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Comment by atraac | Hacker News Reader

I have to work with Teams every day and I can honestly say I've never worked with anything that bad. The UI is really slow, it's hard to find things, Notification settings do not work at all, I had to mute everything because otherwise I'd get pushes everywhere at the same time, even if I literally had the conversation open. App constantly breaks, doesn't load images until reset, has insane input lag(try pressing enter to send the message and start typing the next one...) and ram usage often skyrockets. I can often fetch a coffe when I switch tabs between Chats and Teams. Their API is also convoluted and not thought-out which made making a simple Slackbot clone very difficult. I think the biggest part of its success is the fact that it's just provided with Office 365. I honestly don't see how anyone would pay for this as a standalone product...

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Could not agree more, it one of the worst apps I’ve been forced to use over the past year, unreliable as hell, hungry on resources, deforms code within code blocks, lots of audio problems, hard to share links of editing meetings with people, what the heck is up with its non-native notifications and the beyond all that the thing is just damn visually unappealing (to me).

I can confidently say that I literally never participated in a Teams call that didn't have audio issues to the point of some people being unintelligible, even if audio with the same people but different conferencing works just fine.

Last year I have regularly had calls with participants from US, Italy, Finland and Australia. Never had any issues so go figure...

With audio I can't say I had problems on Teams but there are a lot of things that are poorly designed and there's very little hope for an upgrades

My company has completed Teams voice implementations at multiple orgs. Obviously the endpoints and ISPs factor in, so there are many variables. Having good Internet service for team members (however a company wants to provide/subsidize that) is key, keeping latency and jitter under control is key, along with prioritizing traffic on the LAN (or obviously WAN if you can - e.g. MPLS). People try to skip that last step a lot but it makes or breaks a good implementation. IME, Teams voice is fundamentally a stable phone system if the network conditions allow it to be. It's hard to transplant to a random employee's home or a hotel ballroom unless you have some assurance of the service quality there (hotel internet not prioritizing, kids gaming while mom is trying to run calls all off the crap ISP router, etc).

Interesting perspective. Of course, these days virtually everyone uses Teams from their home office. The issues you mention makes Teams more like a SIP PBX (special care & attention required from the networks people; hypothetically could, but won't, work over Internet or VPN) and less like a conferencing tool.

While most have no problems, managing service perception requires addressing the few that do. You can wing it and say yeah everyone has broadband so they should be fine, and the office has mass b/w on a DIA circuit so should be fine, but when things aren't fine these are the elements we look at. Teams has been a solid voice platform thus far for our customers - speaking on basis of comparing to other customers using other cloud PBX solutions, and has a lot of benefits when customer is already invested in MS land.

Statistically speaking have you considered that your connection or hardware might have been the issue?

I've been using Teams for years, and though I had an issue on a call with one guy the other day, otherwise I'm in at least one meeting with ~5+ folk daily and it works consistently.

I have gigabit fibre and an NVIDIA RTX 2080 Ti.

Teams still can't keep up with my 720p webcam without the preview dropping to 15fps and lagging so badly that I get distracted by the delay between my motions and the movement of my preview in the corner.

In 2020, six months into a pandemic where everyone is working from home and Microsoft's highest priority ought to be on their video conferencing collaboration tool -- but clearly isn't -- is fucking nuts.

Oh, and speaking of the audio, Teams really ought to get decent noise removal, echo cancellation, and/or automatic muting.

> speaking of the audio, Teams really ought to get decent noise removal, echo cancellation, and/or automatic muting.

This covers any/all products and is black magic:

https://krisp.ai

As for quality of meetings, just some counter anecdata...

We moved a many thousand person enterprise across dozens of offices into Teams. The business in question is a meetingful culture, all day every day, and for the most part do not experience the issues you describe.

The issues we do see tend to be (a) echo cancellation from participants who connect from a device and a telephone simultaneously and leave audio turned on on both, (b) consistently the same humans from the same locations, who have similar quality problems on Zoom or WebEx, suggesting what the common element may be.

Worse than teams is Skype Business even worse is something called Yammer. But I share the opinion that Microsoft Teams is poorly designed. I frequently get confused as to where to find something, it is slow and buggy. Post pandemic this has been our main communication tool. But one cannot expect much from Microsoft. Sometimes they do luck out with a good product and that is rare and it doesn't last, they eventually cripple everything.

> I have to work with Teams every day and I can honestly say I've never worked with anything that bad.

They don't target users, they target the people making purchases. A feature goes in the marketing materials. Usability does not. "A full replacement for Slack!" works well because the guy making the decision doesn't use Slack or Teams and probably doesn't even know what they do.

Back when the world started falling apart, my university took a survey about remote education. As part of my feedback I told them they need to get better tools, because college students don't want to use clumsy enterprise software like Office 365. Obviously nothing came of it (and I didn't expect anything, but someone needed to tell them).

This, enterprise software seems to be largely targeted to make a good impression on the golf course, not to work well in practice and show sympathy to it's users.

Yeah ... I can run Discord, Zoom, Meet - anything really, and my system doesn't have any performance problems. I open up Teams and usage jumps to 100% (MBP 13" i7 2016)

Maybe they fixed something because I'm currently in a training session with about 25 people with a bunch of breakout rooms and shared docs and CPU is hovering around the 3% mark (but we mandated that you only turn your video/mic on when speaking) and it's pretty snappy.

Still a bit confusing trying to find things but to be fair I have the same issue with most of these platforms.

I think this area will see an increasing amount of innovation and it's anybody's guess as to who will come out on top in the end.

