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GitHub staff are required to use Teams by Sep 1, 2023

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Re: GitHub staff are required to use Teams by Sep 1, 2023

#81
post #11

Somewhat ironic that a company that’s entire existence was based on the idea of giving developers great tools no longer values giving its own developers great tools. Only a matter of time before this new attitude towards developers shows up in the product.

What do you mean, GitHub doesn't value giving its developers great tools? All their work is done on Codespaces™ leveraging the power of Visual Studio Code® to make developers more productive!

Re: GitHub staff are required to use Teams by Sep 1, 2023

#82

Teams isn’t great compared to Slack for async text chats, however the video conferencing is actually quite good and I didn’t have any real issues moving from Zoom to it.

Background noise cancellation is pretty bad compared to zoom. Teams seems to flake out more when sharing desktops than zoom does (though I've had issues with both).

I went from a company that used Google Hangouts, which is like using pen and paper relatively speaking, to trying to use Slack. Slack wasn't official, but it was an allowed form of communication. People who didn't have the vested interested just couldn't figure it out. So while I preferred Slack, having to hold everyone's hands through basic functionality was awful.

Now I'm at a place that uses Teams. I don't think Teams is perfect, but I feel like Teams gets extra hate just because it's Teams. The best feature in my opinion is the group thread feature. Having people able to start a threaded conversation by default gives a lot of granular control over what notifications I receive by default.

Re: GitHub staff are required to use Teams by Sep 1, 2023

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd think but if where I work ever mandated I had to stop using Linux I'd start looking elsewhere. I have to spend 8 hours a day using a tool and I get frustrated with suboptimal tools, why subject myself to that on top of everything else I have to do.

For what it's worth, Teams is also available as a .deb/.rpm, which is I'd say unique for something with Microsoft in its name.

They said they'd keep supporting skype on Linux too when worries about that popped up on purchase then broke that promise within less than a year. Github desktop was also soon to be officially supported with basically all the legwork done. Nice that there's a community fork.

Re: GitHub staff are required to use Teams by Sep 1, 2023

#84
post #59
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's overtly harsh take I think. Teams has issues; but asking employees of a company to use said companies tools internally isn't necessarily a bad thing. Hard to improve without dogfooding.

The point of dogfooding isn't feeding your employees any old dog food. The point of dogfooding is that the dog food you make is so damn good your employees prefer it over making lunch boxes or eating out. (It doesn't have to be perfect, or course, just do something better than its competitors to be attractive to use. I struggle to think of a single redeeming feature of Teams.)

>The point of dogfooding is that the dog food you make is so damn good your employees prefer it over making lunch boxes or eating out.

I don’t know if I’m misunderstanding how you’ve put this, but I’ve only ever understood dogfooding to mean that you use your own product to find the bugs, improve the workflow, and encourage feature suggestions.

Dog-fooding is not a reward for making the best product (though that makes life easier at work), it’s a commitment to improving your own product, and showing that you are willing to live with your own product in order to make it better for your customers.

Re: GitHub staff are required to use Teams by Sep 1, 2023

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe that works well on Windows machines, on the Mac at least on the Intel-era some year-old Macs MS Teams is one of the most horrible, buggy, resource hungry, non-working app that one could imagine.

It's so bad it makes Slack look lightweight. Which is a real accomplishment.

Actually true and a good way to put it

Re: GitHub staff are required to use Teams by Sep 1, 2023

#86
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft employee here. I was actually handed a MacBook Pro on day 1, I didn't even ask for it my manager at the time just assumed. There is a large community inside Microsoft using Linux as their daily driver.

That's interesting to hear. Is it only certain teams that can do that? It thought Microsoft it's doing some interesting things but I didn't think I could work there because I'd be starting to from scratch with Ms tech, like even having a workflow on my own computer

You need to be able to in-tune the device if you want to access company resources.

Windows is definitely the happy path since support is pretty much baked into the OS. However there is support for both Mac and Linux.

Re: GitHub staff are required to use Teams by Sep 1, 2023

#87
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slack has video conferencing. Every redundant tool a company makes workers use makes work less pleasant. I'd expect at some point they'll push them the rest of the way onto Teams, to reduce that redundancy. Which will be even worse, because Teams is so incredibly bad.

Slack video conferencing was absolutely awful and one of the main reasons we switched to Teams a couple of years back. Is it better now? There seem to be plenty of commenters combining Slack and Zoom so seems not. That's a redundancy right there that Teams solves.

It used to be god-awful but has been pretty OK for the last year or two. Not as good as Zoom, but close enough for many use-cases. I haven't tried it for really giant "rooms" but 99% of the time those would be better as a broadcast, anyway.

Re: GitHub staff are required to use Teams by Sep 1, 2023

#88
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe that works well on Windows machines, on the Mac at least on the Intel-era some year-old Macs MS Teams is one of the most horrible, buggy, resource hungry, non-working app that one could imagine.

As soon as the M1 dropped, Apple just stopped giving a shit about Intel Macs. The whole OS is slow, janky, and appears to have driver bugs on Intel.

Teams was horrible before that. What you consider is not a reason for Teams being utterly crap on at least the Intel Macs - which I was talking of only as I have no Apple Silicon Mac to compare to.

Re: GitHub staff are required to use Teams by Sep 1, 2023

#89

How is it possible that Teams is still such a poor product? I really didn't like it when my job switched like 6 years ago, and I don't recall ever feeling that it improved in any meaningful way. I switched jobs to one using Slack and it's not perfect but it is a lot better. It's almost a meme at this point. In the presence of other clients that have gotten it "right" (or at least more "right" than teams) like Slack,…

They are still using Slack. This is for video conferencing only. I've heard that with regards to video conferencing, it's competitive with zoom.

Re: GitHub staff are required to use Teams by Sep 1, 2023

#90
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, Zoom was wildly better than other options at first, but the rest these days are mostly OK enough to handle most day-to-day needs. And yeah, chat apps are pretty similar. ... except Teams, which manages to be possibly the single most confusing piece of software I've ever used. And I like Paradox games....

Zoom was amazingly batshit better than the competition (mainly gotomeeting) for actual conference calls because of how easy it was for someone who had never used it to start (which we later learned was because Zoom was pulling all sorts of clever bullshit to avoid installation dialogs). Once you're past the onboarding/installation hurdle, they all start to blend together.

Quality (especially audio) and some other features were a lot better and (crucially) more reliable in the early days, too.

But yeah, the light-ish touch installation (which, yeah, because of some bullshit) and single-purpose nature of it made it way less unpleasant to use if someone was like "let's Zoom" and you didn't have it. "We'll call you on Teams" (or any of these other huge do-everything tools) is a much bigger pain in the ass if you don't already have the thing they're going to call you on.

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