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Teams is just so bad. If a company you're interviewing for has chosen to use Teams, what people do you think they choose to promote? What strategies to pursue? Clearly their decision making process is broken, and the consequences probably don't stop at using shitty software.

I'm exaggerating a bit, but for me Teams is a real turn-off.



Are there any other options that actually work well? At least Teams is "free", as in people already using Office365 don't have to pay anything.

We use Teams at work, and I think it's an absolute pile of crap. But whenever I have to attend meetings using other systems, the experience is pretty much never great either.

Zoom has a weird windowing system, stealing focus all the time, and shows notifications as actual windows (as opposed to using the notification system).

Google meet sometimes squeezes my webcam image for some reason. It also transforms my PC in a jet airplane.

Chime sometimes works, sometimes doesn't. Usually, it won't detect my microphone. If I refresh the page enough times, it will end up working.

Webex mostly works, but it's sooo laggy. It also needs me to have the window focused if I connect too early to a meeting and am the first one there. If it's unfocused, it will not connect to the audio, so I'm left waiting around wondering why people are always late. And it insists on showing a bunch of useless crap around the main image. I know who's in the meeting, so if they're sharing their screen, I want to see that instead of their names taking up half the screen.


At least on Mac you can tell Zoom to use Mac notifications now, and to use "dual monitor mode" even if you don't have two monitors, which seems to help.

Of all the various meeting tools, Zoom is the best, but that's damning with faint praise.


Not exaggerating. I agree.

As someone who is interviewing at the moment. I won't completely dismiss the company for using Teams (and expecting the interviewee to 'cope' with the crap experience) but it immediately puts that company in the "hmm, I'll do this interview for the practice and maybe they'll surprise me" camp ...


Teams is worse than zoom certainly, but it's better than Cisco WebEx.

Slack used to be good - especially for just a background chat, but then they hid the "start a call" option away and pushed "huddles", which are far worse.

There's a solid rule of thumb that most software that is good becomes worse. Product managers have to push new features in to justify their job, if the software was 75% good before, there's a 3:1 chance that the change will make it objectively worse, and even higher chance that it will break your workflow and cause you to take cognitive load away from important things to learn how to deal with it in a new way.


At some point, companies need a CUCO: chief user consistency officer.

"No, we're not changing that. Your changes don't meaningfully improve the product enough to offset the disruption."


That's supposed to be the product owner.

Unfortunately I've noticed that "product owners" have become significantly less engaged with steering the product direction. I guess people either don't find it interesting, or they keep getting threatened by higher up and don't feel like they have enough power or own the product.


Teams made me love Slack, it is incredible how bad it is.




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