7 ms·

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. Ha

by 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.
  - rcme 4y ago
    > I’ve only ever understood dogfooding to mean that you use your own product to find the bugs, improve the workflow, and encourage feature suggestions. I've only ever understood dogfooding to mean this as well, but I like GP's point. If you're forcing yourself to use the product to find bugs instead of using the product because it's a great product, then you have problems.
    - teddyh 4y ago
      Dogfooding explained by Joel Spolsky in 2001: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/05/05/what-is-the-work-of-dogs-in-this-country/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/05/05/what-is-the-work-o...
- LeifCarrotson 4y ago
  Dogfooding works when affected employees have the ability to improve the product. You wouldn't want to eat dog food that wasn't prepared in sanitary conditions, so if you worked at a dog food plant and knew you'd be eating something that closed through that dirty grate, you'd clean it. You wouldn't want a program on your PC that regularly consumes an entire core while idle or that crashes when active, so you'd fix those issues if it was your software. People naturally want to fix problems that affect them and add features that would improve their daily use of a product. At a small company or startup, where people can do this, you should use your own products as much as possible. But if you are a Microsoft/GitHub employee with no access to the Teams code, not even access to a human being who works on Teams, there's no point. Use whatever meeting software lets you do your job best.
thomastjeffery 4y ago
That's the problem: Microsoft isn't a company. They aren't a cohesive team working on a product. They are a corporation: a group of companies with separate trends writing on separate products. Is the GitHub team working on Teams now? I doubt it.
- number6 4y ago
  I hope they do. This can only improve Teams
  - thomastjeffery 4y ago
    Why? What value does Teams bring to GitHub? They are totally separate techs. I don't care at all about Teams. GitHub, on the other hand, is the host of many important projects. I would much rather the GitHub team be left alone to do their jobs.
  - imperialdrive 4y ago
    Anything to make Teams better I would certainly appreciate bc it's a daily annoyance to use in any meaningful way.
belter 4y ago
Team has issues is the understatement of the year. A simple feature like screen freeze has been requested per use in the thread below hundreds of times... "Between different messaging boards (including the link above) this feature has been requested over 2000 times (1044 times as of this writing on the link above alone). Could Microsoft chime in to let us know if this is going to be on the roadmap? Thanks." https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msteams/forum/all/pausing-screenshare-in-teams-meeting/7bd13939-cf24-4b06-918b-4ea2e0b03764 https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msteams/forum/all/pausin... The tool will say you are in the meeting but won't let you have access to the chat. A bug hitting regularly hundreds of persons. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams/why-someone-cannot-see-chat-after-leaving-the-meeting/m-p/2303738 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams/why-s... https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams/problem-with-chat-in-teams-some-participants-losing-access-to/m-p/2438322 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams/probl... I pity GitHub employees and would consider resigning :-)
- cyberge99 4y ago
  They don’t even have something as simple as a key combo to mute and other basic functionality (macos).
  - Steltek 4y ago
    Why is this such a hard thing to get right? WebEx seemingly has 4 different mute keybinds, depending on the style of meeting you're in. It's worse than nothing because you randomly mash keys, making it look like you're not paying attention.
  - fcoury 4y ago
    I am not trying to defend Teams, I hate it. But Cmd+Shift+M does that on Teams on macOS.
    - macintux 4y ago
      I was forced to memorize that keyboard shortcut because for the last several weeks Teams will randomly stop recognizing mouse clicks.
creshal 4y ago
Dogfooding only has a purpose if someone cares about the dogs' feedback.
bcrosby95 4y ago
So should they also force every subsidiary to use Windows, VSCode, Office 365, Azure, etc?
- Arainach 4y ago
