I got a new job, fully remote, and we use Teams. Not gonna lie, I don’t get the hate. It seems as exactly adequate as WebEx or Zoom. None of them make me cum, none of them make me upset.
What is it about Teams that people hate so much? How does WebEx or Zoom do it any better?
Fully onboard with hating new Outlook though, fuck it sucks. Can’t even browse the global address list, it’s search only.
Several years ago I inadvertently (because I didn’t realize who they were) got in a twitter argument with someone who I seem to recall as the creator of electron about how it was fucking embarrassing how bad electron apps are. At the time I kinda felt bad because he seemed like a decent guy and I let loose but I wonder what the carbon footprint of his little side project is…
I think what started the rant was that back at that time, if you scrolled one page back in a chat, it would display a graphic representing a chat while it loaded the chat. And the fucking software was sitting there using a GB of ram and couldn’t keep 5 min of conversation cached. Just inexcusably bad.
I don’t know who at Microsoft had such a hard-on for electron back then, but it seems to have spread and it’s still nowhere close to the good old windows GUI for resource usage.
Thankfully it has gotten better. Slightly. Still pegs my CPU but I think that’s because I have a shit CPU with integrated gfx
I could see the benefit if they wanted it to work on other systems, but I doubt that’s why they chose it. Someone up high just saw it as the cool new thing and forced it onto projects, even when it didn’t make sense.
Comparing the amount of noise my laptop’s CPU fans make between the two of them when doing moderately intensive tasks like screen sharing a 4K display, Zoom is measurably worse.
Possibly the one time that Microsoft’s inexplicable inability to make their own software run well on their own OS has somehow not manifested.
Don’t get me wrong, it is still death-by-a-thousand-cuts terrible, but the most current iteration of Teams is not the worst in its field… at this one specific thing.
So when my old job had it, about 5 (out of 30) people in my area just couldn’t open it.
Not the same five, IT would frequently reinstall it to fix it, but it would just break constantly.
Work computers, very locked down, couldn’t do any alternative to it at the time, and we worked remote, so while everyone else had chat, some unfortunate people needed constant updates via email.
The question was who would be SOL, not if someone would be, that day.
It closes and opens itself multiple times a day for whatever reason, updating ? Crashing ? I don’t know because it always just reappears in a completely other place than where I had it before.
I’m in the same shoes about new job having to use teams and I wildly disagree. It is awful.
The best part of it is the noise cancellation on the microphone in calls seem pretty good and having a chat created for meetings is a good integration. BUT…
voice quality significantly decreases as soon as it’s more than 2 participants… you can clearly tell the difference as soon as a 3rd member is invited.
annotating on the screen share is extremely useful in slack (not sure if zoom has it too), not a thing I could find in teams
the channels Vs chats separation in the UI is just weird
the chats don’t have threads… that’s such a strong feature to contain conversations. I know the channels kinda serve this purpose but it feels weird to use them and closer to sending an email or posting on a forum than directly talking to someone (with having to write a title and bring presented in 1-2 messages per screen due to the size
Compared to zoom, I guess it’s not a big deal really. I’d prefer zoom but it’s oh well. Compared to slack (which has it’s own set of problems, but still) however it seems like a pile of shit in my opinion.
For me, it has nothing to do with how good or bad the actual application is, it’s the terms of service that go along with it. Basically microsoft hoovers up every morsel of data you put into their system, including your voice and face. I liken it to giving all your personal data to someone (including your voice and face), they put in a pretty looking safe on the side of the street and then they sell the keys to it.
Ignoring the fact that the data could be stolen from one of the many third parties it partners with, microsoft could (will) also give the data to the government which will then be used as evidence to deport or jail you or people you know for speaking out against the American regime or acted against Gods will and had an abortion. Or maybe someone in DC makes up some bullshit law targeting some arbitrary demographic which includes you, they request data from microsoft which is promptly provided; you get arrested and sent to jail or deported.
