I spent some time in China working in manufacturing. I remember talking to some of the guys there. As it was explained to me, everything they had, their home, kids school, wife’s job was owned by the employer. Meaning if you lose your job you lose everything. I remember how incredibly difficult was to get things done there, no one wanted to make decisions. That was many years ago, maybe things have changed.
You're taking about statistical averages but I'm talking about a significant minority of over-70s who are wildly dangerous. Most of them only stop driving when they cause an accident. Sometimes its a serious one.
There are already some measures for young people, like the 6 point thing. Maybe there could be more. Doesn't change the facts about dangerous OAP drivers
They also get less likely to commit crime, but that’s not how we gauge risk. We don’t generally say “that teenager’s crime risk is going down so they are less risky than that geriatric whose crime risk is fairly constant.” Risk probability is usually the area under a hazard rate curve.
Over a long enough interval, that reduction in risk would be important. So what is the appropriate time interval for these risk assessments?
Yes - I’ve seen the pricing algorithms at several large insurers. Massive surcharges for young people 16-25, rates level out 30-55, and then slowly start to go back up, but it’s a slow increase compared to the young ones.
AIUI, that's a misleading figure, because the elderly self-correct, in awareness of the greater difficulty, by driving a lot less, so the greater danger is masked in the per-unit-time accident rate.
So, in theory, policy could appropriately adjust for this dynamic by only requiring the test of over-70s driving more than X miles/year, but that adds hassle to enforcement.
A close friend is considered one of the best neurosurgeons at one of the best hospitals in the country. Brain tumors are his specialty. I remember him once saying he was growing exhausted about his job and thinking of retirement, even when he’s still young. The reason being, most of the other doctors in his team were not very competent and he had to constantly review and correct their work. He’s not an arrogant guy but all the contrary, very down to earth. For him to say something like that is because the mistakes he sees have to be bad. Every time he tried to quit, the hospital threw so much money at him that he could not refuse it.
Probably worse than that. I can totally see it being weaponized. A media company critic o a particular group or individual being scrutinized and fined. I haven’t looked at any of these laws, but I bet their language gives plenty of room for interpretation and enforcement, perhaps even if you are not generating any content with AI.
Are there real documented cases of a company replacing their SaS with a vibe-coded version?
Like I can see how a very small company could replace a portion of an overkill and underutilized SaS platform.
I don’t see how a larger more complex business could replace their SAP or ADP with a vibecoded version.
These stories are all very similar in where the author knows some CEO of an obscure company who told them they had an engineer reverse engineer and vibecode some obscure SaS solution and saved them $50K.
What’s so bad about Teams that makes it so hated? I used it lately and often to work with a customer and I don’t find anything terrible about it, other than some minor usability annoyances like phantom chat notifications once in a while. But overall it does what it’s supposed to do, get on a video call, share your screen and share files over channels. The transcript feature seems to work well too. I’m not amazed by it, but I don’t see anything to hate either. I guess it is one of those tools I don’t have a strong opinion about.
"I don't have an issue with it" tells me you've never used anything else. Have you tried Slack? Zulip? Mattermost? Fucking... IRC from 1988?
Teams isn't just mediocre, it's aggressively hostile to basic usability. The camera bar sits at the top of the window, directly blocking where you're supposed to position your camera for eye contact. Chat organisation is broken: you get duplicate groups because the order people were added matters somehow. Notifications phantom in and out. Reactions are buried in an activity feed. Search is useless. You can't reliably paste text without major formatting issues. The mobile app logs you out randomly and doesn’t tell you unless you manually check it. Desktop notifications don't sync with read state. Files uploaded to chat don't appear in the Files tab. The "new Teams" broke half the features that worked in classic Teams. Presence status is a coin flip. Audio settings reset themselves between calls. Screen sharing has a 50/50 chance of sharing the wrong window. The difference between a chat and a channel is arbitrary and confusing. You can't edit messages older than a few hours. Threading is bolted on and barely works.
Performance is inexcusable. Multiple gigabytes of RAM to display text messages and lag constantly on modern hardware. How do you make a chat application lag? It's rendering text, not computing fluid dynamics. Opening the application takes 30 seconds on an SSD. Switching between chats stutters. Typing has input delay.
