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Ask HN: Why is Microsoft Teams still so bad?

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Re: Ask HN: Why is Microsoft Teams still so bad?

#621

Post by nullwarp »

joejag wrote: post #564

I had the joy of helping with a Teams to replace Slack rollout at the start of the Pandemic. During which I had multiple meetings with Engineers and Product folks at MS. Two reasons struck out as significant problems. The first was that Teams is Skype and Sharepoint mashed together with duct tape. When you'd ask for improved UX, it would all fall to "Ah yes, the Sharepoint team would have to do X so the other team ca…

The complete lack of being able to have offtopic/misc conversations has really sucked. When we had slack we had a channel specific to just chitchat and it was always active but very loose and fun.

We now have a "Chit Chat" channel/team but it's so difficult to use in a natural way that now nobody uses it and now we have zero of it.

As a purely remote worker it kinda sucks

Re: Ask HN: Why is Microsoft Teams still so bad?

#622

Post by bluGill »

Woeps wrote: post #393
bluGill wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Communication software needs to run in case someone wants to contact you. It should start in the background though.

Wait wüt.... Regardless of software, I decide when I'm available to be contacted... not somebody else. I already mute all notifications/ringtones on the phone when I want to focus, why should we also start doing this on computers?

What makes you as a human more valuable than other animals is your ability to communicate. As if your have everything muted you are making yourself less valuable. The ability to focus without distraction for short periods is okay, but as a human you need to be available to communicate with others the vast majority of the time.

You will get less done in total, but what you do get done is so much more valuable to humans as a whole that it is worth the loss of focus. It was a real mind blower when I realized that, I still get frustrated at times with my inability to get hard things done quickly, but in return I get much more important things done with the help of others.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Microsoft Teams still so bad?

#623

Post by hackeraccount »

zmmmmm wrote: post #402

Teams doesn't have to be good to succeed. It just has to exist. It's not even very important how good it is. Given it exists, IT will make everyone use it on Microsoft's behalf regardless of how bad it is. Or another way to look at it is that the real customers for Teams are IT departments. It makes their lives easier because they don't have to do anything and it meets all the compliance requirements they are suppose…

Do you think that helps Teams or not? I mean, if you can make a shitty product and know that it will sell, why make a good one? If you know you have to make a good product to get sales then that's what you'll do.

Shouldn't there be a level where some people will find the pain of the shittiness so great that they'll step outside of the Microsoft ecosystem whereas other people will accept the shit in exchange for the ease of staying inside the Microsoft ecosystem.

If that's true - and I don't know if it is - it seems like the leg up that Teams gets for being part of Microsoft doesn't help nearly so much as it should. Though truthfully in order to compete with Microsoft's entrenchment you don't just need "not shitty" you need a product that's got something going for it that's weirdly compelling. See Linux on servers or Google Chrome on the desktop.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Microsoft Teams still so bad?

#624

Post by thrownaway561 »

With all the problems with Teams, I would rather use it then Google Meet. At least with Teams you can request control of the presenters PC which make it great for doing support calls. Google Meet is sooooooo resource intensive that my entire machine goes to a crawl when I am on a call with more than 3 people (which is often). Not to mention that Teams is so integrated with Office 365. I love that whatever chat you have in a Teams meeting, you have in the Teams app unlike Meet which anything you place in chat is lost after the meeting.

Teams might not be perfect by far, but it is light years better than anything in the enterprise right now.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Microsoft Teams still so bad?

#625

Post by bluGill »

jknoepfler wrote: post #199
bluGill wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Communication software needs to run in case someone wants to contact you. It should start in the background though.

Communications software needs to run when and only when I want it to run. Who in the heck are you to tell me when to run an application on a device I own?

No, communications software needs to be in the background ready to use at an instant when needed.

There are many people who need more personal discipline to not contact people constantly, but the software itself should be ready for the times when they should contact you, interrupting whatever it is you were doing.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Microsoft Teams still so bad?

