8 ms·

> It’s available right where employees already spend most of their day — in Microsoft Teams. Depression and dread is coming through me. All the repressed memor

> It’s available right where employees already spend most of their day — in Microsoft Teams. Depression and dread is coming through me. All the repressed memories are flowing back up.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
egecant 1y ago
Microsoft Teams is DaaS (Dread as a Service). Here is a great video about how it sucks your soul: https://youtu.be/3O0VbCvWlxk?si=E61rlKLjtFMczl3D https://youtu.be/3O0VbCvWlxk?si=E61rlKLjtFMczl3D
daheza 1y ago
Our company is forcing us to drop slack and use teams. It’s going to be terrible. But hey it saves 600k per year. Never mind that our customer experience will become terrible as team communication fails.
- seethishat 1y ago
  I worry about this too. Diversity is a good thing. And when we do email, DNS, Web, calendars, chat, meetings, storage, etc. all on the same platform, how will we operate/communicate when it fails? Heterogeneous computing environments provide diversity to isolate and contain failures. So when email goes down, we can still chat and meet.
  - dowager_dan99 1y ago
    Teams is so tightly integrated into the MS ecosystem and 365 that it can essentially bring down email and even office apps. Example: PP decks always want to open in Teams by default; every meeting in outlook wants to be a Teams meeting, etc.
    - 9x39 1y ago
      Luckily, short of a DNS or auth problem, my experience is that Teams is just an alternate GUI for what already exists - Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive. And to be fair, you can just tell Teams to open in the desktop office apps by default (settings > Files and Links), and Outlook has a little radio button to turn off whether meetings are also Teams meetings. All the enterprise productivity apps seem to accumulate complexity and resultant scar tissue, usually in the form of busy settings or painfully opinionated defaults - painful when the defaults don't optimize for your use case.
- ctkhn 1y ago
  It's gonna be terrible. There are so many teams integrations with github, jira, our deployments etc that took busywork off my plate when I was at a slack company and has slowed down me down a ton when I went to a teams org. Sorry man.
- dowager_dan99 1y ago
  We're all-in on Teams PLUS have management pushing for "service level objectives" on response time. It's impossible to stay on top of the stream of consciousness posts, impossible to find anything you previously answered or value you know is in there somewhere, impossible to measure response time or take ownership of... (what? a chat?). MS keeps cramming poorly thought out "AI-first" features without addressing things like cameras and mics that randomly stop working, blue screens in the middle of meetings. It's such a garbage piece of software that's now THE foundational infrastructure for so many companies. You'll save $600K on the financials and lose $6M across all the things that won't directly show: poor customer service, churn, slower everything, individual and team frustration... but your VP of IT doesn't pay for that.
  - aaravchen 1y ago
    The stream of consciousness posts is my pet peeve. A lot of open source projects insist on using Telegram or Matrix instead of an issue tracker or forum and have the same problem. If you want to spend 90% of your time answering the same questions again and again, be my guest, but as a user I won't do more than a cursory search of chat history, and won't try to follow intermingled replies anymore. I will simply ask again and explicitly say "the chat history on this can't be followed and there's no forum, so...". Professionally I also won't try to keep up with most chats. Someone mentions me on something and if I can't read their one message to get the context needed, I just reply with "I'm not readinf everything said in the last X days. What's the context?" and make them re-explain it. My company even recently added AI assist tools for our chats, and I occasionally will use it to summarize everything I haven't read just to see if there's any topics I should know about. But I won't use it to try and get context for a question I've been asked. The chat systems are basically like being in a physical room with everyone coming and going and having their own verbal conversations around you. I'll pay equally as much attention and effort ignoring it to get work done, and ask people to repeat things if they suddenly pull me into a conversation. I'll also drift out of conversations the same, but now they can't see me going back to work to take the hint its time to wrap it up.
- ramon156 1y ago
  Sorry if I'm ignorant, but how can slack cost 600k/year? I doubt they wouldn't give some form of deal for bigger companies. I know integrations can sometimes suck up money, but 600k is insane
