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Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

Yup. Immediately a negative impression from me.

Doesn't mean it won't sell, congrats to OP, but god I hate everything about Teams.

Right now it's showing me calendar items with times that are wrong, they'll switch to the right time in a few minutes... probably. I didn't change time zones, I didn't do anything, it's just something wonky about their new calendar setup. If the time updates I'll click to open the calendar item, and it won't show me the join link to join the meeting ... well eventually it will pop in there, maybe.

It's not just annoyingly designed and slow, it's constantly buggy with new and exciting bugs every few months.

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My personal favorite UX-failure-of-the-moment in Teams: If I open the teams tab > Browse, it shows a big list of company-wide channels that I could join. There's a search box, but unlike any normal search box, it only does a prefix search, so if your channel is named "some test channel", and you search for "test", it doesn't find it! Several times I've given up at guessing the right channel name and had to ask coworkers to tell me the exact name in order to join.

The number of new and novel ways companies (Microsoft and Apple specifically) have found to screw up search is mind boggling.

And we're not talking edge cases, just "It's been solved since the 60s" meat and potato use cases.

> to screw up search is mind boggling.

it's because they hired "frontend" developers to develop these features, likely someone with little actual compsci experience, and have little to no room to make the feature and under a tight deadline.

Ah the good old us vs them thing popping up again. Manners

Don't expect sprinters to care about marathon issues.

The article is about a product written in Express(Node) and React.

Tell me more about "frontend" developers please.

Two of my team Channels completely vanished last week. Not in the recycle bins, just gone. The only way I knew was because I got a sync notification from Onedrive.

I contacted support two weeks ago. So far they have asked me to check the Teams admin recycle bin (3 days) and then the SharePoint recycle bin (7 day). I had shared screenshots of both of these in the initial support request, both are empty.

Only 3 people have admin rights in the company, one of us deleted the channels, and even if we did there's supposed to be a 93 day recovery window. But they're just....gone.

I asked for them to escalate 3 days ago. No reply.

My favorite bug (still unsolved!) is that maximizing the window on a video call only shows the top left quarter of the video feed. I have to manually resize the window to that exact region of my screen just to see someone’s full face or screen share. Nobody can fix it, my teams install is just stuck like this. Another one: when using airpods, everyone’s voices sound super slowed down, like the audio samples are being played back at half speed. Google meet and Slack huddles work fine. Cherry on top: sometimes the entire window just vanishes mid call (no video, audio, or any UI) but I’m still broadcasting. This isn’t just bad, it’s repeated complete failures of basic functionality that happen on the regular. Frankly, it’s the most incompetently written piece of software I’ve ever had the displeasure of using.

Your video window issue may be related to display scaling and/or video hardware acceleration. If you care enough, try tinkering with those settings in teams, windows, and your display driver (if it has them…).

Ah, that's probably related to the bug I'm seeing where I've got my Teams calendar synced to my phone, but about half of the events show up an hour later or earlier.

Isn't getting this right, like, _the_ purpose of a calendar?

Microsoft recently claimed 30% of their code was AI written. Maybe this is what you get when your systems are non-deterministic

Having interviewed many people from there, I can only assume they hire anyone with a pulse and give them major features to write in a language they don’t know.

Might be time for me to apply ...

If they don't dogfood it (or dogpoop it, in this case), that would be one away to avoid working at a company where you have to use Microsoft Teams.

I try to explain to people how consistent under-market salaries and a combative work environment has thoroughly brain drained Microsoft. It's really hard to turn that around.

From using their products it seems they just don't value excellence. I think everything else is downstream of that (e.g. if they did, they'd pay more, optimize the work environment, etc.).

Excellence is threatening to those who have prioritized politicking above all else so they'll actively work against it.

Well said and so true. It’s a pity really since there is so much wasted human energy involved.

I'm unfortunately using Teams. It's really such a comprehensive piece of shit.

I can't share photos in a channel w/ a customer. Why? No idea. There's no feedback at all. Drag and drop simply fails. Uploads won't go. I went through support and there's 5 different places in the admin to check. All of them seem fine.

