs over video conferencing software would be extreme.
    • markdestouches 4y ago
      But this isn't just about video conferencing software. I think it's pretty reasonable to assume that Microsoft is going to keep pushing in the same direction
    • kneebonian 4y ago
      You'd think but if where I work ever mandated I had to stop using Linux I'd start looking elsewhere. I have to spend 8 hours a day using a tool and I get frustrated with suboptimal tools, why subject myself to that on top of everything else I have to do.
      • kahrl 4y ago
        Now, I could be wrong here, but I'm pretty sure an operating system and conferencing software are two different things.
        • Tempest1981 4y ago
          Unless you're in video meetings most of your day. (Not judging)
      • input_sh 4y ago
• aldarisbm 4y ago
  uh.. i dont see the problem? They are only using it for video conferencing. day to day collab still on slack...
  • ketchupdebugger 4y ago
    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.
    • aldarisbm 4y ago
      I'm all for dogfooding, the only meaningful difference between slack and Teams to me, is the search for actual information that I know I've encountered in the past (it's easier on slack IMO), and the awesome way to interact/thread with conversations in a natural way. Video-conferencing wise, I always have more problems with slack than with zoom/teams.
    • tkone 4y ago
      this already happened to some extent. the “blessed” way to develop github is in vscode (from ms), using codespaces (from ms), running on azure (from ms). vim/emacs users can use the terminal (although the codespace and port forwarding, at first, had to be done via vscode exclusively) but your entire toolstack needs to be installed each time you launch a new one. collaborating with anyone at ms already meant you were using teams to some extent. (former github developer)
    • TechBro8615 4y ago
      This way they also don't send all their internal company communications to a third party, which would be extra stupid when you have your own in-house conferencing software to use instead.
    • cpuguy83 4y ago
      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.
• meitros 4y ago
  "for the sole purpose of video conferencing". They're still using slack for day-to-day...
  • Buttons840 4y ago
    So the official meetings will be in teams and the important meetings in Slack huddles? Does teams allow you to draw on the screen?
    • w0m 4y ago
      > Does teams allow you to draw on the screen? i mean; no one can really tell you what to do with your sharpie. (but yes; that's been baked in for a while)
      • procinct 4y ago
        Only on a freeze frame of the screen though. Not like in a slack huddle.
  • staircasebug 4y ago
    Step 1 towards, "we will be using Teams for day-to-day collaboration".
    • chasd00 4y ago
      Embrace Teams for video conferencing, Extend Teams to day-to-day collaboration, Extinguish Slack. That's not how Embrace-Extend-Extinquish worked traditionally but it still fits.
      • pknomad 4y ago
        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.
  • 4y ago
• jmclnx 4y ago
  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 ?
  • williamstein 4y ago
    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.
    • hackerman_fi 4y ago
      Same way Gitlab and countless other services are built on top of Git, which is definitely not owned by MS :)
      • yamtaddle 4y ago
        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).
    • bombcar 4y ago
      The problem is that what GitHub does is relatively reproducible (Gitlab, gitea, bitbucket? others do it) but the value GitHub provides is free hosting for so much content. Anyone can make an image hosting site, making one profitable long term is always the problem. For now, GitHub is winning because of the free side of their toolset.
      • creshal 4y ago
        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.
• ralph84 4y ago
  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.
  • VeninVidiaVicii 4y ago
    Well said. I am getting these eerie feelings todays tech giants are turning into modern-day IBM — in that they are more just turning into generic businesses.
    • runlevel1 4y ago
      By "generic" do you mean competing by means other than the strength of their product? Which companies do you have in mind? (Apart from Oracle.)
  • version_five 4y ago
    Not that I disagree with the sentiment. But one could look at this an an opportunity to try and improve Teams. Sucks a bit short term for the people who have to use it, but if they can capture feedback (from a captive user group paid for their time) and improve it, everybody wins. I think is would be worse if they just kept polishing a turd in an ivory tower (so to speak) and let their employees use something else
    • Rygian 4y ago
      And here's me thinking that turd polishing was not location dependent.
    • franga2000 4y ago
      I don't think lack of feedback is a problem, nor would Microsoft have any trouble assembling a paid group of testers to give them feedback if they needed it without subjecting Github employees to the not-even-all-that-polished turd that is Teams.
    • deleted 4y ago
• tootie 4y ago
  Maybe I'm nuts, but I see almost zero appreciable difference between any of the most common chat or video conference platforms. They all have some little quirks or bonus features, but 99% of the time I'm only using the core features that they all do the same. Slack is absurdly expensive for what it does. Slack Pro is $12.50/person/mo. It's the same price for O365 which includes chat, video and the entire Office suite.
  • yamtaddle 4y ago
    Nah, Zoom was wildly better than other options at first, but the rest these days are mostly OK enough to handle most day-to-day needs. And yeah, chat apps are pretty similar. ... except Teams, which manages to be possibly the single most confusing piece of software I've ever used. And I like Paradox games....
    • bombcar 4y ago
      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.
      • yamtaddle 4y ago
        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.
      • tootie 4y ago
        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.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• christkv 4y ago
  Next you must use office 365 for all documents and we will be moving to Sharepoint.
  • easton 4y ago
    ...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.)
  • bombcar 4y ago
    The single redeeming feature of Teams is that you can use it for documents and Sharepoint shit without ever having to actually open one drive or Sharepoint. Until it inevitably breaks.
• mathattack 4y ago
  Seems natural to be forced to eat the owners dog food. At least they don’t have to deal with the Microsoft sales reps.
• rwalle 4y ago
  What's the problem with "4 yr old laptops"? My colleagues and I use Teams on computers 1-5 years old and haven't heard about any issues.
