[mardifoufs]

>i) Effective immediately, we will be moving laptop refreshes from three years to four years. ii) We will be moving to Microsoft Teams for the sole purpose of video conferencing, saving significant cost and simplifying cross-company and customer conversations

Layoffs and having to use teams? Talk about a morale hit

[romellem]

I'm not kidding, one of the reasons I left my last job was when our parent company forced Outlook, Sharepoint, and Teams on us (vs. Google mail, Google Drive, and Slack). That change on its own isn't the worst thing of course, there were other reasons why I was considering leaving, but it was definitely one of the last straws.

Those MS solutions are just worse than the competition, and getting frustrated at your bugged technology because the parent company decides it can save some money is just trading employee satisfaction for dollars.

[ApolloFortyNine]

Gmail is so much better than outlook it's honestly insane. The way it handles email chains is infinitely better than outlooks, which often leads to responses just getting lost when someone replies all to a message that wasn't the most recent.

Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if this is 'our' fault, as I'm sure someone will point out. But in the years of using Gmail at my last employer, it just worked.

[rnk]

I love gmail, use it every day. But the chat in the paid corp version of email is so painful. I hate it with a passion. Gmail also now has the stupid left side bar where it doesn't show the gmail folders unless you click first. I wish gmail chat would just copy slack.

[Myrmornis]

I would honestly like to know more about how to make it handle email chains. My work is happily quite email free but recently I've been involved with a company in my private life and I'm finding the email chains in Gmail incomprehensible -- the old emails aren't folded; I seem to have to scroll past millions of copies of the same email signatures with images in the signatures, as well as tons of quoted text from random copies of the group conversation at earlier points in its life, trying to hunt out the "real" last email. Is this normal?

[ApolloFortyNine]

Probably just one person using an email client is breaking its ability to collapse emails? In my experience it was perfect at collapsing emails.

Maybe it's a setting an admin disabled, if it's literally every email chain.

[readwriterick]

No, this is not normal in my experience using only gmail for all my companies for about a decade.

[albrewer]

> getting frustrated at your bugged technology because the parent company decides it can save some money

It doesn't even save money - the cost is just shifted from subscription expenses to lower dev team productivity. Management can't measure the latter as easily as the former, and arguing against switching is a much more complex argument to understand than "this number is bigger than that one".

[userbinator]

Management can't measure the latter as easily as the former, and arguing against switching is a much more complex argument to understand than "this number is bigger than that one".

There's a very appropriate classic quote for that sort of situation: "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted, counts."

[galkk]

Outlook is more or less fine, but share point and teams are abominations

[TheRealDunkirk]

I want whatever you're smoking. Outlook is the poster child for overengineered software. It's the pointy end of Microsoft's attempt to make their software be all things to all IT department buyers' checklists.

[saiya-jin]

I don't know if its some crap in our top tier banking corporation's customization of Office 2016 suite, but outlook feels I am in Windows 95 era, running maybe some 486 DX2/66MHz machine with fabulous 8MB of RAM and loud clicky slow HDD.

I click on email, it takes few seconds to render that few lines of text. I click on one below, same 3-5 seconds. Emails I read few mins ago. Click on Calendar, again 3-5 seconds for switch. But then teams is same, effin' chat and nothing more, but also has proper UI bugs visible all the time, ie read stuff still has notifications. Having web call in it with screen share kills CPU for good. Our hardware is not the best currently but pretty recent and definitely things should be smooth.

What is it, implemented in javascript?

[mike22]

Then there’s the times people update the bug-tracker-table-in-a-Confluence-page, and Confluence sends an email alert about the edit to those “watching the page (which is everyone who ever edited it). In Outlook the scroll bar literally shrinks before my eyes as it renders the email from top to bottom.

[travisgriggs]

I credit Outlook with the downfall of email as a defacto form of internet communication.

[disgruntledphd2]

The calendar in Outlook is waaaay better than the Google one, though.

