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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.

by samiru 4y ago

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...
ygjb 4y ago
I will be blunt. Teams is an awful user experience; I have been using online collaboration tools since the BBS days, and while I appreciate and understand why and what they are trying to build, it is bad software. Every single experience I have had as a teams user in professional settings, interacting with communities, and being required to use it for interactions with my childrens schools since the 2020 shutdowns has been awful. The platform is slow, and every time I have to use it, it feels completely obtuse in unique and frustrating ways. After nearly three years of weekly interactions, I regularly am confused by what I am meant to do, or how to resolve errors that occur; it is the single most frustrating online tool I have had to use, largely because the decision to use it is out of my hands. The absolutely sole saving grace for the tool is that I can now effectively use it with a web browser, instead of the invasive thick client application that I was required to when it was first rolled out. If my employer required me to use it, I would immediately find another job. It's that bad.
- javier123454321 4y ago
  I simply don't understand this at all. I've used in 3 of my last workplaces. Two exclusively and one in addition to slack. No particular complaints for having internal meetings of any size. I literally do not know what you are talking about and feel like I am missing something.
  - TylerE 4y ago
    For meetings it's decent. It's the everything else that's the problem.
    - ygjb 4y ago
      Decent isn't good enough though. It runs slowly, meetings lag periodically (at least on Mac), and the "everything else" is the part that is mandatory (accessing and reviewing assignments with my kids at school, accessing and collaborating on documents, etc). I have lost track of the number of times we bailed on Teams for even meetings when interacting with teachers or the other organizations I work with (as a volunteer which makes the tooling issues even more frustrating), in favour of another service, or collaborating in a google doc instead.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - addandsubtract 4y ago
    I feel like a lot of it comes down to which system & client people use. If you're on PC or macOS and using the desktop client, you're probably having a good experience (as long as you only have one account). If you're on Linux or use the web version, you're probably going to have a bad time.
    - charrondev 4y ago
      Unfortunately the Mac client is similarly awful. Absolutely horrifically slow. We were using for a little while at my company after we were acquired and it had so much horrifically buggy or slow behaviour. - Switching between chats caused a big flicker of content loading in. I have no idea why this wasn’t cached but it was annoying. - starting a meeting could sometimes takes 30+ seconds. - I frequently observed and issue where some hidden/invisible window would be opened in the background and keep taking focus every time a used the tab key to cycle through windows. - Delayed and sometimes missed notifications. Why they didn’t use the native system notifications was beyond me. The notifications also did not respect the systems do not disturb window. Sometimes they would appear behind other content and would be missed. - massive resource consumption. Our 1 teams org would frequently be consuming > 3gb of memory on my system. People complain about slack but this is a whole other level.
X-Istence 4y ago
My company uses Teams... and I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. So here's at least one person who is using teams who complains about it. The shitty UI/UX is one thing, but some of the behaviors are incredibly frustrating. Here's some examples: - Sharing a single window makes Teams minimize the window with everyones video camera on it into a small window in the corner of your primary screen. I have a 49" wide screen, I can have that Teams window open (so I can see faces/people) and share a window at full-size for everyone else, STOP minimizing that window. - That small window sits in the bottom right corner of the primary screen, if you move it elsewhere, click on Teams for chat, and then foreground another app, it re-positions itself in the bottom right corner (thereby obscuring whatever app happens to be sitting there) - All of my meetings that were created through Outlook/Office 365 as a Teams meeting are labeled "untitled" and there is no way for me or anyone else to change the title of the meeting, its worse if the meeting is on a shared calendar - Teams notifications are the worst, it'll tell me I have 2 messages, but I open the app and there is nothing, OR it's messages I've already seen - No easy integration for 3rd party chatbots and the like, which is a HUGE thing we use on Slack - Teams out of all of the apps (including all the security software corporate loves) uses the most energy and power, and is the primary reason that we all upgraded to M1's as fast as possible because then maybe we'd have a chance to use our laptops without carrying the power brick when in meetings - Tagging people in messages may or may not notify them... - Meetings allow you to add people to them, but once the meeting is over they get removed from the chat, even if you've tagged those people in the meeting chat with important information, you have to formally invite people to the meeting with the original meeting invite for them to "stick". - No way to copy/paste entire chat history/print chat history. I have so many screenshots of meetings/notes I need to keep and or share with others. Overall Teams is one of the worst products I've used, and I was using "Teams" in the Microsoft Lync on macOS during the Office Communicator days. The lack of native app is a real killer though, and unlike Slack which has done a LOT to improve how they use Electron/how much energy they use, Teams is the slowest and worst of them.
- jrochkind1 4y ago