The real problem isn't that Teams is terrible. It's that "it technically functions" has become an acceptable standard. When you've never experienced better, "it works" seems fine. But Teams is what happens when a monopoly position means you don't have to care about quality. Microsoft has unlimited resources and still ships this.
Even Skype for Business was more stable, and in Skype for Business you couldn't reliably select text. That's how low the bar is.
This. Opening a chat for the first time in the morning consistently takes 5-10 seconds. Opening subsequent ones takes 2-3 seconds. That is, if they contain plain text. If not, UI keps reflowing and jumping while thumbnails and silly gifs are loaded async, so you cannot even reliably click.
Out of all the things you listed (and I'd have a couple more), copy-paste is really what drives me insane, because it's completely cursed!
Sometimes, text copied from teams includes `[Sender Name, 2026-01-03, 21:51]` as a prefix—other times not. Sometimes you paste formatted text and it ends up pasted as formatted but inconsistent HTML, including (of course) text color of all things, rendering it black even with the dark theme, and thus unreadable. Other times you copy code, and there's two blank lines between each line when you paste elsewhere.
It makes you cry, really.
I have used at least Skype, Meet/Chat, Slack, Teams and Discord, plus some other niche apps I can’t remember. In Discord, I like the ability to share user screens concurrently and the way you can just jump on a channel and have an impromptu meeting without much ceremony. But I have seen only one case of Discord in a corporate environment. My use cases are simple, video calls, screen sharing, file sharing and chat with mentions and code snippets, once in a while a survey to pick a place for lunch. I have been using Teams daily since last October. No issues. If it was consistently bad, it would have been replaced already. People I work with value their time. Also last week I was in a 2K+ people presentation with Q&A. I haven’t experienced most of the issues you mentioned, and don’t have the use case for some, like search or mobile. I use my email as my source of truth for communications, if it’s not in my inbox it didn’t happen. We are very diligent in keeping meeting minutes and transcripts which are shared my email at the end of the each call.
Your claim that "if it was consistently bad, it would have been replaced already" just... totally misunderstands how enterprise software decisions work, even in organisations where people value their time.
Switching costs are enormous. Your organisation has Teams integrated with your Office 365 licensing, which means you're already paying for it. Replacing it with Slack means paying $8-12 per user per month on top of your existing Office costs, because you still need Outlook, Word, Excel, and SharePoint. For a 500-person company, that's an additional $48,000-72,000 annually for a tool that overlaps with something you've already paid for. Finance departments kill these proposals before they reach decision-makers, regardless of how much time is wasted on Teams' inefficiencies.
The IT burden to move is quickly substantial. Migrating chat history, file repositories, and integrations takes months. You need to retrain users, update documentation, reconfigure SSO, and migrate bots and webhooks. Most IT departments are already understaffed. Unless Teams is completely non-functional, that project never gets prioritised over security updates, infrastructure maintenance, or business-critical requests.
Organisations don't optimise for employee time the way you seem to think they do. The calculus isn't "is this tool good", it's "is this tool bad enough to justify the cost and disruption of replacing it". That threshold is extraordinarily high. People tolerate inefficient tools because the alternative is fighting procurement, convincing IT, and enduring months of migration pain. Lotus Notes persisted in enterprises for over a decade despite being universally despised because the switching cost was too high. SAP is notorious for terrible UX but remains entrenched because migration is a multi-year project costing millions.
Your workflow actually proves the point. You use email as your source of truth because Teams' search and organisation aren't reliable enough. You manually distribute meeting minutes and transcripts because you don't trust Teams as a system of record. You've built workarounds to compensate for the tool's deficiencies and normalised them as standard practice. That's not Teams working well, that's your organisation adapting to work around its limitations.
