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Comment by 0xbadcafebee | Hacker News Reader

It's hard to understand why Teams is so bad. They have all these engineers, and it's not like it's difficult to make a chat program. Teleconferencing, sure, that's difficult. But most of the problems I hear about is "Teams crashed" or "Wouldn't connect" or "Makes my machine run unbearably slow". How do you end up with such a crap app? And why is the interface so terrible? Can't they afford UX people? And why are there only 6 emoji reacts? Do they realize that people prefer Slack because the experience is better?

On top of all that, if you don't have a "Microsoft/Office365 Business" account, you can't even connect/join a meeting from a handful of clients, depending on if you're chatting or teleconferencing. Only Chrome/Edge works on browser, I can't remember if Android works at all without a business account, the Linux client kinda works? It was such a pain when I tried to interview with a Teams-using org that I think I just sent them a Zoom invite, which of course just works everywhere.

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The project execution is also remarkably bad. In 2020, they set out a multi-phase schedule for renaming the “Planner” app to “Tasks by Planner and Todo” to “Tasks.” https://www.onmsft.com/feature/whats-going-on-with-the-tasks.... It’s been a year and a half and they’re still on the second phase!

Even by the low standards of web apps—I just learned about nvm today, WTH?—somehow Teams manages to be outright garbage. My office is a Microsoft shop and it actually makes me worried about what we’re going to do when the old C++ grognards at MS retire. What’s going to happen to Office, Outlook, etc?

Who do you think is left realistically? They're probably in their third or fourth generation of new hires since the heady days of when these applications were originally built. Some may have stayed as manager and a really small group may still Bere there as ICs but I'd be boggled if there's many left. That said, since most of these products are largely in maintenance, it's not like they need a ton of key people to drive innovation.

When I was there about 10 years ago there were still plenty of people left who had worked on core features like tables in Word and pivot tables in Excel.

Granted a decade is a long time and most of them are probably retired at this point but it's pretty reasonable that engineers working on those teams today worked directly with the people who built a lot of the original features for these applications.

So probably closer to something like 2.5 years removed in a lot of cases.

Microsoft, again 10 years ago, had more engineers spending their entire career at the company than I've seen at anywhere else by a fairly large margin. Especially a large tech one (maybe Google is getting there?).

I’m in OT and have been begging IT to set up public folders and calendars for each of the factories that aren’t tied to any one person so we can maintain continuity even as folks come and go. I looked at using teams with tasks by planner but outlook/exchange is so much better and i know it won’t disappear or change on me.

The UI of desktop Office is currently being destroyed by their crappy redesign (thankfully still in preview). They do it by embedding like 3 different web browsers on top of office. OneNote completely changes teams and plans every couple of years. Outlook is going to be replaced by electron/webview monstrosity. They are removing features from Excel.

> They have all these engineers, and it's not like it's difficult to make a chat program. Teleconferencing, sure, that's difficult. But most of the problems I hear about is "Teams crashed" or "Wouldn't connect" or "Makes my machine run unbearably slow".

The answer is hidden in your question already. "not difficult" + "all these engineers" = overengineering.

I've had to use Teams daily for the past two jobs I've had. Over-engineered is not what comes to mind when describing the app. It's not a complicated app, the UI isn't overwhelming, and if anything it seems like it lacks functionality.

Visual Studio - that's seems over-engineered (excellent app in many respects, but still...) The whole Lync thing felt over-engineered. MS has more than a few good examples of over-engineering, but Teams doesn't strike me as one of them.

I'm sure Teams has crashed on me at least once in using it for the past 3-4 years, but if so then it has been extremely rare - I wouldn't call it a crashy app. I've experienced performance issues with it, particularly when I've got my laptop hooked up to a larger monitor and I'm sharing my screen. There too though, I've learned to live with it and Teams works fine for me day to day.

However, I do see it as a lowest-common-denominator slack clone, and I agree with others here in that the overall Teams experience is lacking compared to slack.

It feels like MS is trying to do something different with it, but it hasn't worked. They keep pushing it so hard though that more and more people find themselves having to interact with it. Similarly, more and more shops pick it up because "nobody ever got fired for choosing Microsoft" and they're probably already neck-deep in Azure and O365 anyway.

Teams is not particularly buggy, it's not crash prone, it seems like it's missing some functionality, and other functionality seems like an afterthought (e.g., the wiki feature). It's just not a great app.

> Teams is not particularly buggy, it's not crash prone, it seems like it's missing some functionality, and other functionality seems like an afterthought.