  > Sharing a single window makes Teams minimize the window with everyones video camera on it into a small window in the corner of your primary screen. I have a 49" wide screen, I can have that Teams window open (so I can see faces/people) and share a window at full-size for everyone else, STOP minimizing that window. Took me a while to figure this out, but, and if I understand what's going on and you didn't realize it you're going to smack yourself, but... Try clicking on that tiny window with everyone's video feed on it. It gets bigger again into a full (and resizable) window with everyone's video feed, while the window you are sharing is still being shared (and outlined in red). Apologies if I misunderstand or this doens't apply to you (I'm on MacOS), but it literally took me months of being frustrated with that situation before I realized clicking on the tiny window would restore it to a full window, so I figured that might be you too. I forget, maybe it requires a double-click.
gcapu 4y ago
I use it and I would be happy if Teams was able to do basic copy/paste. When you copy, it copies things you didn’t select and doesn’t copy some things you selected. When pasting, it auto-formats the text and does a terrible job at it. It’s a disaster. I hope the Teams team is forced to use Teams.
- btilly 4y ago
  Sadly they probably are forced to use Teams. But all of the product and prioritization decisions are made by product managers who view this as intended behavior and not a bug. And they are used to dismissing programmer concerns on this. Because most users don't care about it.
- stefan_ 4y ago
  My favorite: when you use dark mode and the person on the other side the default light theme, text that you write will appear black on their screen and white on yours (so far so good). Now if you copy & paste text that they have written, it will appear white to you and white to them, making it impossible for them to see. Just crap.
- Rexxar 4y ago
  Not intuitive at all but there is "ctr+shift+v" for pasting only text
  - antifa 4y ago
    That's actually the paradigm most programs use for "paste without formatting" which teams is the only program I can think of that doesn't support it.
brightball 4y ago
Google Chat has improved a lot but it's definitely not there yet from a savvy users standpoint. I've seen it used with great success at smaller, non-technical companies though.
1270018080 4y ago
I had to use Teams at my last job, now in interviews I ask every company if they use Teams or Slack. It's a good smoke test on whether the company pays a slight premium to improve the efficiency and quality of life of their employees, even if it doesn't directly show up on the balance sheet. Of course salary is more important than chat software, but I don't want my day to day experience to be miserable.
deleted 4y ago
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btilly 4y ago
On what basis do you insinuate that other people's dislike is based on ignorance? That's a shallow dismissal of the kind that https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html asks us not to do. Most of the time people's dislike is based on past bad experiences. If you think that those experiences may be out of date, indicate what has improved. If you like one product better than another, say why. Personally I have 25 years of bad experiences with Microsoft products breaking quoted code through inserting smart quotes, long dashes, and the like. It is beyond absurd to me that Teams tries to be a collaboration tool for teams which include programmers, and STILL gets this wrong. Other tools like Slack don't make this mistake. And decades of Microsoft's continuing this behavior makes me doubt that they will ever see this as something to change. They are too wedded to trying to be clever about formatting.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
arcosdev 4y ago
I am forced to use it and it is hot garbage. It is a productivity killing anti-app.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  It's got the most confusing, designed-to-lose-stuff UI I've ever seen. And that includes major social media sites, Atlassian's whole... pile of stuff, and (its closest competitor I've come across) a very "advanced" set of Asana projects and workflows.
matwood 4y ago
> My company forces us to use Google Chat. I would take Teams any day. For video or text chat or both? Meet + Slack is my preferred solution. IMO Google Meet is the easiest to use video meeting software. Click link and the person is dropped in the meeting. Slack is the best text chat. Zoom is fine. Teams is a dumpster fire on my mac. I have a couple external meetings that are Teams and I have to remember start trying to get on 5-10 minutes early. Otherwise I won't have time to force quit the client or restart my browser to make Teams work.
- samiru 4y ago
  > For video or text chat or both? To keep things simple, I would like to use Teams for both. I do not recall any issues on using Teams on Windows. On Mac neither, but most of my work is done on Windows, so even I am a Mac user I do not have that much experience of using Teams on Mac. Edit. Even at the moment I am forced to use Google products at work for communication, I can't say that I have had any "issues" with those products either. I think the dislike/like is mostly about feeling. Maybe at some point in my working life I got used to Teams and that stuck?
- rozab 4y ago
  It's fascinating how good the Google Meet experience is in contrast to how bad Google Chat is. Chat seems like such a simpler problem, but it's still missing basic features like working search
- josephd79 4y ago
  Don’t forget the random mic / sound issues and even worse the phantom rings lol. It sucks
- __turbobrew__ 4y ago
  Google meet is the best experience in Linux as well. Joining a call through firefox or chrome on linux works flawlessly.
- brarsanmol 4y ago
  Ironically I have had the exact opposite experience, it's interesting to see how the app behaves so randomly. I used Teams on Windows for work last year and the performance was horrible on a relatively beefy workstation machine, getting into a call or loading a chat would have a visible lag or delay. But using it on my personal Mac it was a fairly okay experience, just a run of the mill app I would say. Perhaps the difference is O365 (Enterprise) Teams versus Teams for Life (Personal)?
mcguire 4y ago
Teams is better than whatever we had before. Couldn't cut-n-paste code into a chat because it turned all the punctuation into emojis.
1123581321 4y ago