Let me address the specific issues you haven't encountered:
- Teams' resource usage is measurable and documented. PC World's 2023 benchmarks showed Teams using 1.4GB RAM at idle compared to 500MB for Slack and 350MB for Discord. ExtremeTech's testing found Teams taking 22 seconds to cold start versus 4 seconds for Slack on identical hardware. r/sysadmin consistently reports Teams causing performance problems on machines with 8GB of RAM, forcing hardware upgrades. Microsoft implicitly acknowledged this by completely rebuilding Teams in 2023, promising 2x faster performance and 50% less memory. The fact that they had to rewrite the entire application is an admission that the performance problems were architectural. (it didn't help though)
- Microsoft's own documentation acknowledges search limitations. The search index doesn't include all message content beyond a certain threshold. Results ranking is poor enough that Microsoft published a support article explaining how to use advanced search operators to find messages, which rather proves the basic search doesn't work. The r/MicrosoftTeams subreddit has over 3,000 posts about search not returning results that users know exist. IT administrators on Spiceworks report having to advise users to "use Ctrl+F in the browser if Teams search doesn't work", which is a workaround for a broken core feature.
- Files uploaded in chat messages don't appear in the Files tab automatically. They're stored in a hidden SharePoint folder that most users don't know how to access. Microsoft's official guidance for this is to manually move files to the Files tab or use SharePoint directly. Is that an edge case? Is it FUCK, it's documented in Microsoft's own support articles as expected behaviour. If your organisation hasn't hit this, it's because you're not using Files tabs or you've trained people to work around it.
- Microsoft's Tech Community forums have literally thousands of threads about notification badges showing unread messages that don't exist (5,000+ when I last checked), or notifications not appearing for actual messages. Microsoft's official response, posted repeatedly since 2020, is "we're aware of this issue and investigating". It's six years later now, it's still not fixed. The fact that you haven't noticed might mean your notification settings are configured differently, or you've unconsciously learned to ignore the notification count as unreliable.
- Going back to r/MicrosoftTeams: the community continually documents persistent issues with the mobile app... notifications not syncing with desktop read state, automatic logouts requiring re-authentication, messages appearing in different orders on mobile versus desktop, and the app draining battery faster than comparable applications. GitHub's issue tracker for Teams mobile shows hundreds of unresolved bugs (then again, I suppose what popular app doesn't). You mentioned you don't use mobile, which explains why you haven't experienced this.
- Regarding Chat versus channel architecture, Microsoft's own UX research lead, cited in a 2022 Verge interview, acknowledged that the distinction between chats and channels confuses users but can't be changed due to early architectural decisions. The duplicate groups issue I mentioned isn't a bug, it's a consequence of treating "Alice, Bob, Charlie" as a different entity from "Alice, Charlie, Bob". This is documented in Microsoft's developer documentation as intended behaviour. Your organisation either hasn't hit this scale yet or has developed unofficial naming conventions to work around it.
You've been using Teams for four months. These issues emerge over time, at scale, or in specific usage patterns. When you're managing multiple projects with overlapping team members across different time zones and need to reference decisions made months ago, the organisational problems compound. When you're working on older hardware or need reliable mobile access, the performance issues become blocking. When you need to find a specific technical discussion from six months ago buried in one of 40 channels, the search deficiencies become critical.
The question isn't whether Teams works for your specific, constrained use case after four months. The question is whether it's good software compared to alternatives, and whether the problems people report are valid. The evidence says yes, they are valid. The performance metrics are measurable. The bugs are documented in Microsoft's own forums. The UX problems are acknowledged by Microsoft's own researchers. The antitrust case is real.
Your experience is one data point. It's not invalid, but it's also not representative. Saying "I haven't personally experienced these problems in my limited usage" doesn't refute the documented experiences of millions of users, the measured performance benchmarks, or the systematic issues that Microsoft itself acknowledges. It just means you haven't hit them yet, or your use case is simple enough that they don't matter, or you've normalised workarounds as standard practice.
And, I haven't even started talking about what happens if you dare to work across multiple organisations.
> Replacing it with Slack means paying $8-12 per user per month on top of your existing Office costs, because you still need Outlook, Word, Excel, and SharePoint. For a 500-person company, that's an additional $48,000-72,000 annually for a tool that overlaps with something you've already paid for.