  • cpuguy83 4y ago
    I think it's a dig at how resource hungry Teams is.
  • top_sigrid 4y ago
    Maybe that works well on Windows machines, on the Mac at least on the Intel-era some year-old Macs MS Teams is one of the most horrible, buggy, resource hungry, non-working app that one could imagine.
    • bitwize 4y ago
      As soon as the M1 dropped, Apple just stopped giving a shit about Intel Macs. The whole OS is slow, janky, and appears to have driver bugs on Intel.
      • top_sigrid 4y ago
        Teams was horrible before that. What you consider is not a reason for Teams being utterly crap on at least the Intel Macs - which I was talking of only as I have no Apple Silicon Mac to compare to.
    • yamtaddle 4y ago
      It's so bad it makes Slack look lightweight. Which is a real accomplishment.
      • top_sigrid 4y ago
        Actually true and a good way to put it
        • 4y ago
• nih0 4y ago
  poor souls
• rwalle 4y ago
  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)
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• anonyfox 4y ago
  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?
• kimbernator 4y ago
  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?
  • jasonlotito 4y ago
    They are still using Slack. This is for video conferencing only. I've heard that with regards to video conferencing, it's competitive with zoom.
    • kimbernator 4y ago
      I've been in a "mixed" slack/teams environment and it seems there was always a push to be a little more teams-y every month or so - given that Github is owned by MSFT, I wouldn't be surprised if that happened there, too.
    • sofixa 4y ago
      > I've heard that with regards to video conferencing, it's competitive with zoom. Did you hear that from a Microsoft salesperson? Only a person who hasn't used both regularly can say that. UX and features on Zoom are better. The mere fact that to this day Teams has wildly different features depending on how you join the call is a joke - for instance, joining from a browser on macOS results in no chat (the button simply isn't there).
      • rhaway84773 4y ago
        If you asked someone who’s new to Zoom if they’re on mute or not, I bet they will have a 50% hit rate. Heck, I bet even someone who regularly uses Zoom would have the same success rate. The Zoom UI is atrocious.
• pxeger1 4y ago
  Assuming a new laptop costs about $2000, they'll be cutting costs by about $420k/yr. Is GitHub really making so little money that that's noticeable?
• ralmidani 4y ago
  I’m extremely picky - as long as my livelihood is not threatened and I actually have options. For me, being forced to use Windows, Teams, Skype, Java/Spring, or Jira (among others) would be a dealbreaker (again, unless that job might be among the few available to help me feed my family). I spent some time learning in the structured environment of a large company, which I recommend everyone do for a first and/or second job. Now, at this point in my career, I tend to gravitate toward smaller companies; my current company (less than 40 employees) ordered me a high-spec Framework Laptop (I put Fedora on it) and $900 ultra-wide monitor without hesitation. I believe I was the first dev at the company to ask about a Sublime license (in a Slack message), and within minutes I got an email from SublimeHQ with the license key. Of course, YMMV, but if you want and are ready for flexibility, you might do best by avoiding big companies - and even startups where leadership has intense personalities and overly-strong opinions.
  • kypro 4y ago
    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.
    • betaby 4y ago
      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.
• thiht 4y ago
  Is this front page worthy news for HN? That’s just whining over a valid corporate policy. GitHub was bought by Microsoft, now GitHub employees have to use Microsoft tools. What’s newsworthy here? Also is « 4 years old laptops » supposed to be impressive? Like you’re developing on a dinosaur or something? A 4 year old laptop for most development work is completely fine.
  • locallost 4y ago
    It's scratching someone's itch. And apparently a lot of people's. So why don't we try to find out what the issue is instead of yelling at clouds?
• dustedcodes 4y ago
  Immediate resignation reason and turns out the ones who got recently laid off are the real winners as they walk away with a severance package at least.
  • barbazoo 4y ago
    That would be a rather silly reason to quit over, wouldn't it?
    • dannyobrien 4y ago
      I think it's probably a variant on https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-earth-%E2%80%93-soda%E2%80%99s-are-no-longer-free/ https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• aliqot 4y ago
  Bit early for Act 3 of the tried-and-true microsoft EEE playbook.
• m00dy 4y ago
  looking at this thread is probably greatest and cheapest way to get UX feedback.
• jdlyga 4y ago
  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.
• BazookaMusic 4y ago
  One thing to keep in mind is that there's a security angle to this as well. It is beneficial for a company to centralize all of its communication through one service which can be audited for security and also support all the features required to meet the internal Requirements. Having multiple tools multiplies the work needed to maintain security standards. Of course, I'm not saying that teams is more secure than competing products or that this will automatically improve security. The point is that it's a single option that's easier to manage. Outside of security, this also applies to cooperation between MS and Github teams. Teams helps with keeping common calendars, meeting invites, recordings and transcripts. Having more tools means that an adapter needs to exist between them and might be disincentivising communication, since engineers would prefer to work on their tasks rather than work around fixing soft problems.
  • danudey 4y ago
    Teams is great for functionality, and also the worst, most unperformant application I've ever had to use for work. Somehow even Word/Excel on the web are more performant than Teams itself has ever been. It's slow to switch from "chats" to "chat rooms", and then to switch from whichever chat/room you're on to the one you want to be on. Allegedly they're working on this, but there's no way they're going to make it usable any time soon. I felt constant frustration using Teams and have it miss keypresses, fail to focus the text input in chats (I had to manually do so every time I changed chats), and remove all formatting and trim whitespace from code or text that I pasted, even if I pasted it into a code block (though for code blocks it only removed it when I send, so it looked fine until I hit enter). Trying to view or add integrations would often take several minutes for the modal dialog to finish loading (during which I couldn't use Teams). I also found frustrating sending files to people who then couldn't actually see them unless I manually granted them permissions. Why is this a thing? The QoL of developers at Github is going to drop significantly once they're forced onto Teams, because even after years and years it still feels like an early beta release where they haven't done a UX or optimization pass yet. My heart goes out to the Github team for this one.
