GitHub staff are required to use Teams by Sep 1, 2023 • Hacker News Board

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

#411

Post by ChymeraXYZ » Mon, Feb 13, 2023, 9:03 PM UTC

wvenable wrote: post #249

dragonwriter wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Teams is minimally usable, but its pretty much worst-in-class for…everything it does. It’s two compelling selling points seem to be (1) that “nobody every got fired for buying IBM” now applies to Microsoft more than IBM, and (2) moreover, users don’t actually buy Teams qua Teams, they get a Microsoft 365 subscriptions for some of the things where Microsoft has not-worst-in-class solutions, and Teams comes along for t…

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

I expect a chat program to show me all messages the have been sent in a chat, in so far the other party intends me to view them (have no been deleted etc.). That is not an expectation Teams manages to fulfill.

I expect an edit (mine or someone elses) to be reflected on all my devices. That is not an expectation Teams manages to fulfill.

I expect to do the same series of keystrokes in a blank "chat input" field and get the same result. That is not an expectation Teams manages to fulfill.

I expect the text that I see as have been sent to appear the same (for a reasonable value of "same") on the other persons screen. That is not an expectation Teams manages to fulfill.

I expect that if I scroll to the bottom, I will be able to make the last message intended to be visible, become readable and copyable. That is not an expectation Teams manages to fulfill.

I expect that when I select a text and press "ctrl-c" or the local equivalent, the text now in my clipboard is always predictable. That is not an expectation Teams manages to fulfill.

And yes, I have personally seen and experienced each and every one of this things.

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

#412

Post by vel0city » Mon, Feb 13, 2023, 9:04 PM UTC

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #394

vel0city wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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. I'm not sure what quality of integration Teams has - but Chat has had this integration for several months now.

Here's an example in Teams. I'm in a call and someone shares a document in the chat. That chat is (somewhat) exactly like any other group chat in Teams, it appears in the same list as other chats I've had in my recents and is searchable in the same way. There's a couple of odd features that are or are not available from chats from meetings, but those are at the fringes of usages usually so for the most part its the same as any other group chat and can be continued well after the call or persist through recurring meetings.

Now, that document isn't just in that chat, its also in the OneDrive/Sharepoint and in the history of recently opened documents in something like Excel or Word or Powerpoint.

Like I said, it may have improved in the last year or so (about when I had to change), but last I used Workspace the chat in Meet was practically ephemeral. If someone shared a link to a document in Meet, at the end of the Meet that link was practically gone. No additional permissions was granted, I wouldn't be able to quickly find it in a recent documents list, no chat history in my recent chats, the next time for the meeting there was no chat history, etc.

The fact that Meet and Chat are still two separate "products" really points to that bifurcation of the two things. There's the video chat platform: Meet, and then there's the collaboration and chat tool: Chat. In the Google world if you want to talk by text you use one product, and if you want to talk by voice/video you use a different product, if you're wanting to schedule a meeting you use yet another product. But in the end a meeting is a meeting. Meetings can involve voice, video, text, documents, and more and usually benefit from scheduling. Needing multiple "products" means kludging things together or having things more un-linked. And in the Microsoft world there's a single tool that can do all of those things: Teams.

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

#413

Post by blibble » Mon, Feb 13, 2023, 9:05 PM UTC

mrguyorama wrote: post #403

blibble wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried hiding a channel once that was it, there's apparently no way to ever get it back unless I can remember its exact name (which I can't) I learnt my lesson

Uh what? Every "Team" I have on the left side of my teams window has a "X hidden channels" message that I can click and that shows every single channel in the teams, including archived ones.

this is what I have to go through: https://allthings.how/how-to-hide-and-unhide-chat-in-microso...

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

#414

Post by hulitu » Mon, Feb 13, 2023, 9:05 PM UTC

0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #269

wvenable wrote: post #249

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?

For chats, it is embarrassingly slow at rendering. Seemingly only maintains the last ~two dozen messages in memory, if you scroll back in history, you have to painfully wait for it to retrieve the text and then render it. Weird rendering bugs frequently. Meanwhile, I remember reading full ebooks on my Pentium which were rendered as a single HTML file with zero lag.