If only in this calculation they'd factor in how much time each employee wastes because of Teams glitches…
Let's not forget how stupid the client on GNU/Linux was regarding audio devices. Every other app I had installed, that has anything to do with microphone (OBS, Audacity, Discord, Discord in Browser, Signal, ...) recognized my mic, which was connected via jack. Not MS Te-eams!!! Tada! Had to buy another headset with USB plug for Teams to get it.
I get the same issue on Mac, if it's any comfort. I had to close and reopen the app 7-8 times to have my microphone recognized, despite it worked reliably on every single tool I ever used, both on Linux and later on Mac. Teams couldn't do that either with the native client or with the web client.
Notifying you about messages you've already seen. You have to change chats and to back for it to dismiss it. Kills me.
Likes to open new windows if you click a notification.
It is slow.
The search is not good at showing multiple results from the one chat. Why does it search all the other chats anyway...
Switching accounts constantly is a pain in the arse - I unfortunately have to use four accounts and one sub-account (member of some other org's team or something).
My favourite one ( still happens ) is having to mute then unmute at the beginning of the conversation otherwise nobody can hear me. It was so common, with people fiddling with their headset, calling again etc that I eventually asked everyone exhibiting audio issues to start with this
Another interesting one is that if you’re not connected properly , you send messages , but never get notified that they never left, and are never notified that you’re not connected.
It’s also a resource hog and will eat your machine for breakfast.
I don't love it, but I don't have many of the problems other people seem to have. And I've used everything from IRC in the 80s to Slack more recently. The only thing I can think of is that I don't run it on Windows, but rather a fairly new MacBook Pro M4. Maybe in this case it actually runs better on Mac, which is kind of ironic.
It's a resource hog, crashes, it's constantly littering files all over SharePoint which becomes even more than a garbage bin than it already is.
And the UI is terrible, huge balloons around everything. I want density but even at the densest setting it sucks.
Oh and it also fails to update online status. Often I click on a colleague who seems green and only then it updates and it turns out they've been away for 3 hours. Grrr
Another one for the pile. You can choose to open office documents in Teams directly, the browser, or in the native desktop app, but you can only set it to open by default in either Teams or browser. Why?
Teams feels as though it were vibe-coded, but dates back well before there was such a thing. It works, basically, but isn't something I'd feel good about shipping myself.
It seems to me it is more of a penalty to encourage people to get Real ID while still allowing them to fly. I would imagine most air travelers have some kind of real id, passport, actual real id DL or global entry card. Very few people cannot get real id due to name inconsistency issues, but most are just lazy. Allowing them to fly for $45 seems reasonable to me, particularly if they cause delays at security.
But fun fact: even if an ID is on that list, if it's not one that their little scanner machines know how to read, then it's effectively not on that list. I've been hassled every single time I try to use my TWIC card at TSA, and they invariably demand to use my (non-REAL) driver's license, since their dumb scanners can manage to read that one. They often then have the gall to give me one of their "You need to have a REAL ID" pamphlets. I can't wait to see what happens next time I travel with this new fee in effect.
The population of Africa is estimated to be 5-6 times the population of Europe by 2060. For context, in 1990 Africa had slightly less people than Europe. Today more than double.
I wonder how that can happen once climate change starts affecting their ability to grow food. It might make the current immigration problems look quite minor once you have 500 million people knocking on the door and wanting to come in.
My experience with doctors in the US is that they often not only give you contradictory advice but just bad plain advice with complete lack of common sense. It feels like they are regurgitating medical school textbooks without a context window. I truly believe doctors, most specialists and definitely all general practitioners, are easily replaceable with the tech we have today. The only obstacle is regulations, insurance and not being able to sue a LLM. But it is not a technical issue anymore. Doctors would only be necessary to perform more complicated procedures such as surgery, and that’s until we can fully automate it with robots. Most of the complicated medical issues I have had, some related to the immune system, were solved by myself by seeing them as engineering problems, by debugging my own body. Meanwhile doctors seeing me had no clue. And this was before having the tools we have today. It’s like doctors often cannot think beyond the box and focus only in treating symptoms. My sister is a doctor by the way and she suffers from the same one-size-fits-all approach to medicine.
so, poor healthcare workforce quality is not just an "issue of an economically poor country", as I thought!?
like, I tried to treat the bloating in one municipal clinic in Ternopil, Ukraine (got "just use Espumisan or anything else that has symeticone" and when it did not work out permanently, "we don't know what to do, just keep eating symeticone") and then with Gemini 3 (Pro or Flash depending on Google AI Studio rate limits and mood), which immediately suspected a poor diet and suggested logging it, alongside activity level, every day.
