That's the problem: Microsoft isn't a company. They aren't a cohesive team working on a product. They are a corporation: a group of companies with separate trends writing on separate products.

Is the GitHub team working on Teams now? I doubt it.

I hope they do. This can only improve Teams

Why? What value does Teams bring to GitHub? They are totally separate techs.

I don't care at all about Teams. GitHub, on the other hand, is the host of many important projects. I would much rather the GitHub team be left alone to do their jobs.

Anything to make Teams better I would certainly appreciate bc it's a daily annoyance to use in any meaningful way.

Team has issues is the understatement of the year. A simple feature like screen freeze has been requested per use in the thread below hundreds of times...

"Between different messaging boards (including the link above) this feature has been requested over 2000 times (1044 times as of this writing on the link above alone). Could Microsoft chime in to let us know if this is going to be on the roadmap? Thanks."

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msteams/forum/all/pausin...

The tool will say you are in the meeting but won't let you have access to the chat. A bug hitting regularly hundreds of persons.

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams/why-s...

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams/probl...

I pity GitHub employees and would consider resigning :-)

They don’t even have something as simple as a key combo to mute and other basic functionality (macos).

Why is this such a hard thing to get right? WebEx seemingly has 4 different mute keybinds, depending on the style of meeting you're in. It's worse than nothing because you randomly mash keys, making it look like you're not paying attention.

I am not trying to defend Teams, I hate it. But Cmd+Shift+M does that on Teams on macOS.

I was forced to memorize that keyboard shortcut because for the last several weeks Teams will randomly stop recognizing mouse clicks.

that's not true. CMD + Shift + M mutes and unmutes your mic. you can also press Option + Space to temporarily unmute yourself.

Nice, I can't even view the first link because I'm redirected to a stupid MS login and I have blocked scripts, not even a message shows, just plain black screen.

Stagnant feature requests are the least of Teams' problems.

It's a slow buggy resource hog that crashes frequently.

Features keep getting added but until they address the fundamentals, all they're doing is polishing a turd.

I suspect that it’s a resource hog because it’s not fully native. Someone may correct me though.

Have you tried the web version of Teams? It’s not ideal, but I have found it to be more stable than the desktop version.

The point of dogfooding isn't feeding your employees any old dog food. The point of dogfooding is that the dog food you make is so damn good your employees prefer it over making lunch boxes or eating out.

(It doesn't have to be perfect, or course, just do something better than its competitors to be attractive to use. I struggle to think of a single redeeming feature of Teams.)

>The point of dogfooding is that the dog food you make is so damn good your employees prefer it over making lunch boxes or eating out.

I don’t know if I’m misunderstanding how you’ve put this, but I’ve only ever understood dogfooding to mean that you use your own product to find the bugs, improve the workflow, and encourage feature suggestions.

Dog-fooding is not a reward for making the best product (though that makes life easier at work), it’s a commitment to improving your own product, and showing that you are willing to live with your own product in order to make it better for your customers.

I phrased it a little oddly. What I mean is that if not even my employees (who hopefully share my ideals and values) volunteer to use my software, I would take that as a strong signal that I've failed to find a sustainable niche in the market, and maybe the right approach is not to force it down people's throats and hope that they can dig me out of my hole, but rather to pivot and ask myself, "what should I have done differently to get a product people want to use, despite technical flaws?"

So yes, dogfooding is there to get immediate feedback on technical flaws of an otherwise desirable product. Dogfooding is not there to fix a product--market mismatch. That needs to happen at a different level of development.

> I’ve only ever understood dogfooding to mean that you use your own product to find the bugs, improve the workflow, and encourage feature suggestions.

I've only ever understood dogfooding to mean this as well, but I like GP's point. If you're forcing yourself to use the product to find bugs instead of using the product because it's a great product, then you have problems.

Dogfooding explained by Joel Spolsky in 2001: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/05/05/what-is-the-work-o...

Dogfooding works when affected employees have the ability to improve the product.

You wouldn't want to eat dog food that wasn't prepared in sanitary conditions, so if you worked at a dog food plant and knew you'd be eating something that closed through that dirty grate, you'd clean it. You wouldn't want a program on your PC that regularly consumes an entire core while idle or that crashes when active, so you'd fix those issues if it was your software.

People naturally want to fix problems that affect them and add features that would improve their daily use of a product. At a small company or startup, where people can do this, you should use your own products as much as possible.