Data privacy is important, especially when the government is corrupt and insane. It’s prudent to protect ourselves and the people we know.
Haven’t needed to use it myself, but here’s an open source alternative I’ve heard a lot about:
I manage teams in a MacOS environment and ive seen teams fail to notify when people get a message or phone call straight up. Ive seen it fail to deliver a message, automatically select audio devices (because it has to use its own selection of audio devices) sharing screens is like watching a slideshow no matter what network you are on, controlling another users computer is even worse. Our headsets are Plantronics “certified for teams” or whatever its called and the mute button sometimes desyncs with the client and the headphones may be muted but the client not or vice verse. Theres much more but im so tired from dealing with teams all day. I also think its just a wildly unintuitive ui, settings are completely strewn across all sections
automatically select audio devices (because it has to use its own selection of audio devices)
Dude, this so fucking hard. It doesn’t even respect the system volume on my Windows 11 work laptop; despite being set at like 30%, my eardrums always get blasted at the start of the meeting. Every single time, I have to go into the volume settings and turn down the individual application (which has TWO volume controls for…reasons?), because apparently per-app volume is higher priority than system volume for reasons I have yet to find an answer to.
I want the old Volume Mixer back. At least that worked as any reasonable person would expect.
Teams meetings aren’t really that much worse than Zoom, it’s mostly minor gripes, although there are quite a few of those. The Teams chat client on the other hand is an absolute garbage fire that’s significantly worse than Slack, Discord, or pretty much anything up to and arguably including IRC.
An organization , “team”, channel, and chat are confusing as hell, that breakdown does not in any way align with the way communication works in a large organization. Why is there so little configuration available for notification settings? Why can’t I completely silence or ignore a “team”, channel, or chat? Why do I not receive notifications half the time for the things I actually want to be notified about? Why aren’t there threads or at least a sensible and easy to follow “reply to” option? Why can’t anyone seem to agree on the correct way to organize things? Half our groups are creating gigantic “teams” that include half the company, while the other half are creating shared channels nobody knows about. Both options suck.
I had to use teams with multiple accounts with multiple organisations. Sometimes my account is added to their organisation, sometimes I used their provided account. Microsoft was going for a one sign in approach and the whole thing just totally failed to account for my situation. It never successfully let me switch accounts, running multiple concurrently certainly never worked.
With one situation the work around was to follow the original organisation invite again, reset my password then proceed with my meeting. I’d do this maybe ten times a day sometimes if I had to bounce between different companies.
And all controls are basic as fuck. It’s a business tool that thinks its target market is my grandma. All controls were apple-ified. I’d get a long error code and I couldn’t select it to copy and paste it, and if I clicked off the window the notification displaying the error code would go away, so i’d have to print screen the error code, paste out somewhere, and then type it out manually into Google to try and diagnose. This was a solved problem 30 years ago. Why are we going backwards?
Anyway, rant over. It’s a pos. Slack is light years ahead.
My biggest problems with Teams are system slowdown (this was a big issue before I got my new work laptop), and different versions of Teams launching at startup (personal as default and then you have to choose professional or whatever and wait for it to reload everything). Back during the pandemic I had two different Teams (one for my reserve component, and one for my regular job) and it was a nightmare.
Teams is mostly fine these days and I think it’s the only MS product that is getting better over time instead of worse. If you have a competent IT team then the various MS integrations can actually work well to make Teams a usable one stop for comms, recordings/transcripts, scheduling, file sharing, etc.
New features are slow to come but they do come. The insane memory footprint became much more reasonable for me when they moved from Electron to their own Edge-based WebView2 thing last year. The preview builds have finally combined the “teams” channel listings and ad-hoc chats into one tab where you can group them together however you want.
Teams still pisses me off on occasion but no more than any other piece of enterprise software. It’s fine.
TEAMs was terrible going into the pandemic but it’s steadily gotten better, especially over the past 18 months. Reading down the comment chain though I’m in awe at the amount of problems that people are apparently still having with it!
