Me irl

131 comments

Ngl teams is trash. Especially when IT keeps messing with settings they don’t understand.
- Easily the worst popular messaging app out there. Even on windows the thing barely ever worked for me and hogged a bunch of system resources to boot
  As with many messaging apps only thing keeping it alive is the network effect (and integration with 365)
  
  You moved your mouse near the calendar? LET ME CREATE A MEETING FOR YOU!
  You opened up a card from a planning board? LET ME TRUNCATE THE TITLE SO YOU CAN’T READ IT!
  You opened a document? HAHA CAN’T DO THAT FROM YOUR IP BUT YOU WON’T GET AN ERROR MESSAGE JUST AN INFINITELY SPINNING DOODAD!
  I wish they just copied better apps like the Microsoft of old did.
  
  Is Teams a messaging app? 😮‍💨 Then please give me a way to sort and group my chats.
- As someone near in the administration of it, Microsoft are at fault, they permanently make breaking changes for no obvious reason
  
  My boss has gotten to the point of "As Ashe would say, fucking Microsoft"
  Let's not forget the endless name changes, 404'd documentation that points to non existent tools all of the time, the GUI that barely works. Always an adventure
- IT enforced background blur for GDPR reasons. You simply couldn't turn it off, so everybody was blurred during the daily standup.
  
  The sound of thousands of underpowered integrated graphics processors, their fans screaming in agony.
  
  Sounds like a win to me.
  We don't even use Cameras anymore for anything except explicitly scheduled one-on-one meetings like Quarterly Review.
  
  I despise these blurred backgrounds. I understand if you use it when working from home and don't have a dedicated office, but so many people do it even when they're at the corporate office. The flickering is just super annoying.
- My old place had something screwed up where I lost audio after about 30 seconds into a meeting on teams. Constantly using my phone for audio sucked.

Beats WebEx. I contracted at Cisco after they had bought WebEx and the dev teams had to stagger their scrums in the morning because WebEx infra couldn't support all the meetings at once.
- Beats Skype for Business too, which was Microsoft's previous offering. And it was BAD.
  
  What? Skype was waay better than Teams! It only started turning into dogshit when Microsoft acquired it.
  **Edit: Skype, not "Skype For Business", as others pointed out.
  
  Actually we just finished our switch from Skype to Teams and honestly, as much as I love having GIFs to express my disdain for work, at least Skype could group chats, didn't require all the RAM in the world, and automatically saved chats which, in a records management hellscape was an absolute lifesaver. Also my headphones would automatically answer a call when I put them on my head but I have a feeling that has more to do with the settings than anything else.
  Also I'm tired of having to tell people "no we can't do that because Microsoft hasn't integrated that very valuable and highly requested feature you're asking for"
- Oh hell yeah, Teams is far from perfect, but it is still light years ahead of webex

Teams is miserable

Just transitioned from a Google + slack company to a Microsoft account company.
I asked if we put our email accounts on our phones to be able to answer after hours, my supervisor said very few people are given access to emails on their phones.
I am fine with the switch, I used to get 40-60 emails to sort through a day. Now I will be doing maybe 5-10 a day and only 3 or 4 might actually be for me and I only have an 8 hour day with no after hours meetings.
- I've had a company require employees to install MDM on personal phones (remote control/management) to be allowed to use them for 2fa app or email access.. there was a surprised Pikachu when I refused. Eventually they issued me a company phone, because it was impossible to do most tasks without 2fa. That device was on 9 to 5 only.
  
  But why would anyone?
  I have an MDM on my work phone and I can't even access PlayStore anymore. It only allows Company Allowed Apps which is to say nothing. YouTube is broken because MDM somehow controls my DNS records. Firefox cannot be installed so Ads everywhere. Chrome only and it can only go to approved websites because Yahoo is safe but Ars Technica is not???
  Why would anyone want that on a device they pay for?
  Is my MDM different from their MDM?
  
  What the fuck? Are there really people who allow that?
  
  Remote control of your personal phone for work? That sounds dodgey, I would definitely refuse. Would anyone actually accept that?
  Also, 2fa is a really shit excuse for that.
  
  Why not just a physical TOTP token? There's ones that do 100 Tokens, probably won't need more than that. Smartphone for 2fa seems overkill.
- Sounds like a pretty big win to me? Who answers emails after hours, yuck
  
  I'm going from a 24/6 bigger city operation to a mon-fri 7-430 operation in a small town. It is a huge win for me.
- They must have some intense data retention policies. You can configure compliance levels to allow anyone into their Outlook acct using the app without any special permissions pretty easily.
  Good on them to cut down access like that
- Now I wonder if there's a correlation between companies using Microsoft package being companies less obsessed with crunch culture...
- But ... why?
  Outlook on phones works well enough. Was it some security measurement or something?
  
