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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 it's free, but there's a difference between "I chose an email/identity platform that I know and I guess I'll use its chat app too" and "I evaluated team chat offerings and Teams is our top pick."
Hell, at my most recent company (which was founded on O365 before I arrived) I replaced Teams chat interface with self-hosted Mattermost (Slack's HIPAA-compliant tier is way too expensive for a startup) and it was roundly loved. We did still lean on Teams for its video chat, because most of our non-tech staff know how to schedule and join video meetings, but even then the top complaint I got was from folks on Windows laptops whose Teams plugin for Outlook somehow got corrupted (or something?) and suddenly Outlook's Teams integration was gone.
Just an awful product all around -- said with no offense meant to the team building it.
_Update_: I now notice the text "for the sole purpose of video conferencing" which lines up with my use case, but still -- of all the video apps I put Teams down with Webex as "bottom of the barrel choices" due to the constant performance and functionality issues.
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...
On a regular basis I use Teams, Zoom, and Jitsi for video conferencing. Teams isn't the most troublesome of the set.
> I'm sure this is just Microsoft unifying everyone on the same comms platform, but seriously, I don't know anyone who chooses Teams.
In big companies like GitHub people don't typically choose their own video conference platform. It's picked for them.
For Microsoft I can see a huge benefit to using Teams at GitHub. That's cost. Microsoft can use Teams at cost. That's a better price that those outside Microsoft can get it. It's a better deal than paying for Zoom. At a time when expenses are being cut it's hard to justify paying for a competitors platform.
I think the biggest problem with Teams is the leadership's strategy.
They seem to be focusing on adding as many glossy features as quickly as possible. The quality, performance and consistency doesn't seem to be a point of consideration at all. Yet for a user who spends a lot of time in it each day, I really don't care about animated waves on top of my video, or this together mode. I just want it to work and not take ages to open, show stale status info until I click on a user, have choppy video, running my mac's fans on full blast, and be so cluttery that it's almost impossible to find back information we shared in chats in the past. And the worst thing for me: the information density is so low. These big bubbles around everything seem to care more about looking pretty than to actually show information and cause way too much scrolling. Slack does this so much better.
The Teams guys can learn so much from their VS Code colleagues. It's really weird how one company can produce one of the worst infamous electron apps and also the gold standard best one at the same time.
Ps and please, tell me what's going wrong. "Something went wrong" is ridiculous. And let me log into multiple tenants at the same time without switching.
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 excited to show off their setups. All of them said that it allowed them to go remote during the pandemic and has helped them stay flexible once movement and office work started returning to normal.
The way they use it is also interesting. It’s not just chat. They integrate a whole host of apps directly into it including sales pipeline tools, document management, and project management. We are not talking about chat bots either. We are taking integrated apps+interfaces. All their meeting happen in MS teams itself. The multinational has a non trivial arrangements using multiple instances where some are separated for client convos and others are for different teams.
I use the term interesting because the way they use it is nothing like how I’ve ever seen any slack being used. And I don’t think I’ll ever see slack supporting that. Putting it out there because I think there’s a world of use cases for ms teams that doesn’t involve people being forced to use a bad thing.
>it's telling that Microsoft has to require folks to use Teams.
Not really I think, considering that MS bought GitHub, with all of its already existing culture. I see this move as them homogenizing the infrastructure. And also not willing to pay to another company for a product that's actually their competition.
I have a surface pro 7,running windows 11. Video calls in teams will reliably cause an actual BSOD (blue screen of death for the younger readers) , and my other coworker with the same hardware experiences the same issue. I don't have issues in zoom or Google meet, but teams video calls will reliably cause an honest to God BSOD. The first couple of times it happened I was a little bit nostalgic, I hadn't seen that since XP and even with XP it was rare.
I don't know how I could have a better environment to run teams, I'm using Microsoft hardware, running a Microsoft camera driver, on a Microsoft OS, using a Microsoft messaging platform. Absolutely ridiculous, thankfully we only have one external vendor who uses teams. Ironically, that vendor is an oracle provider, so their whole existence just revolves around hideous software.
Teams makes no sense. The audio on it is objectively terrible for calls. Zoom is crystal clear [Its UI has issues though] but on teams I have to actually move my head closer to the computer speakers. Another interesting aspect of it is that it appears actually limit the volume. I plug in better speakers during a call and no change. On zoom it just auto sense the new speakers and boom louder.