  - supportengineer 1y ago
    That's a huge financial incentive to build an alternative.
    - karel-3d 1y ago
      There is Mattermost which you can self host. Once you do, you will realize the DB grows REALLY fast
      - ThunderSizzle 1y ago
        Our enterprise deletes all PMs after 24 hours. That's one way to not worry about that.
        seb1204 1y ago
        I think this is a good approach, although 24 hours seem very short. 24 hours is not even covering overlap across time zones, WE or PH.
      - mynameisash 1y ago
        I poked around with Mattermost like ~8 years ago, but never anything serious. I don't know how good it is now, especially w/r/t administration, but I have to imagine that if you're concerned about $1000s -- let alone $100ks -- in annual costs, you can scale up your storage and still come out _way_ ahead. Maybe that's a naïve take?
        sgarland 1y ago
        Until you have to administer the DB. It’s doable, of course, but RDBMS administration for anything beyond toy scale gets interesting.
- aaravchen 1y ago
  I just had to use Slack again after 6 years, and it's incredible how much worse its gotten. Honestly I don't know how they managed to make an industry leading tool actively worse by so much that its now _worse_ than Teams. Features it had 6 years ago that I desperately missed when we had to start using Teams are pretty much all gone now. Its such a slap in the face of how Enshittified it's become.
  - __jonas 1y ago
    I'm not really sure what you mean, I'm also coming back to using Slack for some contracting work after a similar period of time and it seems identical to how it always was to me, definitely feels nicer to me than Teams. Could you point out what has changed? I guess calls are called "huddles" now for some reason, that's a bit weird but doesn't really bother me.
    - CWIZO 1y ago
      Ine big thing for me is the removal of the reactions & mentions sidebar. I now have to constantly manually check in a special tab to see if someone ACKed my message.
      - stavros 1y ago
        That's moved to activity -> mentions, I think.
    - asp_hornet 1y ago
      You used to be able to remote control during desktop sharing.
  - goosejuice 1y ago
    Yet it's better than every single alternative. Teams is a flaming pile of UX poo. Just like the rest of Microsoft products except Excel and _maybe_ Outlook.
    - degamad 1y ago
- karel-3d 1y ago
  The good thing: When you switch from slack to teams, all channel communications go to 0, because the experience is so dreadful, so you don't get 100 channels to read. The bad thing: it all moves to private messages
  - Aeolun 1y ago
    Teams realized that nobody was using their channels too. So instead of doing the reasonable thing, they noved all the channels to the chat view now.
    - criddell 1y ago
      I never understood how they wanted me to use channels so I didn’t. What was the reasonable thing that they should have done?
  - zhivota 1y ago
    In my experience the discussions move to insecure channels like WhatsApp too, which is hilarious.
- cycomanic 1y ago
  As if slack was any better. I never understand how people accepted this piece of crappy software for regular communication. I mean it has the populate when scrolling behaviour that everyone hates in website design, but somehow it's acceptable for a chat app where looking at past messages is crucial?! I mean you just displayed those messages to me yesterday, why do you need to reload them from the server today. The amount of space saving compared to the bloated mess that your electron app is can't be worth it?! That would be not so infuriating if the search wasn't so crappy that it's often easier to find things by scrolling. The there's the whole mess when using multiple a mobile and desktop app. It often happens that I get slack message notifications from my phone in my pocket while the open desktop app sometimes takes another minute to get the same message. The same happens with huddles, why does my phone ring abut not my desktop app? And one of my colleagues even has the problem that when he picks up a call on the desktop it opens up on his phone. I agree that teams is a mess, but IMO mainly because of the mess that is calendering... around it. The calls and messaging parts are OK. In contrast slack can't even get it's core competency right.
- silisili 1y ago
  I worked at a company that went through this. Honestly, it changed the entire mood of the company and working there. We went from thousands of messages per day to something like 10 (of those channels I was part of, at least). People just hated it, and only used it if they really, really needed to. No more bouncing of ideas around, no more ribbing, just the desperate 'who do I talk to about accomplishing X, anyone know?' A business owner might conclude 'ah, less time jawing, more time working', but hardly the case. In fact, I think that was a big factor in what ultimately killed the company off a couple years later - through both people literally quitting over it, and a complete breakdown in communication.
