At my company, the developers are all on fairly powerful MacBook Pros, and everyone else in the company has Windows laptops (I think generally Surface devices)
For the developers, Teams works... as good as Teams can. So not great, but it works most of the time (for me, anyway). For everyone else though, I hear nothing but issues. Constantly having to restart to make Teams work. And again, this is on Surface devices, so Microsoft is making the app, the OS, and the hardware!
Even aside from the performance, I just think Teams is laid out horribly and it stifles communication. The redundancy between chats, group chats, and Teams channels (which are like a message board?) is just bizarre and constantly causes confusion. It's so much worse than Slack (which we used to use, and I used at a previous job) where all communication channels are listed along the left side, and you didn't have to dig through menus and trees of categorization to get to certain places to talk to your coworkers. And since Teams channels are sectioned off behind another screen from your chats (where you'll probably be most of the time), the only way to be aware of when someone posts in one of the channels is to turn on notifications for it. Which is very annoying!
edit: oh also a recent update made it so when you paste a code snippet into the plaintext editor thing (whatever it's called, you activate it by typing 3 backticks), it strips all the whitespace from the left, meaning you lose all the code indentation. Just great
Teams is like the most developer-hostile piece of burning rubbish that I have ever had the misfortune to have to use. Sending little code snippets is such an important part of development. If a company has mandated Teams for all communications, you know they cannot be “developer friendly”—some management level is making decisions about what the engineers need.
While we’re bashing Teams—why are their notifications some awful custom window that doesn’t respect your OS notification settings?!??!
I love it when the teams "you have a meeting now" notification pops up in front of the meeting lobby window you already have open and blocks you clicking the join meeting button.
Teams at least is slightly better than Skype For Business, which would hijack copy paste to put the sender's name and for some reason insert zero-width characters between every space.
Copying in Teams is messed up similarily where selecting message content also copies the timestamp and sender name even thought the selection shows otherwise.
Today when I started typing, my cursor remained in the leftmost position and all of the characters appeared one by one to the right, effectively reversing all the text. I can't make this up.
This is the behavior of the Unicode Right-to-Left Override character U+202E. Meant to embed Hebrew or Arabic text, it is most used by hackers to change their exploittxt.exe attachment to read exploitexe.txt
"Skype for Business" is summed up by the fact that, AFAIK, it's just the old Lync codebase. Which was such a terrible product that they thought they'd be better off getting rid of its own branding and rubbing Skype on it.
It also stomps on the .mimeapps.list file every time it starts (in Linux) up even if its already in the list. Annoying for me because mine is a symlink into the read only nix store in NixOS.
Not sure when, but on Windows at least, they finally integrated into Windows native alerts. You have to go find and enable the setting which is of by default...
We used Teams at my last job. It was unpopular and we didn't use it a whole lot since the building was small enough that we could just... ya know, yell.
Then MS introduced that weird semi-forced threaded discussion feature that make following conversations a nightmare and nobody, not a single person in the whole company, sent a message over Teams ever again. We kept running it to appear online, but literally nobody actually used it.
We did spend a fair amount of downtime talking about how much we hated Teams, though. And Azure DevOps. More than one person there considered it some of the worst software they've ever used, and they're right. It was a horrendous mess or awful UX (but tons and tons of charts for the managers to value far too highly).
That was a year and a half ago or so, maybe it's better now. But at the time, having switched to that from Gitlab, it was atrocious and we avoided it as much as we could.
I first had the pleasure of using Teams in 2016 or 2017, I forget exactly when, and at the time they didn’t have accessibility features. None. You couldn’t even increase the text size in the app. It was nigh unusable then. I left for a different job and within a year, Teams again reared its ugly head. I’ve thankfully moved on from that job too.
Whatever cost savings Teams affords, the difference is more than lost in confusion, miscommunication, and frustration across the workplace.
May I never have to use it again.
Interestingly, my team now uses Discord for communication and we really love it.
I’m not who you replied to but Discord has this terrible behavior in channels with a lot of content where scrolling up loads historical messages, but often sends you to a random location in history instead of smoothly scrolling through them in reverse chronological order.
> ...The redundancy between chats, group chats, and Teams channels (which are like a message board?) is just bizarre and constantly causes confusion...
Oh yeah, I'm with you! I'll admit that Slack's UX and UI is not my favorite either, but at least any challenges are in a single dimension (not like Teams in multiple, challenging dimensions)...Meanwhile Teams' is just awful. I mean, the Teams "rooms" (I guess i call them "rooms" because its annoying to call them "Teams Sites"?) almost exist like channels/rooms in good ol' IRC...but then Teams has channels underneath Teams Sites/rooms...?...Plus, if i want to chat with an indiviodual, those live in the separate "Chat" area...Ugh! To the valid point about slack, at least its all there on the left. I guess i could sort of see if there was drastically different functionality between Chats and Rooms/Sites...but i dont think so. So, why then separate them? As much as i dislike Microsoft as an organization overall (for their historic corporate behavior), they often don't jhave the worse UX ideas...But for Teams, ugh!
I'm gpoing to pivot a little to matrix, and specifically the Element client...which is the most popular matrix web client. I'm an admitted matrix fanboy, so clearly i'm biased...but even Element has areas that are simpler for me to comprehend and utilize...Also, Element in my mind is still waaaaay early in its evolution, and still very much far from their UX being topnotch. But even in Element's infancy is leaps abovew what Teams is now after several years. I acknowledge that Teams "does more" (like embedding Office software, etc.)...and of course the underlying matrix protocol is NOT limited to chat...But, wow, is Teams sucky.
