[testudovictoria]

I went from a company that used Google Hangouts, which is like using pen and paper relatively speaking, to trying to use Slack. Slack wasn't official, but it was an allowed form of communication. People who didn't have the vested interested just couldn't figure it out. So while I preferred Slack, having to hold everyone's hands through basic functionality was awful.

Now I'm at a place that uses Teams. I don't think Teams is perfect, but I feel like Teams gets extra hate just because it's Teams. The best feature in my opinion is the group thread feature. Having people able to start a threaded conversation by default gives a lot of granular control over what notifications I receive by default.

[explorigin]

Coming from Slack, group threads is annoying. Teams gets extra hate because it's often forced upon engineers for cost-saving measures. Slack has a lot of nice features that help maintain a company's remote-work culture. Teams is just an organized collaboration tool. There's a huge difference.

When Teams was forced upon us at my company, it was a trash product that I would be ashamed to release. It crashed a lot. It was slow. Background noise cancellation was non-existent. Scroll-back history was nearly impossible. Search was trash. Of these things, it's now more stable and has background noise cancellation, but it's still slower and more difficult to use with garbage search and a confusing interface to find the team you're looking for.

Before we had teams, there was a lot of talk in the company of "breaking down the silos". Well teams has silos built-in. It literally makes it harder to find the right person or team to talk to just by how it's designed.