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Comment by selykg | Hacker News Reader

Go use Microsoft Teams for awhile and then tell me "Slack is quite crap."

I'm stuck using Teams right now and it is an abysmal experience. There are definitely complaints to have about Slack, but it can be miles worse.

Just today I was looking for a prior conversation to document it for the future. I selected a portion of the conversation so that I could paste it into another tool I use for documenting. I selected the text once and it deselected a good chunk of it. Repeat. Okay, clearly not working well. I had to copy and paste 5 times to get ~15 lines of text because if you scrolled at all it somehow deselected some portion of the text.

I mean, honestly, what tool doesn't even let you easily copy the conversation? Teams is that tool. That's just one of the many issues I have run into today.

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Somebody described Slack vs Teams this way:

- Slack is so easy and fun to use that we use it for things we shouldn't be (fun channels, fun integrations). It creates too much noise and hard to extract signal. It ends up being distracting past 100+ people company.

- Teams is so bad that people try not to use it. It forces you to use it minimally because everything is terrible. It actually ends up being more productive than Slack.

Teams creates knowledge siloes which is worse than Slack. Every company I have used ends up with people creating various "Teams" and channels under them, then everyone just creates group chats all the time because it's easier.

Here's my problem with Teams: the search is terrible. I know I had a conversation with someone (but maybe I don't remember if it was just them, them and a few others, or a meeting chat, or a team chat), I know what it was about, I know a few words from it...and I can't reliably search for it. Useless.

Teams are much cheaper though - $4 vs $7.25 per user per month for a roughly equivalent plan.

Honestly the (last I used) inability to go back to a conversation months ago via search is a much higher cost.

It's cheaper yah, but each time I lose ten minutes it costs me more than that.

That was part of the pitch at work - "oh, over 3 years our total savings is $200k" or something. Great, but if each dev loses 10 minutes a month, or is frustrated and less efficient for an hour, that costs us 5x that.

Unsure if it still is, but if you had a MS office contract it was free, which describes a lot of the defense industry.

And that fucking card UI absolute abomination.

And now they have just flipped the interface so you scroll up for new and not down. With no warning and no notification so for the first day no one could find any current conversations.

And the terrible "Teams documents" so we can lock away documents behind a specific chat. If anyone should be having layoffs, it is their UX folks.

I can't believe how bad the search is. Every time I need to find something we talked about days or weeks ago, it's torture.

I believe this is a rendering optimization leaking through to UX. It's a bit of a pattern in recent MS UI, especially their "productivity" web apps. Another example I saw a couple years ago: Ctrl-A in Outlook Web Access only selects the visible messages + a small number above and below the visible messages, because the selection logic only has access to the currently-rendered items. That's my guess, anyway. I've implemented controls with this so-called "virtualized rendering" technique and it was a nightmare to retrofit to existing controls.

Just because Teams is bad, and it's bad, make no mistake, it doesn't make Slack a good tool. Slack is just a resource hog which creates too much noise.

Neither are good tools.

Just because MS Teams is an even worse train wreck does not automatically make Slack brilliant. The whataboutism when people criticize a program that they happen to like is wild. The complaints in the GP are exact complaints I have. I'd even add having to type a space before using a slash character when all you want to do is type a path to something.

Yes, MS Teams might actually suck worse, but don't try to diminish valid complaints about something else that also sucks

I couldn't disagree more with this post. Teams offers such a better solution than Slack for virtually everything, in my opinion. Slack's voice/video chat is a toy, and it's unbelievably slow and unreliable. I am so glad I don't work for a company that uses Slack anymore.

It's very interesting how different people's experiences are. I worked for a company that used both Slack and Teams, and Teams always caused issues, was unstable, and had many video problems. Slack worked much more reliably for us. Perhaps it's a platform issue? Nobody in our workplace used Windows, everyone was either Linux or OSX.

I've found teams > slack for video and stability on OSX, but slack has a better UI. Both have been mostly unusable for me on linux though I think it may also be machine dependent (I had an XPS13). I've never tried them with windows

The biggest problem with Teams is everything outside of chat/video that it tries to do.

Did you know Teams had apps? Inside of it?!

90% of the problems I encounter with Teams (bad UX, crashing, freezing, corrupted sessions) would be removed if they deleted every feature outside of chat/video and more loosely coupled themselves to Office365/Exchange.

I think the Linux thing is machine dependent. I used a Dell Latitude something-or-other (7490? idk) for about 3 years, but it was the version that shipped with Ubuntu. Rock solid on Slack, and Teams mostly just had company-wide issues for us. But my colleague with the same model laptop and same Ubuntu version had no end to trouble with both Slack and Teams - turns out, the Windows version of the laptop had different internals and it struggled mightily. It was mostly GPU issues. Just thought that was interesting, mine is probably not a useful anecdote.

I'm with you, man. I went Skype -> Hipchat -> Slack -> Hipchat -> Teams -> Slack and feel Slack is the superior tool.

Yeah, Hipchat and Flowdock were reasonable Slack alternatives but Teams is a complete nightmare.

I liked the Teams video calls.

But did you ever try to search for a message in a conversation, and have it give you just the message you wanted, without any surrounding context? Or have you ever tried to scroll through chat history, only for it to lazy-load 10 messages at a time, making you spend 5 minutes scrolling constantly to find a conversation from a few months ago?

Teams would even lose my messages completely from time to time. It was honestly hard to believe how janky it was.

> But did you ever try to search for a message in a conversation, and have it give you just the message you wanted, without any surrounding context?

Yes; they seem to have fixed that now, I don’t know when but I was surprised when it took me to the conversation with context suddenly.

Teams complains that my driver is out of date, but will only do it when I go to share my screen.

Do I stop my presentation so that I update my driver, or do I wait until next time I want to share my screen and interrupt then?

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