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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?

#671

Post by LgWoodenBadger »

planede wrote: post #444
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…

Also "we are paying for O365 already, we get Teams for free*".

Exactly. Nobody would pay for Teams if it cost money. That's how bad it is.

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

#672

Post by sandos »

DocTomoe wrote: post #372
Daub wrote: post #119

I teach visual effects and digital art. I am used to the madly compLex interfaces (Maya, Blender, Nuke etc). I have no fear of such software. But I am completely defeated by Teams. - Why two windows when you are in a meeting? The second window is sometimes hard to find intuitively. - Why, when opening an attachment, is the user locked out of chat? Again, with many windows open, the preview can look and function like…

> - Why two windows when you are in a meeting? The second window is sometimes hard to find intuitively. Seriously, that is a godsend if you are presenting a lot and have a two+ monitor setup - have the presentation up on one, still see your participants on the other one. > - Upload a file to chat and sending that file are two separate actions. Why? I can’t count the number of times I have to remind students to press…

Wait, the default in teams is surely not to "undock" the presentation? Its a combined window with participants and presentation/video, and the other window is just the rest of Teams...

But I do agree "undock" is awesome, its the only way to get near-fullscreen on presenations. So in this case there is actually 3 windows...

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

#673

Post by bborud »

OK, let's not mince words. It is so bad because you, all of you who suffer under this, don't give IT managers and decision makers enough shit for choosing this crap. You don't stand up for yourself, you don't refuse to use it, and you do nothing to improve your situation because you think you can't.

Right now most of you are shaking your head. "It isn't that simple". "I can't do anything about this". "It isn't my place". You are wrong. You can do something about it, but it is going to take a bit of backbone and a bit of initiative. You may lack a backbone. Grow one. Don't whine. Whining accomplishes nothing and communicates that you have given up.

You find better alternatives, recruit others to your cause and force badly run organizations to change -- essentially by leading a revolt. There is only so much a manager can do when employees say "no". And it is easier to say "no" when more people say "no".

If you have ever been a manager you know perfectly well that if you can't get your people to do as you say, you are done. A leader who can't make people follow isn't a leader. It can be a career killer. Lots of managers have nightmares about this.

You can use that to your advantage.

If you don't want to use Teams: find an alternative, start using it, recruit others to your cause and stand up to whomever says "you can't".

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

#674

Post by Uehreka »

bborud wrote: post #673

OK, let's not mince words. It is so bad because you, all of you who suffer under this, don't give IT managers and decision makers enough shit for choosing this crap. You don't stand up for yourself, you don't refuse to use it, and you do nothing to improve your situation because you think you can't. Right now most of you are shaking your head. "It isn't that simple". "I can't do anything about this". "It isn't my pla…

Yup.

On my team at a previous company we just started a team Slack when the company moved to Teams. If people wanted to get in touch with us faster, they had to use Slack. If they wanted a meeting with us, we’d send them a Zoom link.

It was passive aggressive for sure, but it allowed us to not have to use Teams as much. I’m sure there are some draconian companies that will actually fire you for refusing to fall in line on this stuff, but for many reasonable people, it’s pretty difficult to fire high performing people for something this trivial.

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

#675

Post by philippejara »

jerojero wrote: post #184
philippejara wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's kind of crazy to look back and see just how much worse we are today than some years ago with regards to this stuff. I remember an old social media named Orkut, had pretty much everything facebook had and more, also had a huge userbase in brazil and india(?) iirc, but just goot overtaken by facebook. Original skype would probably work better than zoom does today with a few tweaks(I assume, could be wrong there wh…

Forums weren't replaced by discord. Forums were replaced by Reddit. Although you post still stands, I think you're very wrong in thinking about the reasoning why people use one or another platform. Let's think about discord for a minute, why is everyone using it? And what are they using it for? I think the answers here are rather simple, people have a need for communication with peers; this communication usually take…

>Forums weren't replaced by discord. Forums were replaced by Reddit.

