Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 725 posts

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

#191

Post by flappyeagle »

red-iron-pine wrote: post #143
chongli wrote: post #2

That’s plenty of time to dust off the resume and start pounding the pavement! Very generous of Microsoft to give so much notice! Edit: for those who may think I’m overreacting to a small change in tooling, I offer this classic essay [1]. It explains the reasoning behind leaving much better than I could! [1] https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...

Tech layoffs are exploding and there is a looming recession and maybe world war, and you're gonna quit over the work-chat software? At least the layoffs meant people got severances; this is walking for $0 and maybe the ability to find a different office productivity suite. I mean vote with your feet and all, but if this came up in an interview I'd probably laugh at you.

Yes many people would quit over being forcing to use tools that make their lives harder day to day.

It’s the difference over picking up a recruiter call vs ignoring. Or spending 15 min to fix up a resume.

There are degrees before flipping a table and walking out. Forcing people to use teams when they are accustomed to better software pushes everyone marginally in that direction.

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

#192

Post by larryfreeman »

gautamdivgi wrote: post #129
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.

My Teams works fine on my Mac without issues. Have been using it for over a year now. Fwiw - I don’t understand why it’s hated. It’s a collaboration tool - mainly messaging and conferencing. It’s been decent at that for me.

We use Teams, Slack, and Zoom on Mac.

Zoom is much easier to use than Teams for conference calls. When I use Teams for conference calls, I find the default never works for establishing a connection (I have found that connecting through the browser works fine -- but this is not the default way to connect -- it still takes some effort to pick the path that works).

I have also found the user interface is non-intuitive. I had little trouble getting up to speed on zoom (from webex). I might have less problems with Team once I get used to its interface. At present, if anyone accidentally schedules a meeting with Team (which sometimes is the default conference call setting in our Outlook), they usually create a zoom conference call link which is used instead (usually, the notification for the zoom link goes out through slack -- for some reason, folks don't even chat over team to let folks know that the meeting has been changed to zoom).

As far as the application itself, I find that Slack is much easier to use and has capabilities that have been very helpful. The Slack user interface was intuitive and I quickly got up to speed. For Teams, I use it when I need to (not all times at our company have slack) but everyone I know prefers slack. The slack ui is more intuitive and has features such as slacking to yourself which is useful for notetaking. Again, my opinion of Teams might change as I better learn the user interface.

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

#193

Post by rhaway84773 »

sofixa wrote: post #149
jasonlotito wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I've heard that with regards to video conferencing, it's competitive with zoom. Did you hear that from a Microsoft salesperson? Only a person who hasn't used both regularly can say that. UX and features on Zoom are better. The mere fact that to this day Teams has wildly different features depending on how you join the call is a joke - for instance, joining from a browser on macOS results in no chat (the button simp…

If you asked someone who’s new to Zoom if they’re on mute or not, I bet they will have a 50% hit rate. Heck, I bet even someone who regularly uses Zoom would have the same success rate.

The Zoom UI is atrocious.

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

#194

Post by jacquesm »

Teams is so horrific we banned it. If you force us to use teams you'll have to find another supplier. Seriously, it is incomprehensible that Microsoft would ship something so utterly broken. I know they don't have a reputation for writing good software but Teams is on another level, and I don't mean that in a positive way. I've really tried to get it to work but it is so messed up that I don't think it can be done. Meanwhile, even Zoom 'mostly works' (though we don't use that either). Eventually we standardized on Google 'meet', it works most of the time, we had a single issue in four years of intensive work and that was mostly related to a Google meet Chromebox auto-updating in the middle of a meeting (brilliant) and then never coming back up again. It serves well as a small PC now, we cancelled our subscription and just use laptops and desktops with webcams.

What really bothers me about all this: we had the basics of these setups working in 1995, and since then enough time has past that this should be a complete non-issue. But there is no interop between the various systems, everybody tries to push their own little walled garden and it breaks randomly for no apparent reason. If the phone system had been built like this we'd still be living in a disconnected world.

