Why do you hate Teams/Why is Teams despised?

Compared to skype, irc, slack, xmpp, and any other chat/phone software I've used its unreliable spyware.

Spyware in that it's used to force idle status used by middle managers to make assumptions about when and how you work.

Unreliable in that it stops showing system tray message status when it updates without alert, using vdi/Bluetooth headsets are a crap shoot if audio will work or not, and destroys history by allowing corpo policy to remove messages after X days.

My company dropped Slack for Teams, because it’s free with the Office subscription, so I guess they put a price on collaboration and culture. Weeks on none of the bots and integrations work properly because there’s no time to fix shit that was already working.

Its super slow, one of the biggest misuses of electron I have seen. The website unironically works better than than the app. It seems to subtly break in weird ways every new release. Reactions are notifications. And the whole old/new teams thing causes a whole lot of confusion.

Why is teams terrible?

1. Why can I see multiple calendars in outlook but only see my calendar in teams? How does that make it useful to schedule team meetings?
2. Why are updates always available even though I just updated?
3. Why can I only pin one post in a group chat?
4. Why does teams always use its own audio settings over the system settings?
5. Why haven’t they implemented proper push to talk?
6. Why is it that every few updates one of my meeting members randomly gets muted?
7. Why does “Meet Now” basically accomplish what a group call does but the notifications don’t really go out?
8. Why do I need to”Apps” in my teams?
9. After my call hangs up because the phone app is having issues, how come the other person could still see and hear me?
10. Why do you assume I want to use onedrive?
11. Why can’t my favorites also appear in chats in a chronological order?
12. Why is @everyone even a feature? This isn’t discord.

Hey, wanna try the New Calendar? Tries the new calendar, it is even worse than the current one. Hey, wanna try the New Calendar? STFU Teams, I need to work!

Real talk? Because it's forced on people at work and it's made by Microsoft. It certainly has its flaws but it's not the worst software in the world.

Honestly it's never been too bad for me.

except that time it randomly turned on my microphone during a meeting, when I was casually chatting to my brother about the beneficial value of replacing antidepressants with a microdose of shrooms 😬

or when it wants to open docs in Teams instead of opening it in the actual program. It always opens so slow, just so I can close it.

or when it tried to force its update on me, and took me from black background to white, and suddenly the background matched my rage; white hot and seething

You can look at a post, even click into it, but the notification will not clear until you leave for another page and go back

To me, Microsoft's entire transition to web technologies is a self inflicted wound. Going native is a massive performance win. They already had that, and went the other way. Just, Why!? Now, Microsoft software is all big, bloated, and slow as fuck. Even the OS. They were literally bragging about a 9 second start up time after some optimizations to Teams. They don't even know what efficiency is anymore. We all essentially have super computers, now, but sure, congrats on your 9 second load time for a fuckin chat program.

Sysadmin for a living here - Teams breaks constantly in our office. Multiple people report issues with Teams not starting or not functioning properly on a weekly basis.

This is true for Windows 11 as a whole, truthfully. Windows 11 can eat my ass for many reasons.

My workplace used g suite then got acquired and spent six painful as fuck months transitioning to SharePoint and teams.

Half the shit in teams doesn't work and I'm still bitter about wasting time transitioning. My favorite three current issues.

From the SharePoint homepage there's a nice little search bar, you can type in your query and get literal garbage back. If you click "search more" to get it to stop being a modal window then the search results are accurate - Teams does this shit all the time... stuff that should be the same everywhere is just randomly implemented differently on different pages.

I currently have a little error bar in Teams - it says the web view version of edge is incorrect for this version of teams. If I click it (and there's little motivation for me to do so since everything seems to be working) then it opens a pane to a web page, redirects half a dozen times, then lands on a page that says "You already have this version installed". The next time I open teams the error is back.