  - Cthulhu_ 1y ago
    I'm no UX expert but I'm going to claim it's because of the UX that Teams doesn't work for so many people, and I'm left wondering why Teams hasn't had a UX overhaul yet. The other competitor to Slack is Discord, and if you remove the playful "gamer" elements I think it'd be a lot less jarring to people used to Slack, because they follow a lot of similar UX and design patterns. At one point Discord tried to rebrand into something a bit more serious but it didn't work, but I think they should try again; create a Discord Pro or something like that, get the certifications, add SSO support, etc.
- lurking_swe 1y ago
  i hated using MS Teams (in the past) so much, i would probably look for a new job immediately if my company decided to do this today. I’m not joking in the slightest. And i’m not a slack fan boy, i just dislike MS Teams that much. These moves are always penny wise and pound foolish if you ask me.
youniverse 1y ago
I haven't used teams but if it's so bad there has to be a good open source alternative? Let's build one???
- sceadu 1y ago
  Seems like you're unfamiliar with enterprise IT
  - cj 1y ago
    Your comment is unnecessarily dismissive. Disrupting the space now doesn't seem any less hard now than it was 10 years ago when slack and zoom did it. But yes, if your point is that it's hard, then indeed. It is hard. Should that stop someone? No!
    - jf22 1y ago
      I think it's dismissive to say that explaining something is harder isn't important. And something being harder stopping your from doing it is ubiquitous in life. It's a good skill to know how much effort something will take and weighing the risks and rewards.
      - cj 1y ago
        Let’s try to turn this into a productive thread that adds some value here. What is it about enterprise IT that is preventing us from building a better alternative? How can we get around those hurdles?
        nemomarx 1y ago
        If you built that alternative, would companies choose to use it? they get teams built into their outlook and office 365 contracts and all the other integration. Slack didn't lose because it was worse, so just being better isn't enough. The hurdle is producing a full suite covering everything Microsoft sells in one package, which seems impractical without their funding to start with.
cosiiine 1y ago
I think the cracks that ultimately led me to quit corporate IT and pursue being an artist were first formed when leadership insisted that the entire company switch to Teams under the guise of saving $9 a month per user.
duxup 1y ago
Yup. Immediately a negative impression from me. Doesn't mean it won't sell, congrats to OP, but god I hate everything about Teams. Right now it's showing me calendar items with times that are wrong, they'll switch to the right time in a few minutes... probably. I didn't change time zones, I didn't do anything, it's just something wonky about their new calendar setup. If the time updates I'll click to open the calendar item, and it won't show me the join link to join the meeting ... well eventually it will pop in there, maybe. It's not just annoyingly designed and slow, it's constantly buggy with new and exciting bugs every few months.
- ValentinPearce 1y ago
  Last week there were so many apps added to my teams that I couldn't see the chats anymore.
  - szundi 1y ago
    [dead]
  - yieldcrv 1y ago
    Should have repented, because now you’re in hell
  - Bombthecat 1y ago
    Teams is the old new SharePoint, and it will be the same unmanageable mess
    - multjoy 1y ago
      Lotus Notes enters the chat
- MrJohz 1y ago
  Ah, that's probably related to the bug I'm seeing where I've got my Teams calendar synced to my phone, but about half of the events show up an hour later or earlier. Isn't getting this right, like, _the_ purpose of a calendar?
unixhero 1y ago
Well this is how I make tons of money, so no depression from me just acceptance... people said the same of Jira and Confluence earlier
- GoblinSlayer 1y ago
  Depends on what you compare to. Jira and Confluence at least work even if chubby and get only a bit of your attention.
- karel-3d 1y ago
  jira and confluence are annoying but they do their job, somewhat. You don't like them but you don't hate them Teams is a different beast
codegeek 1y ago
Necessary evil especially at Enterprise Level. But I agree. I used to think JIRA gave me nightmares until I came across MS Teams. It is that bad. Source: I run a SAAS where we have to unfortunately support integrating with MS Teams (for training etc).
jollyllama 1y ago
Hey, think of the countless souls this author saved from Sharepoint.
DontchaKnowit 1y ago
Im confused seeing all the hate for teams here. Whats so bad about it? Its a simple calendar and a messenger. Its not perfect but its not awful. Jira on ghe other hand.....