From my experience there's a split, more "generalist" forums did get "replaced" by reddit, by subs such as technology, games, news, etc. More "in-depth" forums where you expected to see the same guys working on something or having matches together etc I've seen being almost always replaced by discord:fighting games forums(even for games with good MM), dev/security/cracking forums, really anything that isn't "mass appeal".

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

#676

Post by origin_path »

rjsw wrote: post #538
viridian wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally find that the more I have to use JIRA, and the more magical ephemeral rules that are set up in it to take actions in response to my actions with it, the more terrible it is to use. I've worked on teams where I just threw info into a card, and it was acceptable to use, and I've worked on teams where commits had to have a JIRA tag associated or the commit got rejected, including in instances where bitbucke…

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.

This assumes that writing a ticket causes people to explain their rationale better than a commit comment does. That might be the case, but it often isn't because tickets are filed by developers themselves, or by PMs who just write tickets like: "A system requirement is that users be able to do X" without further explanation.

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

#677

Post by Karsteski »

yrro wrote: post #415

2022 and Microsoft still can't write a program that correctly uses the clipboard. When I select "some text" and press Ctrl-C I want "some text" in the clipboard. Not this monstrosity: [09:57] John Smith: some text I can't believe anyone inside MS uses Teams for serious communication. It must surely drive them mad!

This is one of the egregious sins of Teams that I've noticed. Who would ever want copy & paste to work this way..? Fine if you want to have that option, but call it "Copy entire message". Everyone at my company universally agrees Teams is shit.

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

#678

Post by JeremyNT »

bborud wrote: post #673

OK, let's not mince words. It is so bad because you, all of you who suffer under this, don't give IT managers and decision makers enough shit for choosing this crap. You don't stand up for yourself, you don't refuse to use it, and you do nothing to improve your situation because you think you can't. Right now most of you are shaking your head. "It isn't that simple". "I can't do anything about this". "It isn't my pla…

I've worked at the same place for years, and they switched to Teams a couple of years ago.

I can't change their decision, but I can work for somebody else, and having to suffer through this crapware is pushing me in that direction. "Must use Teams" is a huge red flag for any potential job offer.

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

#679

Post by vel0city »

analog31 wrote: post #30

It's the iPhone effect: If you use Teams, and something goes wrong, everybody is patient and sympathetic. If you use something else, then it's your fault for being "weird" or "cheap." In my case, my computer came from IT, pre-loaded with Teams, and it runs nearly flawlessly. But I've noticed something else about computers and software. You can have two people with similar jobs, similar computers, similar software, et…

I often find the "spent two days setting it up exactly the way I want it" means they've tweaked so many things those users didn't fully understand into incompatible setups which causes a lot of that friction, while those who just roll with mostly the defaults have much smoother sailing.

Forcing the square peg into the round hole often results in extra challenges. Sometimes its just easier to use the round peg, even if its not perfectly what you'd like.

I tend to just roll with the defaults and only change settings when I really need to. I tend to experience a good bit less friction than a lot of my coworkers who flip every switch into something other than the default.

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

#680

Post by philippejara »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #218
akira2501 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC the other major problem was that Orkut was invite-only for a very long time. That's partly was it was so popular in a few South American countries, it was very difficult to get yourself on the platform, and even if you did, it was difficult to use it to communicate with anyone locally. Google was not the giant then that it is now.

Orkut's biggest problem was that Google didn't want to devote any resources to moderation but its creator had enough political power to keep the lights on. It didn't take long for users to figure out they could do whatever they wanted. It quickly became a cesspool of racism, child porn, and other illegal activity, mostly by Brazilians, who bullied everyone else off the platform

It wasn't for a lack of trying by brazillians[0]. I can't remember much racism if I'm honest, especially by mid 2000's standards, and Orkut wasn't like twitter or facebook(today), you only had contact with people you wanted to have contact, so I can't see it being a big deal.

[0]:https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna25514386

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