But if you are a Microsoft/GitHub employee with no access to the Teams code, not even access to a human being who works on Teams, there's no point. Use whatever meeting software lets you do your job best.

Dogfooding only has a purpose if someone cares about the dogs' feedback.

So should they also force every subsidiary to use Windows, VSCode, Office 365, Azure, etc?

Absent a strong business reason otherwise, absolutely.

Azure: yes, all the major cloud providers should migrate all of their use to their cloud. If their cloud doesn't support something that's a problem for their users and they need to fix it ASAP.

O365: Same thing.

VSCode: Developer tools such as IDEs shouldn't be mandated (and weren't when I worked at MS) but if one is mandated it absolutely should be their version unless there's a strong technical reason otherwise (for instance, if they were using Java there are better choices).

Windows: Again, most good shops don't mandate what your desktop environment is

Besides O365 the rest are not even the same thing. If half your company is on Teams, and half is on Slack, they can’t communicate with each other.

Mandating a single communication platform is absolutely the right move. And the fact that MS picked Teams as that single communication platform is beyond obvious. What else could they have chosen?

> Mandating a single communication platform is absolutely the right move

Is it, even if there will be productivity losses? Is making your teams less productive "absolutely the right move"?

If mandating the use of their own productivity tools causes them productivity losses, I'm happy to watch MS either come to terms with that and try to fix Teams or suffer the same losses that they inflict on the rest of the world.

From an outsider's perspective of MS and Github, I think it's the right move.

Yes!

Literally sitting here right now trying to figure out how to get simple things going compared to slack after being forced to move to teams from slack (not GitHub).

I am all for dogfooding here, but if the dog-fooding is not improving the product it shows that the goal is to eat market because of lopsided ecosystem monopoly. Screw MS and MS Teams.

eg. : We need a tag in a shared channel so that we can provide single point of support for other teams, instead of people having to tag the whole channel. Slack made is as easy as breeze to sync on-call person from PD -> a group.

From the quote it appears the goal is to save money. From the numbers I found, GitHub could be paying upwards of $35k/month in licensing for Slack users. In a climate where companies are trying to shed expenses, wouldn't it make sense to bring that expense in-house?

To people only focused on short term dollars, perhaps. But what impact will it have? Certainly an impact on productivity in short term, perhaps longer? Are there equivalent replacements for all the slack hooks people have in place now? How long will it take to become 'just as' productive in Teams? 1 month? 3 months?

$35k... that's... under $500k/year in licensing they're paying? Will they take more than a $500k hit in productivity?

By HN standards, $500k isn't even the loaded cost of one intern these days in SV, but... even in the 'normal' western business world... $500k/year is likely the cost of 2-3 engineering staff. Trying to eke that much savings in the short term seems short sighted.

Long term, it will likely result in the improvement of Teams due to dog fooding. It may not be instant, but it will happen.

So you save about 1 employee cost per year, and make the other thousands miserable and less productive? Definition of penny wise, pound foolish.

I 100% agree with you about bringing that experience in-house.

My comment was reaction to the fact that there is a forced migration without 1:1 parity in feature set. Most large orgs/teams in my experience heavily rely on automation that has been added over the period of time reduce the cognitive load that is accidental/side-effect. Now if you are going to force them to move; give them a migration path.

Think of this in terms of API contracts. If half of the methods in your new version are not even available; why even make the new API public?

"Teams has issues" is an understatement, the app will sometimes notify you that you have a new message, and when you try to open it from the web page, it won't show up, but if you force refresh it will. Or it will show up on the mobile client, but not on the web one.

The number of times I've had to hold a conversation via Teams on my phone instead of on the desktop because the chat on the desktop just refused to update... ugh, geez.

Slack also does that sometimes. In the app!

The default settings give you a notification in the notifications list when you get a thumb's up in the chat you're currently reading. You'll have to switch views to clear that notification(!) beyond infuriating for such a small thing.

> Teams has issues;

Issues like unable to switch teams without re-authenticating? Slack can do this, Discord can do this, both of them completely seamlessly but Teams just can't.

Dogfooding means using your own product. The Teams team does not work at GitHub, they work at Microsoft. Yes, I know the one owns the other, but the fact that this requirement needs to be made at all is testimony to the fact that they would much rather use a product by a competitor, that's how broken it is.

> Hard to improve without dogfooding

They've been dogfooding and I don't think most of us regular users have seen any measurable improvement for years. Apparently it's hard to improve with dogfooding too?