I don't understand why teams constantly asks me if I want to upload a new version of a document when I upload a document, the answer is always yes, that's why I am uploading it. I dont care what you do with the original. I am sure there is a way to fix this but I don't have the energy to figure it out, I just want it to work like slack. Why does it have a separate notification area for people using emojis that makes me click outside of the chat to remove the notification?
The entire thing is so far removed from intuitive and "it just works" that I almost think its intentional.
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...
> 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")
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.
To everyone at GitHub: I’m so sorry. I don’t mean this in a clever way, either. Teams is awful and it will make your lives worse to one degree or another.
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, Discord to an extent, and Zoom for video calling, how has Microsoft allowed this festering wound to languish? Surely they could afford to revamp this product and reap the rewards of people not hating using their tools?
Teams for Linux, when I inspect it with htop, is actually running a process called "Skype" in the background.
I think that explains some of the crappiness of the UX! (It has required some serious hacking to make it even functional for me.)
Since then my team has swapped to using Discord for what we're doing. It sounds a bit weird to use a Gamer tool at work but it's actually been pretty great since we run an Open Source AI + Security community[0]. Having everybody in one place is great!
For anybody else that's building dev tools or that's doing Open Source work, I'd really recommend Discord. The video quality is great for screen sharing (biggest problem with Google Meet) and the client is significantly better than Zoom (which chugs constantly on Linux). Plus it's cheap! (~$25/month for the whole dev team)
Using it on the browser:
- it's wonky
- 1 on 1 calls not always share the screen and I need to hang up, refresh the browser and call again
- translation stopped working both ways. Once a text is translated it doesn't go back to its original language
- it's a mess if you make a lot of group calls with different people. You end up having trillions of opened chat. I ended up pinning the main ones to keep them at the top and ignore the rest.
- code snippets are just awful. They are a box inside of a box and you always need to click on expand to see the code.
- music when you are on hold can't be stopped which can make you crazy. I always hang up or mute the tab
- group video calls don't have an option to see everybody in the same screen. Now it's like divided in pages
And I could go on and on. Discord is thousands of times better than this.
"for the sole purpose of video conferencing". They're still using slack for day-to-day...
No surprise here, but I wish almost anyone else purchased github instead of Microsoft. One can hope the founders will eventually pull a "MySQL" --> "mariadb" :)
I wonder when github developers will be forced to moved from Linux to Windows ?
One thing to keep in mind is that there's a security angle to this as well. It is beneficial for a company to centralize all of its communication through one service which can be audited for security and also support all the features required to meet the internal Requirements. Having multiple tools multiplies the work needed to maintain security standards.
Of course, I'm not saying that teams is more secure than competing products or that this will automatically improve security. The point is that it's a single option that's easier to manage.
Outside of security, this also applies to cooperation between MS and Github teams. Teams helps with keeping common calendars, meeting invites, recordings and transcripts. Having more tools means that an adapter needs to exist between them and might be disincentivising communication, since engineers would prefer to work on their tasks rather than work around fixing soft problems.
That’s plenty of time to dust off the resume and start pounding the pavement! Very generous of Microsoft to give so much notice!
Edit: for those who may think I’m overreacting to a small change in tooling, I offer this classic essay [1]. It explains the reasoning behind leaving much better than I could!
[1] https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...
Teams is just bland. That’s it really. We moved from Slack to Teams and we had a huge drop in inter-team communication to the point we moved back. For remote company it’s hugely important.
A lack of thread conversations was a huge issue too.
The only plus side was video conferencing was rock solid and office integration was good, as expected.
Teams is dogshit in general, but the unforgivable part is that sometimes messages just don't show up until you restart the client.
It's hard to know when this is happening, unless someone follows up on or refers to the missing message(s), but once you catch it a couple times it's hard to have any faith in the software at all.
We've been told that this has been fixed, and it does seem more rare now, but I still end up restarting the app regularly out of caution. Which is a pretty pathetic thing for an enterprise tool from a company like ms.
I’m extremely picky - as long as my livelihood is not threatened and I actually have options. For me, being forced to use Windows, Teams, Skype, Java/Spring, or Jira (among others) would be a dealbreaker (again, unless that job might be among the few available to help me feed my family).
I spent some time learning in the structured environment of a large company, which I recommend everyone do for a first and/or second job.