  • bdlowery 4y ago
    They aren’t centralizing their communication in teams. It’s being used for video conferencing. Everything else remains in slack. Read the image in the tweet, it’s only 100 words or so
• revscat 4y ago
  To everyone at GitHub: I’m so sorry. I don’t mean this in a clever way, either. Teams is awful and it will make your lives worse to one degree or another.
  • samiru 4y ago
    I wonder if those who complain about Teams actually use it. They might not. My company forces us to use Google Chat. I would take Teams any day.
    • TylerE 4y ago
      I am forced to use Teams on a Mac. It's beyond horrible. Messages sometimes take an hour+ to appear. I would crawl through broken glass for google chat. Teams is sooooo bad.
      • millzlane 4y ago
        I'm using a 2017 2.3ghz i5 with 16gbs of ram. I'm in 7 different teams and have over over 15 pinned chats and IM's. The only delay I see is when comparing desktop app to the mobile app. Even video chats are bearable and work fine with even background effects turned on.
        • TylerE 4y ago
          So not on a mac then? Because only 1 mac was ever released with an i5, and it wasn't out in 2017.
          • sokoloff 4y ago
            The iMac18,1 (MMQA2LL/A) and MacBookPro14,1 (MPXT2LL/A) would like a word. https://www.sellyourmac.com/mac-product-guides/imac/mmqa2ll-a-21-5-imac-slim-alum-mid-2017-2-3-ghz-core-i5.html https://www.sellyourmac.com/mac-product-guides/imac/mmqa2ll-... https://www.sellyourmac.com/mac-product-guides/macbook-pro/mpxt2ll-a-13-macbook-pro-no-touch-bar-mid-2017-2-3-ghz-core-i5.html https://www.sellyourmac.com/mac-product-guides/macbook-pro/m...
• throwawaaarrgh 4y ago
  Everyone who didn't get laid off now wishes they did
• GiorgioG 4y ago
  If only Slack hadn't completely dropped the ball on the "Huddle" experience. I can't tell you what's worse, Teams or Slack anymore.
• penguin_booze 4y ago
  Teams? OK, our thoughts are with you in these difficult times. Good luck.
• vondur 4y ago
  We have to use Teams here where I work, and for the most part it's okish. However, a long standing bug in the Mac version that's really annoying is using CMD+TAB to switch to the app really doesn't work. I think there is some sort of hidden window that the app spawns so when you try to switch to it, it technically does, but nothing is there. I've seen fixes that instruct you to use the native Mac notification system vs. the Teams app notifications, but the issue still persists.
• IceWreck 4y ago
  What did GitHub staff use before ? Slack + Zoom ? Mattermost or something else ?
  • shagie 4y ago
    If I've read the histories and articles correctly, Slack for intracompany chat and Zoom for intra and inter company video. This is switching the intra and inter company video to Teams (which means that GitHub doesn't have to pay Zoom for video anymore). Intracompany text chat remains on Slack.
    • ricktdotorg 4y ago
      Slack [video] Huddles didn't cut the mustard for them? edit: ahh i see "inter-company". yeah, Slack huddles start to suck when guest accounts/other Slack instances or externals get involved. got it.
• bigbottomenergy 4y ago
  [flagged]
• jhallenworld 4y ago
  This is like being acquired by IBM and being forced to use Lotus Notes and Sametime. You must eat your own dogfood..
• hkgjjgjfjfjfjf 4y ago
  [dead]
• joostdevries 4y ago
  I wonder if MS is aiming to use the conversations about software that employees are having in Teams meetings as training data for AI. To automate them away.
• jacquesm 4y ago
  Teams is so horrific we banned it. If you force us to use teams you'll have to find another supplier. Seriously, it is incomprehensible that Microsoft would ship something so utterly broken. I know they don't have a reputation for writing good software but Teams is on another level, and I don't mean that in a positive way. I've really tried to get it to work but it is so messed up that I don't think it can be done. Meanwhile, even Zoom 'mostly works' (though we don't use that either). Eventually we standardized on Google 'meet', it works most of the time, we had a single issue in four years of intensive work and that was mostly related to a Google meet Chromebox auto-updating in the middle of a meeting (brilliant) and then never coming back up again. It serves well as a small PC now, we cancelled our subscription and just use laptops and desktops with webcams. What really bothers me about all this: we had the basics of these setups working in 1995, and since then enough time has past that this should be a complete non-issue. But there is no interop between the various systems, everybody tries to push their own little walled garden and it breaks randomly for no apparent reason. If the phone system had been built like this we'd still be living in a disconnected world.
  • mk89 4y ago
    What's the issue with zoom? I think it's one of the best software I have on my machine. It never ever stopped working since I have it installed, not even in meetings/webinars with 1000+ people. And the integration with Slack is really convenient, you can start a meeting in seconds anywhere you are.
    • jacquesm 4y ago
      On what operating system?