My current bugbear with Teams is it cannot open Office files in the native Office applications, which I have installed, by default. Sure, you can manually select "Open in..." each time and pick "Desktop application". But when you do "Change default", there are only two options: "Always open Word, PowerPoint and Excel files in (A) Teams, (B) Browser (default)". There's no option "(C) Desktop application"!

Come on guys, how hard can this be? What PM decided that option (C) should be left out? I mean, it's not as if the native Word, Excel and PowerPoint applications haven't been industry standards - and the basis for MS's success - for 30 years...

No. It’s over managed. If I was handed teams I could vastly improve it on my own over a 6 month period. However the most significant change would be replacing Azure AD/B2C for auth with literally any other auth solution.

I’d need a year to overhaul AD/B2C and would probably want to hire a team of two more devs so we could get it right for all use cases. Even then it could be so broken that it’s almost impossible to fix in place.

I must be misunderstanding. Are you saying the auth mechanism is largely responsible for all the problems with Teams? Like if they added, I dunno, OAuth Login-with-Facebook, then magically all the crashes, disconnects, UI latency, bloated features, broken input text box and other poor UX design issues would somehow resolve themselves?

No I’m not saying that at all.

I’m saying there’s plenty wrong with it, but the thing that would take the LONGEST to fix is Azure B2C, because that’s a whole beast in itself and is tightly coupled with all of the other MS products from Windows to Minecraft, to many many thousands of Web Apps that were unfortunate enough to have used it.

As a user who has multiple Microsoft accounts (due to years of contracting), I can’t log in to teams.

Edit: Teams has lots of problems, fixing AD/B2C is by far the hardest because it is a legacy pile of garbage used in thousands of production apps

> Linux client kinda works

I had to use it when working for a certain customer. It was chrome/chromium configured for accessing Teams, packed in a single archive/executable, if memory serves. They still managed to fuck it up in a way that after a single app crash, the bundled chromium was unable to connect to Microsoft services anymore (made no outgoing connections iirc). Fresh copy worked after spinning up a live system.

I don't know how they do it but Microsoft is great at fucking simple things up.

I tried it the other day and screensharing didn’t work on the linux client. However, turns out there is a Teams website that seems to have all the same functionality as the client (at least the same stuff I use) and screensharing worked through that.

> How do you end up with such a crap app?

Developers valuing their own experience over literally everything else, combined with them not understanding what they're doing and using way too many abstraction layers.

The other day I read a comment here on HN that said "prefer developer experience over performance of the app".

So yes, we are in it for bad.

> They have all these engineers, and it's not like it's difficult to make a chat program. Teleconferencing, sure, that's difficult.

FWIW, the UI of your average teleconferencing app is way simpler than a chat app and the state is only relevant in the moment which makes both the front end and backend easier to design due to a lack of search or history. The actual "conferencing" parts of a teleconferencing stack, both the client and the servers, are also nigh unto commodities at this point (as Google open sourced the tech for almost all of the hard problems they solved for Hangouts), while figuring out how to better index file attachments people throw into chat discussions isn't exactly a solved problem.

Every IRC program i used had a better UI than Teams. And i used them 20 years ago.

"... it's not like it's difficult to make a chat program."

A chat program? Easy. A chat program with 270 million monthly active users? Slightly harder, but sure, still easy. A chat program with 270 million monthly active users that has to integrate the entire Microsoft ecosystem [sharepoint, outlook mail + calendar + contacts, yammer, O365 groups, etc] because that is what their enterprise customers demand? Slightly less easy. A chat program with 270 million monthly active users that really isn't just a chat program but rather an entire chat + teleconferencing + screen sharing + MS O365 app platform which has to deal with B2B AAD authentication cross organization, legacy on-premise Exchange servers setup in a hybrid environment, excessive levels of enterprise-controlled configuration and policies, compliance (Purview, IB, retention policies, etc), legal requirements needed to allow Teams to be used as part of the Microsoft 365 Government offering, and many many more niche requirements/features? I suspect it's hard.

I don't particularly like the software (and had many issues with it myself at my prior job) but MS Teams is not realistically _just_ a "chat program" that is easy to build. If you are a company just looking for a good chat experience, I have no idea why you would not use Slack. However, if you are one of the countless companies who have already bought into the entire Microsoft O365+outlook+AAD+sharepoint ecosystem, Teams is probably a good choice, as it is very seamlessly integrated.

Daily Teams user and I agree with you. Maybe the scope is too broad. But the UI is the worst part. I have around 50 chats open and switching from one to another usually takes more than 10 seconds. Joining a large-ish meeting takes 30 seconds of hearing audio and no response from the UI.

