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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

#331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My company uses Teams... and I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. So here's at least one person who is using teams who complains about it. The shitty UI/UX is one thing, but some of the behaviors are incredibly frustrating. Here's some examples: - Sharing a single window makes Teams minimize the window with everyones video camera on it into a small window in the corner of your primary screen. I have a 49" wide scree…

It is telling that there is almost no overlap between your list of why you hate Teams, and my list of why I hate Teams. Burn it with fire. Salt the ground on which it stood.

That's because there's nothing redeemable about Teams. My list of annoyances are the things I dealt with this morning... I am sure that if you give me another hour or two I will have a whole new list of annoyances :P

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

#332
post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sharing a single window makes Teams minimize the window with everyones video camera on it into a small window in the corner of your primary screen. I have a 49" wide screen, I can have that Teams window open (so I can see faces/people) and share a window at full-size for everyone else, STOP minimizing that window. Took me a while to figure this out, but, and if I understand what's going on and you didn't realize it…

but when the video window pops up again, it's a different size than it was before. I usually have the video window expanded to half a screen (the other half is for taking notes). If I share the other monitor, the sequence is: 1. share monitor to Teams 2. click on the little window to make it big again 3. reposition the video window back to where it was before It's not clear to me the value of steps 2 and 3...

Yeah, the random resizing it does is also incredibly annoying. I also placed it where I wanted it so that it is to the left of the window I am sharing... I know where I want it, but Teams thinks it knows better.

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

#334

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,…

Have you used Outlook or Office 365 recently?

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

#335
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.

Well said. I am getting these eerie feelings todays tech giants are turning into modern-day IBM — in that they are more just turning into generic businesses.

By "generic" do you mean competing by means other than the strength of their product?

Which companies do you have in mind? (Apart from Oracle.)

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

#336

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.

This comment and the grandparent both ring true for my and my experience. When using Teams as basically an IRC replacement it worked fine and didn't have any serious issues, when folks started using it to try to host meetings across sites and share interactivity it really struggled unsuccessfully.

I agree with Jacques that all the pieces (except for high speed networking) were in place in the last century I expected this to develop more than it has.

Given the stuff that ML can do TODAY, it should totally be possible to give the "presenter" a view of the audience where you use a combination of the pre-computed model for people's faces, and a client doing pose estimation from the web cam. If I'm looking at the presentation on my screen, that information should allow the presenter's view to see me looking at them. If I'm looking away it could show me looking down or something. If I leave and go to the bathroom or something it could show my seat being empty. Similarly, raising a hand should present on the speakers screen as my raising my hand in the audience, calling on me with the mouse should unmute my microphone until the presenter moves the mouse/pointer off my face in the audience.

Early, EARLY, on in the Java group the idea had been worked on to provide a "visual environment" for doing things, and of course "Snowcrash" came out at the same time and everyone was doing their own "metaverse." I was looking at the problem and realized that to be successful we'd have to emulate some of the physics that keep us sane in group settings today. (like everyone can't hear everyone else talking in a room usually). David Rosenthal did a study for NIST, as I recall, on the network implications of something like the metaverse and concluded that it would take a terabit of network connectivity to "host" a live concert in the metaverse with the same "feel" as being there in person. (so everyone gets a view from their POV, voices travel 10 - 30' in a cone from the direction of the mouth, sound from the stage follows the acoustics of the modeled room etc. And then that analysis is followed by trimming things out to reduce bandwidth until you reach the "present day" bandwidth numbers and describing that reduced experience. He got back to Zoom like meetings with something like 1mbps/10gbps for the participant/network ratio.

So summarizing; Often people approach the problem without realizing the complexity of what they are trying to do, in part because meetups/communication in "real life" has so much of the complexity taken care of by physics and the fact that you learned what worked as a toddler before you could think so it just "is" in your brain. Stepping outside of that mindset requires deliberate effort. There are likely opportunities here that are not being exploited because of this mindset.

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

#337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, b…

> 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.

Bingo, that right there. Need to work with one team, but also quickly jump onto a meeting with another client... So bad. If you need to be available to two clients at the same time? No, that's not going to work.

The UI is horrible, finding people is difficult at best. Chatting with someone and want to jump on a video call... well, that will take a few minutes to locate the right button. At least Google Chat just put a big old button right in your face so you can do a quick meeting. Google suite of product (Meet, Calendar and Chat) have their own issues, but it's so easy to do meetings, and it just works every time. For six months a number of us at the office were unable to make audio work on the desktop Mac app, and Firefox wasn't supported, so you needed Chrome to join a Teams meeting.

You can't really complain about the audio or video quality in Teams, they got that mostly figured out. It's just that the desktop app has a horrible UI. I mean so does Slack, given the option I'd use neither.

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

#338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me the ability to seamlessly start a meeting, pull in 10 participants from different organizations by just sharing a URL and be off to the races a few minutes later is what makes the difference. If I have to spend even a couple of minutes debugging audio/video issues, dealing with people that can't seem to join, people that are trying to install a client that they then can't get to work, people that need to make…

I've never had a problem sharing a URL to get outside people in a meeting with Teams and, of course, it works in the browser. Are you sure this is still a problem?

Teams has never worked reliably for me when sent a link from orgs that use Teams. Half the time we end up in my Zoom call and the people on the call always gripe about having to use Teams for the first few minutes.

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

#339
post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your definition of broken is likely different than the GP.

Pretty sure the GP definition of broke is not really what broke means. I know it is all the rage these days to just redefine terms to make them often mean the exact opposite of what the rest of the planet understands them to mean But we have to have shared definitions for words or communications just breaks down It can not be "your definition of broke is different from mine" if that is the case then language is just…

> Pretty sure the GP definition of broke is not really what broke means. I know it is all the rage these days to just redefine terms to make them often mean the exact opposite of what the rest of the planet understands them to mean

After they explained to you it was broken in their official client for their officially supported operating system, you moved the goal post to it's only broken in the client, try the web app instead:

> The Linux Desktop client always sucked, so much is no longer a thing, 100% a web app now. The web App teams should work just fine.

Just stop.

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

#340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does it mean to be worst-in-class for text chat or video conferencing. Video conferences look and sound great. Text chat is text chat. What am I missing here that's so awful?

> What does it mean to be worst-in-class for text chat Poor discoverability of, basically, everything, paste doesn’t support standard options like pasting text only without formatting, so cutting and pasting from format documents takes either manual format correction or using a third app to paste without formatting and the cut again to avoid the ransom-note look. Formatting that supports Markdown entry (kind of), but…

What platform are you on? Doesn’t CTRL+SHIFT+V work for you?
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