My company uses Teams (thank god for meetings only, we use Slack for chat) but it's become a running joke of sorts that I have to "drop for memory". At least once a week I'll be in the middle of the meeting and have to say: "sorry I have to drop and join again, Teams is eating my memory". For context I have a 16" MBP, i7, 16GB RAM.

Am I the only person who likes teams? My company uses it heavily for text and video chats and I think it's pretty great, and don't get the bugs and slow performance issues of others. I wouldn't call it snappy, but still fine, and makes communications very easy.

I'm using a surface laptop 3. Maybe MS did the apple thing of making software that only works properly on their own hardware

Copy pasting code snippets do not work in Teams. It randomly inserts nbsp.

Does it let you receive real time notifications from other organisations, or do you only get them from the one you're 'active' in? That was the dumbest thing ever and caused me to constantly miss messages from clients (or my actual employer, if I was signed into the teams space for a client) until I got an email a few hours after someone had sent a message. I just don't get why they'd choose to artificially restrict it with such a deficient model.

Other things that sucked:

- search never seemed to find anything I wanted, and I never knew why, but I can always find what I want in e.g. Discord so pretty sure the problem isn't actually me

- copying and pasting code was always a nightmare with formatting

- if you called someone at the same time as they called you, who knows what could happen, it couldn't handle the multi-device nature of it all

- general latency, everything was slow and with a delay (which I think contributed to the issue just above)

- the file viewer sucked immensely, and never was improved

- resource use on Mac OS was often abysmal

- updates constantly caused further issues, to the point it became a joke with the team when we'd encounter new bugs

- delivery of message notification emails was inconsistent if not signed in at all. Sometimes it would be near instant, other times it would be hours later, and sometimes days later. Never had that issue with other services like Slack, so also don't think that was on our end.

- ghost calls, where teams would think someone was in a call, but it had been cancelled, causing misc. issues with calling back etc.

Damn, what a piece of junk!

I think so? Everyone I know at companies that have bought it also had employee-lead efforts to buy slack and/or zoom, and employees use those instead, like Adobe for example. I haven’t used it personally but I have only heard very negative things in my network.

The video conferencing is pretty good. Everything else is horrible. It's so clunky and limited. Especially coming from Slack at my last job.

search feature is horrendous. Very difficult to remind yourself about something you know you talked about person X with.

I work for Microsoft (not on Teams). I actually don’t mind Teams much, it does the job and doesn’t seem much worse than Slack. But the crappy search is absolutely my biggest pet peeve.

For being descended from (and forcibly superseding) what was once the genericized trademark for video chat (Skype), it's pretty egregious that "not much worse than Slack" is the best Microsoft can do.

All Microsoft products have terrible search, Teams isn’t exceptional in this regard.

If you work at Microsoft, and have any influence on the WinDev team, please tell them that the Start menu search is simply shameful.

There hasn’t been a single major Windows release — server or client — capable of consistently, reliably, and correctly finding start menu items. Worse, every major release is broken in new and creative ways. This is especially true for a fresh install, because apparently a 64-core server needs several days to index 500 KB of text. (Microsoft support told me this with a straight face, almost verbatim.)

Seriously, what is that team doing!?

Is this the same code that’s in Outlook and Teams search too?

It feels like it…

I use slack regularly at work, discord for gaming and teams at university. The worst of all 3 is teams by far, just the startup is too slow.

I use it on a standard spec windows laptop and it works fine… Little bit slow and stuttery in places and definitely a resource hog when screen-sharing but it has a ton of functionality that makes up for it.

From what I can figure this is kind of inherent when apps are electron based to be cross-platform. Similar experience with vscode.

Yeah I used it on a MBP for months before I left my last job. It struggled when a lot of people had their camera on but it seemed to improve over time. I wonder if it has to do with OS version or something. I didn't love it, but for video meetings it worked well enough for me.

I don't feel strongly one way or another.

As another said, the dismissing of notifications is onerous.

But I have no issues with performance, and no apparent bugginess either.

No Surface here - custom AMD Ryzen / AMD Radeon desktop. Windows 10 Pro.

Pretty great compared to what? I can make it usable, but Slack has always just worked.

As an aside though, on Surface it was Google Meet that destroyed performance. I repeatedly got overheating warnings while in meetings.

MS software works on MS hardware with an MS OS. Who would have thought.

It isn't just a Mac issue. I had a i9 / 64GB Ram windows laptop which turned into a furnace when I ran teams. I've been doing a lot of work on the couch over the pandemic and it was too hot to set on my lap.

I have since switched to a M1 macbook and it heats up too, but at least the processor is efficient so it doesn't become uncomfortable.

These issues simply did not happen on either laptop with Zoom. Teams is simply a horribly written piece of crapware. MS should be ashamed of themselves.

It works fine on Windows so you and your team will just have to switch to Windows on your PCs in order to continue using Microsoft's Office 365... /sarcasm

> It works fine on Windows

No it doesn’t.

Video calls are worse than Skype or Google meets.

The Word thing in Teams is buggy, ‘open in app’ leads to better behaviour but you can end up in version hell. The online Word version doesn’t do the same things as Teams Word or the native app.

As a test, try moving a picture or editing a footer.

>It works fine on Windows like hell it does.

crashes all the time. I actually had a better experience with it on Mac more often than Windows.

All the developers at my company have Macs and everyone else is given Windows laptops (mostly Surface Laptops and Pros)

The Windows people have WAY more issues. The Mac experience isn't great but not nearly as bad as the Windows users.

if i have the app open for longer than 4 hours the memory footprint bloats to 6GB. it's absurd.

using the msedge webapp i _only_ bloat to about 2GB.

edit: on my win10 machine

Not sure if I understand you properly, but if the entire operating system crashes due to one malfunctioning app then it sounds like a serious bug in the OS, right?

I don't use Mac myself but these days the operating system is supposed to continue running even if some specific app does something stupid.

Teams chat seems to work fine on my 2021 MacBook Pro with M1 processor. We typically use zoom for video calls. MS Outlook on the other hand frequently crashes. Maybe there’s a memory leak issue?

> MS Outlook on the other hand frequently crashes. Maybe there’s a memory leak issue?

Off-topic but I need to get this off my chest: Outlook on the web is a much better experience than the native app on the Mac.

I don't know if the native app on the Mac is the same as the Windows one, but the latter is absolute crap. It's sooo laggy. Sure, I don't have a 64 core thread ripper or other ridiculous CPU, but even on my 11th gen i7 work laptop, the webapp runs circles around the native app. Even on Firefox on Linux.

However, they must have caught wind of this, because there have been some "improvements" recently, where they reduced the vertical screen space with an empty menu line, and it also feels a bit less snappy than before.

And the parent comment’s suggestion works with it to. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32085044

My wife uses Outlook (but not Teams) on her 2021 M1 MBP and there is some sort of leak. Her SSD fills up with swap files or something, and restarting gives her back 90GB of space. Literally. It is crazy.

I don't know if it's Outlook though. I have similar issues with my Intel MBP, and I don't use Outlook. I slowly drain from 20GB available down to 2, and then I have to restart. It's like living in the early 2000's, restarting all the time.

To be fair any app will crash the last Intel macs. They're probably one of the slowest computers in existence. You have to run fan control at full blast for it to even be usable.

How does "slowest" translate to a crash?