I work with multiple organizations so have opportunity to use Teams and Zoom calls regularly. When using both regularly it's hard to start thinking that Teams is just fine. It seems like I might start to think Teams is fine if I only used Teams, but that would just be my standards lowering, not something I want to happen. Zoom has issues as well but I don't regularly get to use better services than Zoom.
lampe3 4y ago
Yes I use it daily at work and its as bad as people are saying here. Compared to any other Message software it is the worst. I would rather use Discord then Teams.
onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
> My company forces us to use Google Chat. I would take Teams any day. What are the shortcomings of Google Chat over Teams?
gnicholas 4y ago
I occasionally use Teams on my Mac and am dismayed that every time I open it, it reinstalls itself in my Login Items. In my book, that qualifies it as malware. I used the desktop version for a while, to see if they would update it and fix this bug. Turns it out it was a 'feature' not a 'bug'. Now I just use the web version, and plan to never reinstall the desktop software again.
e40 4y ago
I've used Teams, Zoom and Meet. Teams is, by far, the worst options. I cringe every time I have to use it, because it's random whether I or one of my colleagues will not waste minutes at the start of the meeting getting something to work, or just joining. You see, MS has completely messed up the login for Teams. I have like 3 different MS accounts (Azure, Office365, etc). Some of my coworkers have many more than that, due to identities they use for contracts. I've tried Chrome, Edge, Firefox, etc. I've tried incognito windows. Sometimes it just doesn't work. Never had a single problem with Zoom or Meet, other than the default audio devices not being selected. That's easily fixed.
- bombcar 4y ago
  > You see, MS has completely messed up the login for Teams. This is my single biggest complaint. Teams with your small group of people on the same Microsoft365 account? Decent, it works, whatever. Try to invite someone outside your group to chat, even if you give licenses away like candy? Hell. Absolute hell. End up giving up and make an actual account on your tenant? They can't easily switch between them, and it's hell to ever figure out why. Completely unusable. They could have made the email of chat and fucked it up.
brazzledazzle 4y ago
I use it and hate it for chat. For video calls it's better than WebEx but how much is that really saying? (Disclaimer: I haven't used WebEx in years, things may be better now)
drakenot 4y ago
I’m fine with using Teams for the actual scheduled meeting video calls. It isn’t amazing — but has been relatively reliable for me. The app takes up too much memory, but Slack video calls have had a lot of issues also (although Huddles has improved things a lot). My contention with using teams would be for team text chat. No thank you, it is terrible. I’d rather use Slack or really any alternative. When these forced teams migrations happen, what I’ve seen most people do is some core subset of the dev team has an unofficial Discord, free Slack, or Telegram channel that they use for chat instead.
cozzyd 4y ago
Teams is terrible on Linux. Maybe it sucks less on other platforms. Academia standardized on zoom+slack in like 2016 in part because of excellent cross-platform support.
apple4ever 4y ago
Google Chat isn't much better, so that's not saying much. I do use Teams when a vender uses it, and it's just so so bad.
happymellon 4y ago
Did Google chat decide the reverse the scrolling of one of the chat tabs without notice so everyone wasted a day scrolling down to get to the latest message only to find they were going to older messages. But they didn't reverse the other tab, so depending on context you may need to scroll up or down. What a crappy UX which still occasionally catches me out. Teams also wants you to create a "team" for a group chat, but this also creates a sharepoint site and other pointless tabs for documents to go in. Now you have probably just lost discoverability of requirements. I've used Google chat and it was a pretty rubbish chat. However Teams is not just bad software, it's user hostile.
raffraffraff 4y ago
Multi-line code blocks are impossible on the Linux client. And Android (just confirmed). I have to use this feature about 10 times a day and triple backticks works about 1% of the time so you know what i do? I copy a multi-line code block from another chat and edit the text. Garbage. I can add a code snippet but that thing is bloody awful. What's with the huge title over the snippet and truncating the text to a few lines even if it's only 2 lines longer? Gah. Also, separating "chats" and "teams" into two places in the UI? Why? It's confusing. I occasionally click on the teams section and see a bunch of unread messages they I did't get notifications for. I think. Because notifications are garbage. I'll be told that there's a message in a chat. Now I have to click on it and pray that it brings me to the right place. With slack the notification used to contain the sender and part of the message. Half the time I could eyeball the notification and get 100% of that i need without context switching. Edit: my team is insisting on slack. We're ditching teams as a chat tool. Might keep it for video stuff but that depends how slack video conferencing works. (Used to use Zoom and Slack before)
- raffraffraff 4y ago
  For anyone finding this, code blocks do work. But unlike every other editor I've ever used, it's not three backticks that activate it. It's three backticks and a space. Why in hell would I think of adding unwanted whitespace after the backticks? Anyways, that's the fix.
thefz 4y ago
Whoever used WebEx would treat Teams as the coming of the messiah.
Spivak 4y ago
The work chat tier list Discord Slack Mattermost <chasm> IRC Email <chasm> Hangouts Teams <chasm> Linq / Skype For Work Teams so fundamentally misses what the point of a good office/team oriented chat looks like that it’s worse than useless. They would be better off just splitting off the video calls (which are pretty good but drop the annoying corner thing) and just starting over with a Slack clone.
albrewer 4y ago
In my professional life, I have used Webex, Slack, Discord, Skype, and Teams. I would only pick Teams over Webex and Skype.