I did a Teams call today. Neither of us could work out how to share our whole screen, only invidual apps, which was a massive pain.

This often breaks after a call has had interrupted shares and you have to leave and come back. This is one bug where you don't have to also reboot, great improvement MS!

Likely because of a police. Same for sharing of files ( pictures)

you can try copy pasting. For some reason drag and drop doesnt work on some channels

I had an issue with drag and drop which to me is just related to a very crappy UI. I have to drag and drop my file exactly inside my small chatbox, and if it's in another place, it won't work. Such nonsense.

Yes my phone teams app, the outlook app, and Teams at times all regularly disagree about my calendar.

It's amazing as outlook used to be consistent, but now that its calendar is tied to teams too... it has inherited the suck.

The only app I hate more than outlook, is teams.

I was once 5 hours late to a fairly important meeting because the Teams calendar was showing the time in UTC instead of my zone. Never determined why.

Whenever I schedule a meeting, Teams warns me that some attendees are in a different time zone. Except they aren’t. I’ve confirmed with coworkers and checking our settings.

And then there’s the “helpful” way teams resets the calendar view: let’s say I’m going back through calls from last week to see how long they took. In Teams, I go back a week, click the calendar item, record the time in my app, then go back to the calendar view and…I’m on this week. Neat. Intuitive.

>> Whenever I schedule a meeting, Teams warns me that some attendees are in a different time zone.

Are they on a VPN to another time zone?

Funny enough, we’re all on the same VPN in the same state.

I used to have a problem very similar to this, where the "working hours" Teams showed on my profile were in the wrong time zone. It turned out the solution was to go deep into some submenu of the Microsoft account settings website (_not_ anywhere in the actual Teams app) and edit the account time zone preferences, so perhaps look into that and make sure those match the local settings in the Teams app.

I appreciate it but at this point I’ve given up on it. It doesn’t cause any issues, or hasn’t thus far, outside of the annoying nag. That said, if I ever get to digging in again I’ll check in to those settings - thanks!

For thirty years now, the world knows that the last company to trust calendars and mail is Microsoft and yet they are all over the place. I have lost all hope for humanity‘s future.

Last week there were so many apps added to my teams that I couldn't see the chats anymore.

Should have repented, because now you’re in hell

Teams is the old new SharePoint, and it will be the same unmanageable mess

Lotus Notes enters the chat

This seems to be a very common response. I definitely believe it but Teams seems ok to me - can make video calls and do text chats. That is all I need it to do, really. Maybe I just haven't used Zoom enough to know what I am missing.

I think it’s less that you’re missing something Zoom does better, it’s mostly that Teams is a poor replacement for any calendar, messaging app, or video call service. It does those things “fine”, but I wouldn’t say it does any of them _well_.

I actually don't like zoom either ;)

Video conferencing for me Teams isn't the issue as much as it is a compromise when it comes to everything else.

Having used better solutions for those things in the past, being forced to use Teams feels like a significant step back.

I miss slack so much. Their attention to detail makes for a much more enjoyable product, paying for something we get for free with 365… still. I don’t know if Microsoft should be content with a product that’s so awful people literally only use it because of network effects.

I always found slack to be sort of awful and hated it. Then I used teams and understood that slack was actually a decent version of such apps.

Curious to know what's awful about slack specifically. For me, I don't like to get lost in a bazillion channels, pins are not global (`saved for later` is), there is no personal message queues etc.

Do you have a laundry list?

Not so much a laundry listening more that it feels wrong as it is clearly an electron app and doesn’t feel like a native app and chooses to have its own conventions over embracing feeling like a native app.

I think that causes some of the issues you are mentioning.

Now I don’t personally see any communication app like slack that is any better than it. They all sort of suck but I feel like I had a better time with IRC apps back in the day than I do with modern communication apps.

I just pin it in my browser now. I don't really get anything out of using the app version.

That is an even worse experience IMHO.

What? How? It's the exact same experience, but without needing to run a heavy electron app.

These are...identical apps. That's the point of packaging with electron.

Because it is now a browser tab instead of a stand alone app. Running things in the browser is even worse that electron imho.

RIP HipChat; we don't know how good we had it.

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