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

#195

Post by flappyeagle »

slantedview wrote: post #10
chongli wrote: post #2

That’s plenty of time to dust off the resume and start pounding the pavement! Very generous of Microsoft to give so much notice! Edit: for those who may think I’m overreacting to a small change in tooling, I offer this classic essay [1]. It explains the reasoning behind leaving much better than I could! [1] https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...

Changing jobs over video conferencing software would be extreme.

No it’s not. I work remotely. I am on slack and zoom 3-4 hours a day. It’s basically my virtual office.

Imagine if there was a company policy that made your office annoyingly uncomfortable after it was totally fine before. Is it extreme to consider other options?

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

#196

Post by samiru »

revscat wrote: post #147

To everyone at GitHub: I’m so sorry. I don’t mean this in a clever way, either. Teams is awful and it will make your lives worse to one degree or another.

I wonder if those who complain about Teams actually use it. They might not.

My company forces us to use Google Chat. I would take Teams any day.

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

#197

Post by mgkimsal »

gautamdivgi wrote: post #129
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.

My Teams works fine on my Mac without issues. Have been using it for over a year now. Fwiw - I don’t understand why it’s hated. It’s a collaboration tool - mainly messaging and conferencing. It’s been decent at that for me.

For people who are not solely at one company - contractors/freelancers who perhaps need to support connectivity with multiple organizations - MS Teams is a huge hostile pita.

I had 2 clients each using Teams, and I was working with each. But... I can't just be 'logged in' to two different Teams organizations. If I was in company A, I couldn't see anything from company B. Apparently you can do this in the phone app, but not the desktop version. I could keep one company on desktop, and another on phone, and just monitor two, but... you can't scale that.

With slack, I'm just connected to 3-4-5 client orgs at a time, and can react/respond as needed within the same tool without needing to log in/out constantly.

The last time I had to deal with this was last autumn - perhaps it's "fixed" now? Except... I don't think it's seen as a "bug" in the first place, so may never be "fixed".

Also... just connecting to Teams would often just hang... wait... no indication anything is happening. If I got impatient, I'd have folks saying "oh... just calm down..." but then also wonder why I was "not in the meeting"... well... because... Teams can never tell me if it's going to take 90 seconds to join, or 39 seconds or... if it just will never resolve. Opening a secondary link in a web browser became my default, though I'd have to read a banner every time saying "you won't get the best experience - some features may not work!" except... it at least loaded.

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

#198

Post by jacquesm »

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 means using your own product. The Teams team does not work at GitHub, they work at Microsoft. Yes, I know the one owns the other, but the fact that this requirement needs to be made at all is testimony to the fact that they would much rather use a product by a competitor, that's how broken it is.

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

#199

Post by treesknees »

apnew wrote: post #137
w0m wrote: 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.

Literally sitting here right now trying to figure out how to get simple things going compared to slack after being forced to move to teams from slack (not GitHub). I am all for dogfooding here, but if the dog-fooding is not improving the product it shows that the goal is to eat market because of lopsided ecosystem monopoly. Screw MS and MS Teams. eg. : We need a tag in a shared channel so that we can provide single p…

From the quote it appears the goal is to save money. From the numbers I found, GitHub could be paying upwards of $35k/month in licensing for Slack users. In a climate where companies are trying to shed expenses, wouldn't it make sense to bring that expense in-house?

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

#200

Post by shagie »

IceWreck wrote: post #179

What did GitHub staff use before ? Slack + Zoom ? Mattermost or something else ?

If I've read the histories and articles correctly, Slack for intracompany chat and Zoom for intra and inter company video.

This is switching the intra and inter company video to Teams (which means that GitHub doesn't have to pay Zoom for video anymore).

Intracompany text chat remains on Slack.

Post reply on HN