[pugworthy]

I'm curious whether this approach to career/job selection is sustainable in a downturn. You can do this kind of "I quit because..." thing if you have many opportunities and options. But when things are tight? Good luck to you, as they say.

One aspect of where I work (large old tech company) is that we value those that can adapt. You aren't judged as much by your skill set as you are by how you use your skills or work with the skills others have. Sure, there are limits and this doesn't mean you become the metaphorical frog in the slowly heating pot of water.

[noirbot]

They didn't say they'd never work somewhere with MS tools, just that that was part of the reason for leaving. I totally get it. If your employer is telling you a major part of your job is communication and giving you bad communication tools it's like if you got hired to be a chef and were given a camping stove.

There's certainly folks who enjoy the challenge or adaptation, but it does show a certain attitude towards the work and workers if your management doesn't think you need good tools to do the job well.

I'd stick around in a bad job if I thought I couldn't get something better, but it definitely means I'm looking to leave when things recover.

[afro88]

Slowing down laptop refreshes is so short sighted. One of the cheapest productivity boosts you can give someone is a faster laptop. Better than hiring another dev to join a bloated team.

[phpisthebest]

Laptops are not advancing that much yoy and a 3 year cycle is already aggressive.

4 years was the standard for a long time, these days many companies are moving to 5 or even 6 years for laptops.

Hell right now I have employees at 4 years that refuse to change out their laptops because they have no problems with them and want to keep them longer

[bsimpson]

I was issued a 2015 rMBP and held onto it until the 2022 M1 was available to replace it.

It was barely usable in the end, but I didn't want to be locked into years of crappy keyboard et al when the improvement was Just Around The Corner™.

[readwriterick]

Yeah but the 2015 rMBP was, like, the One True Laptop. I held until M1 as well, but I think the stars won't so align again any time soon.

[zeroonetwothree]

My PC from 2011 still works fine. My 2015 MBP lasted until 2022 (when it broke, it was actually still working fine). So I'm skeptical you really need to be refreshing every 3 years.

[afro88]

That's machine durability rather than performance.

Performance translates into more productivity for employees spending most of their time in front of one.

Even JIRA and Confluence are way faster on my 2021 M1 compared to my 2019 MBP due to the javascript runtime being much more performant. Admittedly a bit of a cherry picked example, but still.

[corndoge]

Teams for video, not so bad. If they were replacing Slack with Teams, that would be horrible.

[shagie]

> ii) We will be moving to Microsoft Teams for the sole purpose of video conferencing, saving significant cost and simplifying cross-company and customer conversations. This move will be complete by September 1, 2023. We will remain on Slack as our day-to-day collaboration tool.

[chrisandchris]

I really love when one brings in more tools. So let's use Slack for text, Teams for audio and Zoom for video.

It's like most people forgot that in the early days there was a phone and it worked just perfect. Everyone was reachable through it. Now I need to check multiple channels for the same thing.

[corndoge]

Yes, that is what I was replying to.

[jjeaff]

Surely they are just trying to gradually switch everything to Teams. Seems weird to use a slack clone for video chat only but continue to use slack for the chat.

[robryan]

Isn't it more the scheduling of meetings? Does slack have a reasonable way to schedule huddles and integrate them with calendars? My company does scheduled meetings on teams and everything else on slack.

[bhouston]

Teams isn't that bad overall compared to Slack these days.

[grepfru_it]

I wonder why they are not talking about the elephant in the room, the AWS spend. Cut back on that and these layoffs probably aren't necessary. The problem is the sheer size of GitHub data and the unreliability of Azure. There is an entire datacenter that is unused because data locality severely limits performance.

[umeshunni]

Moving from AWS to Azure is an order of orders of magnitude harder than moving from Zoom to Teams.