- jbm 1y ago
  You must not use it that much. Features that worked in mIRC in the 1990s are broken, like sending messages. Right this second if I click to reply to someone's message, I can't add a message in Japanese unless I copy-paste it in. This happens every few months. I can't tag people who have non-English names reliably. It crashes my browser. There are weird security settings, and when you have multiple environments, it is completely unusable without having multiple browsers. Sometimes you can't log in without clearing your cache completely. It is sheerly anti-organic, adding features no one wants. I'm literally taking time out of my vacation to complain about it, fml.
  - DontchaKnowit 1y ago
    I use it every single day, constantly, and it works just fine for me. Only compaint I ever had is that the search functions suck but thats common to literally anything microsoft has ever done
    - burningChrome 1y ago
      I would have to agree with you. I use it every day for work and besides some wonky syncing between Outlook and Teams and the search which you already pointed out, it works. More than I can say for some of the older tech we were using before Teams. I would also not that I've never been a huge power user or rely heavily on it for anything really outside of calendar or channel conversations so for me, on a basic level it works.
- bigstrat2003 1y ago
  I don't understand all the hate for Jira to be honest. I've used it at various companies and I think it's fine. You can absolutely customize Jira into a monstrosity that sucks to use, but that's true of many ticket systems. I think that the out of the box experience is reasonable though.
mattlutze 1y ago
Honestly I'm here for it, because it's an option for a market of groups that don't otherwise have the opportunity to deploy this kind of capability. Teams feelings aside :) I worked for a client once that refused to let us build and manage databases for things that needed it. The one option in the end that we could get approved was using Microsoft SharePoint lists and CRUD'ing to them through the Javascript API. A lot of problems have lame constraints, but having an option at all to solve them is pretty nice.
GenshoTikamura 1y ago
Gosh, I just recently talked our management out of taking the Teams turn after Skype sunset was scheduled, in favor of another solution. I thought maybe I'm too biased against M$ due to all those coworkers' accounts being blocked for no reason without any way to reinstate - but reading through this thread is a sure confirmation I was right
- AvocadoPanic 1y ago
  Where did you go after Skype?
bambax 1y ago
That's a great strength of the OP: instead of running away they decided to fix things, one feature at a time, and got rewarded for it!
andyjohnson0 1y ago
I never really understand allthe hating on Teams around here. I use it at work for team meetings, often with people in multiple timezones, on desktop and mobile, and it just works. Its not a stellar experience, but it does just quietly get the job done. The whole, largish company runs on it.
- bdangubic 1y ago
  it is like Jira, everyone loves to shit on it :)
  - goosejuice 1y ago
    Jira is much worse. There's not a single reason to buy Jira. I wouldn't use it if it was free.
    - eclipticplane 1y ago
      I'd buy Jira and Teams for my competitors if they'd let me.
    - bdangubic 1y ago
      exactly my point :)
- aners_xyz 1y ago
  Do you use it for anything other than team meetings?
  - andyjohnson0 1y ago
    Meetings, chat, sharing. The core functionality basically.
- bongodongobob 1y ago
  I think on HN, it might be because smaller teams are using it and aren't actually managing it properly. I get the impression they are just rolling it out as a free for all and not restricting who can add apps and channels etc. Of course it will turn into a mess if you allow that.
moscoe 1y ago
Comments like this are the real source of dread on HN. The guy built a successful side hustle that clearly has found a place in the market, and people just want to shit on it and virtue signal how much cooler they are than ms teams. If it’s not for you, move along if you don't have anything useful to contribute.
Nevermark 1y ago
What we need here is a Teams upgrade/replacement that, purely as a sales impedance match, integrates really well with Teams…
smrtinsert 1y ago
Sad but true. If you run Teams you're more likely to be what some people would consider a slow death corporate hell hole. Thankfully last place I had like that was a husk of a company so I enjoyed a flexible work schedule since literally no one knew what I was doing and no one cared. I logged in, ran an offshore stand up, did the days activities to maintain schedule, and left whenever I wanted to. Liminal office spaces aren't so bad when you can leave anytime and get decent fast food for lunch. Good times!