Now, at this point in my career, I tend to gravitate toward smaller companies; my current company (less than 40 employees) ordered me a high-spec Framework Laptop (I put Fedora on it) and $900 ultra-wide monitor without hesitation. I believe I was the first dev at the company to ask about a Sublime license (in a Slack message), and within minutes I got an email from SublimeHQ with the license key.
Of course, YMMV, but if you want and are ready for flexibility, you might do best by avoiding big companies - and even startups where leadership has intense personalities and overly-strong opinions.
Teams isn’t great compared to Slack for async text chats, however the video conferencing is actually quite good and I didn’t have any real issues moving from Zoom to it.
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.
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...
For my current project I have to use Teams on a Mac. Priblems that I encounter daily:
1. I am invisible in conference calls, quiting and starting Teams sometimes helps.
2. Messages refuse to load. I get a notification but no message appears.
3. Recent messages that were already loaded take ages to appear when switching chats
4. When switching chats I get put at a random place in the timeline.
5. Collegues do not receive my messages.
6. The text starts to jiggle a few pixels up and down. When this happens I cannot copy anything.
7. I get a missed call notification without having got the call.
Speaking of text and copying, I really dislike how often when I select a specific part of the text and paste it, it contains the username and the timestamp, I want this 0% of the time. Also their seems to be a issue with the font rendering like it is the wrong DPI.
The software contains so many rough edges, things like the alignment of text jumping all over the place because the diration of the call text changes size while counting.
Truly, and honestly, this software makes me feel miserabel. I would be hesitant accepting a project that requires me to use Teams in the future.
Seems natural to be forced to eat the owners dog food. At least they don’t have to deal with the Microsoft sales reps.
I don't get the hate for Teams. Working from home, it's the best tool I can think of:
- because the app is so slow, our IT suggested to use the web version instead, as such it can't detect the away/available status properly, meaning no one can see if you're in front of your computer working on some other windows, or actually away from your computer - the web app keeps getting disconnected, and fails to deliver messages and notification in time. It also fails to indicate that it's failing. It's therfore customary for message to take several hours to be sent to/received by the other party. It's the perfect excuse for ignoring your colleagues for hours, and be like "Oops. Teams, am I right?", wether you were actually around, or again, doing something else entirely.
Maybe I'm nuts, but I see almost zero appreciable difference between any of the most common chat or video conference platforms. They all have some little quirks or bonus features, but 99% of the time I'm only using the core features that they all do the same. Slack is absurdly expensive for what it does. Slack Pro is $12.50/person/mo. It's the same price for O365 which includes chat, video and the entire Office suite.
MS Teams is so bad that if an employer forced me to use it, I'd resign immediately. I feel sorry for all the folks at Github being tortured in this way.
I don’t know much about Teams (we’re a Google Workspace/Meet shop) but I know they are selling all sorts of crazy access rights packages because any given Teams group I meet with, if they send the invite, it’s a different connection experience. You need an account. You need an account on their domain. You don’t need an account, but you need a guest account. You need your own account with Microsoft. You need a user name. You don’t need a username. It works on my phone, or not. It works in the browser, or not. It works in the desktop app, or not.
What. The. Hell?!
Immediate resignation reason and turns out the ones who got recently laid off are the real winners as they walk away with a severance package at least.
This is like being acquired by IBM and being forced to use Lotus Notes and Sametime. You must eat your own dogfood..
What's the problem with "4 yr old laptops"? My colleagues and I use Teams on computers 1-5 years old and haven't heard about any issues.
The main annoying thing is Teams has no markdown support.
What they call markdown support is still a broken "wysiwyg"
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.
We have to use Teams here where I work, and for the most part it's okish. However, a long standing bug in the Mac version that's really annoying is using CMD+TAB to switch to the app really doesn't work. I think there is some sort of hidden window that the app spawns so when you try to switch to it, it technically does, but nothing is there. I've seen fixes that instruct you to use the native Mac notification system vs. the Teams app notifications, but the issue still persists.
Let's be honest, Slack sucks too. All of the solutions in this space suck.
Similarly, Jira sucks, but all alternatives to Jira also suck.
It seems kind of silly for Github to pay for another solution when they could use the in-house solution (which is Teams). This is what you have to compromise on when you let another company acquire you. People who don't like it need to leave -- that might not be how the world ought to work, but that's the reality and nothing anyone feels or says will change it.
