[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.