> It’s available right where employees already spend most of their day — in Microsoft Teams. Depression and dread is coming through me. All the repressed memories are flowing back up.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

egecant 1y ago

Microsoft Teams is DaaS (Dread as a Service). Here is a great video about how it sucks your soul: https://youtu.be/3O0VbCvWlxk?si=E61rlKLjtFMczl3D https://youtu.be/3O0VbCvWlxk?si=E61rlKLjtFMczl3D

daheza 1y ago

Our company is forcing us to drop slack and use teams. It’s going to be terrible. But hey it saves 600k per year. Never mind that our customer experience will become terrible as team communication fails.

seethishat 1y ago
I worry about this too. Diversity is a good thing. And when we do email, DNS, Web, calendars, chat, meetings, storage, etc. all on the same platform, how will we operate/communicate when it fails? Heterogeneous computing environments provide diversity to isolate and contain failures. So when email goes down, we can still chat and meet.
- dowager_dan99 1y ago
  Teams is so tightly integrated into the MS ecosystem and 365 that it can essentially bring down email and even office apps. Example: PP decks always want to open in Teams by default; every meeting in outlook wants to be a Teams meeting, etc.
  - 9x39 1y ago
    Luckily, short of a DNS or auth problem, my experience is that Teams is just an alternate GUI for what already exists - Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive. And to be fair, you can just tell Teams to open in the desktop office apps by default (settings > Files and Links), and Outlook has a little radio button to turn off whether meetings are also Teams meetings. All the enterprise productivity apps seem to accumulate complexity and resultant scar tissue, usually in the form of busy settings or painfully opinionated defaults - painful when the defaults don't optimize for your use case.
ctkhn 1y ago
It's gonna be terrible. There are so many teams integrations with github, jira, our deployments etc that took busywork off my plate when I was at a slack company and has slowed down me down a ton when I went to a teams org. Sorry man.
dowager_dan99 1y ago
We're all-in on Teams PLUS have management pushing for "service level objectives" on response time. It's impossible to stay on top of the stream of consciousness posts, impossible to find anything you previously answered or value you know is in there somewhere, impossible to measure response time or take ownership of... (what? a chat?). MS keeps cramming poorly thought out "AI-first" features without addressing things like cameras and mics that randomly stop working, blue screens in the middle of meetings. It's such a garbage piece of software that's now THE foundational infrastructure for so many companies. You'll save $600K on the financials and lose $6M across all the things that won't directly show: poor customer service, churn, slower everything, individual and team frustration... but your VP of IT doesn't pay for that.
- aaravchen 1y ago
  The stream of consciousness posts is my pet peeve. A lot of open source projects insist on using Telegram or Matrix instead of an issue tracker or forum and have the same problem. If you want to spend 90% of your time answering the same questions again and again, be my guest, but as a user I won't do more than a cursory search of chat history, and won't try to follow intermingled replies anymore. I will simply ask again and explicitly say "the chat history on this can't be followed and there's no forum, so...". Professionally I also won't try to keep up with most chats. Someone mentions me on something and if I can't read their one message to get the context needed, I just reply with "I'm not readinf everything said in the last X days. What's the context?" and make them re-explain it. My company even recently added AI assist tools for our chats, and I occasionally will use it to summarize everything I haven't read just to see if there's any topics I should know about. But I won't use it to try and get context for a question I've been asked. The chat systems are basically like being in a physical room with everyone coming and going and having their own verbal conversations around you. I'll pay equally as much attention and effort ignoring it to get work done, and ask people to repeat things if they suddenly pull me into a conversation. I'll also drift out of conversations the same, but now they can't see me going back to work to take the hint its time to wrap it up.
ramon156 1y ago
Sorry if I'm ignorant, but how can slack cost 600k/year? I doubt they wouldn't give some form of deal for bigger companies. I know integrations can sometimes suck up money, but 600k is insane
- supportengineer 1y ago
  That's a huge financial incentive to build an alternative.
  - karel-3d 1y ago
    There is Mattermost which you can self host. Once you do, you will realize the DB grows REALLY fast
    - ThunderSizzle 1y ago
      Our enterprise deletes all PMs after 24 hours. That's one way to not worry about that.
      - seb1204 1y ago
        I think this is a good approach, although 24 hours seem very short. 24 hours is not even covering overlap across time zones, WE or PH.
    - mynameisash 1y ago