      • larrik 4y ago
        I used to use it (Zoom) constantly on Linux Mint, fwiw. I switched to Mac only because I couldn't get parts for a new desktop at the time. I miss Linux, though :/
        • 4y ago
• aspaviento 4y ago
  Using it on the browser: - it's wonky - 1 on 1 calls not always share the screen and I need to hang up, refresh the browser and call again - translation stopped working both ways. Once a text is translated it doesn't go back to its original language - it's a mess if you make a lot of group calls with different people. You end up having trillions of opened chat. I ended up pinning the main ones to keep them at the top and ignore the rest. - code snippets are just awful. They are a box inside of a box and you always need to click on expand to see the code. - music when you are on hold can't be stopped which can make you crazy. I always hang up or mute the tab - group video calls don't have an option to see everybody in the same screen. Now it's like divided in pages And I could go on and on. Discord is thousands of times better than this.
  • ukoki 4y ago
    You forgot the worst one! When you copy a message in Teams, it "helpfully" adds a header so you end up pasting "[Tuesday 12:54] John Doe" into random form fields / your terminal / your browser location bar ten times a day
    • polyvisual 4y ago
      My lord, that behaviour drives me mad. The experience of using the editor for writing and editing is horrendous.
      • casenmgreen 4y ago
        Oh Gods yes - this. I stopped editing text in Teams. I wrote text in an editor outside of Teams, then pasted it into Teams.
    • ChickenNugger 4y ago
      ...I would seriously consider bytecode manipulation to remove this "feature" from the executable. And I haven't touched even assembly in almost 20 years.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• pelasaco 4y ago
  Probably a not so cool answer: It is just a tool, that you will use while working. Not great, better than some other tools out there, maybe not the best tool. Good news: You just have to use it while working. In another hand, I'm thrilled to see which tools the smart people from GitHub will create around it!
• DrBazza 4y ago
  Teams is just bland. That’s it really. We moved from Slack to Teams and we had a huge drop in inter-team communication to the point we moved back. For remote company it’s hugely important. A lack of thread conversations was a huge issue too. The only plus side was video conferencing was rock solid and office integration was good, as expected.
• jrochkind1 4y ago
  Note the mandate is just "for the sole purpose of video conferencing". That is, they're not replacing slack. Just, I think, what they used before/currently, is zoom. This came up on an earlier HN thread when MS/Github leadership was already telegraphing that. I think github uses some significant "slack ops" integrations, so even if leadership would like to move off that too, it would probably be a lot harder and take longer and require some development/ops work.
• ShaneMcGowan 4y ago
  How is this news
• mensetmanusman 4y ago
  Borg or die
• mensetmanusman 4y ago
  Teams iOS has gotten much worse lately, takes many more seconds to open things on the iPhone 14 pro max compared to my iPhone 12 Pro Max. Something broke.
• waffletower 4y ago
  Wow, that would be enough for me to resign a position at Github. Teams is some seriously low-grade dog food. I always buy my dog food that I could stomach eating myself. Taking the metaphor further than I ought to -- Microsoft ought to be reported for animal abuse.
• brundolf 4y ago
  MS strategy for Teams adoption: buy up companies one by one and force them to use it
• pluijzer 4y ago
  For my current project I have to use Teams on a Mac. Priblems that I encounter daily: 1. I am invisible in conference calls, quiting and starting Teams sometimes helps. 2. Messages refuse to load. I get a notification but no message appears. 3. Recent messages that were already loaded take ages to appear when switching chats 4. When switching chats I get put at a random place in the timeline. 5. Collegues do not receive my messages. 6. The text starts to jiggle a few pixels up and down. When this happens I cannot copy anything. 7. I get a missed call notification without having got the call. Speaking of text and copying, I really dislike how often when I select a specific part of the text and paste it, it contains the username and the timestamp, I want this 0% of the time. Also their seems to be a issue with the font rendering like it is the wrong DPI. The software contains so many rough edges, things like the alignment of text jumping all over the place because the diration of the call text changes size while counting. Truly, and honestly, this software makes me feel miserabel. I would be hesitant accepting a project that requires me to use Teams in the future.
• zcmack 4y ago
  act like its so bad, they've been using ruby since inception.
• packetlost 4y ago
  My condolences to GitHub staff.
• focom 4y ago
  The main annoying thing is Teams has no markdown support. What they call markdown support is still a broken "wysiwyg"
• tristor 4y ago
  MS Teams is so bad that if an employer forced me to use it, I'd resign immediately. I feel sorry for all the folks at Github being tortured in this way.
• bob1029 4y ago
  I see some super hot takes in here. Teams is not ideal, but it does seem to work for us. In total, I spend about 3-4 hours in the actual Teams UI per week, so maybe I don't have enough exposure to lose my mind over this. We've used other messaging tools in the past - Mattermost, Slack, Skype, etc. For better or worse, Teams seems to be sticking and we are all way too busy to worry about whatever horrific implications this brings. One thing I'd consider in all of this: Products like Teams are entirely about connecting other people (and businesses) to you. A vast majority of the decision to use that product is going to come from non-developers and other assholes in a typical org chart. Your front-line, minimum-wage employees are not going to have the patience or skills to configure their own federated IRC instances in order to correspond with your development team.
• killjoywashere 4y ago
  I don’t know much about Teams (we’re a Google Workspace/Meet shop) but I know they are selling all sorts of crazy access rights packages because any given Teams group I meet with, if they send the invite, it’s a different connection experience. You need an account. You need an account on their domain. You don’t need an account, but you need a guest account. You need your own account with Microsoft. You need a user name. You don’t need a username. It works on my phone, or not. It works in the browser, or not. It works in the desktop app, or not. What. The. Hell?!
  • casenmgreen 4y ago
    Yes. I once tried to use Teams on Linux. Eventually, I discovered buried in the package description text in Synaptic package manager that "this software only works with a corporate MS account". This information could not be found on-line, the error messages were completely incorrect, there was negative on-line support - which is to say, there's a public forum MS run which has a bunch of confused people asking what the hell is going on (they were having my problem) and being given wrong answers by "I don't work for MS, I just help out here on this forum".