  Absent a strong business reason otherwise, absolutely. Azure: yes, all the major cloud providers should migrate all of their use to their cloud. If their cloud doesn't support something that's a problem for their users and they need to fix it ASAP. O365: Same thing. VSCode: Developer tools such as IDEs shouldn't be mandated (and weren't when I worked at MS) but if one is mandated it absolutely should be their version unless there's a strong technical reason otherwise (for instance, if they were using Java there are better choices). Windows: Again, most good shops don't mandate what your desktop environment is
  - rhaway84773 4y ago
    Besides O365 the rest are not even the same thing. If half your company is on Teams, and half is on Slack, they can’t communicate with each other. Mandating a single communication platform is absolutely the right move. And the fact that MS picked Teams as that single communication platform is beyond obvious. What else could they have chosen?
    - mgkimsal 4y ago
      > Mandating a single communication platform is absolutely the right move Is it, even if there will be productivity losses? Is making your teams less productive "absolutely the right move"?
      - evilduck 4y ago
        If mandating the use of their own productivity tools causes them productivity losses, I'm happy to watch MS either come to terms with that and try to fix Teams or suffer the same losses that they inflict on the rest of the world. From an outsider's perspective of MS and Github, I think it's the right move.
apnew 4y ago
Literally sitting here right now trying to figure out how to get simple things going compared to slack after being forced to move to teams from slack (not GitHub). I am all for dogfooding here, but if the dog-fooding is not improving the product it shows that the goal is to eat market because of lopsided ecosystem monopoly. Screw MS and MS Teams. eg. : We need a tag in a shared channel so that we can provide single point of support for other teams, instead of people having to tag the whole channel. Slack made is as easy as breeze to sync on-call person from PD -> a group.
- treesknees 4y ago
  From the quote it appears the goal is to save money. From the numbers I found, GitHub could be paying upwards of $35k/month in licensing for Slack users. In a climate where companies are trying to shed expenses, wouldn't it make sense to bring that expense in-house?
  - mgkimsal 4y ago
    To people only focused on short term dollars, perhaps. But what impact will it have? Certainly an impact on productivity in short term, perhaps longer? Are there equivalent replacements for all the slack hooks people have in place now? How long will it take to become 'just as' productive in Teams? 1 month? 3 months? $35k... that's... under $500k/year in licensing they're paying? Will they take more than a $500k hit in productivity? By HN standards, $500k isn't even the loaded cost of one intern these days in SV, but... even in the 'normal' western business world... $500k/year is likely the cost of 2-3 engineering staff. Trying to eke that much savings in the short term seems short sighted.
    - chaostheory 4y ago
      Long term, it will likely result in the improvement of Teams due to dog fooding. It may not be instant, but it will happen.
  - TylerE 4y ago
    So you save about 1 employee cost per year, and make the other thousands miserable and less productive? Definition of penny wise, pound foolish.
vhcr 4y ago
"Teams has issues" is an understatement, the app will sometimes notify you that you have a new message, and when you try to open it from the web page, it won't show up, but if you force refresh it will. Or it will show up on the mobile client, but not on the web one.
- ajb 4y ago
  Slack also does that sometimes. In the app!
- danudey 4y ago
  The number of times I've had to hold a conversation via Teams on my phone instead of on the desktop because the chat on the desktop just refused to update... ugh, geez.
- kzrdude 4y ago
  The default settings give you a notification in the notifications list when you get a thumb's up in the chat you're currently reading. You'll have to switch views to clear that notification(!) beyond infuriating for such a small thing.
chx 4y ago
> Teams has issues; Issues like unable to switch teams without re-authenticating? Slack can do this, Discord can do this, both of them completely seamlessly but Teams just can't.
jacquesm 4y ago
Dogfooding means using your own product. The Teams team does not work at GitHub, they work at Microsoft. Yes, I know the one owns the other, but the fact that this requirement needs to be made at all is testimony to the fact that they would much rather use a product by a competitor, that's how broken it is.
mgkimsal 4y ago
> Hard to improve without dogfooding They've been dogfooding and I don't think most of us regular users have seen any measurable improvement for years. Apparently it's hard to improve with dogfooding too?

