Comment by andyjohnson0

Techincally it works, but the UX is terrible. So many times I couldnt copy a message because of the stupid emojis popping up right below my mouse, so that you have opportunity to look dumb after sending a "heart" in a professional meeting about serious matter.

Also, it HAS to rename my files.

Also sending code barely works, and not for long messages

This is just on top of my head

In the strictest form Teams "works". You can chat with people, you can do video calls, you can share files. Outside of the core "calling a person" experience though it's a mess, starting with the way the word Team is so overloaded, it has several different meanings within the Teams application. There's very few other places where its so apparent that a piece of software is bunch of other products all mashed together and shipped as fast as possible - you've got Sharepoint in there, Office, Skype for Business, and very little consideration seems to have gone into how to make all of those work together seamlessly.

I’m also puzzled by the hate for Teams. I used Teams for years and developed on Power Platform. The integration between all the pieces of the MS stack is unrivaled.

I now use Slack, Zoom, Google Workspace etc. and don’t enjoy the experience at all. It feels low quality and messy compared to Teams.

Same for me, it works and allows me to do what I need to do. It does it neither gracefully or efficiently, but I think that's down to it trying to be everything at once, and the UI suffers as a result.

The main thing that trips me up is that I often confuse my Outlook calendar for me Teams calendar - because they look almost the same but work completely differently.

You're not doing it wrong, if anything I'm genuinely happy for you.

This isn't sarcasm or anything, I really mean it. If you're somehow on Teams' happy path and it does what you expect then I'm envious, I wish I was you and I am grateful that it's helpful to you at least.

For me, though, the frustration stems from being forced to use it at work, which amplifies every quirk tenfold. Minor annoyances like duplicated groups of the same people (splitting chat histories across sessions), the "every team is a SharePoint site" bloat, and the massive resource drain (though that's easing as hardware improves) add up fast.

That is to say that they also relay all of their calls through datacenters half a continent away, so if you're close to one of those then it's fine but the further you are the more likely you are to accidentally talk over people and so on, there's no peer-to-peer, even 1:1 calls are relayed with Teams; making Google Meet and Jitsi perform "better" (though people can't explain why).

Then there's the dev-side slop: mangled code snippets in chats, meeting controls jammed at the top (pulling your eyes away from the camera), and—God help you: if you've ever tried building chatops integrations on it, you'd break down and cry. Like, real, actual office-bathroom breakdown tears.

You are not alone. I also personally find Teams more than ok even if I wish it was more snappy.

Meetings work great. Compatible equipment in room makes everything feel seem less. Collaborative editing and file sharing are both awesome.

Every time it’s brought up on HN I get the feeling that people here use collaborative tools in a very different way I do. They mostly want something to chat via text which I and most of the people in my area of work use very little. I think that’s where the disconnect comes from.

Teams is not primarily a text chat software. It’s not built for this purpose as that’s not how most office workers collaborate. That’s quite obvious.

The biggest problems with Teams -- which I had to use daily for over a year and a half at my previous job -- is with its UX, not its implementation. I found bugs in the Linux client here and there, but they weren't showstoppers. But using it was just frustrating because it got in the way of communication and didn't work how I expected.

It's just not good. When you compare it to Slack, etc. it's just constantly awkward and getting in the way. And it tries to do too much, on top of that.

Slack is rapidly getting shittier though, so.

mIRC and many other clients just sat there and did their thing. 30 years ago. Countless projects have been coordinated via IRC. This isn't a high bar for chat software.

Teams fails every day at its basic purpose. Chats are confusing, the threaded ones being utterly useless. Constantly have to use the mouse to do basic stuff like address people or change channel. Stuff randomly breaks all the time, syntax highlighting seems to break in some new way every other week. It's complete garbage software and a massive regression for those of us who remember proper, simple chat software from decades ago.