TEAMs via app or browser on my Windows 10 box at work? Fine.
TEAMs via app or browser on my Windows 11 Surface? Fine.
TEAMs via app or browser on my wheezy HP laptop with Windows 11? Fine.
TEAMs via browser (Firefox even!) on all three of my Linux systems? Also completely fine!
Hell I’ve got Creative T-60 USB-C speakers, a logi webcam, and Turtle Beach headphones hooked to a USB sharing KVM for two of those linux boxes and it still just works.
I must be the luckiest dumb-ass alive when it comes to MS TEAMs because at least for the last two years it just works.
My TEAMs laptop unfortunately only has an 11th gen i5 and 16 gigs of RAM so it runs like crap. And yes I only run TEAMs, a proprietary application with <50 MB RAM and <1% CPU usage, and occasionally Firefox.
Though TEAMs in Edge runs fine. It’s only an issue with the app.
Teams is fine for video calling and screensharing. The mess begins when organisations, as MS encourages them to do, try to embed everything there is into teams. Then it can very fast become a black hole where no one finds anything anymore
Honestly thats just a user problem, not a Teams one.
Just limit it to files and forms and stuff like that, and explain to users that the teams folders, SharePoint, and the files on their computer are all the same.
I cant stand anything microsoft anymore. Teams, outlook, word, every iteration just makes me more angry.
I got a new job, fully remote, and we use Teams. Not gonna lie, I don’t get the hate. It seems as exactly adequate as WebEx or Zoom. None of them make me cum, none of them make me upset.
What is it about Teams that people hate so much? How does WebEx or Zoom do it any better?
Fully onboard with hating new Outlook though, fuck it sucks. Can’t even browse the global address list, it’s search only.
It uses a fucking inordinate amount of resources to accomplish its task, mostly.
That’s Electron baby!
Several years ago I inadvertently (because I didn’t realize who they were) got in a twitter argument with someone who I seem to recall as the creator of electron about how it was fucking embarrassing how bad electron apps are. At the time I kinda felt bad because he seemed like a decent guy and I let loose but I wonder what the carbon footprint of his little side project is…
I think what started the rant was that back at that time, if you scrolled one page back in a chat, it would display a graphic representing a chat while it loaded the chat. And the fucking software was sitting there using a GB of ram and couldn’t keep 5 min of conversation cached. Just inexcusably bad.
I don’t know who at Microsoft had such a hard-on for electron back then, but it seems to have spread and it’s still nowhere close to the good old windows GUI for resource usage.
Thankfully it has gotten better. Slightly. Still pegs my CPU but I think that’s because I have a shit CPU with integrated gfx
I could see the benefit if they wanted it to work on other systems, but I doubt that’s why they chose it. Someone up high just saw it as the cool new thing and forced it onto projects, even when it didn’t make sense.
Ahem… it’s Edge Webview 2. Which I promise is in no way exactly the same as Electron…
Comparing the amount of noise my laptop’s CPU fans make between the two of them when doing moderately intensive tasks like screen sharing a 4K display, Zoom is measurably worse.
Possibly the one time that Microsoft’s inexplicable inability to make their own software run well on their own OS has somehow not manifested.
Don’t get me wrong, it is still death-by-a-thousand-cuts terrible, but the most current iteration of Teams is not the worst in its field… at this one specific thing.
Yeah, Zoom is the only one I’ve used that makes my computer chug and stutter. Webex and Teams have been fine IME.
It has gotten so much better over the years. Which is more testament to how unutterably awful it was at release than how good it is now.
So when my old job had it, about 5 (out of 30) people in my area just couldn’t open it.
Not the same five, IT would frequently reinstall it to fix it, but it would just break constantly.
Work computers, very locked down, couldn’t do any alternative to it at the time, and we worked remote, so while everyone else had chat, some unfortunate people needed constant updates via email.
The question was who would be SOL, not if someone would be, that day.
