GitHub to layoff 10% and closing all offices

Re:GitHub to layoff 10% and closing all offices by agilob on Thursday February 09, 2023 @01:06PM (#34728379)

I know I'm in the minority here, but I choose Teams over Slack any day. I much prefer thread-based chat than message based chat. Teams forces people to use top message as a topic, then respond to messages under that topic. Slack message is just a message. You want to search something on Teams, you get full threads, chat is part of documentation. You want to find something on Slack, you need to click on date of the related message and hope no one wrote any off-topic messages underneath. I often felt like Teams could replace unofficial documentation and most Confluence pages.

Screen sharing, reminders about meetings are also better in Teams.

Ability to add people to "direct message channels" is definitely lacking in Slack. No I don't want to convert this chat with 3 people into a channel, FO. I want to add 3rd person.

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Re:GitHub to layoff 10% and closing all offices by savanaly on Thursday February 09, 2023 @01:11PM (#34728479)

I'm quite confused because almost all conversation in my company's slack happens in threads. Maybe your impression of Slack was formed in a time when they didn't have threads?

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Re:GitHub to layoff 10% and closing all offices by brookst on Thursday February 09, 2023 @01:17PM (#34728604)

I'm also confused because almost all of my company's Teams usage happens in unthreaded chats.

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Re:GitHub to layoff 10% and closing all offices by ilyt on Thursday February 09, 2023 @01:24PM (#34728757)

We don't use teams feature almost at all because it forces threading. Before wer used mattermost but teams is 100% worse but with video chat...

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Re:GitHub to layoff 10% and closing all offices by tablespoon on Thursday February 09, 2023 @01:21PM (#34728692)

> I'm also confused because almost all of my company's Teams usage happens in unthreaded chats.

Yeah, having a feature doesn't mean people use the feature.

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Re:GitHub to layoff 10% and closing all offices by relaxing on Thursday February 09, 2023 @01:52PM (#34729144)

The unthreaded chats are all private, no? If you want to use the group chat it forces you into threaded (or is there a way to switch out of that?)

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Re:GitHub to layoff 10% and closing all offices by SahAssar on Thursday February 09, 2023 @03:04PM (#34730516)

Are you talking about threads or channels? It sounds like you are describing what slack calls channels.

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Re:GitHub to layoff 10% and closing all offices by relaxing on Thursday February 09, 2023 @03:28PM (#34730900)

Yes, in the places I've used Slack, channels were the default mode of communication.

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Re:GitHub to layoff 10% and closing all offices by WorldMaker on Thursday February 09, 2023 @03:10PM (#34730606)

It has "private" group chats in Chats tab and all meetings auto-create group chats. At various points I've tried to push conversations into a proper Team and threaded chat, but the "convenience" of just sending a chat message in last week's meeting chat or some hand-built group chat rather than just finding the right Team channel seems to keep winning out more often than not.

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Re:GitHub to layoff 10% and closing all offices by brookst on Thursday February 09, 2023 @03:17PM (#34730723)

In chat, just go to New Chat and add as many people as you want. Boom, unthreaded group chat. You can rename it to a topic or group name.

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Re:GitHub to layoff 10% and closing all offices by relaxing on Thursday February 09, 2023 @03:29PM (#34730913)

But then what's the point of the "Teams" part of Teams?

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Re:GitHub to layoff 10% and closing all offices by c54 on Thursday February 09, 2023 @01:14PM (#34728544)

I think they’re just saying that teams forces you into using a thread, and make a choice to create a new one if that’s what you want. In slack by default you’re writing a top level message (ie creating a new thread)

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Re:GitHub to layoff 10% and closing all offices by brazzledazzle on Thursday February 09, 2023 @01:25PM (#34728778)

Pedantic perhaps but maybe it's worth pointing out that Teams doesn't force you to use a thread. It just makes it the obvious choice since each top level message has a reply button directly on it so it's a single step process. Also when we're talking about Teams there's a big distinction between a Teams/Teams/Channel vs a Teams/Chat which is its own annoyance. They don't even support the same formatting capabilities (e.g. markdown) which is weird.

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Re:GitHub to layoff 10% and closing all offices by mortenjorck on Thursday February 09, 2023 @01:25PM (#34728786)

Indeed, never underestimate the power of defaults. There’s a tendency on HN to say “well, everyone should just use threads on Slack then.” There is, of course, a way Slack could make that happen: make it the default.

(For what it’s worth, I much prefer Slack for communicating, but when I have to find something, I wish I were looking for it in Teams.)

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Re:GitHub to layoff 10% and closing all offices by tomtheelder on Thursday February 09, 2023 @02:13PM (#34729561)

Slacks threading model is super weak compared to other options. I haven’t used teams, but I went from Zulip to Slack a little while ago and it felt like a huge step backwards.

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Re:GitHub to layoff 10% and closing all offices by Smaug123 on Thursday February 09, 2023 @02:19PM (#34729672)

Zulip is in a league of its own, though - I'd say Slack is pretty similar to other non-Zulip options.