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.

by 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...

ygjb 4y ago

I will be blunt. Teams is an awful user experience; I have been using online collaboration tools since the BBS days, and while I appreciate and understand why and what they are trying to build, it is bad software. Every single experience I have had as a teams user in professional settings, interacting with communities, and being required to use it for interactions with my childrens schools since the 2020 shutdowns has been awful. The platform is slow, and every time I have to use it, it feels completely obtuse in unique and frustrating ways. After nearly three years of weekly interactions, I regularly am confused by what I am meant to do, or how to resolve errors that occur; it is the single most frustrating online tool I have had to use, largely because the decision to use it is out of my hands. The absolutely sole saving grace for the tool is that I can now effectively use it with a web browser, instead of the invasive thick client application that I was required to when it was first rolled out. If my employer required me to use it, I would immediately find another job. It's that bad.

javier123454321 4y ago
I simply don't understand this at all. I've used in 3 of my last workplaces. Two exclusively and one in addition to slack. No particular complaints for having internal meetings of any size. I literally do not know what you are talking about and feel like I am missing something.
- TylerE 4y ago
  For meetings it's decent. It's the everything else that's the problem.
  - ygjb 4y ago
    Decent isn't good enough though. It runs slowly, meetings lag periodically (at least on Mac), and the "everything else" is the part that is mandatory (accessing and reviewing assignments with my kids at school, accessing and collaborating on documents, etc). I have lost track of the number of times we bailed on Teams for even meetings when interacting with teachers or the other organizations I work with (as a volunteer which makes the tooling issues even more frustrating), in favour of another service, or collaborating in a google doc instead.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- addandsubtract 4y ago
  I feel like a lot of it comes down to which system & client people use. If you're on PC or macOS and using the desktop client, you're probably having a good experience (as long as you only have one account). If you're on Linux or use the web version, you're probably going to have a bad time.
  - charrondev 4y ago
    Unfortunately the Mac client is similarly awful. Absolutely horrifically slow. We were using for a little while at my company after we were acquired and it had so much horrifically buggy or slow behaviour. - Switching between chats caused a big flicker of content loading in. I have no idea why this wasn’t cached but it was annoying. - starting a meeting could sometimes takes 30+ seconds. - I frequently observed and issue where some hidden/invisible window would be opened in the background and keep taking focus every time a used the tab key to cycle through windows. - Delayed and sometimes missed notifications. Why they didn’t use the native system notifications was beyond me. The notifications also did not respect the systems do not disturb window. Sometimes they would appear behind other content and would be missed. - massive resource consumption. Our 1 teams org would frequently be consuming > 3gb of memory on my system. People complain about slack but this is a whole other level.