I can almost feel my shoulders cramping up gaaaaaaaaahhhh
I had to enroll users in teams. Doing so was confusing and 1 user would never get the invite. I ended up ditching it after about a month.
It closes and opens itself multiple times a day for whatever reason, updating ? Crashing ? I don’t know because it always just reappears in a completely other place than where I had it before.
I’m in the same shoes about new job having to use teams and I wildly disagree. It is awful.
The best part of it is the noise cancellation on the microphone in calls seem pretty good and having a chat created for meetings is a good integration. BUT…
Compared to zoom, I guess it’s not a big deal really. I’d prefer zoom but it’s oh well. Compared to slack (which has it’s own set of problems, but still) however it seems like a pile of shit in my opinion.
Teams has live annotations, it’s under accessibility settings.
Are you thinking of live captions?
Annotation is on the sharing toolbar (full screen share only, not a window only share).
For me, it has nothing to do with how good or bad the actual application is, it’s the terms of service that go along with it. Basically microsoft hoovers up every morsel of data you put into their system, including your voice and face. I liken it to giving all your personal data to someone (including your voice and face), they put in a pretty looking safe on the side of the street and then they sell the keys to it.
Ignoring the fact that the data could be stolen from one of the many third parties it partners with, microsoft could (will) also give the data to the government which will then be used as evidence to deport or jail you or people you know for speaking out against the American regime or acted against Gods will and had an abortion. Or maybe someone in DC makes up some bullshit law targeting some arbitrary demographic which includes you, they request data from microsoft which is promptly provided; you get arrested and sent to jail or deported.
Data privacy is important, especially when the government is corrupt and insane. It’s prudent to protect ourselves and the people we know.
Haven’t needed to use it myself, but here’s an open source alternative I’ve heard a lot about:
https://meet.jit.si/
Not sure it’ll help with your work though.
Teams randomly selects the wrong microphone, so either people can’t hear me or they can hear everyone around me too (laptop mic).
How hard can it be to store my microphone preference?
The leave button is right next to the share button. That’s my biggest complaint.
I manage teams in a MacOS environment and ive seen teams fail to notify when people get a message or phone call straight up. Ive seen it fail to deliver a message, automatically select audio devices (because it has to use its own selection of audio devices) sharing screens is like watching a slideshow no matter what network you are on, controlling another users computer is even worse. Our headsets are Plantronics “certified for teams” or whatever its called and the mute button sometimes desyncs with the client and the headphones may be muted but the client not or vice verse. Theres much more but im so tired from dealing with teams all day. I also think its just a wildly unintuitive ui, settings are completely strewn across all sections
Dude, this so fucking hard. It doesn’t even respect the system volume on my Windows 11 work laptop; despite being set at like 30%, my eardrums always get blasted at the start of the meeting. Every single time, I have to go into the volume settings and turn down the individual application (which has TWO volume controls for…reasons?), because apparently per-app volume is higher priority than system volume for reasons I have yet to find an answer to.
I want the old Volume Mixer back. At least that worked as any reasonable person would expect.
Teams meetings aren’t really that much worse than Zoom, it’s mostly minor gripes, although there are quite a few of those. The Teams chat client on the other hand is an absolute garbage fire that’s significantly worse than Slack, Discord, or pretty much anything up to and arguably including IRC.
An organization , “team”, channel, and chat are confusing as hell, that breakdown does not in any way align with the way communication works in a large organization. Why is there so little configuration available for notification settings? Why can’t I completely silence or ignore a “team”, channel, or chat? Why do I not receive notifications half the time for the things I actually want to be notified about? Why aren’t there threads or at least a sensible and easy to follow “reply to” option? Why can’t anyone seem to agree on the correct way to organize things? Half our groups are creating gigantic “teams” that include half the company, while the other half are creating shared channels nobody knows about. Both options suck.
Our organization turned off the ability to edit or delete any posts in a Team channel.
So outdated information, typos, stupid questions, etc remain polluting the channel for all eternity.
