Hacker News Reader

Comment by revscat | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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 am forced to use Teams on a Mac. It's beyond horrible. Messages sometimes take an hour+ to appear.

I would crawl through broken glass for google chat. Teams is sooooo bad.

I'm using a 2017 2.3ghz i5 with 16gbs of ram.

I'm in 7 different teams and have over over 15 pinned chats and IM's.

The only delay I see is when comparing desktop app to the mobile app.

Even video chats are bearable and work fine with even background effects turned on.

So not on a mac then? Because only 1 mac was ever released with an i5, and it wasn't out in 2017.

The iMac18,1 (MMQA2LL/A) and MacBookPro14,1 (MPXT2LL/A) would like a word.

https://www.sellyourmac.com/mac-product-guides/imac/mmqa2ll-...

https://www.sellyourmac.com/mac-product-guides/macbook-pro/m...

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 has been awful.

The platform is slow, and every time I have to use it, it feels completely obtuse in unique and frustrating ways. After nearly three years of weekly interactions, I regularly am confused by what I am meant to do, or how to resolve errors that occur; it is the single most frustrating online tool I have had to use, largely because the decision to use it is out of my hands.

The absolutely sole saving grace for the tool is that I can now effectively use it with a web browser, instead of the invasive thick client application that I was required to when it was first rolled out.

If my employer required me to use it, I would immediately find another job. It's that bad.

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.

For meetings it's decent. It's the everything else that's the problem.

Decent isn't good enough though. It runs slowly, meetings lag periodically (at least on Mac), and the "everything else" is the part that is mandatory (accessing and reviewing assignments with my kids at school, accessing and collaborating on documents, etc).

I have lost track of the number of times we bailed on Teams for even meetings when interacting with teachers or the other organizations I work with (as a volunteer which makes the tooling issues even more frustrating), in favour of another service, or collaborating in a google doc instead.

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.

Unfortunately the Mac client is similarly awful. Absolutely horrifically slow. We were using for a little while at my company after we were acquired and it had so much horrifically buggy or slow behaviour.

- Switching between chats caused a big flicker of content loading in. I have no idea why this wasn’t cached but it was annoying. - starting a meeting could sometimes takes 30+ seconds. - I frequently observed and issue where some hidden/invisible window would be opened in the background and keep taking focus every time a used the tab key to cycle through windows. - Delayed and sometimes missed notifications. Why they didn’t use the native system notifications was beyond me. The notifications also did not respect the systems do not disturb window. Sometimes they would appear behind other content and would be missed. - massive resource consumption. Our 1 teams org would frequently be consuming > 3gb of memory on my system. People complain about slack but this is a whole other level.

Mac OS desktop client is broken.

My biggest complaint is missing notifications when the client is not focused. I can't imagine how a top tech company can create a chat client that doesn't fetch notifications when running in the background.

The web client has been far more stable and useable than the desktop client. Someone can correct me, but the desktop client doesn’t even seem like it’s fully native even on Windows.

That's because it's not. It's electron on every platform including Windows.

MacOS desktop client is terrible. Videoconference streams constantly flickering in and out.

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.

You are not alone. I have used Teams every day at work for the past 5-7 years and have had few issues ever.

I’m always baffled by the HN hatred for Teams and the horrible experiences others have had — because I’ve experienced nothing even remotely similar.

I've found Teams acceptable for video calls, including large-scale ones. Some of the Office integration is quite nice, e.g. PowerPoint Live. But what I really hate about it is the chat functionality. Very basic person-to-person DMs work ok, but it doesn't scale up to larger groups. Some UI complaints:

- When someone messages a group that you're part of, you get a notification. This makes it hard to distinguish between someone trying to get ahold of you, and the background chatter in a group. Slack just has better defaults here: it'll notify you for DMs, and use a more subtle message count for channel messages (unless someone @'s you).

- When someone calls you on Teams, it's like they're using a telephone from the 1990s. You could be in the middle of another meeting, and your computer will play a ringtone, because SOMEONE IS CALLING, URGENTLY!!! So you have to quickly excuse yourself from the current meeting and pick up the phone (and probably find out that it was nothing urgent anyway). Slack's UI for huddles are a lot better here, and the smooth jazz is just a nice touch :)

- If you set up a "team" within MS Teams, it's supposed to set up a place where people from that team can collaborate. The UI for it is just awful though, and I've never seen teams stay engaged through this. Slack channels are just far more intuitive, and remove a lot of the friction from collaborating with your teammates.