    • themoonisachees 4y ago
      As a sysadmin who has had the displeasure of working on window server, this experience is consistent across most Microsoft products. Random forums, one guy asking for info but he doesn't work for ms, just knows a lot. Makes you wonder how he learned that in the first place.
• jFriedensreich 4y ago
  might be good to add "for video conferencing", this actually might make sense as the horrible teams app can be closed outside of video calls and they still use slack for everything else. slacks video conferencing is seriously lacking in bad network conditions so slack even recommends using zoom there and zoom is very expensive at githubs scale. if they forced this on employees for team chat that would probably be reason to suspect the beginning of the end. i would certainly consider quitting over using teams for chat.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• ramesh31 4y ago
  Props to Slack for perfectly timing the market peak. They would be worth a fraction of what they got now.
• say_it_as_it_is 4y ago
  Who cares? Why is this front-page of HN?
• jspaetzel 4y ago
  Clickbait title, try again please
• tiffanyh 4y ago
  Why the negatively? Let’s view the positive. Hopefully this dog-fooding will result in improvements to Team. Microsoft should be commended for forcing their employees to use their own products. You’d be shocked at how few companies actually do.
  • oneepic 4y ago
    Keep in mind that dogfooding is one thing, and actually making improvements based on it is another. In plain English, they still might not fix anything they find.
• ifyoubuildit 4y ago
  Teams is dogshit in general, but the unforgivable part is that sometimes messages just don't show up until you restart the client. It's hard to know when this is happening, unless someone follows up on or refers to the missing message(s), but once you catch it a couple times it's hard to have any faith in the software at all. We've been told that this has been fixed, and it does seem more rare now, but I still end up restarting the app regularly out of caution. Which is a pretty pathetic thing for an enterprise tool from a company like ms.
  • thepostman0 4y ago
    For me it is the amount of ram it demands. Most of the day it is an IRC client, for a small portion it does voice/video. How does it need a gig of RAM all day? This squeezes my computer towards e-waste, and I'll be damned if I throw this computer away for an IRC client. Screw you MSFT, get it fixed.
    • wkat4242 4y ago
      > How does it need a gig of RAM all day? Electron. Now, an electron app doesn't have to be terrible. The tech makes it really easy to make turds, but if you spend the time optimizing it, it can be very good. See VS Code for example. I think Microsoft should acquire the company that makes VS Code and let those guys teach the Teams devs how to do it. Oh wait ...
• freeqaz 4y ago
  Teams for Linux, when I inspect it with htop, is actually running a process called "Skype" in the background. I think that explains some of the crappiness of the UX! (It has required some serious hacking to make it even functional for me.) Since then my team has swapped to using Discord for what we're doing. It sounds a bit weird to use a Gamer tool at work but it's actually been pretty great since we run an Open Source AI + Security community[0]. Having everybody in one place is great! For anybody else that's building dev tools or that's doing Open Source work, I'd really recommend Discord. The video quality is great for screen sharing (biggest problem with Google Meet) and the client is significantly better than Zoom (which chugs constantly on Linux). Plus it's cheap! (~$25/month for the whole dev team) 0: https://discord.gg/kheMFne2mW https://discord.gg/kheMFne2mW
  • aprdm 4y ago
    I use it in the web browser
  • prmoustache 4y ago
    I find it strange to associate open source and discord. I tend to dismiss any open source project that uses it.
    • freeqaz 4y ago
      I'm excited for Linen[0] to potentially replace Discord for our use case because unfortunately it doesn't feel like there is another tool that we could use besides Discord or Slack. (We were on Slack for a long time but we just couldn't get people to use it, and we've had a lot more success building a community since swapping to Discord.) What other tools do you recommend for Open Source communities to use? 0: https://www.linen.dev/ https://www.linen.dev/ (They are going to be adding a 2-way sync soon that lets you post messages from the web into Slack, Discord, and even GitHub Discussions, so you can basically pick any platform and it doesn't matter. Kind of like the old IRC days!)
      • davidjfelix 4y ago
        Sounded interesting but I'm immediately turned off by the wall of channels in their screenshot. They can't even show 3 letters worth of alphabetic searching in a full screen of text. I think discord has it's faults but they're working to reduce the wild growth of new channels and seem to cope with large communities in a somewhat decent manner.
• beebmam 4y ago
  Teams is the worst business app, except for all the others (Zoom, Slack, etc). It's hard to take an argument against teams seriously when in the same breath they advocate for Zoom or Slack, both of which are complete nightmares and virtually toy applications.
  • Aeolun 4y ago
    You must have a completely different experience than me. Zoom for meetings anch Slack for chat sounds perfect to me.
• albertopv 4y ago
  I use both slack and teams. Slack chat features are vastly superior, they work really well, we devs use only slack, but I prefer Teams for video conferences, it's not that slack doesn't work, but I found teams screen sharing or recording to be better. Also Teams is simpler for non dev people.
• lpbonenfant 4y ago
  I don't understand most of the negative comments in this thread along the lines of "if my company would require I use Teams I'd quite on the spot". Really? an IM client is what's going to make you quit? I always thought it was amusing that old developers were super anal about vim vs emacs and saw it as a tongue in cheek but now I realize most of those people are really serious and take these things quite emotionally...
  • jdlshore 4y ago
    It's a tool that people use day-in, day-out for all their communication with colleagues. If it's unpleasant to use, the majority of your work becomes a constant reminder of that unpleasantness.
