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This can be made better or worse by processes and tools. After years and years in Slack workplaces, I’m now witnessing firsthand how Teams can effectively thro

This can be made better or worse by processes and tools. After years and years in Slack workplaces, I’m now witnessing firsthand how Teams can effectively throw sand in the gears of remote work, simply due to how its UI is designed. The lack of basic normal-ass chat rooms in a “team” pushes everything into 1-1 chats and chats attached to meetings. It kills serendipity, splits attention in unhelpful ways, and, thanks to the astonishing bad idea of how they crammed a threaded model—and only a threaded model—into a single-channel chat interface for Teams chats, makes those feel disorganized and high-friction. It’s like the tool was deliberately designed to create ad-hoc, hidden silos. A simple choice of tool can make a big difference in the effectiveness of remote workers. Business processes and such can have just as big an effect. A lot of that stuff improves in-person work, too (that Teams horse-shit isn’t better for in-office workers, either) so adjustments to improve remote work tend not to even be trade-offs.

red-iron-pine 3y ago
I been saying for years that Teams is worse than Slack -- glad I'm not the only one. > The lack of basic normal-ass chat rooms in a “team” pushes everything into 1-1 chats and chats attached to meetings Exactly. The big killer is being able to pop into a team's room and say "hey tell me about VLAN X" and get an answer from someone. or even just figure out who to ask. with teams that's much harder, you have to play the "find the right person to ask" game, and the visibility is poor. > (that Teams horse-shit isn’t better for in-office workers, either) Teams is fine if you need a IM client for people who are in cubes on the other side of the office and integrates with the Office suite. but for distributed team use it's garbage.
potta_coffee 3y ago
Most of the company uses Windows. A few of us actually write code and are on Mac. For some reason, for me, Teams is perpetually disconnecting from the network and requiring a refresh. It's essentially become a worse email service for me.

red-iron-pine 3y ago

I been saying for years that Teams is worse than Slack -- glad I'm not the only one. > The lack of basic normal-ass chat rooms in a “team” pushes everything into 1-1 chats and chats attached to meetings Exactly. The big killer is being able to pop into a team's room and say "hey tell me about VLAN X" and get an answer from someone. or even just figure out who to ask. with teams that's much harder, you have to play the "find the right person to ask" game, and the visibility is poor. > (that Teams horse-shit isn’t better for in-office workers, either) Teams is fine if you need a IM client for people who are in cubes on the other side of the office and integrates with the Office suite. but for distributed team use it's garbage.

potta_coffee 3y ago

Most of the company uses Windows. A few of us actually write code and are on Mac. For some reason, for me, Teams is perpetually disconnecting from the network and requiring a refresh. It's essentially become a worse email service for me.