There are more issues, e.g. Teams isn't friendly to my laptop's fan, and it keeps screwing up my bluetooth settings. Although I'm not sure if Apple is actually to blame for those ones.

I appreciate this comment because it is one of the few I have found that succinctly puts a finger on why people hate Teams so much. People say it's awful but they don't explain why.

I'm with you - I don't love teams, but it's certainly no worse than Skype. We use it constantly for meetings, chat and calls in our team of ~20, and across the broader organisation. There were some teething problems when it was first rolled out, but I think that was mostly our infra guys getting things configured correctly.

Our dev team uses Slack for chat, but that's only because we can't connected to the corporate Teams from our dev environment.

You should try searching for a message in teams, and then finding the context (not just one message before/after) of the message.

It just doesn't do that lol.

I concur. It is truly awful. For what it's worth I use the features Save message and Pin if I think I might need to get back to it. But they are crutches for sure.

as opposed to zoom that doesn't even have a search?

I didn't realize this was a zero sum game where if Teams needs something Zoom needs to have it first too?

I don't use zoom, I use teams. Try again perhaps.

> It just doesn't do that lol.

This is wrong, it works 33% of the time.

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 platform is slow

> I regularly am confused by what I am meant to do, or how to resolve errors that occur;

Just to provide two examples of specific complaints from the parent post.

Have the same experience:

- ms teams on my windows laptop turns it into a raging heater. While i dont even have my webcam on.

- ms teams is so multi-functional you can do anything with it. Office suite, create polls (that are very laggy). It is so bloated there’s clearly no straightforward UX flows. Buttons all over the place. Desktop UI feels terribly slow.

- typing in chat boxes is laggy as hell.

I’m not alone. My colleagues experience similar issues as me.

Opposite experience: I use Teams every single workday and have never experienced the lagginess or laptop heating you describe. I’ve never heard of any coworkers having these issue either.

It’s so strange that so many people can have completely different experiences with the same software.

I think it's also the varying differences of experience in using different tools/platforms to communicate. For example, someone coming from Zoom may notice how laggy Teams is compared to Zoom. I definitely felt this way, once I experienced the alternatives to Teams, I just couldn't wait to stop using it.

Why does it need to have excel implemented into it? Why is the search function still there if it literally doesn't do searching. Why does it take 20 seconds to open a PDF?

Many more issues and questions stand out if you've previously used a platform where none of those are issues.

I think that's it. When you've used other better tools, you realize how bad Teams is.

My complaint? Well, back when I had to use it (between jobs now), I found the app (Mac M1-base laptop) to be slow and painful to use. But using Teams via a website? Way faster, which I found odd because I think both are web based (I think the "app" just contains its own instance of Chrome).

I am starting to fear that I am missing out on something major, because we've used Teams for years now and it works fine (on macOS) for what we do - basic chat, multiplayer powerpoint, some video calling, etc.

Maybe it's a team size thing, and Teams just blows monkey chunks when you're one of fifty thousand employees at a company?

My experience is similar to yours — including at a company of over 50,000 employees.

I’m baffled as to how so many people here on HN have such horror stories with Teams, while I’ve not experienced nor heard of anything remotely so bad at the companies I’ve worked.

It’s been a year since I’ve used teams but my biggest gripe is search. Conversations are contextual. My work often requires me to find conversations that happens months ago. When unused Skype I could god into my email and recover it that way.

With teams , back when I used it, you could search no problem. What you couldn’t do is go back to a conversation and get the context. I’m not sure how on earth you ship a search feature without the ability to go back to that message In a chat application.

To add copy and pasting conversations more than one page doesnt work and there is no feature to export conversation.

This may be the key - I use it as a chat program and rarely if ever search or go back more than a day

I don't know how on the Mac it works for you, because I've tried using it for years and its terrible on audio and video calling, and that's if it opens (which most of the time it doesn't, requiring removing some obscure cache file).

I have no objections to Microsoft as a company, I primarily use Windows on my personal devices since I am an avid gamer, and I enjoy several of the tools Microsoft publishes (VS Code, Visual Studio, most of the office suite).

The software is confusing, and at least, in my experience, doesn't have a consistent user experience or do a good job of guiding the user in how to use it.

