[ygjb]

I will be blunt. Teams is an awful user experience; I have been using online collaboration tools since the BBS days, and while I appreciate and understand why and what they are trying to build, it is bad software.

Every single experience I have had as a teams user in professional settings, interacting with communities, and being required to use it for interactions with my childrens schools since the 2020 shutdowns has been awful.

The platform is slow, and every time I have to use it, it feels completely obtuse in unique and frustrating ways. After nearly three years of weekly interactions, I regularly am confused by what I am meant to do, or how to resolve errors that occur; it is the single most frustrating online tool I have had to use, largely because the decision to use it is out of my hands.

The absolutely sole saving grace for the tool is that I can now effectively use it with a web browser, instead of the invasive thick client application that I was required to when it was first rolled out.

If my employer required me to use it, I would immediately find another job. It's that bad.

[javier123454321]

I simply don't understand this at all.

I've used in 3 of my last workplaces. Two exclusively and one in addition to slack. No particular complaints for having internal meetings of any size. I literally do not know what you are talking about and feel like I am missing something.

[quicklime]

I've found Teams acceptable for video calls, including large-scale ones. Some of the Office integration is quite nice, e.g. PowerPoint Live. But what I really hate about it is the chat functionality. Very basic person-to-person DMs work ok, but it doesn't scale up to larger groups. Some UI complaints:

- When someone messages a group that you're part of, you get a notification. This makes it hard to distinguish between someone trying to get ahold of you, and the background chatter in a group. Slack just has better defaults here: it'll notify you for DMs, and use a more subtle message count for channel messages (unless someone @'s you).

- When someone calls you on Teams, it's like they're using a telephone from the 1990s. You could be in the middle of another meeting, and your computer will play a ringtone, because SOMEONE IS CALLING, URGENTLY!!! So you have to quickly excuse yourself from the current meeting and pick up the phone (and probably find out that it was nothing urgent anyway). Slack's UI for huddles are a lot better here, and the smooth jazz is just a nice touch :)

- If you set up a "team" within MS Teams, it's supposed to set up a place where people from that team can collaborate. The UI for it is just awful though, and I've never seen teams stay engaged through this. Slack channels are just far more intuitive, and remove a lot of the friction from collaborating with your teammates.

There are more issues, e.g. Teams isn't friendly to my laptop's fan, and it keeps screwing up my bluetooth settings. Although I'm not sure if Apple is actually to blame for those ones.

[djha-skin]

I appreciate this comment because it is one of the few I have found that succinctly puts a finger on why people hate Teams so much. People say it's awful but they don't explain why.

[proamdev123]

You are not alone. I have used Teams every day at work for the past 5-7 years and have had few issues ever.

I’m always baffled by the HN hatred for Teams and the horrible experiences others have had — because I’ve experienced nothing even remotely similar.

[lannisterstark]

You should try searching for a message in teams, and then finding the context (not just one message before/after) of the message.

It just doesn't do that lol.

[antifa]

> It just doesn't do that lol.

This is wrong, it works 33% of the time.

[synecdoche]

I concur. It is truly awful. For what it's worth I use the features Save message and Pin if I think I might need to get back to it. But they are crutches for sure.

[shaklee3]

as opposed to zoom that doesn't even have a search?

[lannisterstark]

I didn't realize this was a zero sum game where if Teams needs something Zoom needs to have it first too?

I don't use zoom, I use teams. Try again perhaps.

[TylerE]

For meetings it's decent. It's the everything else that's the problem.

[ygjb]

Decent isn't good enough though. It runs slowly, meetings lag periodically (at least on Mac), and the "everything else" is the part that is mandatory (accessing and reviewing assignments with my kids at school, accessing and collaborating on documents, etc).

I have lost track of the number of times we bailed on Teams for even meetings when interacting with teachers or the other organizations I work with (as a volunteer which makes the tooling issues even more frustrating), in favour of another service, or collaborating in a google doc instead.

[JenrHywy]

I'm with you - I don't love teams, but it's certainly no worse than Skype. We use it constantly for meetings, chat and calls in our team of ~20, and across the broader organisation. There were some teething problems when it was first rolled out, but I think that was mostly our infra guys getting things configured correctly.

Our dev team uses Slack for chat, but that's only because we can't connected to the corporate Teams from our dev environment.

[addandsubtract]

I feel like a lot of it comes down to which system & client people use. If you're on PC or macOS and using the desktop client, you're probably having a good experience (as long as you only have one account). If you're on Linux or use the web version, you're probably going to have a bad time.

[charrondev]

Unfortunately the Mac client is similarly awful. Absolutely horrifically slow. We were using for a little while at my company after we were acquired and it had so much horrifically buggy or slow behaviour.

- Switching between chats caused a big flicker of content loading in. I have no idea why this wasn’t cached but it was annoying. - starting a meeting could sometimes takes 30+ seconds. - I frequently observed and issue where some hidden/invisible window would be opened in the background and keep taking focus every time a used the tab key to cycle through windows. - Delayed and sometimes missed notifications. Why they didn’t use the native system notifications was beyond me. The notifications also did not respect the systems do not disturb window. Sometimes they would appear behind other content and would be missed. - massive resource consumption. Our 1 teams org would frequently be consuming > 3gb of memory on my system. People complain about slack but this is a whole other level.

[rirze]

Mac OS desktop client is broken.

My biggest complaint is missing notifications when the client is not focused. I can't imagine how a top tech company can create a chat client that doesn't fetch notifications when running in the background.

[chaostheory]

The web client has been far more stable and useable than the desktop client. Someone can correct me, but the desktop client doesn’t even seem like it’s fully native even on Windows.