by 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.
- rcme 4y ago
  > I’ve only ever understood dogfooding to mean that you use your own product to find the bugs, improve the workflow, and encourage feature suggestions. I've only ever understood dogfooding to mean this as well, but I like GP's point. If you're forcing yourself to use the product to find bugs instead of using the product because it's a great product, then you have problems.
  - teddyh 4y ago
    Dogfooding explained by Joel Spolsky in 2001: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/05/05/what-is-the-work-of-dogs-in-this-country/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/05/05/what-is-the-work-o...
LeifCarrotson 4y ago
Dogfooding works when affected employees have the ability to improve the product. You wouldn't want to eat dog food that wasn't prepared in sanitary conditions, so if you worked at a dog food plant and knew you'd be eating something that closed through that dirty grate, you'd clean it. You wouldn't want a program on your PC that regularly consumes an entire core while idle or that crashes when active, so you'd fix those issues if it was your software. People naturally want to fix problems that affect them and add features that would improve their daily use of a product. At a small company or startup, where people can do this, you should use your own products as much as possible. But if you are a Microsoft/GitHub employee with no access to the Teams code, not even access to a human being who works on Teams, there's no point. Use whatever meeting software lets you do your job best.

thomastjeffery 4y ago

That's the problem: Microsoft isn't a company. They aren't a cohesive team working on a product. They are a corporation: a group of companies with separate trends writing on separate products. Is the GitHub team working on Teams now? I doubt it.

number6 4y ago
I hope they do. This can only improve Teams
- thomastjeffery 4y ago
  Why? What value does Teams bring to GitHub? They are totally separate techs. I don't care at all about Teams. GitHub, on the other hand, is the host of many important projects. I would much rather the GitHub team be left alone to do their jobs.
- imperialdrive 4y ago
  Anything to make Teams better I would certainly appreciate bc it's a daily annoyance to use in any meaningful way.

belter 4y ago

Team has issues is the understatement of the year. A simple feature like screen freeze has been requested per use in the thread below hundreds of times... "Between different messaging boards (including the link above) this feature has been requested over 2000 times (1044 times as of this writing on the link above alone). Could Microsoft chime in to let us know if this is going to be on the roadmap? Thanks." https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msteams/forum/all/pausing-screenshare-in-teams-meeting/7bd13939-cf24-4b06-918b-4ea2e0b03764 https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msteams/forum/all/pausin... The tool will say you are in the meeting but won't let you have access to the chat. A bug hitting regularly hundreds of persons. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams/why-someone-cannot-see-chat-after-leaving-the-meeting/m-p/2303738 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams/why-s... https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams/problem-with-chat-in-teams-some-participants-losing-access-to/m-p/2438322 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams/probl... I pity GitHub employees and would consider resigning :-)

cyberge99 4y ago
They don’t even have something as simple as a key combo to mute and other basic functionality (macos).
- Steltek 4y ago
  Why is this such a hard thing to get right? WebEx seemingly has 4 different mute keybinds, depending on the style of meeting you're in. It's worse than nothing because you randomly mash keys, making it look like you're not paying attention.
- fcoury 4y ago
  I am not trying to defend Teams, I hate it. But Cmd+Shift+M does that on Teams on macOS.
  - macintux 4y ago
    I was forced to memorize that keyboard shortcut because for the last several weeks Teams will randomly stop recognizing mouse clicks.

creshal 4y ago

Dogfooding only has a purpose if someone cares about the dogs' feedback.

bcrosby95 4y ago

So should they also force every subsidiary to use Windows, VSCode, Office 365, Azure, etc?

