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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

#551

Regardless of what you think of Teams -- I myself have had nothing but poor experiences over 2.5 years of using it daily -- it's telling that Microsoft has to require folks to use Teams. I'm sure this is just Microsoft unifying everyone on the same comms platform, but seriously, I don't know anyone who chooses Teams. I know non-tech folks who chose Outlook 365 because of familiarity and then end up on Teams because i…

If nothing else, Teams is horrendously inconsistent and one might naïvely think that MS would want to dogfood it better, with good statistics.

This HN article now has nearly 600 comments of people – mostly – griping about Teams. A large number of them are replied to with people saying "Oh, it's never done that for me!" or, alternatively, "Teams never works fully, but at least X works" being replied to by "X has literally never worked for me". They're all right. I've had vast numbers of random errors – like the application bars just disappearing, or a thousand and one "Sorry, Something Went Wrong™!" errors, but fundamentally, it's indescribably awful.

Periodically I'm asked to give feedback about how a call went. I always give one star. I'm not cruel and petty – it genuinely is always one star, where with my hardware, Zoom is pretty much real-time HD audio and video. People chop in or chop out, or I hear fan noise, or I wasn't able to join the link in Chrome because – well, it recognises that it's in Chrome but the version numbers don't match, and it thus asks me to download Chrome or Edge to join in Chrome – whatever. Microsoft must know that it's made a dog, and a very, very positive take would be that they want to make it better by having a larger base of competent developers to call upon to basically bug and betatest.

If I worked there, I'd have jumped ship at the acquisition, however...

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

#553

I don't understand most of the negative comments in this thread along the lines of "if my company would require I use Teams I'd quite on the spot". Really? an IM client is what's going to make you quit? I always thought it was amusing that old developers were super anal about vim vs emacs and saw it as a tongue in cheek but now I realize most of those people are really serious and take these things quite emotionally.…

It's a collaboration tool, not just some IM client. After 6 years of using Slack I have to use Teams now on a project I lead. Oh boy, it's so much worse. I completely agree that it can make you leave, especially when you are responsible for efficient collaboration and tool like this is constantly in the way. It discourages communication between teammates, channels and threads are a mess so everyone rather DM people directly (so transparency suffers a lot). Everyone regardless of the OS have problems getting notifications, the threads are a joke, so are the reactions. It's so hard to find anything there, channels (teams?), a message, a user. I haven't seen an integrations/bots/apps in teams, maybe they are there, but in Slack they were so useful and easy to add, that they were used so much.

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

#554

Regardless of what you think of Teams -- I myself have had nothing but poor experiences over 2.5 years of using it daily -- it's telling that Microsoft has to require folks to use Teams. I'm sure this is just Microsoft unifying everyone on the same comms platform, but seriously, I don't know anyone who chooses Teams. I know non-tech folks who chose Outlook 365 because of familiarity and then end up on Teams because i…

Sample size of 1, but... In my personal life, I got all my friends on Discord and we've been really happy with that. It's screen sharing seems tuned for video games, though, and sucks for sharing non-game applications. We all set up Teams accounts because it does so much better with screen sharing. I haven't tried Slack recently but I really disliked that I needed a different account on each server and the UI didn't…

we use discord at work and the only bad thing is the screen sharing, many times we can get away with it but if we can't we usually just jump on a free zoom call

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

#555
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.

You are not alone. I have used Teams every day at work for the past 5-7 years and have had few issues ever.

I’m always baffled by the HN hatred for Teams and the horrible experiences others have had — because I’ve experienced nothing even remotely similar.

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

#556

Regardless of what you think of Teams -- I myself have had nothing but poor experiences over 2.5 years of using it daily -- it's telling that Microsoft has to require folks to use Teams. I'm sure this is just Microsoft unifying everyone on the same comms platform, but seriously, I don't know anyone who chooses Teams. I know non-tech folks who chose Outlook 365 because of familiarity and then end up on Teams because i…

I used to work at LinkedIn (owned by microsoft) and about 2 years ago they announced engineering was switching from zoom/slack to teams. There was significant uproar and LinkedIn leadership ended up reversing the decision. To my knowledge LinkedIn engineering is still on zoom/slack.

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

#557

Regardless of what you think of Teams -- I myself have had nothing but poor experiences over 2.5 years of using it daily -- it's telling that Microsoft has to require folks to use Teams. I'm sure this is just Microsoft unifying everyone on the same comms platform, but seriously, I don't know anyone who chooses Teams. I know non-tech folks who chose Outlook 365 because of familiarity and then end up on Teams because i…

Sounds like a good idea from a compliance and risk side of things to require a particular comms platform.

If I had to choose I would pick Teams over Google Chat though

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

#558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the specific complaint against it? Better yet can you come up with tools that you use instead of Teams? Is it xoom? Slack? Discord? MS is not my favorite company but my MS Teams experience has been relatively smooth.

I am starting to fear that I am missing out on something major, because we've used Teams for years now and it works fine (on macOS) for what we do - basic chat, multiplayer powerpoint, some video calling, etc. Maybe it's a team size thing, and Teams just blows monkey chunks when you're one of fifty thousand employees at a company?

My experience is similar to yours — including at a company of over 50,000 employees.

I’m baffled as to how so many people here on HN have such horror stories with Teams, while I’ve not experienced nor heard of anything remotely so bad at the companies I’ve worked.

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

#559
post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The platform is slow > I regularly am confused by what I am meant to do, or how to resolve errors that occur; Just to provide two examples of specific complaints from the parent post.

Have the same experience: - ms teams on my windows laptop turns it into a raging heater. While i dont even have my webcam on. - ms teams is so multi-functional you can do anything with it. Office suite, create polls (that are very laggy). It is so bloated there’s clearly no straightforward UX flows. Buttons all over the place. Desktop UI feels terribly slow. - typing in chat boxes is laggy as hell. I’m not alone. My…

Opposite experience: I use Teams every single workday and have never experienced the lagginess or laptop heating you describe. I’ve never heard of any coworkers having these issue either.

It’s so strange that so many people can have completely different experiences with the same software.

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

#560

Regardless of what you think of Teams -- I myself have had nothing but poor experiences over 2.5 years of using it daily -- it's telling that Microsoft has to require folks to use Teams. I'm sure this is just Microsoft unifying everyone on the same comms platform, but seriously, I don't know anyone who chooses Teams. I know non-tech folks who chose Outlook 365 because of familiarity and then end up on Teams because i…

Sample size of 1, but... In my personal life, I got all my friends on Discord and we've been really happy with that. It's screen sharing seems tuned for video games, though, and sucks for sharing non-game applications. We all set up Teams accounts because it does so much better with screen sharing. I haven't tried Slack recently but I really disliked that I needed a different account on each server and the UI didn't…

Discord is really bad for big groups of people and even worse if you need searchable content.
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