The way it is used varies significantly between the four main user accounts I interact with (son's secondary school account, daughters primary school account, one non-profit I work with, one business that I work with).

As an alternative, I frequently find myself using Google Drive for document collaboration and sharing, and use Zoom or virtually any other video conferencing software.

Don't get me wrong, I would like it to be better, but I have also had the luxury of spending at least two extended afternoons speaking with product/program managers involved in it during a social event, and they seemed pretty ambivalent to my feedback. It's not a tool designed for users of the software, it's designed for organizational owners to mandate specific policies or behaviours, and for business owners that's fine. I just happened to have spent too much of my career working on empowering and improving user-focused and user-centric tools to care about using those bad tools unless I absolutely have to.

We use TeamViewer for online meetings. Lets you share your screen. It's also used for support on customer sites. Works very reliably. We use Teams or WebEx only when interacting with customers and they demand those applications.

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.

> If my employer required me to use it, I would immediately find another job. It's that bad.

Agree with this. I started adding clauses to my services contracts requiring that it not be used, to this end. One client moved over to Slack as a result.

> 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.

I use it and I would be happy if Teams was able to do basic copy/paste. When you copy, it copies things you didn’t select and doesn’t copy some things you selected. When pasting, it auto-formats the text and does a terrible job at it. It’s a disaster. I hope the Teams team is forced to use Teams.

Sadly they probably are forced to use Teams.

But all of the product and prioritization decisions are made by product managers who view this as intended behavior and not a bug. And they are used to dismissing programmer concerns on this. Because most users don't care about it.

My favorite: when you use dark mode and the person on the other side the default light theme, text that you write will appear black on their screen and white on yours (so far so good). Now if you copy & paste text that they have written, it will appear white to you and white to them, making it impossible for them to see.

Just crap.

Not intuitive at all but there is "ctr+shift+v" for pasting only text

That's actually the paradigm most programs use for "paste without formatting" which teams is the only program I can think of that doesn't support it.

My company uses Teams... and I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy.

So here's at least one person who is using teams who complains about it.

The shitty UI/UX is one thing, but some of the behaviors are incredibly frustrating. Here's some examples:

- Sharing a single window makes Teams minimize the window with everyones video camera on it into a small window in the corner of your primary screen. I have a 49" wide screen, I can have that Teams window open (so I can see faces/people) and share a window at full-size for everyone else, STOP minimizing that window.

- That small window sits in the bottom right corner of the primary screen, if you move it elsewhere, click on Teams for chat, and then foreground another app, it re-positions itself in the bottom right corner (thereby obscuring whatever app happens to be sitting there)

- All of my meetings that were created through Outlook/Office 365 as a Teams meeting are labeled "untitled" and there is no way for me or anyone else to change the title of the meeting, its worse if the meeting is on a shared calendar

- Teams notifications are the worst, it'll tell me I have 2 messages, but I open the app and there is nothing, OR it's messages I've already seen

- No easy integration for 3rd party chatbots and the like, which is a HUGE thing we use on Slack

- Teams out of all of the apps (including all the security software corporate loves) uses the most energy and power, and is the primary reason that we all upgraded to M1's as fast as possible because then maybe we'd have a chance to use our laptops without carrying the power brick when in meetings

- Tagging people in messages may or may not notify them...

- Meetings allow you to add people to them, but once the meeting is over they get removed from the chat, even if you've tagged those people in the meeting chat with important information, you have to formally invite people to the meeting with the original meeting invite for them to "stick".

- No way to copy/paste entire chat history/print chat history. I have so many screenshots of meetings/notes I need to keep and or share with others.

Overall Teams is one of the worst products I've used, and I was using "Teams" in the Microsoft Lync on macOS during the Office Communicator days.

The lack of native app is a real killer though, and unlike Slack which has done a LOT to improve how they use Electron/how much energy they use, Teams is the slowest and worst of them.

> Sharing a single window makes Teams minimize the window with everyones video camera on it into a small window in the corner of your primary screen. I have a 49" wide screen, I can have that Teams window open (so I can see faces/people) and share a window at full-size for everyone else, STOP minimizing that window.

Took me a while to figure this out, but, and if I understand what's going on and you didn't realize it you're going to smack yourself, but...

Try clicking on that tiny window with everyone's video feed on it. It gets bigger again into a full (and resizable) window with everyone's video feed, while the window you are sharing is still being shared (and outlined in red).