If someone links to a SharePoint document in a teams chat I'll often get a "You need to be signed in" link unfurling and hovering over the link yields the same message. If I click on the link it'll realize I'm signed in and stop showing that error for a while. Please bear in mind that my teams account and SharePoint account are theoretically the same account. I have the same username and password to enter into both services and can't update information for them independently... if on Microsofts backend if they're technically different accounts then I, as the user, should never fucking know that. Fix your shit.

Bonus one for privacy. If you're in a meeting and muted Teams still demands mic access. If you haven't unplugged your mic or triggered a hardwareish switch then Microsoft is still listening to you... services usually keep listening so that's not super different. But Microsoft actually exposes that it's still listening! If you or someone else has auto-captioning turned on then the autocaptions may capture and transcribe your speech when you're muted.

I was very amused to read about my coworker watching an oblivion lore video when we broke for lunch in a day long meeting last week.

Teams just fucking sucks at everything, there's nothing they do that most of their competitors all do at least as good.

Classic teams had a high contrast mode that worked very well. The background was dark and the text was bright yellow. The new version of teams also has high contrast but now the text and background are both shades of gray.

Want to use a Bluetooth headset? Roll the dice on if it will work at any point in time. 3 back to back meetings? Load the 4th and it's reset your audio to laptop speakers, or now your webcam won't work.

If I want to copy a text message, I have to avoid the emoji pop-up, then very carefully click and drag over the text, making sure I don't also copy the user name. Then I have to paste it in Notepad to edit out any weird hidden characters. Copy it again and paste it.

If I want to send a reaction emoji, it's just a clock away.

Who the hell designed this abomination?

Inability to multitask. Find the file or chat link you want and need to go back to the meeting you were up? Spend 5 minutes digging back into where you were.

Let me check that picture that my colleague sent me. Hmm alright, let's close that. Aaaand I closed Teams. Shit.

Default opening Office documents in Teams is also a pain. "Oh wait no! Don't open it in Teams!" Here you go 2 minutes wasted waiting for the doc to open so that you can close it.

It's a mess for my team in terms of:

• someone's video isn't showing for anyone else
• someone can't see anyone else's video
• it resets my camera settings every time I restart it
• microphone settings seem to randomly break, so we always have people running off to grab backup headsets.
• it's missing thread features (like in slack) so branching discussions are a fucking mess.
• most of my team uses Linux and the screen-sharing as well as file/picture sharing rarely works right.

Before we used a combination of Slack (for text communication) and Google Meet (for video) which was much more reliable a day functional.

What annoys me is that they seem to just ignore any requests to fix things that are broken. For instance, I don't want to see everyone's incoming video by default. I have to turn it off for. Every. Single. Meeting.

And I'm hardly the only one. Here is an example of someone asking for this, back in 2020:

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msteams/forum/all/can-incoming-video-have-a-default-to-turn-off/98c198b5-e9ad-48d5-80d4-dc7051968e51

I suspect that Microsoft views Teams users as basically hostages since it's often something forced onto a big user base at many companies. If you hate it? Too bad: if you want to stay employed, you'll just use it.

It's the entitlement. On Linux, it would startup on boot, and wasn't in the settings panel that disables start on boot apps. Even Discord respects that setting, but Teams had its own startup system that I had to go purge by hand.

Teams for chat and video is generally OK but when managers start trying to do scheduling, task lists, and kanbans in it it becomes annoying in my experience. A software should have a definitive scope and not try to be an everything tool. If you want that interconnectivity then it's better to implement a standard which works with another tool that is designed for that purpose instead of tacking on a bunch of shit.

Current pet peeve: I'm in a meeting, and I click to switch to another app to check something, then I click the Teams icon to switch back to Teams. Clearly, in this case, I want to get back to the meeting.

Instead, it shows me the calendar view. WTF, Microsoft?

I've used it at work for the past 6 years and it's just quite buggy. Sending an image only works around 50% of the time, calls go directly to voice mail despite the other person being there and waiting for my call, mobile app shows me being in a call I've left hours earlier, tabs with things like checklists never load etc. I've used worse programs, but it's far from good. On a positive note though, the background noise filter in Teams is the best I've heard.