      I poked around with Mattermost like ~8 years ago, but never anything serious. I don't know how good it is now, especially w/r/t administration, but I have to imagine that if you're concerned about $1000s -- let alone $100ks -- in annual costs, you can scale up your storage and still come out _way_ ahead. Maybe that's a naïve take?
      - sgarland 1y ago
        Until you have to administer the DB. It’s doable, of course, but RDBMS administration for anything beyond toy scale gets interesting.
aaravchen 1y ago
I just had to use Slack again after 6 years, and it's incredible how much worse its gotten. Honestly I don't know how they managed to make an industry leading tool actively worse by so much that its now _worse_ than Teams. Features it had 6 years ago that I desperately missed when we had to start using Teams are pretty much all gone now. Its such a slap in the face of how Enshittified it's become.
- __jonas 1y ago
  I'm not really sure what you mean, I'm also coming back to using Slack for some contracting work after a similar period of time and it seems identical to how it always was to me, definitely feels nicer to me than Teams. Could you point out what has changed? I guess calls are called "huddles" now for some reason, that's a bit weird but doesn't really bother me.
  - CWIZO 1y ago
    Ine big thing for me is the removal of the reactions & mentions sidebar. I now have to constantly manually check in a special tab to see if someone ACKed my message.
    - stavros 1y ago
      That's moved to activity -> mentions, I think.
  - asp_hornet 1y ago
    You used to be able to remote control during desktop sharing.
- goosejuice 1y ago
  Yet it's better than every single alternative. Teams is a flaming pile of UX poo. Just like the rest of Microsoft products except Excel and _maybe_ Outlook.
  - degamad 1y ago
karel-3d 1y ago
The good thing: When you switch from slack to teams, all channel communications go to 0, because the experience is so dreadful, so you don't get 100 channels to read. The bad thing: it all moves to private messages
- Aeolun 1y ago
  Teams realized that nobody was using their channels too. So instead of doing the reasonable thing, they noved all the channels to the chat view now.
  - criddell 1y ago
    I never understood how they wanted me to use channels so I didn’t. What was the reasonable thing that they should have done?
- zhivota 1y ago
  In my experience the discussions move to insecure channels like WhatsApp too, which is hilarious.
cycomanic 1y ago
As if slack was any better. I never understand how people accepted this piece of crappy software for regular communication. I mean it has the populate when scrolling behaviour that everyone hates in website design, but somehow it's acceptable for a chat app where looking at past messages is crucial?! I mean you just displayed those messages to me yesterday, why do you need to reload them from the server today. The amount of space saving compared to the bloated mess that your electron app is can't be worth it?! That would be not so infuriating if the search wasn't so crappy that it's often easier to find things by scrolling. The there's the whole mess when using multiple a mobile and desktop app. It often happens that I get slack message notifications from my phone in my pocket while the open desktop app sometimes takes another minute to get the same message. The same happens with huddles, why does my phone ring abut not my desktop app? And one of my colleagues even has the problem that when he picks up a call on the desktop it opens up on his phone. I agree that teams is a mess, but IMO mainly because of the mess that is calendering... around it. The calls and messaging parts are OK. In contrast slack can't even get it's core competency right.
silisili 1y ago
I worked at a company that went through this. Honestly, it changed the entire mood of the company and working there. We went from thousands of messages per day to something like 10 (of those channels I was part of, at least). People just hated it, and only used it if they really, really needed to. No more bouncing of ideas around, no more ribbing, just the desperate 'who do I talk to about accomplishing X, anyone know?' A business owner might conclude 'ah, less time jawing, more time working', but hardly the case. In fact, I think that was a big factor in what ultimately killed the company off a couple years later - through both people literally quitting over it, and a complete breakdown in communication.
- Cthulhu_ 1y ago
  I'm no UX expert but I'm going to claim it's because of the UX that Teams doesn't work for so many people, and I'm left wondering why Teams hasn't had a UX overhaul yet. The other competitor to Slack is Discord, and if you remove the playful "gamer" elements I think it'd be a lot less jarring to people used to Slack, because they follow a lot of similar UX and design patterns. At one point Discord tried to rebrand into something a bit more serious but it didn't work, but I think they should try again; create a Discord Pro or something like that, get the certifications, add SSO support, etc.
lurking_swe 1y ago
i hated using MS Teams (in the past) so much, i would probably look for a new job immediately if my company decided to do this today. I’m not joking in the slightest. And i’m not a slack fan boy, i just dislike MS Teams that much. These moves are always penny wise and pound foolish if you ask me.