Apologies if I misunderstand or this doens't apply to you (I'm on MacOS), but it literally took me months of being frustrated with that situation before I realized clicking on the tiny window would restore it to a full window, so I figured that might be you too. I forget, maybe it requires a double-click.

but when the video window pops up again, it's a different size than it was before. I usually have the video window expanded to half a screen (the other half is for taking notes). If I share the other monitor, the sequence is:

1. share monitor to Teams 2. click on the little window to make it big again 3. reposition the video window back to where it was before

It's not clear to me the value of steps 2 and 3...

Yeah, the random resizing it does is also incredibly annoying. I also placed it where I wanted it so that it is to the left of the window I am sharing... I know where I want it, but Teams thinks it knows better.

> Try clicking on that tiny window with everyone's video feed on it. It gets bigger again into a full (and resizable) window with everyone's video feed, while the window you are sharing is still being shared (and outlined in red).

Yup, until you click away from that window, suddenly its the little window in the corner again and it is no longer available in Mission Control, well the little tiny window is.

So I end up clicking on that little window all the goddamn time just so I can see my co-workers and know who is talking.

I don't want it to minimize at all. And I surely don't want it to sit in the bottom right corner and if I move it, move back there.

I don't use mission control, but I'm able to have the bigger window stay open while I click in the window I'm sharing, and also click in other unrelated windows I'm not sharing.

Not sure why it's different for me and you, but I'm not shocked, the software is definitely a mess.

But I somehow don't have the particular problem you are having... anymore.

It seems to be an issue when something covers part of the Teams window. I have the same issue as the parent poster.

If a window is placed over top of the Teams window with all the floating faces, it minimizes itself into that small window...

It is telling that there is almost no overlap between your list of why you hate Teams, and my list of why I hate Teams.

Burn it with fire.

Salt the ground on which it stood.

That's because there's nothing redeemable about Teams. My list of annoyances are the things I dealt with this morning... I am sure that if you give me another hour or two I will have a whole new list of annoyances :P

This is the real reason people hate it with such a passion. It's just got so many baffling/annoying misfeatures that you could make lists about it endlessly.

Have they changed the thing where you only see a circle with people's initials during meetings and you have to click on them to see their actual names?

Edit: note that zoom has some equally-baffling and irritating design choices, but at least it performs well and doesn't try to do nearly as much, so the list of things I hate about it stays small. It's also damning that the list of things I hate about it hasn't changed in the three years I've been using it heavily, but at this point I'm grudgingly comfortable with its "quirks."

> It's also damning that the list of things I hate about it hasn't changed in the three years I've been using it heavily

Honestly, I'll take a program with a bunch of consistent downsides over one that has fewer downsides but comes up with new ones in each version.

Teams is so bad in weird inconsistent ways it feels they A/B downsides and bugs instead of features.

> Have they changed the thing where you only see a circle with people's initials during meetings and you have to click on them to see their actual names?

Nope.

This one is inexplicable. I don't know my coworkers by their initials, I know them by their names. I know it sounds like a simple mental mapping, but first off, it apparently isn't because I see initials and then I have to go mentally step through names to figure out who it could match, and second, I have multiple team members whose initials are JS, you fucking idiots. Is this like a fun puzzle to some people? I don't get it at all. There is room for the names. Just display the names.

In fact, if you really want to beat zoom, show me a nice compact list of people in the meeting, with their names, with a sound meter, with their mute status, sorted by who spoke most recently. Make this something I can see in my main meeting window, for a fairly large number of people (let's say at least 25) without paging through them. Let it go to multiple columns if necessary and I give it space. Do NOT do the zoom thing and make them all get really big so I can still only see 8.

Google Chat has improved a lot but it's definitely not there yet from a savvy users standpoint.

I've seen it used with great success at smaller, non-technical companies though.

I had to use Teams at my last job, now in interviews I ask every company if they use Teams or Slack. It's a good smoke test on whether the company pays a slight premium to improve the efficiency and quality of life of their employees, even if it doesn't directly show up on the balance sheet. Of course salary is more important than chat software, but I don't want my day to day experience to be miserable.

On what basis do you insinuate that other people's dislike is based on ignorance? That's a shallow dismissal of the kind that https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html asks us not to do.