What’s your OS and CPU/GPU? Wouldn’t be unheard of for MS to heavily optimize for newer instruction sets

Windows 10 on an i7 (Dell). It's a work machine.

Have you reported this? I have never noticed it take something other than 0-1% cpu unless I'm actually doing something interactive like being on a call. I'm sure there are tons of bugs that cause this (which is bad) but that's different and much better to it being something inherent in how the App works.

I guess this largely depends on what platform you're on or if you take meetings.

My Linux and MacOS machines behave exactly as the parent suggests, it completely melts my laptops (and my laptops are not slouchy, i7-2020 MBP and a Precision 5520 with a Xeon E3-1505m).

In fact, it's often the case that after a meeting teams will continue using 100% of a CPU core until it's restarted.

Perhaps it's better in Windows?

It seemed to struggle after a video call for me. I tried to persevere & took to restarting the native app after every call for a bit, however on Linux you can't screen-share a single application (only an entire desktop).

Due to this, and as the notification system is designed by a sadist, I switched to using it in a browser, which unfortunately means you can only see one person at a time on calls for some reason.

It is now not uncommon for me to join calls twice at once from browser/app each, and juggle audio/speaker/camera settings for a bit to do demo's, then killing the native app.

I can at least get native notifications & not convert my PC to a space heater this way, but it's still pure bullshit.

I had a brief hope when I found some reference to native notifications in a config file, but that was a dead end.

CPU usage on windows isn't a problem as far as I have heard. RAM usage is, with 0.5-1Gb being par for the course. That's no worse than Slack et.al though.

there is an unacknowledged but reported issue in macos related to the "new meeting" experience, which in most versions is disablable. there are also some common issues with specific gpus, but again no acknowledgement beyond a common help suggestion to disable "gpu acceleration". if you're stuck using it and struggling, see if you can find a setting to disable the new popout conversation/meeting experience.

I am running teams now and all my other tools slack office atom git hub and cpu sitting at 10/11%.

Search in Teams is beyond dreadful, trying to find items in old conversations is pointless. I end up scrolling back and back. Which is infuriating as nothing is cached so Teams is constantly downloading

Which is infuriating as nothing is cached so Teams is constantly downloading

Search far back into history and Teams will load all that past content, then not release it when you're done with the search. So it just bloats in memory. It is caching, but just not in a way that's useful at all.

It is? The only reason I think teams is sort of bearable is that at least search works more or less as expected.

I have to work with Teams every day and I can honestly say I've never worked with anything that bad. The UI is really slow, it's hard to find things,

Try this: say something in a channel, then click away to another channel. A few seconds later the first channel will go into a bold font indicating new activity there. Click back again and that new activity is... your own comment.

I could also add to that list that they probably copied the buggy call code from Skype so I have the exact same Bluetooth issues and crappy sound as Skype.

They definitely have some Skype underpinnings. If you link to a chat thread the link says something like @skype.thread.

That makes sense, I'm not surprised much, the audio quality and bugs are the same on Teams. Not sure why they've done that, Skype has tons of reliability issues, maybe they are not aware of how bad it really is.

That surprises me because Teams is not based on Skype nor derived from it. Teams was an acquisition by Microsoft.

It also has the base background noise, wich made me stop using Skype back in the day.

Weird

We are using it as remote platform for our online classes and it feels stable but the UI's workflow seems to be not the best.

Agreed. We used to use Azure too and my perception of Microsoft is that it is still a company that produces mediocre offerings. Their products do 80% of everything, badly (but they tick the check marks) and they still don’t have taste as Jobs said decades ago.

My favourite issue with Teams was that we would sometimes receieve messages from colleagues out of order, and without any notification. The UI would happily - and silently - insert N lines of conversation above the last line you've read. Quite often the delay could be in the minutes. We figured this out after many frustrated sessions of "but I already gave that context / sent that info". This didn't happen very often, but even just two or three shaky days in a quarter left us with a bad feeling. If you can't trust something as simple as chat delivery, it doesn't give a great feeling.

Still an improvement over the abomination known as Skype for Business

> I honestly don't see how anyone would pay for this as a standalone product...

Most people don’t. Or they pay very little compared to something like Slack. Microsoft provides lots of incentives for Enterprise EA customers.

Teams also works with enterprise PBX and hybrid environments, which is lucrative for enterprise customers.

I don’t like Teams personally but I understand why companies choose it. Better this than Skype for Business.

Indeed, it's absolute garbage. The the absolute worst of Microsoft software culture distilled into one garbage application.

Another thing I love is having Teams, Skype, and Skype for Business being three entirely separate networks for calling, in spite of being owned by the same conglomerate.

What a time to be alive.

UI is not only slow but horrible. Try to distinguish between starting a new thread or replying to the one above. And its mobile app is the worst pile of crap I've ever seen.

At least for the desktop application they fixed this 10 days ago (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/what-s-new-in-mic...)

> I have to work with Teams every day and I can honestly say I've never worked with anything that bad.

Strange how a company with the resources that MS have can't make a decent product, but I guess it is par for the course. I guess what is more fascinating is how people are willing to pay for the garbage that MS makes.

Teams is bad for the same reason that JIRA is bad.

Our CIO doesn’t understand why we’d all rather use Slack, since he isn’t involved in the message/group hell that is teams.

I think it's much better than Google Chat, and I enjoyed it more, than using Slack, though. I hope Teams gets more popular. I wish I could stop using any these kind of apps and just can go back to using email so I can decide when to respond to mails :(

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