At the most basic level? Yeah it works fine. No real complaints.
But the interface is just so goddamn infuriating for anything besides that. I have to stop and think “Wait, how do I do X again” way too often.
I had to use teams with multiple accounts with multiple organisations. Sometimes my account is added to their organisation, sometimes I used their provided account. Microsoft was going for a one sign in approach and the whole thing just totally failed to account for my situation. It never successfully let me switch accounts, running multiple concurrently certainly never worked.
With one situation the work around was to follow the original organisation invite again, reset my password then proceed with my meeting. I’d do this maybe ten times a day sometimes if I had to bounce between different companies.
And all controls are basic as fuck. It’s a business tool that thinks its target market is my grandma. All controls were apple-ified. I’d get a long error code and I couldn’t select it to copy and paste it, and if I clicked off the window the notification displaying the error code would go away, so i’d have to print screen the error code, paste out somewhere, and then type it out manually into Google to try and diagnose. This was a solved problem 30 years ago. Why are we going backwards?
Anyway, rant over. It’s a pos. Slack is light years ahead.
My biggest problems with Teams are system slowdown (this was a big issue before I got my new work laptop), and different versions of Teams launching at startup (personal as default and then you have to choose professional or whatever and wait for it to reload everything). Back during the pandemic I had two different Teams (one for my reserve component, and one for my regular job) and it was a nightmare.
I used self-hosted rocket chat before, now I use teams, I understand perfectly all the hate
Teams is mostly fine these days and I think it’s the only MS product that is getting better over time instead of worse. If you have a competent IT team then the various MS integrations can actually work well to make Teams a usable one stop for comms, recordings/transcripts, scheduling, file sharing, etc.
New features are slow to come but they do come. The insane memory footprint became much more reasonable for me when they moved from Electron to their own Edge-based WebView2 thing last year. The preview builds have finally combined the “teams” channel listings and ad-hoc chats into one tab where you can group them together however you want.
Teams still pisses me off on occasion but no more than any other piece of enterprise software. It’s fine.
What pisses me off is when I create Teams for teams in Teams, and then want to google how to do something specific.
That’s because they’re called “teams groups” not “teams for teams” ;)
TEAMs was terrible going into the pandemic but it’s steadily gotten better, especially over the past 18 months. Reading down the comment chain though I’m in awe at the amount of problems that people are apparently still having with it!
TEAMs via app or browser on my Windows 10 box at work? Fine. TEAMs via app or browser on my Windows 11 Surface? Fine. TEAMs via app or browser on my wheezy HP laptop with Windows 11? Fine. TEAMs via browser (Firefox even!) on all three of my Linux systems? Also completely fine!
Hell I’ve got Creative T-60 USB-C speakers, a logi webcam, and Turtle Beach headphones hooked to a USB sharing KVM for two of those linux boxes and it still just works.
I must be the luckiest dumb-ass alive when it comes to MS TEAMs because at least for the last two years it just works.
My TEAMs laptop unfortunately only has an 11th gen i5 and 16 gigs of RAM so it runs like crap. And yes I only run TEAMs, a proprietary application with <50 MB RAM and <1% CPU usage, and occasionally Firefox.
Though TEAMs in Edge runs fine. It’s only an issue with the app.
Teams is fine for video calling and screensharing. The mess begins when organisations, as MS encourages them to do, try to embed everything there is into teams. Then it can very fast become a black hole where no one finds anything anymore
Honestly thats just a user problem, not a Teams one.
Just limit it to files and forms and stuff like that, and explain to users that the teams folders, SharePoint, and the files on their computer are all the same.
Source: IT manager
Popup #10000: Have you tried feature X that nobody asked for yet?
RIP Clippy
i was so glad my new job uses google products, but the one thing they are missing is a counterpart to onenote. Keep ain’t it.
Obsidian is my answer to it.
looks cool but unfortunately we can only use approved apps which are mostly within the google ecosystem.
skype!
ahh member skype?
You member! You saw me! You membe!