#626

Post by mission_failed »

roydivision wrote: post #379

My 2 cents of venting on this sorry excuse of software - Backtick formatting in a chat post only works after typing the closing backtick, deleting it, re-typing it - Text copied from a conversation is polluted with names and time stamps. "I really want this feature" said nobody ever - The mute/unmute button is hard to find, I don't think I've ever attended a Teams meeting without someone struggling with this. Teams s…

Searching

Oh god the searching

It's so bad it must be actively designed to not work.

Find a result that is outside the current cached chats and want to see the posts around it for context? Just click the result... To show only the result on page?? Lol gfy, you have to manually scroll allllllllll the way back through months of texts.

Let's lump together text chats meeting chats, org chart and sharepoint/teams files, and make a totally useless search function that actively hates users.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Microsoft Teams still so bad?

#627

Post by deergomoo »

roydivision wrote: post #379

My 2 cents of venting on this sorry excuse of software - Backtick formatting in a chat post only works after typing the closing backtick, deleting it, re-typing it - Text copied from a conversation is polluted with names and time stamps. "I really want this feature" said nobody ever - The mute/unmute button is hard to find, I don't think I've ever attended a Teams meeting without someone struggling with this. Teams s…

I had a period of several weeks where most days my arrow keys would just stop working. I could Ctrl+arrow to jump words or Shift+arrow to highlight, but just an arrow key by itself? Nope.

My biggest gripe though is just the sluggishness in every single thing. It’s like there’s a 500ms minimum latency for any action you can perform in the app. Truly miserable bit of software.

I always wonder how the dev teams feel on projects like this. They just know they’re shipping garbage, surely?

Re: Ask HN: Why is Microsoft Teams still so bad?

#628

Post by viridian »

rowanG077 wrote: post #572
rjsw wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm trying to cleanup a Git tree right now where people haven't put JIRA tags in their commit comments, it is impossible to find out why a change was made, it isn't a totally stupid requirement.

Or you just write sensible commit messages. Commits together with the messages should require as little out of band information as possible.

I'm a big fan of this personally, but I've also lived with the experience of completely useless commit messages, so I understand both arguments. Here's the most recent commits for a project I'm working on:

Counts

Counts

Counts

Counts

Log entries

missing package json

missing package json

ttl in seconds

cache back on

Still, I'd rather try to convince people to write useful messages than hard bind my remote code repository to my system for managing work, and often times (but certainly not always), single line commits are self explanatory.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Microsoft Teams still so bad?

#629

Post by 4whaitsworth99 »

osigurdson wrote: post #549

Honestly, I don't find it bad at all. It hardly ever crashes or drops connections and we use it a lot. My only beef is voice communication latency. It is definitely several hundred milliseconds - far worse than using a phone. This leads to very unnatural CB-radio type conversations (you almost need to say "over" when you are finished talking).

For what it's worth... I use teams all day for communication across all of the teams I work with in 3 different countries and have no latency issues.

I agree with your assessment that it isn't bad though. I don't have any of the issues that everyone here is reporting. Everything just works, I can call any of the 1000s of people at our org and they can join effortlessly.

I'd happily switch to whatever else to be less reliant on MS, but teams being bad isn't a valid argument in my mind.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Microsoft Teams still so bad?

#630

Post by jdhzzz »

roydivision wrote: post #379

My 2 cents of venting on this sorry excuse of software - Backtick formatting in a chat post only works after typing the closing backtick, deleting it, re-typing it - Text copied from a conversation is polluted with names and time stamps. "I really want this feature" said nobody ever - The mute/unmute button is hard to find, I don't think I've ever attended a Teams meeting without someone struggling with this. Teams s…

To make the TEAMs experience even worse, our IT department, okay at the behest of the legal team, put a policy in place that removes chat history older than 24 hours thus removing the last shred of utility from the product.
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