[grepfru_it]

My complaint is that MSFT had 3 years to focus on this problem and the solution today is to let go of engineers rather than prioritize minimizing costs (i guess in a way they did). There were EC2 snapshots dating back to 2013 when I last checked. Bad management gonna be bad

[bato]

Pretty much all new features from acquisition news are on azure (packages, codespaces etc).

Which is why outages usually match Azure outages.

[grepfru_it]

Hello fellow hubber? We still deploy new services using AWS or our own internal datacenters. Projects, for instance, is still run on k8s, not AKS. AE development was complicated from the start due to azure capacity, so much so that a tiger team went back to building it from scratch without azure.

Our AWS spending is outrageous tbh

[mardifoufs]

Are they using both AWS and Azure?

[grepfru_it]

Yes

[intelVISA]

Forcing people to use Teams wouldn't fly in a just world: it's a very cruel and unusual punishment.

[dsabanin]

That’s very weird pairing indeed. Some people are definitely going to hate Teams just because of the context it was presented in.

[patrakov]

But what's wrong with Teams? It works well enough for me in Firefox on Linux. But OK, I only joined customer-initiated meetings, and was never presenting, only watching and talking, so maybe never used some important but non-working feature.

[m-ee]

-It regularly sends me notifications that there’s new messages in threads I’m in. The new messages are from me

-The phone dial in option doesn’t exist when you call someone through teams. Only on scheduled meetings. My laptop has audio issues so I have to awkwardly decline calls and send a meeting invite to whoever was trying to reach me.

-Sharing a file in the chat for a meeting puts it into some incomprehensible internal sharepoint structure that is tied to that specific meeting instance and is difficult to ever find again.

-Switching from speaker to Bluetooth headphones on my phone regularly crashes or freezes the app.

-Worst search feature I’ve ever seen for a messaging app. If I manage to find the right keyword it will take me directly to the message, but not show the rest of the thread the message was in. I have to use the date and scroll back up until I hit in in the regular view.

[ccouzens]

> -Sharing a file in the chat for a meeting puts it into some incomprehensible internal sharepoint structure that is tied to that specific meeting instance and is difficult to ever find again.

And prevents you reusing file names. If you uploaded "image.png" or "notes.txt" to a "Team" (room) once, it will make it awkward if someone tries to upload another file with the same name in the future.

[tck42]

Does it at least pick a good spot for it in Sharepoint? A bit off topic but at my last job we used the Webex - Sharepoint "integration" and it worked the same way but it would just prompt you for where to share it from in the folder structure, but from the root. Inevitably people would just create a folder and share it, but the default permissions on the folder would mean nobody had access to it but the sharer. So you'd add the people in the room (manually) and then when someone new joined the room you'd need to manually add them as well, every time... We were a little surprised that the integration wouldn't automatically grant access to anyone in the room.

Terrible UX.

[ccouzens]

I think it was at least better than that. I don't remember having permission issues with uploaded files.

It's been a while, so I can't remember exactly where it put them. But the directory structure had the room name in it. As a user I didn't get a choice where they went.

[mullen]

The thing that drives me crazy about Teams is that I can't figure out how to start a quick meeting. Just a single button that is easy to find that when I click it, it just makes a meeting for me. Does not matter the team or organization, just make a meeting and let me copy the details to send to people.

[jontro]

Just checked, press the calendar and click meet now.

[gertlex]

On my (Android) phone: In order to use bluetooth headphones, I have to FIRST open the "join meeting" screen, connect the device (or turn off, then turn back on if I was already using it), then join.

Only app that has this issue with bluetooth audio. WTF.

[version_five]

I have a small business and I use teams - as part of office365 it's a fully featured video chat plus messaging tool. It would be redundant to also have slack and zoom (not sure what all github is consolidating into teams)

But it also feels more cumbersome. With unlimited money I'd probably use slack and zoom instead. There are just so many little confusions, weird stuff where a team is has a sharepoint but it's not exactly a sharepoint, and it's never obvious where stuff is, and it defaults to opening office documents in some crippled teams-specific reader instead of their usual application. I know there's logic underneath it all, it just feels more clunky and enterprisy then the relatively seamless experience of other software.

