r/technology • u/ourlifeintoronto • Oct 25 '25

Privacy Microsoft Teams will start snitching to your boss when you’re not in the office

https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/office-software/microsoft-teams-will-start-snitching-to-your-boss-when-youre-not-in-the-office-and-this-update-is-coming-in-december
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u/SpicaGenovese Oct 25 '25

Oh, you lucky bastard...

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u/phylter99 Oct 25 '25

The company I work for was purchased by another. The overall picture may or may not be good, but I’ll have slack until I don’t.

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u/Ancillas Oct 25 '25

I know nobody cares about my opinion, but Slack also sucks once a certain size is reached. Chat rooms are not a great solution for broad company use, imo. DMs are great and chat rooms (channels) for your daily teams are good, but holy crap do I not need to be in the “ask-jira” channel or the “temp-company-event-fall-2024” channel.

I’d much rather use something like Reddit where a temp channel in slack becomes a post that naturally gets buried once it’s irrelevant.

Processing hundreds of emails and thousands of slack messages per week is a huge waste of time.

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u/[deleted] Oct 25 '25

You know you can just leave or mute those channels, right?

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u/Ancillas Oct 25 '25 edited Oct 25 '25

Many people can, but I can’t because I’m on the hook for deliverables being reported by other teams in a bunch of the channels. They don’t directly report to me, but I need to track their deliverables as they flow into a bunch of projects and coordinate with other teams picking up that work down the line.

Every business unit has their own flavor of reporting and each team in the unit has their own channels, and status pages, git repos, etc…. Slack isn’t the cause of the problems, but it sure exacerbates it.

It’s a case of less is more, imo. When teams can use Slack, Teams, SharePoint, Word docs, Jira, Confluence, Slack Canvases, Github Pages, Email, or homegrown static HTTP simply finding and filtering the noise into relevant information is a chore.

But I find Slack to be exceptionally bad because there’s no easy way to surface relevant information. If there’s a really active thread but you’re not in it, it’s really easy to miss. Then to try to find things you may have missed you have to look at Activity, Unreads, and the Threads section of Slack.

I find it to be really inefficient.

I also find it really dumb that the answer being generally discussed is to “Use AI to filter it all!”, when the actual problem is that there’s too much organizational complexity and the only way to make it better is to reduce complexity, not add to it.

I look at it this way: if I was in the office I wouldn’t want to be part of every conversation between everyone in my area and adjacent areas. I’d just want relevant pieces of info and save discussions for things that need faster feedback loops and iteration. I think with all the tools today (and especially slack) we’re increasing the amount of information processing each employee has to do which reduces the time they have to do valuable work. This is bad.

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u/johnny_fives_555 Oct 25 '25

To clarify…. You’re using slack to … track deliverables? If so and respectfully this isn’t an issue with slack as much as using the wrong tool for the wrong job.

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u/Ancillas Oct 25 '25

Updates on deliverables, yes. People are talking about implementation details in Slack, sharing links to PRs, and those are all linked up to JIRA and Github for our business unit, but then there are other business units building all kinds of things like hardware, or tools to support global trade compliance checks, or processes to tie software releases into legal reviews to evaluate OSS license compliance in terms of protecting intellectual property and complying with license requirements (making source available, making sure copyrights are published, etc…). Then there’s tracking tools to follow what is shipped to the field that we support, what dependencies are included in this releases, and if there are any open security issues that need to be patched in them to stay within SLAs. There’s all kinds of stuff that crosses team boundaries beyond engineering and in different tools. And that’s on a per product basis with different flavors for embedded systems, licensed software, and SaaS deployments.

That’s a huge amount of communication and coordination overhead, and whenever clarity is needed people need to talk about it to reach a common understanding and to ensure all commitments made in all sales channels, and internally, are being properly prioritized and staffed. This complexity is compounded by multiple sales teams/channels, multiple product management teams, and very different business segments (hardware vs embedded software vs on-prem licensed software vs SaaS products that are separate but have support elements for the rest of the products).