Microsoft doesn't ACTUALLY care about teams so it's a nonstop bad UX, then they try to fix it, then they go a different direction, and so on. To Microsoft, its an add on that they mostly use to keep people away from Slack. When they spend time on it, all they are doing is enough to keep people away from Slack.

Its been like, what, 2 years there they've shipped a "new" client seperate from the existing client (at least on macOS)? People are constantly using the wrong one or switching when one breaks, and Microsoft constantly breaks the new one.

On windows the existence of the built-in "Teams" App is constantly confusing when people are trying to sign into a work account, which requires a different client. This is because the "Teams" App in Windows is just a rebadged Skype.

Before 2022 when I used it for some meetings (we used slack in our unit since we had some of our own budget, but the wider corp was on teams) it was a daily toss up as to whether video calls would work on macos or linux.

Most of my frustrations come from having to develop some integrations with teams:

1. Right now there's a massive bug for the templating language to render cards in the UI and Microsoft's answer has largely been a big shoulder shrug.
2. There are several really easy ways an admin can break a custom integration via azure. Obviously an app-based integration is better, but it's also really common in b2b to have more ad-hoc setups to send some data to teams. Even better, lots of small/medium companies have been convinced that they don't need IT people to help them with their Azure configuration, so no one ever knows how to solve any problems they create (this also applies to email fwiw... Unbelievable how many small/medium O365 customers have very broken email servers)
3. Microsoft's implementation of federation between O365 users is a mess of tiered settings, and figuring our if rhe issue is on the business side or your side is a sysiphean task. If you are in an org which doesn't have a domain hooked up to your setup (as in you use username@company.onmicrosoft.com) there is a very specific sign in page you have to use or it'll blow up on you. And it's not the generic sign in page you get when going to teams or O364's web site.

Tl:dr; Teams is a hacked together mess of bubble gum and toothpicks masquerading as a chat app. Its a miracle ir works as well as it does for "normal" usage, but it's a joke compared to Slack in every other way and quickly becomes a nightmare if you are working on integrations with it.

Mostly tiny irksome things that cause me to have to set up for calls 10 minutes early because I’m not sure if it’s going to behave and I can’t be “late.” The latest is the window not opening on startup even though it’s running on (MacOS). Restarting resolves. Sometimes it doesn’t do it. No idea why.

Also, minor quibble but I don’t personally like that it seems to follow that annoying UI/UX “we know what’s best for you” philosophy as Gnome does where it only shows you what you “need” to see. I get it, but I’m sorta set in my ways in how I expect UIs to act. If you’re new to it, it’s especially aggravating until you’ve used it for a while.

About 30% of the time I simply cannot transfer calls, the dialog bugs out and either won't allow me to type or won't accept the number. Not reliably able to be reproduced and restarting Teams fixes it. Done all the troubleshooting including device resets and no permanent fix found yet.

This sort of random unreliability seems extremely prevalent among all of Microsoft's products. Hell just today we couldn't do email remediation through the MS Security portal, had to do an old school investigation. 'The actions failed. Please try again later.' No details or explanation and they didn't show in the action logs either.

Microsoft products are hell to work with on an organization level.

It's not reliable. I will get a message on my phone that doesn't show up on my PC for 20 minutes. I'll get a notification on my phone but some times not on my PC. I hate that I have to have my phone ping for everything that ever happens because I can't trust the desktop version to actually tell me.

To me Teams pretty much represents one of Microsoft's aggravating mortal sins.

Teams got popular. More due to the circumstances than the inherent quality of the app. And once entrenched, Microsoft did what they always do in situations like this. Jack squat.

This could have been a start of a beautiful new era! Strike the iron while it's hot! Show what the money, resources and the technical know-how at Microsoft's disposal could do! Fix all of the failings of Skype tech, and really polish up the app! Did Microsoft do that? Naaah. It's a mediocre app with brand new jank! That's its destiny now.