youniverse 1y ago

I haven't used teams but if it's so bad there has to be a good open source alternative? Let's build one???

sceadu 1y ago
Seems like you're unfamiliar with enterprise IT
- cj 1y ago
  Your comment is unnecessarily dismissive. Disrupting the space now doesn't seem any less hard now than it was 10 years ago when slack and zoom did it. But yes, if your point is that it's hard, then indeed. It is hard. Should that stop someone? No!
  - jf22 1y ago
    I think it's dismissive to say that explaining something is harder isn't important. And something being harder stopping your from doing it is ubiquitous in life. It's a good skill to know how much effort something will take and weighing the risks and rewards.
    - cj 1y ago
      Let’s try to turn this into a productive thread that adds some value here. What is it about enterprise IT that is preventing us from building a better alternative? How can we get around those hurdles?
      - nemomarx 1y ago
        If you built that alternative, would companies choose to use it? they get teams built into their outlook and office 365 contracts and all the other integration. Slack didn't lose because it was worse, so just being better isn't enough. The hurdle is producing a full suite covering everything Microsoft sells in one package, which seems impractical without their funding to start with.

cosiiine 1y ago

I think the cracks that ultimately led me to quit corporate IT and pursue being an artist were first formed when leadership insisted that the entire company switch to Teams under the guise of saving $9 a month per user.

duxup 1y ago

Yup. Immediately a negative impression from me. Doesn't mean it won't sell, congrats to OP, but god I hate everything about Teams. Right now it's showing me calendar items with times that are wrong, they'll switch to the right time in a few minutes... probably. I didn't change time zones, I didn't do anything, it's just something wonky about their new calendar setup. If the time updates I'll click to open the calendar item, and it won't show me the join link to join the meeting ... well eventually it will pop in there, maybe. It's not just annoyingly designed and slow, it's constantly buggy with new and exciting bugs every few months.

ValentinPearce 1y ago
Last week there were so many apps added to my teams that I couldn't see the chats anymore.
- szundi 1y ago
  [dead]
- yieldcrv 1y ago
  Should have repented, because now you’re in hell
- Bombthecat 1y ago
  Teams is the old new SharePoint, and it will be the same unmanageable mess
  - multjoy 1y ago
    Lotus Notes enters the chat
MrJohz 1y ago
Ah, that's probably related to the bug I'm seeing where I've got my Teams calendar synced to my phone, but about half of the events show up an hour later or earlier. Isn't getting this right, like, _the_ purpose of a calendar?

unixhero 1y ago

Well this is how I make tons of money, so no depression from me just acceptance... people said the same of Jira and Confluence earlier

GoblinSlayer 1y ago
Depends on what you compare to. Jira and Confluence at least work even if chubby and get only a bit of your attention.
karel-3d 1y ago
jira and confluence are annoying but they do their job, somewhat. You don't like them but you don't hate them Teams is a different beast

codegeek 1y ago

Necessary evil especially at Enterprise Level. But I agree. I used to think JIRA gave me nightmares until I came across MS Teams. It is that bad. Source: I run a SAAS where we have to unfortunately support integrating with MS Teams (for training etc).

jollyllama 1y ago

Hey, think of the countless souls this author saved from Sharepoint.