X-Istence 4y ago

My company uses Teams... and I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. So here's at least one person who is using teams who complains about it. The shitty UI/UX is one thing, but some of the behaviors are incredibly frustrating. Here's some examples: - Sharing a single window makes Teams minimize the window with everyones video camera on it into a small window in the corner of your primary screen. I have a 49" wide screen, I can have that Teams window open (so I can see faces/people) and share a window at full-size for everyone else, STOP minimizing that window. - That small window sits in the bottom right corner of the primary screen, if you move it elsewhere, click on Teams for chat, and then foreground another app, it re-positions itself in the bottom right corner (thereby obscuring whatever app happens to be sitting there) - All of my meetings that were created through Outlook/Office 365 as a Teams meeting are labeled "untitled" and there is no way for me or anyone else to change the title of the meeting, its worse if the meeting is on a shared calendar - Teams notifications are the worst, it'll tell me I have 2 messages, but I open the app and there is nothing, OR it's messages I've already seen - No easy integration for 3rd party chatbots and the like, which is a HUGE thing we use on Slack - Teams out of all of the apps (including all the security software corporate loves) uses the most energy and power, and is the primary reason that we all upgraded to M1's as fast as possible because then maybe we'd have a chance to use our laptops without carrying the power brick when in meetings - Tagging people in messages may or may not notify them... - Meetings allow you to add people to them, but once the meeting is over they get removed from the chat, even if you've tagged those people in the meeting chat with important information, you have to formally invite people to the meeting with the original meeting invite for them to "stick". - No way to copy/paste entire chat history/print chat history. I have so many screenshots of meetings/notes I need to keep and or share with others. Overall Teams is one of the worst products I've used, and I was using "Teams" in the Microsoft Lync on macOS during the Office Communicator days. The lack of native app is a real killer though, and unlike Slack which has done a LOT to improve how they use Electron/how much energy they use, Teams is the slowest and worst of them.

jrochkind1 4y ago
> Sharing a single window makes Teams minimize the window with everyones video camera on it into a small window in the corner of your primary screen. I have a 49" wide screen, I can have that Teams window open (so I can see faces/people) and share a window at full-size for everyone else, STOP minimizing that window. Took me a while to figure this out, but, and if I understand what's going on and you didn't realize it you're going to smack yourself, but... Try clicking on that tiny window with everyone's video feed on it. It gets bigger again into a full (and resizable) window with everyone's video feed, while the window you are sharing is still being shared (and outlined in red). Apologies if I misunderstand or this doens't apply to you (I'm on MacOS), but it literally took me months of being frustrated with that situation before I realized clicking on the tiny window would restore it to a full window, so I figured that might be you too. I forget, maybe it requires a double-click.

gcapu 4y ago

I use it and I would be happy if Teams was able to do basic copy/paste. When you copy, it copies things you didn’t select and doesn’t copy some things you selected. When pasting, it auto-formats the text and does a terrible job at it. It’s a disaster. I hope the Teams team is forced to use Teams.

btilly 4y ago
Sadly they probably are forced to use Teams. But all of the product and prioritization decisions are made by product managers who view this as intended behavior and not a bug. And they are used to dismissing programmer concerns on this. Because most users don't care about it.
stefan_ 4y ago
My favorite: when you use dark mode and the person on the other side the default light theme, text that you write will appear black on their screen and white on yours (so far so good). Now if you copy & paste text that they have written, it will appear white to you and white to them, making it impossible for them to see. Just crap.
Rexxar 4y ago
Not intuitive at all but there is "ctr+shift+v" for pasting only text
- antifa 4y ago
  That's actually the paradigm most programs use for "paste without formatting" which teams is the only program I can think of that doesn't support it.

brightball 4y ago

Google Chat has improved a lot but it's definitely not there yet from a savvy users standpoint. I've seen it used with great success at smaller, non-technical companies though.