    • gabrielgio 4y ago
      Exactly, if my chat, my email, my git server, etc. are unpleasant it will make my workflow unpleasant and so will my job as whole. I have changed jobs due tooling being a pain before. I'd never quit on the spot though, I'd silently search for another job.
  • brulard 4y ago
    It's a collaboration tool, not just some IM client. After 6 years of using Slack I have to use Teams now on a project I lead. Oh boy, it's so much worse. I completely agree that it can make you leave, especially when you are responsible for efficient collaboration and tool like this is constantly in the way. It discourages communication between teammates, channels and threads are a mess so everyone rather DM people directly (so transparency suffers a lot). Everyone regardless of the OS have problems getting notifications, the threads are a joke, so are the reactions. It's so hard to find anything there, channels (teams?), a message, a user. I haven't seen an integrations/bots/apps in teams, maybe they are there, but in Slack they were so useful and easy to add, that they were used so much.
• mrguyorama 4y ago
  Hey Microsoft, why when I start sharing my screen, does that cause the chat section of teams to jump to the foreground. I'm explicitly trying to share something that isn't the teams window, so why does it try and shove itself in front of my face?
• ratchetbob 4y ago
  I wish the Github team was forced to use Teams day to day... the Github <> Teams integration is TERRIBLE. (and the slack "daily report" was so good)
• generalk 4y ago
  Regardless of what you think of Teams -- I myself have had nothing but poor experiences over 2.5 years of using it daily -- it's telling that Microsoft has to require folks to use Teams. I'm sure this is just Microsoft unifying everyone on the same comms platform, but seriously, I don't know anyone who chooses Teams. I know non-tech folks who chose Outlook 365 because of familiarity and then end up on Teams because it's free, but there's a difference between "I chose an email/identity platform that I know and I guess I'll use its chat app too" and "I evaluated team chat offerings and Teams is our top pick." Hell, at my most recent company (which was founded on O365 before I arrived) I replaced Teams chat interface with self-hosted Mattermost (Slack's HIPAA-compliant tier is way too expensive for a startup) and it was roundly loved. We did still lean on Teams for its video chat, because most of our non-tech staff know how to schedule and join video meetings, but even then the top complaint I got was from folks on Windows laptops whose Teams plugin for Outlook somehow got corrupted (or something?) and suddenly Outlook's Teams integration was gone. Just an awful product all around -- said with no offense meant to the team building it. _Update_: I now notice the text "for the sole purpose of video conferencing" which lines up with my use case, but still -- of all the video apps I put Teams down with Webex as "bottom of the barrel choices" due to the constant performance and functionality issues.
  • jerrygenser 4y ago
    Why did you need HIPAA Compliance for your chat app? Internal discussion about patients that include PHI?
    • generalk 4y ago
      Bingo. Nearly impossible for our staff to do their jobs and not discuss something considered PHI.
  • npteljes 4y ago
    >it's telling that Microsoft has to require folks to use Teams. Not really I think, considering that MS bought GitHub, with all of its already existing culture. I see this move as them homogenizing the infrastructure. And also not willing to pay to another company for a product that's actually their competition.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• bamboozled 4y ago
  Bing and the GPt fiasco now this…give me popcorn.
• Gravityloss 4y ago
  Flowdock > Slack > Teams. Slack and Teams have this really bad idea of hiding all messages in threads and having the users click around to find them from threads. Has any tool copied Flowdock's threading implementation? They got it right.
  • swasheck 4y ago
    i was taken aback when i saw flowdock is owned by broadcom. seems a weird space in which to find a broadcom offering.
• bastardoperator 4y ago
  Slack isn't going anywhere, they're just getting rid of Zoom.
• Gordonjcp 4y ago
  Lots of people saying that they think Teams is awful but not really saying why on here. I thought it works pretty well, really.
• duxup 4y ago
  I’m convinced that the fonts in Teams just don’t look right… The text controls also seem slightly smaller than needed.
• emmanuel_1234 4y ago
  I don't get the hate for Teams. Working from home, it's the best tool I can think of: - because the app is so slow, our IT suggested to use the web version instead, as such it can't detect the away/available status properly, meaning no one can see if you're in front of your computer working on some other windows, or actually away from your computer - the web app keeps getting disconnected, and fails to deliver messages and notification in time. It also fails to indicate that it's failing. It's therfore customary for message to take several hours to be sent to/received by the other party. It's the perfect excuse for ignoring your colleagues for hours, and be like "Oops. Teams, am I right?", wether you were actually around, or again, doing something else entirely.
• kursus 4y ago
  After two years of using Teams daily I still cruelly Slack for a ridiculously long list of reasons. Teams is a casual chat product as best it doesn't belong to enterprise world.
• jwineinger 4y ago
  Cynical view: what additional % of Github headcount (after the 10% layoffs last week) are they hoping to get rid of with this?
• twblalock 4y ago
  Let's be honest, Slack sucks too. All of the solutions in this space suck. Similarly, Jira sucks, but all alternatives to Jira also suck. It seems kind of silly for Github to pay for another solution when they could use the in-house solution (which is Teams). This is what you have to compromise on when you let another company acquire you. People who don't like it need to leave -- that might not be how the world ought to work, but that's the reality and nothing anyone feels or says will change it.
  • TulliusCicero 4y ago
    I don't use it for work, but I enjoy using Discord well enough for personal things (mostly gaming/tech, surprise surprise). Every time I go from Discord to (full screen) Google Chat I cringe, it just feels so much more clunky for some reason. And I work at Google, so if anything I should be biased in its favor.
  • some_random 4y ago
    Slack sucks, Mattermost sucks, Discord sucks, but don't act like Teams doesn't suck notably more than the competition.
