Comment by NGRhodes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by NGRhodes | Hacker News Reader

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I feel most features in teams are worse than others or have major issues. These are issues I currently have with Teams:

Search results that don't allow you to go to the specific part of long conversations. Wiki that doesn't even qualify as wiki. Integrated calendar that automatically tries to make you join meetings you have not yet responded to (with no way to configure not to happen). Inconsistent ability to quote reply to peoples messages. Hap-hazard method of starting meeting recordings (anyone can do it and with the latest update they become the owner instead of the meeting organiser). External guests can't access meeting recordings. Inserts non visible spaces into code you paste in and does not strip it properly when copying and pasting out. Emoji selection popup fails to load if you join a meeting with busy chat as loading new messages takes priority. Inconsistent loading of tabs when you join a meeting, so some people cant do Q/A or look at files (but can be loaded in a separate window even whilst the meeting is running. Bigger issues like high CPU usage (massively compared to Zoom) with lots of attendees and far more limited visible attendee screens (compared to Zoom).

At the moment obvious defects seem to be added faster than they are removed.

Teams is just so bad. If a company you're interviewing for has chosen to use Teams, what people do you think they choose to promote? What strategies to pursue? Clearly their decision making process is broken, and the consequences probably don't stop at using shitty software.

I'm exaggerating a bit, but for me Teams is a real turn-off.

Are there any other options that actually work well? At least Teams is "free", as in people already using Office365 don't have to pay anything.

We use Teams at work, and I think it's an absolute pile of crap. But whenever I have to attend meetings using other systems, the experience is pretty much never great either.

Zoom has a weird windowing system, stealing focus all the time, and shows notifications as actual windows (as opposed to using the notification system).

Google meet sometimes squeezes my webcam image for some reason. It also transforms my PC in a jet airplane.

Chime sometimes works, sometimes doesn't. Usually, it won't detect my microphone. If I refresh the page enough times, it will end up working.

Webex mostly works, but it's sooo laggy. It also needs me to have the window focused if I connect too early to a meeting and am the first one there. If it's unfocused, it will not connect to the audio, so I'm left waiting around wondering why people are always late. And it insists on showing a bunch of useless crap around the main image. I know who's in the meeting, so if they're sharing their screen, I want to see that instead of their names taking up half the screen.

At least on Mac you can tell Zoom to use Mac notifications now, and to use "dual monitor mode" even if you don't have two monitors, which seems to help.

Of all the various meeting tools, Zoom is the best, but that's damning with faint praise.

Not exaggerating. I agree.

As someone who is interviewing at the moment. I won't completely dismiss the company for using Teams (and expecting the interviewee to 'cope' with the crap experience) but it immediately puts that company in the "hmm, I'll do this interview for the practice and maybe they'll surprise me" camp ...

Teams is worse than zoom certainly, but it's better than Cisco WebEx.

Slack used to be good - especially for just a background chat, but then they hid the "start a call" option away and pushed "huddles", which are far worse.

There's a solid rule of thumb that most software that is good becomes worse. Product managers have to push new features in to justify their job, if the software was 75% good before, there's a 3:1 chance that the change will make it objectively worse, and even higher chance that it will break your workflow and cause you to take cognitive load away from important things to learn how to deal with it in a new way.

At some point, companies need a CUCO: chief user consistency officer.

"No, we're not changing that. Your changes don't meaningfully improve the product enough to offset the disruption."

That's supposed to be the product owner.

Unfortunately I've noticed that "product owners" have become significantly less engaged with steering the product direction. I guess people either don't find it interesting, or they keep getting threatened by higher up and don't feel like they have enough power or own the product.

Teams made me love Slack, it is incredible how bad it is.

> Integrated calendar that automatically tries to make you join meetings you have not yet responded to (with no way to configure not to happen).

Oh man, that calendar is such a shitshow, and it's also not only on Teams, but also on Outlook.

It's able to detect some other conferencing software and add a "join" button, for example Webex.

But, for some reason, it systematically fails to recognize Teams links sent from a company we work with a lot. If I click the "join meeting" link inside the invitation, Teams will open and join said meeting, but it never shows the "join" button on the event in the calendar view.

Oh the quoting is absolutely appalling, but on my Mac it is the only one out of the work chats that actually supports pasting an animated gif into the chat.

You know where the priorities are.

Maybe they fixed it and I gotta upgrade, but for me animated gifs have been broken for a couple weeks.

> Search results that don't allow you to go to the specific part of long conversations.

This is so frustrating. How could anyone work on this feature and not realise how useless it is to see the message in question but not any of the surrounding discussion for context.

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