1270018080 4y ago

I had to use Teams at my last job, now in interviews I ask every company if they use Teams or Slack. It's a good smoke test on whether the company pays a slight premium to improve the efficiency and quality of life of their employees, even if it doesn't directly show up on the balance sheet. Of course salary is more important than chat software, but I don't want my day to day experience to be miserable.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

btilly 4y ago

On what basis do you insinuate that other people's dislike is based on ignorance? That's a shallow dismissal of the kind that https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html asks us not to do. Most of the time people's dislike is based on past bad experiences. If you think that those experiences may be out of date, indicate what has improved. If you like one product better than another, say why. Personally I have 25 years of bad experiences with Microsoft products breaking quoted code through inserting smart quotes, long dashes, and the like. It is beyond absurd to me that Teams tries to be a collaboration tool for teams which include programmers, and STILL gets this wrong. Other tools like Slack don't make this mistake. And decades of Microsoft's continuing this behavior makes me doubt that they will ever see this as something to change. They are too wedded to trying to be clever about formatting.

deleted 4y ago
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arcosdev 4y ago

I am forced to use it and it is hot garbage. It is a productivity killing anti-app.

yamtaddle 4y ago
It's got the most confusing, designed-to-lose-stuff UI I've ever seen. And that includes major social media sites, Atlassian's whole... pile of stuff, and (its closest competitor I've come across) a very "advanced" set of Asana projects and workflows.

matwood 4y ago

> My company forces us to use Google Chat. I would take Teams any day. For video or text chat or both? Meet + Slack is my preferred solution. IMO Google Meet is the easiest to use video meeting software. Click link and the person is dropped in the meeting. Slack is the best text chat. Zoom is fine. Teams is a dumpster fire on my mac. I have a couple external meetings that are Teams and I have to remember start trying to get on 5-10 minutes early. Otherwise I won't have time to force quit the client or restart my browser to make Teams work.

samiru 4y ago
> For video or text chat or both? To keep things simple, I would like to use Teams for both. I do not recall any issues on using Teams on Windows. On Mac neither, but most of my work is done on Windows, so even I am a Mac user I do not have that much experience of using Teams on Mac. Edit. Even at the moment I am forced to use Google products at work for communication, I can't say that I have had any "issues" with those products either. I think the dislike/like is mostly about feeling. Maybe at some point in my working life I got used to Teams and that stuck?
rozab 4y ago
It's fascinating how good the Google Meet experience is in contrast to how bad Google Chat is. Chat seems like such a simpler problem, but it's still missing basic features like working search
josephd79 4y ago
Don’t forget the random mic / sound issues and even worse the phantom rings lol. It sucks
__turbobrew__ 4y ago
Google meet is the best experience in Linux as well. Joining a call through firefox or chrome on linux works flawlessly.
brarsanmol 4y ago
Ironically I have had the exact opposite experience, it's interesting to see how the app behaves so randomly. I used Teams on Windows for work last year and the performance was horrible on a relatively beefy workstation machine, getting into a call or loading a chat would have a visible lag or delay. But using it on my personal Mac it was a fairly okay experience, just a run of the mill app I would say. Perhaps the difference is O365 (Enterprise) Teams versus Teams for Life (Personal)?

mcguire 4y ago

Teams is better than whatever we had before. Couldn't cut-n-paste code into a chat because it turned all the punctuation into emojis.

1123581321 4y ago

I work with multiple organizations so have opportunity to use Teams and Zoom calls regularly. When using both regularly it's hard to start thinking that Teams is just fine. It seems like I might start to think Teams is fine if I only used Teams, but that would just be my standards lowering, not something I want to happen. Zoom has issues as well but I don't regularly get to use better services than Zoom.

lampe3 4y ago

Yes I use it daily at work and its as bad as people are saying here. Compared to any other Message software it is the worst. I would rather use Discord then Teams.

onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago

> My company forces us to use Google Chat. I would take Teams any day. What are the shortcomings of Google Chat over Teams?

gnicholas 4y ago

I occasionally use Teams on my Mac and am dismayed that every time I open it, it reinstalls itself in my Login Items. In my book, that qualifies it as malware. I used the desktop version for a while, to see if they would update it and fix this bug. Turns it out it was a 'feature' not a 'bug'. Now I just use the web version, and plan to never reinstall the desktop software again.