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Re:GitHub to layoff 10% and closing all offices by krzyk on Thursday February 09, 2023 @02:28PM (#34729832)

Regarding threads I've seen two options (besides zulip state of the art handling of that). Either hide the threads like slack or throw them in your face like Cisco webex teams.

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Re:GitHub to layoff 10% and closing all offices by krzyk on Thursday February 09, 2023 @02:25PM (#34729788)

Slack threads are hidden, it is clearly visible that they were added later.

I prefer how they are handled in zulip.

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Re:GitHub to layoff 10% and closing all offices by agilob on Friday February 10, 2023 @04:17AM (#34737380)

I use Slack currently and used it before. Threads in Slack are "optional", then they are 1st class citizen in Teams.

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Re:GitHub to layoff 10% and closing all offices by shp0ngle on Thursday February 09, 2023 @01:16PM (#34728601)

in my experience, the threads in Teams suck so much that everyone just moves chat to private groups that are still un-threaded.

in my company, we moved from slack to teams, and EVERYTHING just moved to giant private chats.

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Re:GitHub to layoff 10% and closing all offices by barbazoo on Thursday February 09, 2023 @01:09PM (#34728433)

> I much prefer thread-based chat than message based chat. Teams forces people to use top message as a topic, then respond to messages under that topic. Slack message is just a message.

Slack has threads: https://slack.com/help/articles/115000769927-Use-threads-to-...

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Re:GitHub to layoff 10% and closing all offices by dijit on Thursday February 09, 2023 @01:12PM (#34728492)

I tried Zulip with the rust community and it completely ruined slacks “threads” for me.

Its the equivalent between a pot noodle and a steak dinner.

Zulip has a lot of other issues though, the app and on-boarding… but I really struggle to enjoy slack now.

teams, however, is a total dumpster fire for serious communication outside of video meetings and some minor ad-hoc 1:1 interactions.

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Re:GitHub to layoff 10% and closing all offices by radicalbyte on Thursday February 09, 2023 @01:17PM (#34728612)

Crashing constantly and being a resource hog killed Slack for me.

That and DMs being visible to whoever pays.

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Re:GitHub to layoff 10% and closing all offices by alluro2 on Thursday February 09, 2023 @02:00PM (#34729280)

Teams, specifically on Mac and Linux, has been a shit-show of instability, weird one-off behavior, blank screens on start, login loops etc for my team. With how amazingly well Microsoft did with Visual Studio Code, it's a bummer how it seems that none of that expertise can be translated to other teams (in this case, the Teams one) as well...

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Re:GitHub to layoff 10% and closing all offices by radicalbyte on Thursday February 09, 2023 @04:01PM (#34731394)

Teams crashes my 5950x in video calls. Otherwise no issues but I can't claim to have used it much.

Discord is by far the best of the bunch combined with Jitsi.

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Re:GitHub to layoff 10% and closing all offices by aliqot on Thursday February 09, 2023 @01:08PM (#34728415)

teams search is ass.

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Re:GitHub to layoff 10% and closing all offices by nunez on Thursday February 09, 2023 @01:20PM (#34728686)

I'm with you. I only hate Teams because of how resource-intensive it is. It would be my preferred experience otherwise. Microsoft is seriously investing in it, and everyone uses it.

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Re:GitHub to layoff 10% and closing all offices by dathinab on Thursday February 09, 2023 @01:20PM (#34728689)

I agree that Slack chat is pretty bad for "technical" (or other detailed) discussions and in my experience the video chat is more likely to not work well.

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Re:GitHub to layoff 10% and closing all offices by make3 on Thursday February 09, 2023 @01:16PM (#34728580)

i think you're confusing slack and discord, everything is in threads in slack

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Re:GitHub to layoff 10% and closing all offices by terpimost on Thursday February 09, 2023 @02:03PM (#34729343)

If you guys really like threads I suggest to use Zulip which is open source thread based team chat

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Re:GitHub to layoff 10% and closing all offices by ghshephard on Thursday February 09, 2023 @02:22PM (#34729725)

I'm guessing you have a different experience with slack than I have - because important channels are frequently set to "Alert" - it's extraordinarily bad behavior (to the point at which you are chastised and coached by your manager) - to ever respond to a message in a channel without threading. We have a broad array of "THREAD-PLEASE" Emoji's that you get hit with in the first week or two when you onboard if you do that.

We've taken it next level here - whenever there is an incident - not only don't you respond as a message in the channel, you get a new channel (created by a Bot when IMOC declares an incident) per incident, so all of the activity for that incident is self-contained (can be many, many thousands of messages) - and, of course, even in that split out channel (which is only talking about a single incident) - even there you need to respond on threads, never as a new message.

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Re:GitHub to layoff 10% and closing all offices by Hackbraten on Thursday February 09, 2023 @04:05PM (#34731450)

Have you tried sending code snippets via Teams using ```-fenced code blocks?

The result looks normal. But once the recipient tries to actually use the code, it breaks horribly, because Teams has a habit of sprinkling it with non-breaking spaces.

This issue has been going on for years. I feel it makes Teams utterly unusable in software development teams.

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