Scrolling through history of a chat is masochistic. You get a web scrollbar and finding individual messages, even if you know where they are is a lottery.

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

#415

Post by hulitu » Mon, Feb 13, 2023, 9:07 PM UTC

kenjackson wrote: post #320

wvenable wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We also use it every day. That said, I feel like I know a lot of devs who think there are a lot of things that are unusable (or the equivalent). Everything from Visual Studio to the display on their iPhone to modern cinema and science fiction in general to In-and-Out burgers. As a general rule, I discount their take on pretty much anything. Is Teams great? No. Its better than what I used before it though, and its pro…

Did you use skype ?

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

#416

Post by cge » Mon, Feb 13, 2023, 9:07 PM UTC

prmoustache wrote: post #392

wvenable wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The issues sometimes aren't about teams but microsoft authentication. You are sometimes forced to use incognito mode or cannot join. Plus it doesn't work on any browser, even if said browser has capability to run it, or on mobile, unless you install their app.

This has been such a problem that, going to a significant scientific conference that was online during the pandemic, and had organizers who insisted on using Teams, the organizers asked everyone to provide a personal email address in addition to their academic one, because they had had too many problems in the past with people being unable to log in to their Teams system if their email address was associated with another university's Office 365 system.

They proceeded to primarily use Teams as a chatroom to let people know when the Zoom meetings were starting.

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

#417

Post by dghlsakjg » Mon, Feb 13, 2023, 9:07 PM UTC

wvenable wrote: post #249

dragonwriter wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Teams is minimally usable, but its pretty much worst-in-class for…everything it does. It’s two compelling selling points seem to be (1) that “nobody every got fired for buying IBM” now applies to Microsoft more than IBM, and (2) moreover, users don’t actually buy Teams qua Teams, they get a Microsoft 365 subscriptions for some of the things where Microsoft has not-worst-in-class solutions, and Teams comes along for t…

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?

Admittedly, I haven't been at a company that uses Teams since 2021: but I had to request an upgrade from an otherwise working computer since teams would max out the CPU so hard that it would throttle and occasionally shutdown. It was an older computer (2015 macbook) but was otherwise fine for dev tasks, and other videoconferencing.

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

#418

Post by LeonB » Mon, Feb 13, 2023, 9:08 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #256

phpisthebest wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Do you realize I'm the idiot that came up with live video in the browser to begin with? When I say it is broken I'm pretty serious about it: we spent a full day because there was one customer that positively insisted that we had to use their Teams setup rather than what we normally use and in the end we just gave up, it isn't worth the stress to me if there is a viable alternative (or even several). But of course if…

> Do you realize I’m the idiot who came up with live video in the browser to begin with

Ok - that really surprised me and from anyone else I would’ve dismissed it as hyperbole… after some digging I ended up reading this incredible story —

https://jacquesmattheij.com/story-behind-wwcom-camaradescom/

Amazing adventure!

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

#419

Post by Dunedan » Mon, Feb 13, 2023, 9:08 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #194

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…

I agree, the user experience of Microsoft Teams is beyond bad. Thankfully I don't have to use Microsoft Teams on a regular basis. However, some times when I had to, it wouldn't show any audio or video devices to select and consequently audio and video didn't work.

Turns out that's the behavior Microsoft Teams exhibits under Linux when it can't add inotify watches for whatever reason.

There is no visible error message of any kind in this case, just an empty list of audio and video devices. How on earth do they expect users to debug and fix that?

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

#420

Post by Scubabear68 » Mon, Feb 13, 2023, 9:08 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #194

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…

Our teams have found that it gets things done with the basics, but has no advanced anything. Chat is OK, video is OK, Files is OK, Channels are OK. But they are all basic. Things like wikis or anything more advanced is very primitive.

Plus of course some things like File are a thin facade over the horror that is Sharepoint, and you occasionally have to drop down into that swamp.

So not a horror show to me, but feels like ten years out of date or more.