DontchaKnowit 1y ago

Im confused seeing all the hate for teams here. Whats so bad about it? Its a simple calendar and a messenger. Its not perfect but its not awful. Jira on ghe other hand.....

jbm 1y ago
You must not use it that much. Features that worked in mIRC in the 1990s are broken, like sending messages. Right this second if I click to reply to someone's message, I can't add a message in Japanese unless I copy-paste it in. This happens every few months. I can't tag people who have non-English names reliably. It crashes my browser. There are weird security settings, and when you have multiple environments, it is completely unusable without having multiple browsers. Sometimes you can't log in without clearing your cache completely. It is sheerly anti-organic, adding features no one wants. I'm literally taking time out of my vacation to complain about it, fml.
- DontchaKnowit 1y ago
  I use it every single day, constantly, and it works just fine for me. Only compaint I ever had is that the search functions suck but thats common to literally anything microsoft has ever done
  - burningChrome 1y ago
    I would have to agree with you. I use it every day for work and besides some wonky syncing between Outlook and Teams and the search which you already pointed out, it works. More than I can say for some of the older tech we were using before Teams. I would also not that I've never been a huge power user or rely heavily on it for anything really outside of calendar or channel conversations so for me, on a basic level it works.
bigstrat2003 1y ago
I don't understand all the hate for Jira to be honest. I've used it at various companies and I think it's fine. You can absolutely customize Jira into a monstrosity that sucks to use, but that's true of many ticket systems. I think that the out of the box experience is reasonable though.

mattlutze 1y ago

Honestly I'm here for it, because it's an option for a market of groups that don't otherwise have the opportunity to deploy this kind of capability. Teams feelings aside :) I worked for a client once that refused to let us build and manage databases for things that needed it. The one option in the end that we could get approved was using Microsoft SharePoint lists and CRUD'ing to them through the Javascript API. A lot of problems have lame constraints, but having an option at all to solve them is pretty nice.

GenshoTikamura 1y ago

Gosh, I just recently talked our management out of taking the Teams turn after Skype sunset was scheduled, in favor of another solution. I thought maybe I'm too biased against M$ due to all those coworkers' accounts being blocked for no reason without any way to reinstate - but reading through this thread is a sure confirmation I was right

AvocadoPanic 1y ago
Where did you go after Skype?

bambax 1y ago

That's a great strength of the OP: instead of running away they decided to fix things, one feature at a time, and got rewarded for it!

andyjohnson0 1y ago

I never really understand allthe hating on Teams around here. I use it at work for team meetings, often with people in multiple timezones, on desktop and mobile, and it just works. Its not a stellar experience, but it does just quietly get the job done. The whole, largish company runs on it.

bdangubic 1y ago
it is like Jira, everyone loves to shit on it :)
- goosejuice 1y ago
  Jira is much worse. There's not a single reason to buy Jira. I wouldn't use it if it was free.
  - eclipticplane 1y ago
    I'd buy Jira and Teams for my competitors if they'd let me.
  - bdangubic 1y ago
    exactly my point :)
aners_xyz 1y ago
Do you use it for anything other than team meetings?
- andyjohnson0 1y ago
  Meetings, chat, sharing. The core functionality basically.
bongodongobob 1y ago
I think on HN, it might be because smaller teams are using it and aren't actually managing it properly. I get the impression they are just rolling it out as a free for all and not restricting who can add apps and channels etc. Of course it will turn into a mess if you allow that.

moscoe 1y ago

Comments like this are the real source of dread on HN. The guy built a successful side hustle that clearly has found a place in the market, and people just want to shit on it and virtue signal how much cooler they are than ms teams. If it’s not for you, move along if you don't have anything useful to contribute.

Nevermark 1y ago

What we need here is a Teams upgrade/replacement that, purely as a sales impedance match, integrates really well with Teams…

smrtinsert 1y ago

Sad but true. If you run Teams you're more likely to be what some people would consider a slow death corporate hell hole. Thankfully last place I had like that was a husk of a company so I enjoyed a flexible work schedule since literally no one knew what I was doing and no one cared. I logged in, ran an offshore stand up, did the days activities to maintain schedule, and left whenever I wanted to. Liminal office spaces aren't so bad when you can leave anytime and get decent fast food for lunch. Good times!