Today, this morning:

It wouldn't let me into my morning meeting, it glitched out with jumping ellipses. I quit the program then when I tried to relaunch it went into a cycle of starting then immediately crash. This went on for two minutes before I restarted the computer. After restarting the computer then relaunched Teams it proceeded to crash/start four times before loading so I can attend my meeting.

This kind of stuff is habitual. I now set alarms five minutes before meetings so I have enough time to press a button.

Because in terms of features/usability it was a downgrade from Skype for Business for my usage.

Sorting the contacts was better in Skype and I was able to have the window as a narrow strip on the leftmost screen, for showing the status of all team members. Teams doesn't allow resizing freely.

When watching a screen share of somebody, Teams has a lot of unnecessary unhidable UI elements that just take up space. For the ones that you can hide there is no setting to have it that way by default, and there are also no shortcuts for them.

Also screen sharing was quite laggy right after switching from Skype, but that might have been an internal IT problem, not sure. But it didn't help make Teams more popular anyhow.

Bad UI/UX.

When I screenshare code with my colleages, the 1 fps can be irritating. You miss subtle editing, scrolling, etc in those 1 s.

I can ignore most other things. We only use it for online meetings and screen sharing.

Which makes the new apparent calendar and appointment integration somewhat irritating. Microsoft loves to push their shit.

From the IT side, I personally hate that 80% of the random teams issues our users have, clearing the apps cache is the only solution. An average user shouldn't need to dig around in unfamiliar directories and clear out this cache to get teams working again. From my experience, most users won't do this bc they're afraid of causing more damage (imo a smart hesitation.)

If the app can update itself can it not also refresh that cache more often? Can a button in settings not be given to users the flush cache and restart the app? (This can currently be done in Windows by going to Settings > Apps and resetting the app from the Installed Apps list, but there is no such option on Macs. It's an OS agnostic issue, we should have an OS agnostic solution.) There's got to be better ways to resolve these issues that all require the removal/refreshing of a folder's contents. I can only imagine how much of a nightmare this is to resolve within companies that don't have dedicated IT or tech savvy users to dig up these resolutions and fix the problem, especially given the often inadequate and outdated documentation Microsoft provides.

It demands too much screen space. you can't rum less than full screen without losing important things. Even full screen I often can' see the presentation clearly because it shrunk the presentation in favor of avitars / videos of other people.

now that I'm old I cannot see tiny text like I used to. I thus get really mad at useless spate while I'm strurgling to read the presentation. you will understand when you turn 45 too.

Every day it fucks my login token. Takes a while to load, then shows me my DMs but with a little "login problem sign in again" at the top (WHILE LOOKING AT MY DMS)

So I click sign in in the toast. It takes forever. I'm now 1 minute late for standup.

I do not have to log in. I do not have to reauthenticate or MFA. I just click the button and it logs me in again.

WHICH IT COULD HAVE JUST DONE ON PAGE LOAD FOR FUCKS SAKE.

The behind the scenes logic must be atrocious.

I hate how if you gotta work on something in an app in Teams, you can't have the chats open. Excel in Teams lacks a lot of features, though luckily you can launch in native app, but then co-operating is out the window.

My computer is old and slow so loading teams is like elder abuse

I’m going to come from a different angle.

I spent 20 years in IT before Teams and now work for a government agency in health care.

My IT side says that teams is just OK like its competitors. It’s not great, but it’s not horrible either. It does the job and some of the annoyances are probably due to the demographic using it - people who don’t care for tech nor the meeting.

My employee side doesn’t see a technical deficit in Teams that isn’t in Zoom or whatever, but holy shit does M$ turn their product to shit by buzzword. Teams this. Teams that. Hit me on Teams.

So yeah. IMHO Teams is bad for the same reason Office is bad. Technically OK, bloated, and catering to the managers.

Mobile notifications are a joke. When I’m not working I want to hear from one single emergency channel, it’s my time, not work’s. But even with all itifs but that one channel set I get pinged for every single reply in every team

Because it's run by Microsoft, which is now a Big Data player. They use Teams to "monetize" your company's data and train their AI on it without your company's consent. They use Teams to collect data on employees who don't have a choice because they need a job to put food on the table, like real name, photo and phone number.

