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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

#561

Post by jacquesm »

cloogshicer wrote: post #395
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…

What makes me very angry about Google Meet is that you can't configure it so that guests can just join without asking. This means if you have a meeting with a lot of people, you constantly have to babysit the "Someone is asking to join" box, as people come in late. Also, this box has got to be the worst UI design I've seen in a while, since it even blocks yourself from muting/unmuting yourself and disabling the camer…

Yes, agreed that is a nuisance. But fortunately that is just a click, it gets a bit frustrating when there are > 10 participants and when people join late.

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

#562

Post by lmm »

heleninboodler wrote: post #497
X-Istence wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This is the real reason people hate it with such a passion. It's just got so many baffling/annoying misfeatures that you could make lists about it endlessly. Have they changed the thing where you only see a circle with people's initials during meetings and you have to click on them to see their actual names? Edit: note that zoom has some equally-baffling and irritating design choices, but at least it performs well an…

> It's also damning that the list of things I hate about it hasn't changed in the three years I've been using it heavily

Honestly, I'll take a program with a bunch of consistent downsides over one that has fewer downsides but comes up with new ones in each version.

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

#563

Post by wvenable »

Aeolun wrote: post #382
alerighi wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

It works mostly fine. It’s also the application I use basically every minute of the day. ‘Mostly fine’ just doesn’t cut it. When we’re talking about an IDE I can just bring my own, but for chat it doesn’t work like that.

That's a fair point. I think if I had to be on a chat/video app every minute of the day, I'd hang myself. For the average use that I have, it's fine. If I had to use it ceaselessly, I might have a different opinion.

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

#564

Post by quicklime »

javier123454321 wrote: post #289
ygjb wrote: 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.

I've found Teams acceptable for video calls, including large-scale ones. Some of the Office integration is quite nice, e.g. PowerPoint Live. But what I really hate about it is the chat functionality. Very basic person-to-person DMs work ok, but it doesn't scale up to larger groups. Some UI complaints:

- When someone messages a group that you're part of, you get a notification. This makes it hard to distinguish between someone trying to get ahold of you, and the background chatter in a group. Slack just has better defaults here: it'll notify you for DMs, and use a more subtle message count for channel messages (unless someone @'s you).

- When someone calls you on Teams, it's like they're using a telephone from the 1990s. You could be in the middle of another meeting, and your computer will play a ringtone, because SOMEONE IS CALLING, URGENTLY!!! So you have to quickly excuse yourself from the current meeting and pick up the phone (and probably find out that it was nothing urgent anyway). Slack's UI for huddles are a lot better here, and the smooth jazz is just a nice touch :)

- If you set up a "team" within MS Teams, it's supposed to set up a place where people from that team can collaborate. The UI for it is just awful though, and I've never seen teams stay engaged through this. Slack channels are just far more intuitive, and remove a lot of the friction from collaborating with your teammates.

There are more issues, e.g. Teams isn't friendly to my laptop's fan, and it keeps screwing up my bluetooth settings. Although I'm not sure if Apple is actually to blame for those ones.

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

#565

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

generalk wrote: post #421

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…

> it's telling that Microsoft has to require folks to use Teams.

Most people, when they get comfortable with something, are averse to change. Even if the thing they would change to is better than what they have, they still won't want to learn a new thing.

Not saying that's the case here. But without real data to lead a decision, people just do what they prefer, rather than what's better. (I use both Slack and Teams daily within my company, and while I prefer Slack, I could probably learn to deal with Teams)

A large organization may have to force a change in order to reap benefits. And there are significant benefits to unifying communications. There are also workarounds and alternative solutions, so you usually need to invest some serious time in evaluating a huge switch to know what's best. Or, you can just make a decision, pull the trigger, and live with the consequences (an "executive decision")

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

#566

Post by kjellsbells »

It's really unremarkable that the company that built Teams would eventually require all employees at their acquisitions to use it over a competitor. Leading aside the obvious cost benefit, even the howls from users are useful: now your PM know what to build next.

But the real deal with something like Teams is that it is not just a chat and call app. The vision is clear: Teams is where people will spend their days. The app integration with workflows like approval of vacation or invoices; the third party plugin ecosystem; the deep support for regulated markets like banking and government...it feels like a glacier that is going to grind slowly but eventually reshape the landscape.

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

#567

Post by culopatin »

mrguyorama wrote: post #476
culopatin wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that keeping track of chats was as much of a pain as it is in teams. Things that were absolutely not a problem in MSN messenger in 2004

Every single chat I had in skype for business caused a transcript to be emailed to me.

Like I want more emails. Why did Skype start a blank chat every time I talked to someone? Close the chat? Bam, go find that transcript

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

#568

Post by X-Istence »

heleninboodler wrote: post #497
X-Istence wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This is the real reason people hate it with such a passion. It's just got so many baffling/annoying misfeatures that you could make lists about it endlessly. Have they changed the thing where you only see a circle with people's initials during meetings and you have to click on them to see their actual names? Edit: note that zoom has some equally-baffling and irritating design choices, but at least it performs well an…

> Have they changed the thing where you only see a circle with people's initials during meetings and you have to click on them to see their actual names?

Nope.

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

#569

Post by brarsanmol »

matwood wrote: post #276
samiru wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> My company forces us to use Google Chat. I would take Teams any day. For video or text chat or both? Meet + Slack is my preferred solution. IMO Google Meet is the easiest to use video meeting software. Click link and the person is dropped in the meeting. Slack is the best text chat. Zoom is fine. Teams is a dumpster fire on my mac. I have a couple external meetings that are Teams and I have to remember start trying…

Ironically I have had the exact opposite experience, it's interesting to see how the app behaves so randomly.

I used Teams on Windows for work last year and the performance was horrible on a relatively beefy workstation machine, getting into a call or loading a chat would have a visible lag or delay.

But using it on my personal Mac it was a fairly okay experience, just a run of the mill app I would say.

Perhaps the difference is O365 (Enterprise) Teams versus Teams for Life (Personal)?

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

#570

Post by Jcowell »

bombcar wrote: post #505
dbancajas wrote: post #470

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?

It’s been a year since I’ve used teams but my biggest gripe is search. Conversations are contextual. My work often requires me to find conversations that happens months ago. When unused Skype I could god into my email and recover it that way.

With teams , back when I used it, you could search no problem. What you couldn’t do is go back to a conversation and get the context. I’m not sure how on earth you ship a search feature without the ability to go back to that message In a chat application.

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