  • flangola7 4y ago
    Slack is excellent! What don't you like about it?
    • twblalock 4y ago
      UI glitches, threads not scaling past a certain amount of comments, frequent undesired logouts, weird jumbled ordering of messages on the mobile app that eventually sorts itself out but leads to hilarious misinterpretation of conversations... The worst part is how the phone app will scroll to the middle of the thread when I open one. I can understand how scrolling to either the top or bottom of the thread might make sense -- but who on earth wants the middle?
• thedougd 4y ago
  This is wonderful news! Perhaps Microsoft/Github find motivation to fix Teams, starting with the code blocks. Here's a recent issue plaguing quite a few Mac users at my workplace: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msteams/forum/all/teams-on-mac-video-is-instantly-choppy/883ebabf-cbe2-4326-957e-3fc471522ed4?page=10&messageId=410ac7eb-b810-4dcd-b2c5-421e235c47ce https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msteams/forum/all/teams-...
• MarkusWandel 4y ago
  Dissenting opinion? I'm a Linux person through and through, my entire household runs on Linux. But at work we have Windows laptops, to run the Windows office tools - most of the real work is done remotely on Linux machines. I'm not particularly fond of Outlook. It just somehow doesn't "think" like I do. It does work. But I like Teams. We use it for most 1:1 calls, all kinds of impromptu meetings, scheduled meetings, remote screen-shared co-work, and of course text chats. It may be a bloated monster but that's on capable laptop that's doing little real work so that doesn't matter. It has some minor bugs but they aren't a big source of frustation in the bigger picture. I tried it on my Linux machine once. It was a bloated, slow Electron app. Maybe the Windows one is "more native" or the computer is that much better, but... no issues.
• einpoklum 4y ago
  People reading this - please consider looking into Jitsi, a FOSS alternative to Zoom/Teams for video conferencing with chat. https://www.jitsi.org/ https://www.jitsi.org/ It may not have all the features I would like, but it works well enough. It doesn't have political censorship (like Zoom has - admittedly only in rare cases). And while Zoom may offer more polish (and Teams could, if MS bothered to fix the UX bugs) - Jitsi is quite usable, and with our support, in terms of both use, QA and possible donations it could improve even further and be fully on par with the commercial offerings.
• raffraffraff 4y ago
  Those poor people
• snow_mac 4y ago
  Teams isn't as good for video as Zoom but it's much better then Slack or Google Chat's video; both of which I've used for work or personal.
• chmorgan 4y ago
  Teams for sure is a worse experience than slack. Why Microsoft chose to separate teams and chats in the UI is one of the biggest wastes of time each day. Several seconds to switch between them. Arg... Wish someone had a more viable FedRAMP compliant competitor to office365.
• bink 4y ago
  Having read a number of GitHub incident reviews I'm really curious how this will impact ChatOps. They're one of the first companies I saw that seemed to use ChatOps for almost everything, including things like updating BGP routing. Do they have 7 months to migrate everything to Teams or will they keep some Slack workspaces around just for ChatOps?
• joeyguerra 4y ago
  The Teams UI and UX enforce private conversations and discourage public collaboration. That, as a result, drives silos and organizational dysfunction. I suspect the UX design is a result of how Microsoft itself is organized.
• w_for_wumbo 4y ago
  My biggest gripes with Teams are the following: - Teams essentially requires a GPU for good performance, we don't have dedicated GPUs on our machines, so sharing your screen brings the machine to a crawl. Exactly what you don't want when demonstrating anything. - All communication is at the same level, so you can't reply to a single comment, without disrupting the flow of conversation. (It'd be nice to have thread replies like on Hacker News) - Tabbed conversations are missing, MSN messenger had it, Lync and Skype for Business had it. It was one of the most efficient ways of maintaining conversations between frequent contacts. I really hope that Github being forced to used Teams results in things in things like performance being finally addressed.
• u801e 4y ago
  I never really understood the reasoning behind mandating a particular communication platform for everyone. Why not just rely on email for communication between groups and let individual groups decide what communication platforms they use within the group. As long as the platform is hosted on-premise, I don't really see the issue.
• nipperkinfeet 4y ago
  One of the worst pieces of software I've ever had to support at work. Teams UI/UX, performance, and every other aspect are all terrible.
• kjellsbells 4y ago
  It's really unremarkable that the company that built Teams would eventually require all employees at their acquisitions to use it over a competitor. Leading aside the obvious cost benefit, even the howls from users are useful: now your PM know what to build next. But the real deal with something like Teams is that it is not just a chat and call app. The vision is clear: Teams is where people will spend their days. The app integration with workflows like approval of vacation or invoices; the third party plugin ecosystem; the deep support for regulated markets like banking and government...it feels like a glacier that is going to grind slowly but eventually reshape the landscape.
• ChickenNugger 4y ago
  I had to sign into teams for a job interview. It took me half an hour to get it installed and signed in. Most of that was trying to sign in. I think to a required Microsoft account. Who has a "Microsoft account"? I couldn't just use an email address. There had to be a Microsoft account tied to it. Or something. To me, it's a red flag if a company uses MS teams.
• syngrog66 4y ago
  MS Teams has been the worst tool of its type I've ever been forced to use. Emphasis on forced. Historically the UX of most (but not all) Microsoft software has been bad, so I was not surprised. For the same project I was forced to use Azure's login system the first time: another clownshow. It was a sad day when Microsoft acquired two of my favorite things, GitHub and Minecraft, because I bet that the awful "Microsoftness" would creep in and degrade them. At least the Teams mandate at GitHub is only for internal comms. But it tells me that bad taste and bad judgment is still there.