If you don't want to give any data to Microsoft, too bad: your employer forces it on you. Don't like it? Your only option is to resign. That's the most egregious aspect of Teams - and Office 365, and all business-oriented Microsoft data honeypots: they use employers to collect data on employees who don't have any say about it.

One I'd throw in:

On Mac, it creates its own audio driver and hijacks the audio feed. That makes it hell to jump between teams and Google meets or zoom as they are constantly fighting.

I hate that it doesn't have some key features, like the ability to easily annotate on the screen as a viewer. The presenter (host?) must allow it first, which for me often results in frustration as I try to guide them to the top tool bar to find it.

They also don't have custom emojis like my beloved Slack. And dear god Teams sends you a desktop notification every time someone reacts with an emoji, I disabled that quick.

I also hated how they did groups/channels, also called Teams, a name I hate (why have a feature with the same name as your product?). It was like a shitty forum board, where someone would post a topic and everyone commented underneath it, made it impossible to scroll through. They changed it recently though for a much more user friendly UI.

My favorite Teams feature is that I can mute other participants on a meeting. I can feel the Thrill course through me every time.

• I have a Linux laptop that Microsoft apps seem to hate. Both Skype and teams refuse to let me share my screen (both app and web version)
• The teams app kept putting itself on startup and I had to change folder permissions to make it stop
• The whole click on link to open app thing that doesn't always work
• I'm current having issues with showing calendars but that could be on me

I know we like to hate on Google here but Google Meet is much better imo.

When I first got to try it the chat didn't work. But it had a meme generator built in. So that's what I had to use for a while to send chat messages

I think it's because it's work. Its hard to have any positive feelings toward a tool used primarily to talk to annoying coworkers and bosses. It doesn't matter how good it bad it is.

Right click open....

In browser?

In Teams?

...

Using a kettle full of live mice?

In app (the program you installed in your computer specifically for opening these documents)?

Oh why not meet about the document from yesterday? Nah, not that one, do a search!... Okay never mind! Their search is junk. Ah well let's meet to talk about it! I can't read, can you maximize your screen so we can see and follow? Just double click here, right click here, scroll down! Push it, twist it, pull it, pipit!!!! Oh hey! We can't hear you! Can you check yorvmike"

They gave us Teams at work, and somehow despite me being logged into everything else Microsoft via Citrix, it decided I couldn't use it anymore. But it adds you to meetings you don't need to be in.

Overall, the big issues I have are that when it breaks it does so unpredictably so I can't learn how to do things right.

1. It was unclear to me for a long time how to find files correctly (it still kind of is unclear). Our institution uses SharePoint for some things, Teams for other stuff, and some folks use OneDrive. It's hard to know how these things talk to each other--sometimes this data is actually shared between those ecosystems and sometimes it isn't. It's probably how some people are settings things up, but I blame the software for making those relationships somewhat obtuse. My understanding is that everything on the backend is actually SharePoint and Teams and OneDrive are just different front ends with different permissions structures. That has helped somewhat but it's an imperfect understanding.
2. Joining Teams meeting links from other institutions is fraught with problems. If I have a Zoom link from somewhere else, I click on the link and the meeting starts. That's it. I click a Teams link on a not-work computer and it can be difficult to open (SSO something something probably). So instead I'll open in browser, which may result in a "browser not supported error" on every browser (including Edge). Even if I can get in my webcam might not support backgrounds. Or the microphone/camera selection I made in browser permissions is ignored by Teams. Any one of these events occurring appears to be random, so I have to plan on a few extra minutes before Teams meetings to log in.
3. Notifications don't go always go away when seen. I sometimes have to click out if the window and click back in.
4. Incomplete markdown support (let me copy/paste a table from pandas!)
5. This is dumb, but gif selection sucks. They must do some sort of aggressive filter for work or something, and maybe that's an enterprise decision. But if I want to communicate exclusively via gifs that is my prerogative, thank you.

