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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 t

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
  [deleted]
w0m 4y ago
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.
- kqr 4y ago
  The point of dogfooding isn't feeding your employees any old dog food. The point of dogfooding is that the dog food you make is so damn good your employees prefer it over making lunch boxes or eating out. (It doesn't have to be perfect, or course, just do something better than its competitors to be attractive to use. I struggle to think of a single redeeming feature of Teams.)
  - sircastor 4y ago
    >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.
    - kqr 4y ago
      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.
unnouinceput 4y ago
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.
- wkat4242 4y ago
  I view WSL the same way. 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.
bitwize 4y ago
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!
gautamdivgi 4y ago
My Teams works fine on my Mac without issues. Have been using it for over a year now. Fwiw - I don’t understand why it’s hated. It’s a collaboration tool - mainly messaging and conferencing. It’s been decent at that for me.
- jrochkind1 4y ago
  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.
- sofixa 4y ago
  Because it's by far the worst UX-wise. If you know better tools, it's just shit. To add insult to injury, it kind of sort of works, sometimes, but there are tons of small problems here and there all the time in many cases. I had to use it only for video calls for 3 years, and probably weekly there was something wrong like restart needed because it screwed up my audio.
  - eganist 4y ago
    > Because it's by far the worst laughs in WebEx
    - avmich 4y ago
      I for some time had way worse experience with GMeet.
      - uncanneyvalley 4y ago
        Me too. My outbound video always looks like crap, even with hardware acceleration on and nothing else open.
    - 4y ago
weatherlight 4y ago
We don't use it for messaging, just calls that are in calendar invites, otherwise, We use slack for everything. It's not that teams is bad, per say. It's just that there are more ergonomic tools out there.
bdcravens 4y ago
Are there any examples of Github allowing its employees to use a competitor's tool when they had their own in-house tools?
vxNsr 4y ago
Considering GitHub is the reason teams is so bad (electron) I say welcome your hens home to roost.
- antifa 4y ago
  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.
winrid 4y ago
Well considering opening my start menu can lag depending on the internet connection, I would say it already has.
anuraaga 4y ago
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.

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
[deleted]

w0m 4y ago

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.

kqr 4y ago
The point of dogfooding isn't feeding your employees any old dog food. The point of dogfooding is that the dog food you make is so damn good your employees prefer it over making lunch boxes or eating out. (It doesn't have to be perfect, or course, just do something better than its competitors to be attractive to use. I struggle to think of a single redeeming feature of Teams.)
- sircastor 4y ago
  >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.
  - kqr 4y ago
    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.

unnouinceput 4y ago

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.

wkat4242 4y ago
I view WSL the same way. 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.

bitwize 4y ago

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!

gautamdivgi 4y ago

My Teams works fine on my Mac without issues. Have been using it for over a year now. Fwiw - I don’t understand why it’s hated. It’s a collaboration tool - mainly messaging and conferencing. It’s been decent at that for me.

jrochkind1 4y ago
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.
sofixa 4y ago
Because it's by far the worst UX-wise. If you know better tools, it's just shit. To add insult to injury, it kind of sort of works, sometimes, but there are tons of small problems here and there all the time in many cases. I had to use it only for video calls for 3 years, and probably weekly there was something wrong like restart needed because it screwed up my audio.
- eganist 4y ago
  > Because it's by far the worst laughs in WebEx
  - avmich 4y ago
    I for some time had way worse experience with GMeet.
    - uncanneyvalley 4y ago
      Me too. My outbound video always looks like crap, even with hardware acceleration on and nothing else open.
  - 4y ago

weatherlight 4y ago

We don't use it for messaging, just calls that are in calendar invites, otherwise, We use slack for everything. It's not that teams is bad, per say. It's just that there are more ergonomic tools out there.

bdcravens 4y ago

Are there any examples of Github allowing its employees to use a competitor's tool when they had their own in-house tools?

vxNsr 4y ago

Considering GitHub is the reason teams is so bad (electron) I say welcome your hens home to roost.

antifa 4y ago
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.

winrid 4y ago

Well considering opening my start menu can lag depending on the internet connection, I would say it already has.

anuraaga 4y ago

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.