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Re:Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible by _jal on Wednesday November 20, 2019 @07:52PM (#21590380)
Bad sign. If the rank and file are afraid to give honest internal feedback, they have a management problem.

At least for me, that's a time-to-leave signal.

Re:Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible by grumple on Thursday November 21, 2019 @08:55AM (#21593981)
It's a company with non-unique tech run by salespeople, of course they have a management problem.
Re:Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible by chris_wot on Thursday November 21, 2019 @04:53AM (#21592701)
Given that Microsoft Teams is literally an existential threat, they really want to listen to feedback internally!
Re:Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible by mullingitover on Thursday November 21, 2019 @09:26PM (#21601911)
Did Teams ever fix that issue where every channel is Hotel California, as in you can never leave?
Re:Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible by sharken on Thursday November 21, 2019 @05:17AM (#21592811)
Not until Microsoft Teams gets the layout fixed, see https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/su...
Re:Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible by syshum on Thursday November 21, 2019 @06:19AM (#21593088)
Not really.

Teams biggest "Feature" is that is part of the Office 364 Suite, a lot of the layout and other issues are simply forgiven since there are no additional licensing or costs to use it over Slack if you are already on Office 364 Enterprise

Teams is "good enough" for most organizations and is improving,

That is microsoft current plan, be "good enough"

Re:Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible by tremon on Thursday November 21, 2019 @06:26AM (#21593110)
That has always been Microsoft's plan, to be "just good enough" to make the cost of switching outweigh the cost of muddling on.
Re:Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible by chris_wot on Thursday November 21, 2019 @10:15AM (#21594852)
In this case, it’s also their competitors plan! Slack seems to have the same ethos.
Re:Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible by fbnlsr on Thursday November 21, 2019 @06:35AM (#21593141)
What happened to the last day of Office 365?
Re:Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible by pjc50 on Thursday November 21, 2019 @06:39AM (#21593167)
Off-by-one error. Or a joke about availability.
Re:Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible by winthrowe on Thursday November 21, 2019 @07:50AM (#21593532)
As a 365 admin, I'm quite certain it's an availability joke.
Re:Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible by OkGoDoIt on Thursday November 21, 2019 @01:39PM (#21597688)
If you’re an office 365 admin, you would know it’s not a joke :-(
Re:Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible by syshum on Thursday November 21, 2019 @07:06AM (#21593295)
Ask Microsoft, they seem to think there is only 364 days in a yer based on their availability
Re:Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible by jlgaddis on Thursday November 21, 2019 @02:24PM (#21598326)
How many days are in a non-Microsoft yer? (sorry!)
Re:Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible by 0xffff2 on Thursday November 21, 2019 @02:50PM (#21598704)
Yep. My large, distributed government agency was a free-for-all for several years. After letting everyone try things out, they've now decided to standardize on O365 and dozens of team-specific Slacks are getting torpedoed in favor of the agency-wide Teams instance.
Re:Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible by Aeolun on Friday November 22, 2019 @05:02AM (#21604282)
Couldn’t they have had an agency wide Slack instance?
Re:Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible by christefano on Thursday November 21, 2019 @01:35PM (#21597639)
Thanks for the link. I’ll be watching it.

Out of curiosity, what do you think of the Stylish userscript that enables a compact mode in Teams and offers dark and light themes?

https://userstyles.org/users/727497

Re:Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible by sharken on Thursday November 21, 2019 @02:23PM (#21598320)
It's a well-made workaround until Teams gets a first rate UI.

I still prefer an App instead of the browser, but that's just personal preference.

Re:Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible by ailideex on Thursday November 21, 2019 @06:10AM (#21593044)
Microsoft Teams is pretty horrible
Re:Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible by rvanmil on Thursday November 21, 2019 @06:48AM (#21593210)
That's never stopped enterprise IT from rolling out tools to their users.

Teams is free as part of an Office 365 subscription (just like Sharepoint and all the other crap they bundle with it), which is what definitely makes it an existential threat to Slack, because now Slack is competing with Microsoft's very strong Office monopoly.