Most of the time people's dislike is based on past bad experiences. If you think that those experiences may be out of date, indicate what has improved. If you like one product better than another, say why.

Personally I have 25 years of bad experiences with Microsoft products breaking quoted code through inserting smart quotes, long dashes, and the like. It is beyond absurd to me that Teams tries to be a collaboration tool for teams which include programmers, and STILL gets this wrong. Other tools like Slack don't make this mistake. And decades of Microsoft's continuing this behavior makes me doubt that they will ever see this as something to change. They are too wedded to trying to be clever about formatting.

I am forced to use it and it is hot garbage. It is a productivity killing anti-app.

It's got the most confusing, designed-to-lose-stuff UI I've ever seen. And that includes major social media sites, Atlassian's whole... pile of stuff, and (its closest competitor I've come across) a very "advanced" set of Asana projects and workflows.

> My company forces us to use Google Chat. I would take Teams any day.

For video or text chat or both? Meet + Slack is my preferred solution. IMO Google Meet is the easiest to use video meeting software. Click link and the person is dropped in the meeting. Slack is the best text chat.

Zoom is fine.

Teams is a dumpster fire on my mac. I have a couple external meetings that are Teams and I have to remember start trying to get on 5-10 minutes early. Otherwise I won't have time to force quit the client or restart my browser to make Teams work.

> For video or text chat or both?

To keep things simple, I would like to use Teams for both.

I do not recall any issues on using Teams on Windows. On Mac neither, but most of my work is done on Windows, so even I am a Mac user I do not have that much experience of using Teams on Mac.

Edit. Even at the moment I am forced to use Google products at work for communication, I can't say that I have had any "issues" with those products either. I think the dislike/like is mostly about feeling. Maybe at some point in my working life I got used to Teams and that stuck?

It's fascinating how good the Google Meet experience is in contrast to how bad Google Chat is. Chat seems like such a simpler problem, but it's still missing basic features like working search

Don’t forget the random mic / sound issues and even worse the phantom rings lol. It sucks

Google meet is the best experience in Linux as well. Joining a call through firefox or chrome on linux works flawlessly.

Ironically I have had the exact opposite experience, it's interesting to see how the app behaves so randomly.

I used Teams on Windows for work last year and the performance was horrible on a relatively beefy workstation machine, getting into a call or loading a chat would have a visible lag or delay.

But using it on my personal Mac it was a fairly okay experience, just a run of the mill app I would say.

Perhaps the difference is O365 (Enterprise) Teams versus Teams for Life (Personal)?

Have you tried using it via a web browser? https://teams.microsoft.com (If I recall correctly---it's been several months since I've had to use it). I found it worked much faster than the actual Mac app.

Teams is better than whatever we had before. Couldn't cut-n-paste code into a chat because it turned all the punctuation into emojis.

I work with multiple organizations so have opportunity to use Teams and Zoom calls regularly. When using both regularly it's hard to start thinking that Teams is just fine. It seems like I might start to think Teams is fine if I only used Teams, but that would just be my standards lowering, not something I want to happen.

Zoom has issues as well but I don't regularly get to use better services than Zoom.

Yes I use it daily at work and its as bad as people are saying here.

Compared to any other Message software it is the worst.

I would rather use Discord then Teams.

> My company forces us to use Google Chat. I would take Teams any day.

What are the shortcomings of Google Chat over Teams?

I occasionally use Teams on my Mac and am dismayed that every time I open it, it reinstalls itself in my Login Items. In my book, that qualifies it as malware. I used the desktop version for a while, to see if they would update it and fix this bug. Turns it out it was a 'feature' not a 'bug'. Now I just use the web version, and plan to never reinstall the desktop software again.

I've used Teams, Zoom and Meet. Teams is, by far, the worst options. I cringe every time I have to use it, because it's random whether I or one of my colleagues will not waste minutes at the start of the meeting getting something to work, or just joining.

You see, MS has completely messed up the login for Teams. I have like 3 different MS accounts (Azure, Office365, etc). Some of my coworkers have many more than that, due to identities they use for contracts. I've tried Chrome, Edge, Firefox, etc. I've tried incognito windows. Sometimes it just doesn't work.

Never had a single problem with Zoom or Meet, other than the default audio devices not being selected. That's easily fixed.

> You see, MS has completely messed up the login for Teams.

This is my single biggest complaint.