I use Teams a lot with some Zoom. I've also used all the competing tools - Slack, whatever the current Google branding gives, among others. They all kinda suck. But hang on, am I asking too much? Is this suckiness because it's hard to do well? Oh, and add in that we all need to use it, all day, every day, so _any_ friction really annoys.
Distributed, connected collaboration in real-time, at (massive) scale - it's a big functional domain. Offering video, chat, document storage, sharing and collaboration, as well as project management and integration into a plethora of other apps and tools. This is surely a hard space.
Just look at apps that inhabit much, much simpler function spaces - say, Twitter, given the start point of the discussion. It doesn't get that glare of all day, everyday work use. It doesn't have the function and criticality to people's day. Twitter is down? It's just not a thing 99.9% of people will freak out over. Post-pandemic, Teams or Zoom is down means loss of a sales, key workshops stranding participants, distributed Teams losing comms during critical releases, and the list goes on.
Unpopular opinion number one: Teams is not that bad. At least it can do video calls properly which is not something I would say of Slack.
Unpopular opinion number two: Pidgin was better and I don't why we all decided as an industry to go to these ridiculously heavy memory hog electron based clients. I use Slack from Pidgin to this day: https://github.com/dylex/slack-libpurple
What most people in this thread don't realize is that Teams, like most products sold to CIO, don't have to be good for it to succeed.
Instead of an stellar ux, Microsoft is focusing on what sells it - that seamless centered experience that unifies SharePoint, Power, replaces slack and Discord and everything else in a single app.
It sucks, but it sells, because people buying it aren't the core users.
Next you must use office 365 for all documents and we will be moving to Sharepoint.
Having read a number of GitHub incident reviews I'm really curious how this will impact ChatOps. They're one of the first companies I saw that seemed to use ChatOps for almost everything, including things like updating BGP routing. Do they have 7 months to migrate everything to Teams or will they keep some Slack workspaces around just for ChatOps?
Dissenting opinion? I'm a Linux person through and through, my entire household runs on Linux. But at work we have Windows laptops, to run the Windows office tools - most of the real work is done remotely on Linux machines.
I'm not particularly fond of Outlook. It just somehow doesn't "think" like I do. It does work. But I like Teams. We use it for most 1:1 calls, all kinds of impromptu meetings, scheduled meetings, remote screen-shared co-work, and of course text chats. It may be a bloated monster but that's on capable laptop that's doing little real work so that doesn't matter. It has some minor bugs but they aren't a big source of frustation in the bigger picture.
I tried it on my Linux machine once. It was a bloated, slow Electron app. Maybe the Windows one is "more native" or the computer is that much better, but... no issues.
Is this front page worthy news for HN? That’s just whining over a valid corporate policy.
GitHub was bought by Microsoft, now GitHub employees have to use Microsoft tools. What’s newsworthy here?
Also is « 4 years old laptops » supposed to be impressive? Like you’re developing on a dinosaur or something? A 4 year old laptop for most development work is completely fine.
I see some super hot takes in here. Teams is not ideal, but it does seem to work for us. In total, I spend about 3-4 hours in the actual Teams UI per week, so maybe I don't have enough exposure to lose my mind over this.
We've used other messaging tools in the past - Mattermost, Slack, Skype, etc. For better or worse, Teams seems to be sticking and we are all way too busy to worry about whatever horrific implications this brings.
One thing I'd consider in all of this: Products like Teams are entirely about connecting other people (and businesses) to you. A vast majority of the decision to use that product is going to come from non-developers and other assholes in a typical org chart. Your front-line, minimum-wage employees are not going to have the patience or skills to configure their own federated IRC instances in order to correspond with your development team.
We used Teams for video occasionally back in 2019 before the pandemic. It was pretty unreliable, and had much better success with BlueJeans or Zoom. If there were more than a couple people on camera, Teams couldn't handle it the same way Zoom or BlueJeans could. I haven't taken a second look since then.
Webex/Outlook/Teams/Zoom/Slack/Gmail - None of these are any inferior or superior to each other (maybe not at the start when the product was launched - there could be big feature/usability gap - but once they are matured which most of these - not much differentiators to matter) and literally none of these products to be used at any corporations are evaluated by their technical or usability excellence - it is simply vetoed or decided by the corporation CEO know which vendor's CEO/CFO well and what both companies agree to barter (use my product and in exchange I will use your product in my company kind of thing). For a end user in any company - unless you are super advance user or some niche feature - any of these software should just work well for day to day usage.