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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

#91

Post by belter »

w0m wrote: post #50
ralph84 wrote: 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.

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.

Team has issues is the understatement of the year. A simple feature like screen freeze has been requested per use in the thread below hundreds of times...

"Between different messaging boards (including the link above) this feature has been requested over 2000 times (1044 times as of this writing on the link above alone). Could Microsoft chime in to let us know if this is going to be on the roadmap? Thanks."

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msteams/forum/all/pausin...

The tool will say you are in the meeting but won't let you have access to the chat. A bug hitting regularly hundreds of persons.

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams/why-s...

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams/probl...

I pity GitHub employees and would consider resigning :-)

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

#92

Post by creshal »

rwalle wrote: post #37

What's the problem with "4 yr old laptops"? My colleagues and I use Teams on computers 1-5 years old and haven't heard about any issues.

"4 year old laptop" can mean anything from "8 cores, 64 GB RAM, dedicated GPU" to "720p display, 4GB RAM, dual-core". If Github for whatever reason punished its employees with the latter, well. Teams is not the world's most optimized Electron app.

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

#93

Post by kqr »

sircastor wrote: post #84
kqr wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 make…

I phrased it a little oddly. What I mean is that if not even my employees (who hopefully share my ideals and values) volunteer to use my software, I would take that as a strong signal that I've failed to find a sustainable niche in the market, and maybe the right approach is not to force it down people's throats and hope that they can dig me out of my hole, but rather to pivot and ask myself, "what should I have done differently to get a product people want to use, despite technical flaws?"

So yes, dogfooding is there to get immediate feedback on technical flaws of an otherwise desirable product. Dogfooding is not there to fix a product--market mismatch. That needs to happen at a different level of development.

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

#94

Post by creshal »

w0m wrote: post #50
ralph84 wrote: 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.

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.

Dogfooding only has a purpose if someone cares about the dogs' feedback.

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

#95

Post by ss108 »

nkotov wrote: post #40
meitros wrote: post #4

"for the sole purpose of video conferencing". They're still using slack for day-to-day...

I had to use Teams for a couple of months with a client. It's not great but it's not terrible. I do miss days of Zoom but I opened it recently and found apps listed during the call of sudden - felt like bloatware.

Not sure what you missed about Zoom. It's works, but doesn't feel smooth and seems to have a very big footprint for something with a specific use-case.

In particular, my day job is at a big corpo office space style place, and the software that requires the most updates is Zoom. I don't get why. It's also a lot less simple to use than Google Meet

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

#96

Post by ss108 »

jmclnx wrote: post #7

No surprise here, but I wish almost anyone else purchased github instead of Microsoft. One can hope the founders will eventually pull a "MySQL" --> "mariadb" :) I wonder when github developers will be forced to moved from Linux to Windows ?

GitHub seems to be doing fine/the same, IMO. What negative consequences have there been for you as a user as a result of MSFT acquiring it?

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

#97

Post by ralmidani »

I’m extremely picky - as long as my livelihood is not threatened and I actually have options. For me, being forced to use Windows, Teams, Skype, Java/Spring, or Jira (among others) would be a dealbreaker (again, unless that job might be among the few available to help me feed my family).

I spent some time learning in the structured environment of a large company, which I recommend everyone do for a first and/or second job.

Now, at this point in my career, I tend to gravitate toward smaller companies; my current company (less than 40 employees) ordered me a high-spec Framework Laptop (I put Fedora on it) and $900 ultra-wide monitor without hesitation. I believe I was the first dev at the company to ask about a Sublime license (in a Slack message), and within minutes I got an email from SublimeHQ with the license key.

Of course, YMMV, but if you want and are ready for flexibility, you might do best by avoiding big companies - and even startups where leadership has intense personalities and overly-strong opinions.

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

#98

Post by creshal »

bombcar wrote: post #34
williamstein wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How might they do that given that Microsoft now owns all of the IP and GitHub is mostly closed source? It seems like a very different situation than the liberally open source MySQL.

The problem is that what GitHub does is relatively reproducible (Gitlab, gitea, bitbucket? others do it) but the value GitHub provides is free hosting for so much content. Anyone can make an image hosting site, making one profitable long term is always the problem. For now, GitHub is winning because of the free side of their toolset.

I'm fairly sure Microsoft doesn't even have the ambition to make it profitable. Like Youtube for Google, or costco hotdogs, it's to get a foot in the door (or rather, customers' feet in your doors) to upsell people on all your other products.

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

#99

Post by thiht »

Is this front page worthy news for HN? That’s just whining over a valid corporate policy.

GitHub was bought by Microsoft, now GitHub employees have to use Microsoft tools. What’s newsworthy here?

Also is « 4 years old laptops » supposed to be impressive? Like you’re developing on a dinosaur or something? A 4 year old laptop for most development work is completely fine.

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

#100

Post by locallost »

thiht wrote: post #99

Is this front page worthy news for HN? That’s just whining over a valid corporate policy. GitHub was bought by Microsoft, now GitHub employees have to use Microsoft tools. What’s newsworthy here? Also is « 4 years old laptops » supposed to be impressive? Like you’re developing on a dinosaur or something? A 4 year old laptop for most development work is completely fine.

It's scratching someone's itch. And apparently a lot of people's. So why don't we try to find out what the issue is instead of yelling at clouds?
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