Usually the day to day experience is really, really bad.

I wish they got rid of this js-on-the-desktop crap and rewrite it in a decent desktop language like C or C#.

Be careful what you wish for. I recall when Visual Studio switched to from native to managed (VS 2005?) and it was brutal. It was sluggish, crashy, with weird WPF UI bits thrown in here and there to support some oddball feature.

As for C, maybe you meant C++? Kicking out a modern, complex, desktop, web/network-centric application in C is just begging for trouble. Particularly given all the headline grabbing research MS has done into how error prone manual memory management has been in their organization [0][1]

Actually, it doesn't really seem like a language issue, does it? You can have a terrible app in C/C++/Rust/Go/JS, any language, you name it. Even electron seems a little like a scapegoat - e.g., VSCode and (previously) Atom are examples of "js-on-the-desktop crap" that are surprisingly solid.

It's not the language that's the problem, and it's not (arguably) the underlying framework. The app just sucks. If Teams were written from the ground up in C# or C and had the same functionality (or lack of functionality), it would still suck. Teams, as a product, is just sub par compared to other offerings. Even so, it's good enough for the majority of Microsoft's enterprisey and/or locked-in customer base since it's so well integrated into everything else they offer.

[0] https://msrc-blog.microsoft.com/2019/07/18/we-need-a-safer-s...

[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-70-percent-of-all-se...

I don't think it "just sucks". Functionality is there and it is very well integrated in its ecosystem. For what I use it every day, it works and has never crashed on me or let me down. I just wish the UI was more responsive, which is a specific concern that can and will be addressed by its developers.

That said, JS still has no place on the desktop in my opinion, and the world is full of Electron applications that have horrible performance. You can hack up an UI in bash too. But should you?

For products that _vertically_ suck, well, try Cisco WebEx.

Thank you for the lesson, though.

The UI is so bad. The whole interface feels like some borderless desert. The list of channels is a jumble of bold and not-bold text, free-floating in space, with no icons or colors or meaningful sorting. And then 20 "hidden channels", which... why are they hidden, and why do I have to unhide them individually?? And why is the "Chats" window literally a jumble of random chats from random Teams and individuals??? Why are Teams and Chats the same content but in different panes?? Why is the "Feed" just a new view of the same Teams / Chats windows?

I feel like they had to try hard to make it this unintuitive and ugly.

I think you're right. Microsoft is doing /just enough/ to provide a "slack-like" experience that also happens to be very deeply integrated into the rest of their offerings. They can't go to wild or it'll probably alienate the suits and non-techies. The UI is a lowest-common-denominator knock-off of an already popular app the many users are already familiar with, so in that context Teams seems like a solid product. And, as you've said, given a company that's already invested in O365, Azure, and is basically an MS shop, Teams is a pretty solid choice. That doesn't excuse some of its shortcomings, but it does provide a little color to the conversation.

Counterpoint...

I don't get all the hate for Teams. I work fully-remote on a medium sized team. We use Teams for one-one calls, team calls, presentations, screen-sharing, calls to external numbers and I've never had any problems. I run it on a Windows desktop and an Android phone. I've never had performance problems or crashes on either.

Some of the file-sharing/explorer stuff is a bit janky in terms of UI but I don't really use that. TBH it's all fairly seamless IMO.

About once every two to three days if I resize a teams window that has ongoing video call, it'll crash so hard that I have undock and redock my laptop to get my monitors to unfreeze.

In one company, I had strictly no problems with Teams, was working correctly, quality was great, with another, it was plagued with bugs. I suspect that it's highly configurable and highly dependent of windows policies that are set +network.

At client, windows itself was unusable and people were blaming Microsoft... No it's the package team who did a shit job.

I regularly lose the ability to unmute or turn off my camera during Teams calls. In that case I have to hang up and rejoin to speak. It also regularly doesn't deliver notifications. At this point I just can't rely on it's primary functions.

Never had an issue with Teams myself. It seems most problems stem from people using a crummy wifi connection to videoconference on their laptop.

Have you tried copy/pasting from teams to another application, or especially code snippets? If you're lucky you can copy what you highlight, otherwise you copy the entire text of the current message with timestamp and all.

Code snippets are a pain to get right. The tilde key is the shortcut to get monospace fonts or code blocks, and it feels like I roll the die everytime I try to convert text to a code block.

Teleconferencing is also a major pain, where devices are not remembered for some reason. It's mostly ok, but every now and then it forgets my mic. This might have been fixed recently since it doesn't happen as often but it still happens.

Not to mention the hangs that comes up when switching between conversations.