Teams is bad, but Element/Matrix is the only chat app I've used in maybe 10 years (outside of SMS) where I miss messages. I get a notification, want to read the entire message, open the app and it isn't there. I'm 99% sure it didn't get deleted, but I'll never know what it said. And since iOS makes the notification go away when you tap it, I can't even see what it was.
Discord should just sell a white label version or start a subsidiary to sell to enterprise. Slack will probably get smushed by Salesforce, and short of Satya Nadella's personal laptop bursting into flames because of Teams, I doubt they'll slim down the client.
Teams is moving away from electron in v2.0, which may go some way towards slimming down the client but won't solve any of the architectural issues that come with a lack of focus.
We treat missing msg bugs in Element as a top priority red alert for obvious reasons. I’m only aware of one recently, which was iOS specific and matches your symptoms - but very rare indeed. It got fixed in https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-ios-sdk/pull/1359 and was a leftover from the nightmare of iOS changing how push worked. Sorry that you got bitten by it. The fix is released in Element iOS 1.8.0.
My introduction to Teams was creating a chat room, trying to add someone not on our actual org team into it, and Teams telling me that I couldn't have non-Team members in that kind of chat.
Which... was bizarre, coming from Slack.
As parent phrased it, "the redundancy between chats, group chats, and Teams channels" is mind-bogglingly stupid.
I can't actually imagine a user who would desire that. Maybe someone from HR worried about secrets being shared in a chat?
Welcome to MS Teams...The chat platform for *YOUR* people, and not *Those Others*! lol
> ...Maybe someone from HR worried about secrets being shared in a chat?
Your phrase there immediately made me think of that Catbert evil HR director character from Dilbert...which is exactly the kind of thing he would want to have setup! :-)
> Welcome to MS Teams...The chat platform for YOUR people, and not Those Others! lol
This is very true, and hugely problematic. As a consultant I have to use Teams with 3 separate clients right now, which means signing in to 3 different Teams tenants - Microsoft SSO does not like that at all.
I have a personal hatred for MS because of their long history of building shit like this, but I hoped that working for a different cloud provider would keep me away from that ecosystem - it was legitimately a positive benefit I perceived about this job when thinking about the move. Alas, the cancer of MS software gets everywhere by virtue of being effectively free for anyone using Office.
I work for an institution that has gone balls deep with MS products and it's driving me crazy considering they are always worrying about budgets and saving money.
When I started everyone was communicating with email. Drove me nuts. I convinced the team I was assigned to, to drop emails and switched to hipchat ( loved it) then slack ( meh )
When covid hit, everyone needed to be on chat. Top brass told us we were not allowed to use anything but MS Teams. The devs hate it. It's run by the main IT dep so we have no control over how it works.
I want to stage a revolt and install mattermost on one of our servers lol
The code formatting is so badly broken now. It simply cannot have been tested. i just can't believe they want it to work like that. i also really hate that copy and pasting into a chat preserves the styling/formatting of the original. why would i want that? and the search... oh the search!
If you run teams on light mode and copy paste to someone who's running on dark mode he simply can't see your message cause it's text color is black on black background.
The fact that this happens on a piece of software which natively supports dark mode tells a lot of the amount of testing that teams is getting before being pushed to users.
Wait until you discover that copy and pasting from the chat might introduce no-break Unicode spaces that looks like spaces in most diff tools! I did the hard way.
Seen this. Docker Compose YML files with invisible spaces, because copied from a code block. That's the point of code blocks. No formatting. <pre> and all that. Caused us much pain.
Favorite terrible teams UX: it only allows you to be logged in to one account but when you click log out, it takes you to a separate screen with all 1 of your sessions and asks you to select which account you'd like to sign out of as a separate step.
Back when I was using Ubuntu for work, teams used to crash my whole system 2-3 times a week. I know it was teams because it'd start with the mouse lagging, and then a few seconds later would just completely freeze up, but if I were fast enough to notice I could right click the teams icon and exit out of it before it had the chance, and then I'd be alright...for another day or so.
Now I'm on Windows, and it doesn't seem to be a problem anymore (or at least it doesn't crash my system anymore, its still always top of the list for memory usage), but it is very irritating to use
From what I get, they are pushing users to use the "advanced editor" a.k.a. the format button. A few things ONLY work there:
- Lists: A few months ago you can simply use markdown style lists in any chat and hitting enter would create a new list item instead of sending the whole message off. A few updates since Nov slowly stripped off this option for Chats, and then Channels. The only option to send lists is to use the format button.
- As you said, code snippets, now they stripped off all indentations if you are not using the format button (and have to go through a tedious process to insert code)
For the developers, Teams works... as good as Teams can. So not great, but it works most of the time (for me, anyway). For everyone else though, I hear nothing but issues. Constantly having to restart to make Teams work. And again, this is on Surface devices, so Microsoft is making the app, the OS, and the hardware!
Even aside from the performance, I just think Teams is laid out horribly and it stifles communication. The redundancy between chats, group chats, and Teams channels (which are like a message board?) is just bizarre and constantly causes confusion. It's so much worse than Slack (which we used to use, and I used at a previous job) where all communication channels are listed along the left side, and you didn't have to dig through menus and trees of categorization to get to certain places to talk to your coworkers. And since Teams channels are sectioned off behind another screen from your chats (where you'll probably be most of the time), the only way to be aware of when someone posts in one of the channels is to turn on notifications for it. Which is very annoying!
edit: oh also a recent update made it so when you paste a code snippet into the plaintext editor thing (whatever it's called, you activate it by typing 3 backticks), it strips all the whitespace from the left, meaning you lose all the code indentation. Just great