  My particular company emails contain privilege information and there is absolutely zero trust in letting smart phones aka roaming data leaks anywhere near that.
  
  I mean it doesn't matter to me, I don't want to take my work home with me and I'm close to the computer while I'm at work.
  
  It is normally a security thing. Unless the company has managed mobile devices, you don’t want company data on a personal cell phone.

I don't particularly like the UI, but I haven't had any Issue with teams ever tbh. It even worked on Firefox with uBlock, NoScript (ofc allowing like one or two domains for it) and VPN. For me, Office in general just works most of the time. I would never use it for private stuff, let alone pay hundreds for it, but for work it's more than fine.
Except Outlook. Holy fuck, how is such a central application such a pile of steaming garbage? It has the worst UI/UX I have ever seen in any mail client by far.
- Same. Teams isn't exactly good, but it works pretty okayish most of the time. I absolutely don't get the love for slack, it seems to be more like an "I use Arch, BTW" thing.
  
  Have you used Slack?
- Outlook is a fucking mess. I wanted to search for a keyword in a long-ass email yesterday, so of course I did F, like a normal person would. That opened the dialog to write and send a reply??? Why???
  And web browser outlook having no keyboard shortcuts whatsoever is fucking criminal.
- I'm forced to have two separate Outlook accounts, I quite literally can not use both accounts on the same computer without getting stuck in a neigh inescapable login loop from hell.
  
  If your job has Office365 access, use the web version of Outlook. You can open multiple accounts in separate tabs and the interface isn't from 1995. I have multiple boxes I have to run and this saved me from having to constantly log in and log out of Outlook.
  
  I'm a software consultant and juggle multiple accounts without issue in Outlook. Whenever the authentication expires I have to sign in again in a bunch of places, but that only happens once a month.

Fuck Slack, Google Chat and Workplace.
Companies abuse it's use instead of using emails and tickets, it's fucking chaos.
Yeah let's make people contact us through this public chat, all at once, I'm sure it won't be a fucking mess.
- You can write to me by chat but no ticket no help
  
  Yeah, channel management is super important. It's useful to have a full featured chat client that can integrate into other systems, but it's important to know what the limitations are. We use Slack for internal chat only (no customers) and it works pretty well for our use case but with all the integrations available it could easily get out of hand if we let more people manage it.
  
  In a previous job I was before we were pretty clear about our channels, and WE (3 people) were the Service Desk.
  But after that I worked in a specific area of the IT of a multinational DIY stores chain and what a fucking mess.
  
  Ah, the digital Neighbor to: You can stand by my desk but no ticket no help
  Not going to let people cut in line in front of the people who do follow the procedures correctly.
- IMHO, you need to know how to admin a good slack workplace. Properly setup workflows, bots and plugins can proactively funnel a lot of people toward the correct intake and resolution systems. You also need to train people on best practices, and revisit that training so bad habits don’t set in.
  Training + automation are kind of required to make any communication platform effective.
- "I am very busy and have my work day planned to work efficiently, so I won't be handling your request immediately. This means things can slip through cracks if there is no ticked describing the task created - create one if what you are asking for is of any importance."
  Followed by not doing anything that doesn't have a ticket and didn't come directly from people you report to.
  Also I have notifications disabled and only check slack between tasks or if I take a breather from a task - on average 4-5 times a day. I also check email as the first and last thing in a workday only
  
  Yeah... in this DIY company I complained to my manager why other deparments didn't create a ticket for requests/incidents for us.
  The response was because tickets would cost money to the deparments! What the actual fuck?
- Uhm... Have you considered that slack has cat picture plugins?
  And meme plugins, and 30 other plugins that look for keywords then spam gifs for what you assume can only be an in joke before your time?
  Oh, and one of the plugins actually creates tickets from chat, but jira is down and the guy who maintains it is busy writing a panda facts plug-in. So now it just vomits out an error message so everyone avoids the words "ticket", "issue", and "status"

I tried to get our team to move to Matrix when COVID hit and there was no infrastructure for remote work.
It was such a shame that it was that exact time Jitsi had issues with Firefox (which most of us use), so we couldn't videochat.
If Jitsi had that resolved immediately, we perhaps could have used something open for at least couple of years. Maybe others would follow suit.
Oh well. Teams it is.

In Teams I can't use my system volume to control Bluetooth headphones... drives me bananas. Especially because one of my coworkers has a loud mic
- That's the dumbest fucking part of teams, half of the problems that make people hate it are simple dumb shit like this that just prove they, like every other fucking company, prioritize business facing improvements, to the detriment of any user level improvement. IM LOOKING AT YOU AUTODESK!
- I have so many issues using Teams with a normal headset. I went into sound settings, and turned off exclusive access to the device. I disabled communication devices. I turned off the sync buttons setting in Teams. Yet Teams still loves to randomly unmute my mic even when it's muted from the PHYSICAL button. Makes no sense
- You probably can. The issue is that most bt headsets mount themselves as a pair of stereo headphones, and a handsfree kit. And for some weird reason Teams will ONLY EVER broadcast audio to the handsfree kit. If you change the volume control to the handsfree kit, blam, you can change the volume.
  