Re:Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible by cc81 on Thursday November 21, 2019 @09:23AM (#21594254)
Teams has some UI issues (please make the chat more compact) but they have a pretty powerful tool for normal users who are already in the Office landscape.

The fact that you can create a group with some channels, add your files there and edit them together, have a wiki, have a (not very good) kanban board etc. makes it a pretty complete experience. Some of the tools they release needs more polish and some tools are by themselves much worse than stand alone competitors but having everything in one is pretty nice.

Re:Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible by Aeolun on Friday November 22, 2019 @04:56AM (#21604264)
The best word I have for teams is ‘clusterfuck’. The files which were already spread around different locations, now have one more location to be added.

Then there is sharepoint, oh, and onedrive, and they all come in the same package so everyone uses something else.

Re:Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible by kevingadd on Friday November 22, 2019 @04:31AM (#21604143)
I don't like Teams much but the calendar integration is really nice. If I get a calendar invite for a meeting via outlook I can tab over to teams and it's right there in the calendar view with a join button. Much easier to keep track of compared to the old way (calendar invite, tab over to slack and find the appropriate channel or group chat to start/join the call)
Re:Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible by jordache on Thursday November 21, 2019 @02:21PM (#21598283)
MS Teams is free.

At a previous company, we had slack and MS Teams side by side, to trial out MS Teams. Everyone preferred Slack by a huge margin. We were told to get use to Teams, because Teams is free.

Guess what, it was fine.. no notable productivity lose going from slack to teams. If anything, team's sharepoint file integration is much better than slack, for keeping a single source of truth.

Re:Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible by Aeolun on Friday November 22, 2019 @04:58AM (#21604273)
Teams is fine, but Slack is pleasant. I don’t really know how to qualify the difference, but I guess it’s somewhat similar to ‘death by a thousand cuts’.
Re:Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible by brynjolf on Friday November 22, 2019 @05:35AM (#21604429)
Endless notifications. I use Teams daily and it drives me insane. Especially every notification you get for a thread you already explicitly told you don't want notifications for. I stopped wishing people happy birthday but cause I would get notifications on three devices for days. Even though I said I don't want notifications for that thread. Teams is a buggy mess they will never get fixed because they only follow the votes on User Voice.
Re:Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible by GFischer on Friday November 22, 2019 @07:20AM (#21604891)
Same here. We used Slack and liked it. We're now using Teams, it's tolerable but Slack had significantly better UX.

The Android app in particular has trouble. And muting is all-or-nothing.

I've also had corrupted channels, I even escalated to Microsoft once.

Re:Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible by lytefm on Friday November 22, 2019 @10:10AM (#21606195)
Same here. Yes, it's buggy and annoyingly messing up the formatting of messages, especially when trying to use WYSIWIG Markdown. Since we're running on Office365 due to Management preferences, we started using Teams. With Franz, it's usabale on Linux. It's bad compared to Slack ofc, but not so much worse that it would justify an additional 11,75€ per user and month.
Re:Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible by CharlesColeman on Thursday November 21, 2019 @01:39PM (#21597698)
> Microsoft Teams is pretty horrible

Doesn't matter, since it comes with Office so it basically costs $0.

It's crap, but that's not stopping my employer from replacing literally everything they can with it. Even our desk phones, purportedly.