[wkat4242]

That's because it's not. It's electron on every platform including Windows.

[jdlshore]

MacOS desktop client is terrible. Videoconference streams constantly flickering in and out.

[JohnFen]

Huh. I'm on a Windows PC using the desktop client with one account, and I don't have a good experience with it. I was thinking about trying out the web version in the hopes it might be an improvement, but I guess not.

[lol768]

> If my employer required me to use it, I would immediately find another job. It's that bad.

Agree with this. I started adding clauses to my services contracts requiring that it not be used, to this end. One client moved over to Slack as a result.

[JohnFen]

> If my employer required me to use it, I would immediately find another job.

There are many hills I'm willing to die on, but the use of Teams isn't one of them. Obviously, since I'm forced to use it at my current position and haven't quit over it.

I do avoid touching it to the greatest degree possible, though.

[dbancajas]

What is the specific complaint against it? Better yet can you come up with tools that you use instead of Teams? Is it xoom? Slack? Discord? MS is not my favorite company but my MS Teams experience has been relatively smooth.

[ygjb]

I have no objections to Microsoft as a company, I primarily use Windows on my personal devices since I am an avid gamer, and I enjoy several of the tools Microsoft publishes (VS Code, Visual Studio, most of the office suite).

The software is confusing, and at least, in my experience, doesn't have a consistent user experience or do a good job of guiding the user in how to use it.

The way it is used varies significantly between the four main user accounts I interact with (son's secondary school account, daughters primary school account, one non-profit I work with, one business that I work with).

As an alternative, I frequently find myself using Google Drive for document collaboration and sharing, and use Zoom or virtually any other video conferencing software.

Don't get me wrong, I would like it to be better, but I have also had the luxury of spending at least two extended afternoons speaking with product/program managers involved in it during a social event, and they seemed pretty ambivalent to my feedback. It's not a tool designed for users of the software, it's designed for organizational owners to mandate specific policies or behaviours, and for business owners that's fine. I just happened to have spent too much of my career working on empowering and improving user-focused and user-centric tools to care about using those bad tools unless I absolutely have to.

[scott_w]

> The platform is slow

> I regularly am confused by what I am meant to do, or how to resolve errors that occur;

Just to provide two examples of specific complaints from the parent post.

[xiwenc]

Have the same experience:

- ms teams on my windows laptop turns it into a raging heater. While i dont even have my webcam on.

- ms teams is so multi-functional you can do anything with it. Office suite, create polls (that are very laggy). It is so bloated there’s clearly no straightforward UX flows. Buttons all over the place. Desktop UI feels terribly slow.

- typing in chat boxes is laggy as hell.

I’m not alone. My colleagues experience similar issues as me.

[proamdev123]

Opposite experience: I use Teams every single workday and have never experienced the lagginess or laptop heating you describe. I’ve never heard of any coworkers having these issue either.

It’s so strange that so many people can have completely different experiences with the same software.

[samuria]

I think it's also the varying differences of experience in using different tools/platforms to communicate. For example, someone coming from Zoom may notice how laggy Teams is compared to Zoom. I definitely felt this way, once I experienced the alternatives to Teams, I just couldn't wait to stop using it.

Why does it need to have excel implemented into it? Why is the search function still there if it literally doesn't do searching. Why does it take 20 seconds to open a PDF?

Many more issues and questions stand out if you've previously used a platform where none of those are issues.

[apple4ever]

I think that's it. When you've used other better tools, you realize how bad Teams is.

[spc476]

My complaint? Well, back when I had to use it (between jobs now), I found the app (Mac M1-base laptop) to be slow and painful to use. But using Teams via a website? Way faster, which I found odd because I think both are web based (I think the "app" just contains its own instance of Chrome).

[bombcar]

I am starting to fear that I am missing out on something major, because we've used Teams for years now and it works fine (on macOS) for what we do - basic chat, multiplayer powerpoint, some video calling, etc.

Maybe it's a team size thing, and Teams just blows monkey chunks when you're one of fifty thousand employees at a company?

[Jcowell]

It’s been a year since I’ve used teams but my biggest gripe is search. Conversations are contextual. My work often requires me to find conversations that happens months ago. When unused Skype I could god into my email and recover it that way.

With teams , back when I used it, you could search no problem. What you couldn’t do is go back to a conversation and get the context. I’m not sure how on earth you ship a search feature without the ability to go back to that message In a chat application.

[kaustyap]

To add copy and pasting conversations more than one page doesnt work and there is no feature to export conversation.

[bombcar]

This may be the key - I use it as a chat program and rarely if ever search or go back more than a day

[proamdev123]

My experience is similar to yours — including at a company of over 50,000 employees.

I’m baffled as to how so many people here on HN have such horror stories with Teams, while I’ve not experienced nor heard of anything remotely so bad at the companies I’ve worked.

[apple4ever]

I don't know how on the Mac it works for you, because I've tried using it for years and its terrible on audio and video calling, and that's if it opens (which most of the time it doesn't, requiring removing some obscure cache file).

[JohnFen]

The majority of my issues are around its user interface. A gazillion problems there, from discoverability problems to basic things like the inability to shrink the window down to a reasonable size.

But there are other issues, too. In meetings (about 12 people at a time), the video gets terrible. People randomly getting kicked out of the meetings are a fairly common experience. At least 3 days a week, people have problems joining the meeting.

We tend to budget the first ten minutes of every meeting as disposable time, so that whatever the problem of the day with Teams is can be worked out enough that we can finally get everyone in the meeting.

[AnonymousPlanet]

We use TeamViewer for online meetings. Lets you share your screen. It's also used for support on customer sites. Works very reliably. We use Teams or WebEx only when interacting with customers and they demand those applications.