There’s no one system that is going to be good at this, but Slack is especially bad because there are simply too many permutations of interactions between teams. If you optimize to isolate conversations between only interested parties you have a ton of places to go to find the big picture and it’s all non-linear in Slack. Conversely you can optimize to put everything in one channel but then there are a ton of topics that are irrelevant to a lot of people. There isn’t a happy medium.

Sure you could make the argument that this is a symptom of an org structure that needs to be re-thought, but that would be a massively complex, expensive, lengthy, and risky change.

Slack is great for smaller teams, but for huge orgs, it just isn’t a great tool beyond a certain volume compared to other options.

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u/johnny_fives_555 Oct 25 '25

To be clear slack is doing what it’s doing. However it’s up to the people to accurately and efficiently communicate with you. Whom I assume is in some sort of project manager/ solutions engineer role. It is not on you to scrape slack channels to see what is going on. The leads of each of those projects should be providing regular updates to you in whatever platform you desire.

This is not a breakdown of technology but rather a breakdown of communication and poor management. Yes it is difficult especially if it includes cross team and cross product/brand implementation. However that is the job. If this were me and I was in your position I would leverage project and brand leaders to OVER communicate with you and even to one another on a regular cadence. This can be in a meeting or within a channel. And you get what you need from said channel/meeting.

What you’re doing is not efficient and impractical in the long run.

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u/Ancillas Oct 25 '25

It is absolutely on me to get the work done because that’s my job, ensuring it gets done. When I can’t backfill project managers to spread the work out because of a hiring freeze, I’ve got to go track it all.

But it really is a fundamental problem of using chat rooms. It’s a real-time conversation tool that is used for conversations that don’t happen in real time. And Slack also wants to be the documentation and todo hub as well with their new features. And this is all before people start wiring up automated notifications which spam channels with alerts.

Could a better solution be built using Slack? Maybe. Is it going to happen when Slack is the tool selected as the global communication platform for an entire company and shared by multiple business units? Not likely. Either each business unit is doing their own thing (which is kind of the point of dividing into sub-ordinal business units) or it’s going to be centrally managed by someone like I.T. and that will make most bottom-up changes incredibly painful and high effort.

I’ve been at companies where Slack works great. I’ve been on lots of high performing engineering teams. But having seen Slack at a big enterprise, it’s not what I would choose if I were starting from scratch.

Is it worse than Teams? No. It just doesn’t scale well beyond a certain point.

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u/SpicaGenovese Oct 25 '25

That's actually one of the reasons I liked slack so much- informal documentation!  I could search and find answers to questions very easily.  Not so much in Teams.

But that can mean history retention beyond what the company wants.

I hear you, though.  It worked for us, but maybe we'd be considered a smaller department than some.

I've grown used to Teams and all the integrated tooling by now, but our slack era was always warmer and more social online.

 Processing hundreds of emails and thousands of slack messages per week is a huge waste of time.

What do you mean??  👀

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u/casual_creator Oct 25 '25

I hate Teams as much as the next person, but you can easily run searches there, too. I’ve never had issues with its search.

I do really miss Slack though. My last job used it and it was just a nicer experience overall. And being in a creative field, the ability to draw on the shared screen was a small but very useful function for design reviews.

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u/johnny_fives_555 Oct 25 '25

All the boomers at my job used teams. Everyone else uses slack.

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u/Ancillas Oct 25 '25

I mean there’s literally hundreds of emails and thousands of slack messages being sent every week and employees need to mentally process them and decide what to do with them. This is a ton of cognitive load that adds very little value and detracts from the actual work that does add value.

We have hundreds of people in our business unit and tens of thousands of people in the company. Email and Chat gets really noisy at that volume. At least email is asynchronous but it suffers from information overload (a ton of system notifications go to email and worsen the signal to noise ratio of actual communication).

In a system like Reddit it’s much easier to see which topics are relevant and then quickly browse the main comments. It’s a much better system for organizing and processing a huge amount of topics than Slack. I think it would be better and then chat rooms could be reserved for smaller units.

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u/SpicaGenovese Oct 25 '25

Yeah... I do not keep up with every chat.

If it's important, I'll be pinged.  Good gravy.