e40 4y ago

I've used Teams, Zoom and Meet. Teams is, by far, the worst options. I cringe every time I have to use it, because it's random whether I or one of my colleagues will not waste minutes at the start of the meeting getting something to work, or just joining. You see, MS has completely messed up the login for Teams. I have like 3 different MS accounts (Azure, Office365, etc). Some of my coworkers have many more than that, due to identities they use for contracts. I've tried Chrome, Edge, Firefox, etc. I've tried incognito windows. Sometimes it just doesn't work. Never had a single problem with Zoom or Meet, other than the default audio devices not being selected. That's easily fixed.

bombcar 4y ago
> You see, MS has completely messed up the login for Teams. This is my single biggest complaint. Teams with your small group of people on the same Microsoft365 account? Decent, it works, whatever. Try to invite someone outside your group to chat, even if you give licenses away like candy? Hell. Absolute hell. End up giving up and make an actual account on your tenant? They can't easily switch between them, and it's hell to ever figure out why. Completely unusable. They could have made the email of chat and fucked it up.

brazzledazzle 4y ago

I use it and hate it for chat. For video calls it's better than WebEx but how much is that really saying? (Disclaimer: I haven't used WebEx in years, things may be better now)

drakenot 4y ago

I’m fine with using Teams for the actual scheduled meeting video calls. It isn’t amazing — but has been relatively reliable for me. The app takes up too much memory, but Slack video calls have had a lot of issues also (although Huddles has improved things a lot). My contention with using teams would be for team text chat. No thank you, it is terrible. I’d rather use Slack or really any alternative. When these forced teams migrations happen, what I’ve seen most people do is some core subset of the dev team has an unofficial Discord, free Slack, or Telegram channel that they use for chat instead.

cozzyd 4y ago

Teams is terrible on Linux. Maybe it sucks less on other platforms. Academia standardized on zoom+slack in like 2016 in part because of excellent cross-platform support.

apple4ever 4y ago

Google Chat isn't much better, so that's not saying much. I do use Teams when a vender uses it, and it's just so so bad.

happymellon 4y ago

Did Google chat decide the reverse the scrolling of one of the chat tabs without notice so everyone wasted a day scrolling down to get to the latest message only to find they were going to older messages. But they didn't reverse the other tab, so depending on context you may need to scroll up or down. What a crappy UX which still occasionally catches me out. Teams also wants you to create a "team" for a group chat, but this also creates a sharepoint site and other pointless tabs for documents to go in. Now you have probably just lost discoverability of requirements. I've used Google chat and it was a pretty rubbish chat. However Teams is not just bad software, it's user hostile.

raffraffraff 4y ago

Multi-line code blocks are impossible on the Linux client. And Android (just confirmed). I have to use this feature about 10 times a day and triple backticks works about 1% of the time so you know what i do? I copy a multi-line code block from another chat and edit the text. Garbage. I can add a code snippet but that thing is bloody awful. What's with the huge title over the snippet and truncating the text to a few lines even if it's only 2 lines longer? Gah. Also, separating "chats" and "teams" into two places in the UI? Why? It's confusing. I occasionally click on the teams section and see a bunch of unread messages they I did't get notifications for. I think. Because notifications are garbage. I'll be told that there's a message in a chat. Now I have to click on it and pray that it brings me to the right place. With slack the notification used to contain the sender and part of the message. Half the time I could eyeball the notification and get 100% of that i need without context switching. Edit: my team is insisting on slack. We're ditching teams as a chat tool. Might keep it for video stuff but that depends how slack video conferencing works. (Used to use Zoom and Slack before)

raffraffraff 4y ago
For anyone finding this, code blocks do work. But unlike every other editor I've ever used, it's not three backticks that activate it. It's three backticks and a space. Why in hell would I think of adding unwanted whitespace after the backticks? Anyways, that's the fix.

thefz 4y ago

Whoever used WebEx would treat Teams as the coming of the messiah.

Spivak 4y ago

The work chat tier list Discord Slack Mattermost <chasm> IRC Email <chasm> Hangouts Teams <chasm> Linq / Skype For Work Teams so fundamentally misses what the point of a good office/team oriented chat looks like that it’s worse than useless. They would be better off just splitting off the video calls (which are pretty good but drop the annoying corner thing) and just starting over with a Slack clone.

albrewer 4y ago

In my professional life, I have used Webex, Slack, Discord, Skype, and Teams. I would only pick Teams over Webex and Skype.