Arainach 4y ago
Absent a strong business reason otherwise, absolutely. Azure: yes, all the major cloud providers should migrate all of their use to their cloud. If their cloud doesn't support something that's a problem for their users and they need to fix it ASAP. O365: Same thing. VSCode: Developer tools such as IDEs shouldn't be mandated (and weren't when I worked at MS) but if one is mandated it absolutely should be their version unless there's a strong technical reason otherwise (for instance, if they were using Java there are better choices). Windows: Again, most good shops don't mandate what your desktop environment is
- rhaway84773 4y ago
  Besides O365 the rest are not even the same thing. If half your company is on Teams, and half is on Slack, they can’t communicate with each other. Mandating a single communication platform is absolutely the right move. And the fact that MS picked Teams as that single communication platform is beyond obvious. What else could they have chosen?
  - mgkimsal 4y ago
    > Mandating a single communication platform is absolutely the right move Is it, even if there will be productivity losses? Is making your teams less productive "absolutely the right move"?
    - evilduck 4y ago
      If mandating the use of their own productivity tools causes them productivity losses, I'm happy to watch MS either come to terms with that and try to fix Teams or suffer the same losses that they inflict on the rest of the world. From an outsider's perspective of MS and Github, I think it's the right move.

apnew 4y ago

Literally sitting here right now trying to figure out how to get simple things going compared to slack after being forced to move to teams from slack (not GitHub). I am all for dogfooding here, but if the dog-fooding is not improving the product it shows that the goal is to eat market because of lopsided ecosystem monopoly. Screw MS and MS Teams. eg. : We need a tag in a shared channel so that we can provide single point of support for other teams, instead of people having to tag the whole channel. Slack made is as easy as breeze to sync on-call person from PD -> a group.

treesknees 4y ago
From the quote it appears the goal is to save money. From the numbers I found, GitHub could be paying upwards of $35k/month in licensing for Slack users. In a climate where companies are trying to shed expenses, wouldn't it make sense to bring that expense in-house?
- mgkimsal 4y ago
  To people only focused on short term dollars, perhaps. But what impact will it have? Certainly an impact on productivity in short term, perhaps longer? Are there equivalent replacements for all the slack hooks people have in place now? How long will it take to become 'just as' productive in Teams? 1 month? 3 months? $35k... that's... under $500k/year in licensing they're paying? Will they take more than a $500k hit in productivity? By HN standards, $500k isn't even the loaded cost of one intern these days in SV, but... even in the 'normal' western business world... $500k/year is likely the cost of 2-3 engineering staff. Trying to eke that much savings in the short term seems short sighted.
  - chaostheory 4y ago
    Long term, it will likely result in the improvement of Teams due to dog fooding. It may not be instant, but it will happen.
- TylerE 4y ago
  So you save about 1 employee cost per year, and make the other thousands miserable and less productive? Definition of penny wise, pound foolish.

vhcr 4y ago

"Teams has issues" is an understatement, the app will sometimes notify you that you have a new message, and when you try to open it from the web page, it won't show up, but if you force refresh it will. Or it will show up on the mobile client, but not on the web one.

ajb 4y ago
Slack also does that sometimes. In the app!
danudey 4y ago
The number of times I've had to hold a conversation via Teams on my phone instead of on the desktop because the chat on the desktop just refused to update... ugh, geez.
kzrdude 4y ago
The default settings give you a notification in the notifications list when you get a thumb's up in the chat you're currently reading. You'll have to switch views to clear that notification(!) beyond infuriating for such a small thing.

chx 4y ago

> Teams has issues; Issues like unable to switch teams without re-authenticating? Slack can do this, Discord can do this, both of them completely seamlessly but Teams just can't.

jacquesm 4y ago

Dogfooding means using your own product. The Teams team does not work at GitHub, they work at Microsoft. Yes, I know the one owns the other, but the fact that this requirement needs to be made at all is testimony to the fact that they would much rather use a product by a competitor, that's how broken it is.

mgkimsal 4y ago

> Hard to improve without dogfooding They've been dogfooding and I don't think most of us regular users have seen any measurable improvement for years. Apparently it's hard to improve with dogfooding too?