Doubt they have fixed the issues, even if they have, don't tell me because I don't care, I will still hate them.

Because clicking on a link on mobile does not always work for whatever reason so I have to manually type in the stuff.

Because it does not work on my computer.

Teams is an abomination of Skype for business, lynx, and SharePoint. If you have ever used any of those then you know how bad that is.

IMHO it just tries to do everything and fails at that. It's not horrible, but not great either.

Chat and calls should be the focus, but even that is buggy. In the "teams" feature I personally have zero overview and I miss a lot of stuff. But that might be user error

I don't know if I hate it but it's annoying how opening links inside Teams tends to open in Teams instead of the real expected app.

It's like they want a whole OS inside of Teams.

Besides that: slack just feels better and less clunky for text chats.

So, I really don't like Teams. What follows is basically an unedited stream-of-consciousness that came out of me after reading the question. I've reread it and now realize that it comes across as extremely angry and dramatic. I would not put Teams in the top 50 difficulties of my life, but I do not have much patience for incompetent software. I'm also just in a bad mood and decided to swing at Teams.

Fuck Teams' stupid fucking pseudo-markdown WYSIWYG editor. Either be markdown or don't, you fucking useless cretinous moron! If you're going to automatically insert an interactive code block when I enter a triple-backtick, then you should god damned well do the same fucking thing when I paste in a fully formed code block. (edit here) I do not want to see triple backticks, a new line, my code in a stupid non-monospace font, and then another triple backticks. I wanted a code block which is why I indicated my intention for it to be rendered as one by using the triple fucking backticks that you recognize(end edit). This is just one example, and I feel like I'm taking crazy pills every time I use that piece of shit chatbox.

I use Linux, which means I use Teams exclusively through the browser (they used to have an electron app for Linux but they got tired of dealing with it and deprecated it). I'd be fine with the browser thing were it not for the fact that when I type in the Teams URI, there's a 50/50 chance that I'll be sent to Teams V1 versus Teams V2. Like, why the fuck are you like this, Teams? I have clicked the god damned "take me to V2" button so many times! I think there's like, an option or something for it that I've also clicked. (edit here) I have cleared my cookies and browser data for Teams, I have completely nuked ~/.{config,cache}/google-chrome for Teams, I have installed Chrome Beta for Teams, and still the issue persists (end edit). I do not want to wait 30 fucking seconds for the V2 version of the page to load when I already waited 10-15 seconds. Don't get me started on how broken the "install this as an app" bullshit is, ugh fuck I hate it.

Finally, Teams has been really great at not fucking reading my auth cookie recently. My company uses Okta for SSO, and like, fuck man, most shitty web apps seem to get it. My browser stores a JWT, it sends that shit in a cookie, some magic crypto shit happens, and boom I'm authorized. Teams is just fucking deaf to this though, and it makes me click a "sign in again" button or some shit, which then has a chance to proc the V1 vs V2 UI issue. Like, come the fuck on bro I SEE the cookie when I look at my network requests, just put the fries in the bag and stop making my life that little bit more irritating.

I just want a compact contact list with status icons. Pining conversations is a shitty solution. Just give me back icq/aim/yahoo/etc

No push to talk aside from some crappy implementation that requires window focus and can't be bound to a different key. Runs like absolute ass on their own hardware which I'm required to use at work

I'm a Slack guy, when forced to use Teams it just always tried to get in the way of anything I wanted to do and Slack would get out of the way.

Sadly Slack are busy trying to make Slack as obnoxious as Teams.

For a counterpoint, my wife loves Teams. She uses it all day every day, and only has good things to say about it.

Why does ux layout eat so much screen space? We have a channel for the team to say hello at the start of shift, the lunch/goodnight.

The UX lets you see maybe 3-4 total posts at once. That is one example, but it takes so much effort of scrolling to be sure you’ve seen everything