  It isn't just teams. That's how the hardware is implemented and it also means that you cannot have high quality audio and use the mic at the same time. It's actually Windows, not the bt device or the app.
  Legacy decisions that keep getting carried forward
  
  I figured out you can disable Bluetooth telephony services if you navigate deep into the printers and other devices control panel. But this might also disable the mic. I'm not able to test it right now.

We use Slack for those of us on the IT team, but Teams for everyone else. I despise Teams.

Google + Slack is pure unadulterated garbage. Gotta wonder what Teams is like if you suddenly develop nostalgy for a flaming dumpster.
- Teams just doesn't work
- I went from an MS+Teams org to a Google+Slack org. The latter is way better, Teams is a steaming pile of wank.
- I have a lot of grudges with Google and slack, but I have tried Teams exactly once and I never want to have to deal with this software again
- Yesterday Teams decided I don't need a microphone. It just mutes me after a few seconds. Only thing I can do is unmute myself every few seconds.

Microsoft actively hates its users. Why are all of the keyboard shortcuts in the most inconvenient place possible? Why does Outlook not mark mail as read/unread in an intuitive way? Why does Teams schedule send require one tap on mobile but two clicks on desktop? Also this isn’t even the thread to get into whatever tf is going on with LinkedIn. Planting seeds and harvesting crops was a mistake.
- Did you know windows has a dedicated keyboard shortcut for launching linkedin, teams, and all the main Microsoft office products?
  
  Why did you make me learn this?

Teams communication is fine but that file "structure" is atrocious.

My favorite Teams feature is that when you share your screen, it puts some giant bar that can't be hidden at the top of the screen that covers up your tabs.

IMO Teams is better than Slack
- Sometimes people have wrong opinions, don't worry it happens to the best of us (/s)
  
  Hey, at least Teams has better surveillance than Slack!
  oh wait that’s bad
- I use Slack for personal projects and Teams for work. I think both are fine. The main reason it made sense to use Teams at work was because there were a number of products in use by different teams. IT had Slack and the rest had Zoom. Zoom was raising their costs and we already had Teams as part of 0365. So it was either buy Slack licenses for the entire company or just get everyone on Teams. It was kind of a no-brainer and it was hard to come up with a convincing argument to pay for Slack for everyone other than "Microsoft bad".
  
  It’s funny you mention that about teams and O365. Microsoft just announced O/M365 licenses will be sold without Teams now, in the US. Something something antitrust lawsuit.

We have Skype + Mattermost (without gifs) + Rainbow. Give me Teams if you want, but please, stop adding tools.
- Mattermost has voice chat now so you can ditch Skype
  
  Either our mattermost is not up to date, or it has been disabled by the administrators. In any case, I have no power to do anything
- We were forcibly moved from Mattermost to Teams (because cost) and the lack of custom emotes is sorely felt throughout the company. I never counted, but I wouldn't have been at all surprised if we'd had >100 of them. So many in-jokes gone forever.

I don't know if I could deal with this bullshit. I work at such a small office we don't do anything but calls, faxes, and shitloads of emails. The odd side text sometimes. Adding a whole chat space thing where I'm constantly on the hook for a reply would do my head in.
- Faxes? Really? Is someone still using fax? Why?!
  
  The medium is the mess.
  
  And they're saying chat software is a headache lol

Microsoft's O365 stack and Teams aren't great, my friend, but they're light years ahead of anything Google and Slack offer. Especially when any sort of collaboration is involved.
- It's weird that there's people that believe this...
  
  There is no way you're using either on a constant basis. He is right. It's not a great setup, but it beats the brakes off of workspace+slack.
- The collaboration features in 365 fuck up and get in the way a lot more often than they work correctly WITH ONLY TWO CONCURRENT USERS. Conversely, I've seen entire classrooms in Google Docs working together like it wasn't even a thing.
  I don't have a lot of love for any of these companies, but what you are saying is objectively false.
- Completely wrong. The Microsoft word collaboration is completly Terrible, constantly locks other people from editing even if they are on another part of the page. It really doesn't work for more than 2 people, while you can have like 30 people on a google doc with no issues (probably more, haven't tried more).
  Also, I blocked beehaw, why can I see your comment
  
  I can't dispute that. I'm not a Word person. I live in Excel and often have half a dozen people working in the same file without issue, but that's much more logically structured than a Word document. Google's team sites are also disjointed and janky af compared to Sharepoint.
  
  Because blocking an instance only blocks their communities from showing up in your All feed, it doesn't block comments.

131 comments