(Edit having just seen the parallel post to mine: the default email notifications are obscene. Getting an email because I didn't look at a message after one hour is super annoying, and is borderline "bullying" in a corporate environment. It's possible to turn it off, but the defaults suck)

[outworlder]

> and was never presenting

Ah. There you go.

It's even worse on non Apple silicon Macs. It doesn't seem to care that you have an I7.

Zoom call quality is far superior and the client is less of a pig (if you don't use Team's web version).

Now, for text conversations? Teams is borderline unusable. Given the option I'd rather use IRC (Team search is horrible anyway). If you are used to Slack, it's horrible.

[boomskats]

It is grossly inadequate when it comes to searching for and retrieving historical text conversations. For software developers, who depend on being able to search for a decision or mention or piece of code from a few weeks ago, it's downright unusable. Especially if they're used to Slack.

[ahepp]

It blows my mind the ways MS Teams finds new and creative ways to mangle and destroy my chat history.

Just about the most important thing a business chat app could do, right?

[mardifoufs]

For me it's that notifications are so inconsistent that I can never rely on them. Sometimes I get them, but sometimes I don't even if I'm actively using my PC. On Windows the performance is ok, but it absolutely ruins my MacBook's battery even when using the ARM native version.

Another thing is that I have to use Intune to use Teams on my phone. Now, I know that's a choice the IT department made, and my employer is to blame here. But at least Zoom and Slack don't even give them the option to mandate bundling literal spyware.

I also dislike the concept of having teams and chats in separate places, with the two having a completely different flow of usage.

[TuringNYC]

Four immediate difficulties:

It will often silently log you out. Then, you're sending messages going into the ether, assuming you are communicating. Except you are not. You have a silent morning w/o any firedrills, until at 11am, you discover you're silently logged out and there was a small popup screen that is hidden asking you to log in again.

You are on a Teams video call, and you cant seem to create another window on your phone to look at chats. Makes no sense.

The real estate required for Teams is so huge. Slack is incredibly space-efficient but Teams is not. Much like MSN Messenger, a lot of the space seems like deadspace.

Cant keep a great group chat by turning it into a channel.

[ilyt]

The code display is utter shit, no proper markdown support and teams (what other chats call "channels" forcing threading for one.

Writing bots for it is also painful.

[ccouzens]

Did video work in Firefox? They must have fixed that. I remember having to launch it in Chrome to join meetings.

Maybe it wasn't specifically Teams, but screen sharing used to be a massive performance hit (MBP around the year 2019). I remember giving a demo, and a response from a keycloak container I was running locally timed out.

It made it very awkward to copy and paste multiple messages in a chat.

[Eji1700]

I’ve honestly never had any issues with it but our use case is pretty light so I’m not sure what other people are missing from it

[gorjusborg]

I think that teams is good for meeting scheduling and conferencing.

For a primary communication channel, teams is terrible.

As long as I can use an IRC inspired tool (slack, discord, irc) to chat, I'll tolerate teams as a virtual conference room.

[ryanwinchester]

I worked at a company that used Teams for video conferencing and Slack for chat. The fact that they specifically said "Teams for video conferencing" reminded me of that.

To be honest, it's not awful if you're only using it for that.

[seti0Cha]

I've never used Teams. Why does everybody hate it?

[bionade24]

VSCode is often stated as the best-performing Electron software, Teams is at the opposite end.

[adra]

The video is largely fine for my uses (last couple years it's come a long way), but the text platform is just so bad for me sitting with it and slack at my desk. Like night and day.

[bushbaba]

Teams has come a long way. It’s totally fine for video conferencing. They are still using slack for chat.

[throwanem]

Not half so much as leaving open the question of who gets cut through the balance of H1.

[meindnoch]

Ugh. Being forced to use Microsoft products is worse than getting laid off tbh...