> The tilde key is the shortcut to get monospace fonts or code blocks, and it feels like I roll the die everytime I try to convert text to a code block.

Backticks are used for formatting code in Teams, not tildes. Surround in-line text in single backticks, or place three backticks on a new line to start a code block.

> Have you tried copy/pasting from teams to another application, or especially code snippets?

Pasting in teams is hilarious. I think when I last tried they were using contenteditable, as formatting that should not have carried over did so, along with the indentation going haywire on paste.

The teams Android app is better made than every other platform including Windows. It's the only one where you can seamlessly switch accounts too

The teleconferencing part (the 'hard' part) is actually very decent in my opinion. I've never had issues with calls, sharing video or sharing the screen, it just works. Features such as showing hand, breakout rooms and so on also seem to work well.

I agree on everything else though. The 'chat' part and the main UI are so janky and buggy. Even simple things like copy pasting or formatting code don't work the way you want it most of the time.

Lucky. Teams always freezes random people for me, has constant audio issues, sharing screens has terrible UX and unbearable frame rate... it's just so laughably bad compared to any other major option out there.

It's truly horrible software, it somehow manages to make even simple tasks like using my Bluetooth headphones in a call difficult (the Android app won't see them unless I disable and then re enable bt after I connect to the call)

Once during a company meeting the mute function stopped working so a few dozen people could hear me making an emergency call to the doctor. That was fun. Support never gave me an explanation for why the mute button didn't mute my mic.

Dear god that's horrible. If the people on calls knew what I was saying while muted...

Design by committee.

Teams looks like a product that's stuck 5 years behind the market because everything is done with 15 program managers with briefcases full of wireframe diagrams.

Everything is make work by 15 managers of managers, pulling 600k, justifying their paycheques.

I got to a point where I back out on interviews where hr tries to book an interview with ms teams. Jesus christ.

> It's hard to understand why Teams is so bad.

Because it has all the things that make win10 and office 365 bad but combined in a single program. 1. No border 2. Does not have input focus on the chat input even when window is active (this is a feature present in other "web" apps like Firefox, Chrome) The colors are ... 3. Themes are not themes but only some very limited color combinations which bring nothing new. 4. Transfering files is a pain. 5. Edit toolbar was made by an artist who hasn't seen other MS products before. "It has to be different". etc.

>They have all these engineers, and it's not like it's difficult to make a chat program

"too many cooks spoil the broth" is a saying for a reason. If hiring more people would solve every problem we'd have fewer problems. Every team trying to bolt their random features on software suites like this is usually why they end up in their bloated states to begin with.

If you wanted to fix software like this the only solution is usually to get rid of people and have some madman with a wrecking ball knock it over and rebuild it and that never happens at large oganisations.

One of the reasons Teams crashes so much is that Microsoft always uses shared code when they want shared behavior. That's why all Microsoft products use the same file picker - because they're writing that code once and sharing it everywhere. Because Teams is essentially the central hub that's supposed to integrate everything else from Microsoft it's running a hell of a lot of code from all across the company. For example when it renders your PowerPoint presentation it's actually using PowerPoint right there, in place.

I think it’s worse because they are forced to use SharePoint for basic functions like storing and sharing files. SharePoint is weird in that it shouldn’t be so bad, it’s just a wiki, but somehow it is bad.

Teams reusing SharePoint instead of just using some simple file store means that basic operations like “let’s store some files for this team and let people collaborate” becomes buggy and weird.

Sharepoint is like this big black hole where things go in but you are really stuck trying to get them out again.

I don't know why or how sharepoint has such a grip on MS. It's a super shitty experience to work with sharepoint.

It’s so bad that if an organisation uses Teams I take that as a red flag and would decline to be interviewed for a permanent job AND will price that in for my contract rate.

For me, use of teams signals the impotence/incompetence of the CTO and that other poor technical and managerial choices will persist at the organisation.

So Mr Consultant, what would you recommend a Microsoft shop uses?

Not everyone is keen on IRC, or having a relationship with Salesforce.

What do you want me to say? Stop being a “Microsoft shop”?

You pick your poison. It wouldn’t be my pick but I’m sure you’ve got your reasons not to pick mine or someone else’s

It's laughable how Microsoft can afford to create and maintain OS No. 1 but can't write a chat app in C++.

I’ve read an estimate that teams pulls in five to seven billion yearly revenue. And they still can’t fix it

Probably the majority of the team is composed of interns and managers driving an offshore team.

Usually it is the magic formula to get this kind of quality, and Microsoft isn't imune to it.

I think they're probably using Azure.

It's MS.

It's Microsoft...

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