Live data from Hacker News

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

twitter.com

291–300 of 725 posts

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

#291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Broken means "doesn't work". I've used Teams for 2 years now for conferencing, chat, desktop sharing, etc. It works just fine. I think a lot of Microsoft hate is clouding judgement here. People want Teams to suck.

I simply can not get it to work. Note that we are on Linux/Chromebooks depending on the person in the team and this alone seems to be a major barrier for something that should be a non-issue. Every two bit video chat site in the world seems to have this figured out.

[deleted]

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

#292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Besides O365 the rest are not even the same thing. If half your company is on Teams, and half is on Slack, they can’t communicate with each other. Mandating a single communication platform is absolutely the right move. And the fact that MS picked Teams as that single communication platform is beyond obvious. What else could they have chosen?

> Mandating a single communication platform is absolutely the right move Is it, even if there will be productivity losses? Is making your teams less productive "absolutely the right move"?

If mandating the use of their own productivity tools causes them productivity losses, I'm happy to watch MS either come to terms with that and try to fix Teams or suffer the same losses that they inflict on the rest of the world.

From an outsider's perspective of MS and Github, I think it's the right move.

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

#293
post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will be blunt. Teams is an awful user experience; I have been using online collaboration tools since the BBS days, and while I appreciate and understand why and what they are trying to build, it is bad software. Every single experience I have had as a teams user in professional settings, interacting with communities, and being required to use it for interactions with my childrens schools since the 2020 shutdowns ha…

I simply don't understand this at all. I've used in 3 of my last workplaces. Two exclusively and one in addition to slack. No particular complaints for having internal meetings of any size. I literally do not know what you are talking about and feel like I am missing something.

For meetings it's decent. It's the everything else that's the problem.

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

#294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using it on Windows for well over a year. I can't speak to how well it works on Mac or Linux, could be a terrible experience, I dunno. In my opinion, its not the most ergonomic tool out there but its by far the most fully realized tool out there. There's lots of tools that are good for this or good for that, but mixing them in together gets to be a bit kludgy. Having calendars, live editing of documents, me…

Have you used the Google workspace tools? They also have tight integration of docs/meetings/chat/etc.

I have, I used and admin'd Workspace for about a decade before changing to O365. There's some good integrations there and I was a big fan of the simplicity of Meet, but chat is where Google definitely falls apart. We never really got into the new Hangouts as we were already pretty integrated into our Mattermost instance and then we migrated to O365, so maybe its better today, but as far as organizational chat kind of things Google was very very behind and way more fragmented. Things like having chats for Meets and sharing documents in a chat then get integrated into Drive are things that Teams does well and last I saw Google still kind of didn't have a fully-baked solution, at least at the time.

The other side of Workspace is dealing with users who really want Office tooling for various reasons. Workspace and O365 still don't seem to play nice together. Workspace document management is great for Workplace-formatted documents, O365 is great for Office-formatted documents, and things often get messy when trying to combine the two.

I really liked Workspace and its really slick how integrated some of their document tools can be into Google Cloud so its easy to help team members who only really know spreadsheets get data in and out of cloud compute and UI builders and what not. But from last I saw of Hangouts they're still not as complete of a chat platform compared to Teams.

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

#295

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. M…

It's so weird -- I use Teams all the time and I've never had a serious problem with it. It's not the greatest software ever made but it's certainly functional. It's definitely getting a lot of work done to it.

It works mostly fine. It doesn't have the prettiest interface, for example message editing is not great, and search is not great (though it got better than 1 year ago that was unusable). Anther stupid thing is that handling multiple organizations (for example if you are added as external collaborator to another company Teams) is basically broken, you don't receive messages from one if you don't switch to it most of the time.

Sure there are systems that work probably better but Teams is fine, also the alternatives either don't have all the features of Teams or they are difficult to use/setup. A pro of Teams is that if you already have Office365 is mostly well integrated with the other tools (mail, calendar, Office, AzureAD authentication) and you have to manage accounts only in one tool (I can from the horrible AzureAD administration console create a user and it has a mail, Teams, Office, and can login into the company computers).

To me the reason to have Teams is just that you don't have to introduce another tool, have another account, etc. Of course if you decided to use GSuite instead of Microsoft one makes perfectly sense to use Google Meet, but GSuite doesn't yet have all the feature of Office365 and it's more expensive, and like it or not you have to deal with .docx documents when interfacing with other companies.

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

#296
post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the issue with zoom? I think it's one of the best software I have on my machine. It never ever stopped working since I have it installed, not even in meetings/webinars with 1000+ people. And the integration with Slack is really convenient, you can start a meeting in seconds anywhere you are.

On what operating system?

I used to use it (Zoom) constantly on Linux Mint, fwiw.

I switched to Mac only because I couldn't get parts for a new desktop at the time. I miss Linux, though :/

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

#297
I see some super hot takes in here. Teams is not ideal, but it does seem to work for us. In total, I spend about 3-4 hours in the actual Teams UI per week, so maybe I don't have enough exposure to lose my mind over this.

We've used other messaging tools in the past - Mattermost, Slack, Skype, etc. For better or worse, Teams seems to be sticking and we are all way too busy to worry about whatever horrific implications this brings.

One thing I'd consider in all of this: Products like Teams are entirely about connecting other people (and businesses) to you. A vast majority of the decision to use that product is going to come from non-developers and other assholes in a typical org chart. Your front-line, minimum-wage employees are not going to have the patience or skills to configure their own federated IRC instances in order to correspond with your development team.

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

#298

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. M…

My supervisor and I once had a Teams meeting on the calendar that was created via Outlook. We both joined, and wound up in different meetings with the same id, wondering where the other person was...

We never scheduled a meeting for Teams again.

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

#299
post #196

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.

Teams is better than whatever we had before. Couldn't cut-n-paste code into a chat because it turned all the punctuation into emojis.

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

#300
post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On what operating system?

I used to use it (Zoom) constantly on Linux Mint, fwiw. I switched to Mac only because I couldn't get parts for a new desktop at the time. I miss Linux, though :/

Neat, so at least for some people it works.
Post reply on HN