• iblaine 4y ago
  Same thing happened at LinkedIn after the Microsoft acquisition. LinkedIn was using gmail, Google was quick to let the g suite contract die, so the timeline to move from gmail to Outlook was accelerated. Engineers at LinkedIn were livid about being forced to move off gmail.
  • brink 4y ago
    > Engineers at LinkedIn were livid about being forced to move off gmail. Is that really worth being livid over? Outlook is fine. I left gmail a few years ago and haven't looked back. I survived.
• 50yearsold 4y ago
  Webex/Outlook/Teams/Zoom/Slack/Gmail - None of these are any inferior or superior to each other (maybe not at the start when the product was launched - there could be big feature/usability gap - but once they are matured which most of these - not much differentiators to matter) and literally none of these products to be used at any corporations are evaluated by their technical or usability excellence - it is simply vetoed or decided by the corporation CEO know which vendor's CEO/CFO well and what both companies agree to barter (use my product and in exchange I will use your product in my company kind of thing). For a end user in any company - unless you are super advance user or some niche feature - any of these software should just work well for day to day usage.
• djha-skin 4y ago
  Unpopular opinion number one: Teams is not that bad. At least it can do video calls properly which is not something I would say of Slack. Unpopular opinion number two: Pidgin was better and I don't why we all decided as an industry to go to these ridiculously heavy memory hog electron based clients. I use Slack from Pidgin to this day: https://github.com/dylex/slack-libpurple https://github.com/dylex/slack-libpurple
• djha-skin 4y ago
  For those having to endure Teams, try it from Pidgin, where you can at least e.g. customize what notifications you get and using interface that doesn't use half your RAM: https://github.com/EionRobb/purple-teams https://github.com/EionRobb/purple-teams
• dmierkin 4y ago
  I guess my comment is against the grain. But I do enjoy Teams. More over, I (as consultant) moved three orgs onto Teams and the clients are happy. Its fantastic integration and communication platform. Enjoy!
• rsanheim 4y ago
  It is a pretty clear sign your product has failed when you need to _force_ one of your biggest acquisitions to use it.
• dbg31415 4y ago
  Teams 4-5 years ago was a nightmare. It's still rough, compared to Slack or Discord. But it's not like... "Get a notification on your laptop and then get another on your phone for the same event that you can't clear until you look at your phone" bad... like it used to be. I don't know... like I did like hitting "Join Meeting" right from Outlook, and having that work. Slack is fine, but it's tedious to integrate with Outlook or Google Calendar. "Go to the Teams Channel and Join the Hangout" is a lot worse than just clicking, "Join Meeting." But the posts says both will stay in use? That seems like the worst option. Switching off Slack too... so tedious to setup all those integrations again with Teams (some of which won't work). Just all of it seems foolish.
• geoffbp 4y ago
  We have slack huddles at work or the option to use teams. The performance of teams isn’t great (even on a modern computer) but it generally is alright - lots of people hate it though. Interesting
• Schnitz 4y ago
  The surprise here is that they are not using teams already.
• rldjbpin 4y ago
  sorry for my ignorance, but what is the point of discussing this? i just see it as a company trying to unify communication within its subsidiaries.
• HeavyStorm 4y ago
  What most people in this thread don't realize is that Teams, like most products sold to CIO, don't have to be good for it to succeed. Instead of an stellar ux, Microsoft is focusing on what sells it - that seamless centered experience that unifies SharePoint, Power, replaces slack and Discord and everything else in a single app. It sucks, but it sells, because people buying it aren't the core users.
• timcavel 4y ago
  [dead]
• willhslade 4y ago
  This is my current list of complaints. If I'm wrong about anything and there are settings that I can change, enlighten me. Copy + Paste sucks and isn't consistent. On my machine, if you copy a message, it includes a header, indicating who said it and when. I can't change this behavior in settings, and, infuriatingly, this doesn't happen on other people's machines in my organization. My biggest complaint is that the screen sharing functionality is broken in surprising and interesting ways. Let me count them. One: I cannot always reliably control another person's machine. Two: When I type on another person's machine, the input is in the controlled machine's keyboard. Three: when I hit a hotkey (ctrl+n in Excel for a new workbook) when I am controlling another person's machine, the hotkey fires twice: once in the controlled application, and once in Teams itself. Again, there is no setting for this. Four: I have at least one person in my organization whose Teams freezes when you try to remotely control his machine. Lastly, I have Teams on my phone and on my work laptop. Calls ring on both devices. I have no desire to ring on my phone and AFAIK there isn't a setting to force it to ring only on certain devices.
• tails4e 4y ago
  Teams screen sharing annotation is abysmal. Other than that I can live with it, but as an engineer, not being able to annotate a live screen is really frustrating.
• avastmick 4y ago
  I use Teams a lot with some Zoom. I've also used all the competing tools - Slack, whatever the current Google branding gives, among others. They all kinda suck. But hang on, am I asking too much? Is this suckiness because it's hard to do well? Oh, and add in that we all need to use it, all day, every day, so _any_ friction really annoys. Distributed, connected collaboration in real-time, at (massive) scale - it's a big functional domain. Offering video, chat, document storage, sharing and collaboration, as well as project management and integration into a plethora of other apps and tools. This is surely a hard space. Just look at apps that inhabit much, much simpler function spaces - say, Twitter, given the start point of the discussion. It doesn't get that glare of all day, everyday work use. It doesn't have the function and criticality to people's day. Twitter is down? It's just not a thing 99.9% of people will freak out over. Post-pandemic, Teams or Zoom is down means loss of a sales, key workshops stranding participants, distributed Teams losing comms during critical releases, and the list goes on.