Teams with your small group of people on the same Microsoft365 account? Decent, it works, whatever.

Try to invite someone outside your group to chat, even if you give licenses away like candy? Hell. Absolute hell. End up giving up and make an actual account on your tenant? They can't easily switch between them, and it's hell to ever figure out why.

Completely unusable. They could have made the email of chat and fucked it up.

I use it and hate it for chat. For video calls it's better than WebEx but how much is that really saying? (Disclaimer: I haven't used WebEx in years, things may be better now)

I’m fine with using Teams for the actual scheduled meeting video calls.

It isn’t amazing — but has been relatively reliable for me. The app takes up too much memory, but Slack video calls have had a lot of issues also (although Huddles has improved things a lot).

My contention with using teams would be for team text chat. No thank you, it is terrible. I’d rather use Slack or really any alternative.

When these forced teams migrations happen, what I’ve seen most people do is some core subset of the dev team has an unofficial Discord, free Slack, or Telegram channel that they use for chat instead.

Teams is terrible on Linux. Maybe it sucks less on other platforms. Academia standardized on zoom+slack in like 2016 in part because of excellent cross-platform support.

Google Chat isn't much better, so that's not saying much.

I do use Teams when a vender uses it, and it's just so so bad.

Did Google chat decide the reverse the scrolling of one of the chat tabs without notice so everyone wasted a day scrolling down to get to the latest message only to find they were going to older messages.

But they didn't reverse the other tab, so depending on context you may need to scroll up or down. What a crappy UX which still occasionally catches me out.

Teams also wants you to create a "team" for a group chat, but this also creates a sharepoint site and other pointless tabs for documents to go in. Now you have probably just lost discoverability of requirements.

I've used Google chat and it was a pretty rubbish chat. However Teams is not just bad software, it's user hostile.

Multi-line code blocks are impossible on the Linux client. And Android (just confirmed). I have to use this feature about 10 times a day and triple backticks works about 1% of the time so you know what i do? I copy a multi-line code block from another chat and edit the text. Garbage.

I can add a code snippet but that thing is bloody awful. What's with the huge title over the snippet and truncating the text to a few lines even if it's only 2 lines longer? Gah.

Also, separating "chats" and "teams" into two places in the UI? Why? It's confusing. I occasionally click on the teams section and see a bunch of unread messages they I did't get notifications for.

I think. Because notifications are garbage. I'll be told that there's a message in a chat. Now I have to click on it and pray that it brings me to the right place. With slack the notification used to contain the sender and part of the message. Half the time I could eyeball the notification and get 100% of that i need without context switching.

Edit: my team is insisting on slack. We're ditching teams as a chat tool. Might keep it for video stuff but that depends how slack video conferencing works. (Used to use Zoom and Slack before)

For anyone finding this, code blocks do work. But unlike every other editor I've ever used, it's not three backticks that activate it. It's three backticks and a space.

Why in hell would I think of adding unwanted whitespace after the backticks? Anyways, that's the fix.

Whoever used WebEx would treat Teams as the coming of the messiah.

The work chat tier list

    Discord
    Slack
    Mattermost
    <chasm>
    IRC
    Email
    <chasm>
    Hangouts
    Teams
    <chasm>
    Linq / Skype For Work

Teams so fundamentally misses what the point of a good office/team oriented chat looks like that it’s worse than useless. They would be better off just splitting off the video calls (which are pretty good but drop the annoying corner thing) and just starting over with a Slack clone.

In my professional life, I have used Webex, Slack, Discord, Skype, and Teams.

I would only pick Teams over Webex and Skype.

I do use it a lot. Some of the infuriating things: * scrolling back past last day conversation doesn’t work properly, you have to wait a few seconds then text is rendered in such a way that you lose track where you were * worse latency with each month for receiving messages. I’m logged on multiple machines and messages come with random delays * even after joining a call my other Teams instance will still ring for some time…

Is there a single high level engineer (like, whatever L9 is at Google where you make millions of dollars for being a savant) working on Teams? If not, why not? A ton of its problems seem fixable. Discord/WhatsApp and Teams are both Electron apps from what I can tell. Discord/WhatsApp very usable, so it's not like Teams is doomed from the get go without a full rewrite.

Is the entire thing written by a team who don't care/don't know any better/can't do any better?

L9s ship more ppt than code

You're being charitable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com