Re:Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible by stevehawk on Thursday November 21, 2019 @09:21AM (#21594233)
It doesn't matter. It's part of the Microsoft enterprise offerings. If you don't want to get replaced by one of their products, which the CIO will do just to make his/her own life easier, then you better make a product everyone wants.
Re:Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible by criddell on Thursday November 21, 2019 @10:47AM (#21595276)
It would be a great time for them to add markdown support and in the press release say we're listening.
Re:Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible by wickchuck on Thursday November 21, 2019 @01:41PM (#21597720)
It's been requested and denied. Still quite a few comments on it since I last posted tho. Go vote and get them to have a powermode to enter normal markdown with no WYSIWIG https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/su...
Re:Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible by blntechie on Friday November 22, 2019 @01:40AM (#21603362)
Doesn’t matter. Orgs are moving to Teams in droves. I personally know four 50k+ orgs moving to Teams just in the last 6 months. Slack’s pricing is not helping them either.
Re:Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible by naravara on Tuesday November 26, 2019 @02:30PM (#21641742)
"Pretty horrible" + easy integration with Sharepoint and Exchange + cheap if you're already knee deep into O365 is a tradeoff many large Enterprise IT folks are perfectly happy to make.
Re:Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible by eirini1 on Thursday November 21, 2019 @03:24PM (#21599139)
really? I find it rather great. Whats wrong with it?
Re:Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible by Erlich_Bachman on Thursday November 21, 2019 @04:36AM (#21592615)
*Slack, not signal.
Re:Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible by umeshgmrl on Thursday November 21, 2019 @04:51AM (#21592692)
he might meant to say 'sign', not the company name
Re:Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible by baby on Wednesday November 20, 2019 @10:26PM (#21591178)
And this ladies and gentlemen is the over reaction of the year!
Re:Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible by anyfoo on Wednesday November 20, 2019 @11:24PM (#21591451)
In my company (not a small one) and in any previous ones, I’ve never even thought that people could be afraid of giving honest feedback. I’ve seen internal feedback causing change, I’ve also seen it being ignored (sometimes to be listened to later after all, sometimes it turned out that things weren’t as bad as they seemed), but I’ve never perceived any potential for negative repercussions.

So if that is indeed the case here, then it does indicate some problems.

Re:Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible by toyg on Thursday November 21, 2019 @05:36AM (#21592888)
Uh, that’s actual the default behaviour I’ve witnessed at small and large companies I’ve worked for: complain or be critical of the shiny bright path that executives push you onto, and you’ll be branded a nuisance to suppress. Rule n.1 of survival has always been “don’t rock the boat”. The one time I felt safe enough to speak my mind without filters, I eventually paid the price for it.
Re:Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible by baby on Thursday November 21, 2019 @02:45AM (#21592171)
Sure, my point is that it makes little sense to jump to these conclusions with so little information, especially since this is not the point of the article.

I’m amazed that I’m still talking about this :)

Re:Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible by wpietri on Wednesday November 20, 2019 @10:44PM (#21591253)
Not at all. Why stay at a place that doesn't value your ability to think? Or, worse, doesn't value the thoughts of anybody below a certain rank?

Not only is that a miserable experience, but I think it's also a recipe for a product that only gets worse.

Re:Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible by hanspeter on Thursday November 21, 2019 @03:16AM (#21592293)
> Why stay at a place that doesn't value your ability to think? Or, worse, doesn't value the thoughts of anybody below a certain rank?

That's the over reaction part. The fact that two engineers feels uncomfortable expressing their feelings, says very little about the culture or values in their company.

It could be that they are just too introverted or insecure to speak up about most things, or that they have a good relationship with the fellow engineers in that other team, and don't feel like ruining it by telling them, that their contributions to the product sucks.

Re:Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible by wpietri on Friday November 22, 2019 @10:30AM (#21606408)
If the original commenter had said, "if any two engineers feel uncomfortable, you should definitely quit right away", then you'd be right.

But that's not what was said. It was correctly described as a possible management problem, a signal. If your notion is that one should leave at the first signal, that's something you bring to it.

Anyhow, we have evidence that the problem is more widespread. It's obvious from the HN reaction that quite a lot of people hate this feature, engineers especially. But still it was released. If you want to hypothesize a situation that makes that unimportant, you have to dream up a lot more than two extremely insecure engineers.

Re:Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible by thsowers on Wednesday November 20, 2019 @10:47PM (#21591268)
While I can appreciate some healthy skepticism on how widespread the practice is, welcoming honest input from rank and file members of any company can be extremely valuable to improving the quality of products, and many successful companies realize this and encourage such feedback
Re:Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible by jraph on Thursday November 21, 2019 @04:27AM (#21592569)
Nice self-reference :-)