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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

#691

Post by willhslade »

This is my current list of complaints. If I'm wrong about anything and there are settings that I can change, enlighten me.

Copy + Paste sucks and isn't consistent. On my machine, if you copy a message, it includes a header, indicating who said it and when. I can't change this behavior in settings, and, infuriatingly, this doesn't happen on other people's machines in my organization.

My biggest complaint is that the screen sharing functionality is broken in surprising and interesting ways. Let me count them. One: I cannot always reliably control another person's machine. Two: When I type on another person's machine, the input is in the controlled machine's keyboard. Three: when I hit a hotkey (ctrl+n in Excel for a new workbook) when I am controlling another person's machine, the hotkey fires twice: once in the controlled application, and once in Teams itself. Again, there is no setting for this. Four: I have at least one person in my organization whose Teams freezes when you try to remotely control his machine.

Lastly, I have Teams on my phone and on my work laptop. Calls ring on both devices. I have no desire to ring on my phone and AFAIK there isn't a setting to force it to ring only on certain devices.

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

#692

Post by Marsymars »

ragingroosevelt wrote: post #492
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…

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…

Conversely, my friend group is mostly on Discord for group chats, and it’s the least favourite chat program I regularly use.

I’m not interested in the constant upsells to their paid service, and I find the client fairly unpleasant to use with its lack of configurability (like I can’t even make the window as narrow as I want, there’s a minimum width to it that’s way too wide).

And Discord’s pretty hostile to third-party clients, so I’m stuck using this client that I don’t like.

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

#693

Post by raghukolluru »

denysvitali wrote: post #503
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…

Shameless plug: that's why we started FossTeams [1]. As most of us are forced to work with this thing, the least we can do is to find a workaround for the problem somehow... [1]: https://github.com/fossteams

Have you considered using official Teams API? https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/resources/teams-...

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

#694

Post by raghukolluru »

denysvitali wrote: post #503
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…

Shameless plug: that's why we started FossTeams [1]. As most of us are forced to work with this thing, the least we can do is to find a workaround for the problem somehow... [1]: https://github.com/fossteams

Have you considered using official Teams Graph API as your backend layer? https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/resources/teams-...

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

#695

Post by JohnFen »

brmgb wrote: post #689
nstart wrote: post #616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fwiw, I do know quite a few companies outside the tech space that use, and even love teams. These are the ones where I have personally gotten to see how they use teams: 2 car sale companies. 1 Accounting shop. 1 ultra large company that owns multiple types of businesses across 4 different countries. A few real estate businesses. The vast majority of people using it have said they are happy and several have even been…

Yes, that's how most people use MS Teams. It's extremely useful. The sharing space for documents is good. Collaborative editing in Office is good. Conferencing is good. Presenting from Powerpoint is good. It's the same thing in every discussion involving Teams: most HN readers don't realise just how unusual the tools they use and what they want are with regards to the average job.

> most HN readers don't realise just how unusual the tools they use and what they want are with regards to the average job.

Probably because it literally doesn't matter what experience other have. The only thing that matters to me about a tool is if it's helping or hurting.

Teams does both, which I consider damning because there are other tools available that are much lighter on the "hurting" side.

But companies don't actually seem to care about things like that. They see that they are getting Teams "for free", and so that's what we're forced to use.

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

#696

Post by JohnFen »

luckman212 wrote: post #584
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 boring reading comments like these. Really? 2.5 years of " nothing but poor experiences"? I have to ask: what the hell is wrong with your computer? I started using Teams heavily in 2020 and yes, back then it was unequivocally the worst of the bunch. But I've seen it make great strides, and it's been many months, perhaps years since I've really had any problems with it. Audio, video, screen sharing, PSTN dial-in,…

True, Teams isn't as awful as it was in 2020. But it's still pretty bad, and it's a bad that is foisted on many of us. That makes putting up with it even more irritating than it might otherwise be.

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

#697

Post by JohnFen »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #684
analog31 wrote: post #610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People love change. Look how Google, Amazon, and social media took the world by storm. And pocket calculators, smart phones, large screen TV's, the list goes on. People like changes that benefit them. On the other hand, probably the #1 user request for enterprise software is: Please don't change anything. This tells you something about the software. Common reasons are: * The last major change broke everything and we…

Another way to put it is, people follow the path of least resistance. If they can still make an old thing work, and adopting the new thing seems like a chore, they'll keep the old thing. OTOH, if they see the new thing will greatly ease their life, the path of least resistance is the new thing. Of course they mostly do this for short-term personal gains. For new solutions that seem like a chore to adopt and only have…

Change is painful. It's costly, and comes with risk.

People will embrace it happily, though, when the benefit of doing so clearly exceeds the pain it brings. When you see people resisting change, it's because they don't see that great of a benefit.

This strikes me as a rational position to take.

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

#698

Post by JohnFen »

ygjb wrote: post #209
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.

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…

> If my employer required me to use it, I would immediately find another job.

There are many hills I'm willing to die on, but the use of Teams isn't one of them. Obviously, since I'm forced to use it at my current position and haven't quit over it.

I do avoid touching it to the greatest degree possible, though.

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

#699

Post by JohnFen »

addandsubtract wrote: post #362
javier123454321 wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 feel like a lot of it comes down to which system & client people use. If you're on PC or macOS and using the desktop client, you're probably having a good experience (as long as you only have one account). If you're on Linux or use the web version, you're probably going to have a bad time.

Huh. I'm on a Windows PC using the desktop client with one account, and I don't have a good experience with it. I was thinking about trying out the web version in the hopes it might be an improvement, but I guess not.

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

#700

Post by JohnFen »

dbancajas wrote: post #470
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…

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.

The majority of my issues are around its user interface. A gazillion problems there, from discoverability problems to basic things like the inability to shrink the window down to a reasonable size.

But there are other issues, too. In meetings (about 12 people at a time), the video gets terrible. People randomly getting kicked out of the meetings are a fairly common experience. At least 3 days a week, people have problems joining the meeting.

We tend to budget the first ten minutes of every meeting as disposable time, so that whatever the problem of the day with Teams is can be worked out enough that we can finally get everyone in the meeting.

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