Gemini's suggestions were nothing extreme - just cut sugar and ban bread and pastry. I was guilty of loving bread, croissants, and cinnabons (is this how they are translated?) too much.
the result is no more bloating on the third week, -10cm in waistline in 33 days, gradually improving sleep quality, and even ability to sleep on a belly, which was extremely uncomfortable to me due to that goddamned bloating!
Over here it feels like there is a taboo among doctors to just tell people "you are fat and unhealthy, fix it", I guess since the idea is that this would discourage people from going to the doctor in the first place...
Just my observation as a sixty-something year old, and my attempt to understand the changes I’ve seen… It seems like these days doctors advice and hospital emergency procedures are mostly (and increasingly so) based on statistical likelihoods of outcomes (from where exactly I’m not sure; and who vetted them??) and a set of options that insurance companies will pay for, probably determined similarly. Probably will get worse until AI gets inserted into the loop. I also wonder if perhaps this is occurring to accommodate a reduction of the typical skill set of the “wellness” oriented practitioners most of us see for check-ups and emergencies. I have received good care from specialists by and large.
Yeah it's bad. That doesn't mean it's necessarily uniformly bad. But if it's bad where you are, yeah it's bad.
You can see multiple doctors (among the ones you're allowed to see by your insurance). The doctors are all in an echo chamber which reinforces their thinking. Their cognitive load and goal seeking is burdened by what they can determine they can bill insurance for (there is still no price transparency). You don't have a "regular" / primary care physician because they rotate through the provider network constantly.
Symptoms which don't fit the diagnosis are ignored / dealt with by deflecting that you should "see your regular physician". "Stare decisis" rules the second opinion. In their minds they believe they have no place to write down e.g. drug interactions with things which they didn't prescribe and don't believe in (the one time I got a call from quality control working for the umbrella organization I utilized this as an example of why I was looking for a different doctor and the QA person, who was, they said, a licensed nurse, said "they can add that to the record, I'll do it right now").
You might get fired as a patient for passing out or having a seizure during a blood draw, hard to say whether that's because they failed to follow SOP and call the meatwagon or because you upset staff by acting unusually. You might get into a conversation with a physician which goes strange and they end up telling you that their clinic gets health inspections like a restaurant... they don't. There's a "wet work" inspection (just like a butcher shop) before occupancy is allowed, but there's no posted inspection report because... there is no inspection! But there's more. There are relatively "safe" and common procedures which still have ooopsies and people end up in the hospital or die. The hospitalization rate might be 1:5000 and the death rate 1:100000 but if you do a million of these there are going to be a few. If the procedure took place in a clinic it's supposed to be reported, and the reports are public record; but surprise surprise, the reported rates for serious complications are far far below what the actuarial tables show.
If you're seeing constellations of incidents similar to these, you need to get a second opinion from somewhere / somebody who is not caught up in that particular bubble. It can be very hard to see what's happening, and also to find a measurable proxy for "in / not in the bubble".
Former Siemens employee here. There was a point in time my engineering team was 5 people and we had 3 project managers. No joke. If you have watched Office Space that’s pretty much how it was. They would stroll (very slowly) around with a mug asking how was going and timesheets. The thing is at many of these organizations there’s really no way to increase your hourly rate and bonuses unless you get into management. My team put a lot of overtime that was not always compensated. We often made more take-home money than PMs but worked disproportionately more too, so at an hourly rate we were much lower. There’s also a stigma about being in engineering by 40, so you see many experienced engineers in their 30s getting their PMPs and pushing in their performance review for management positions. Leadership in engineering once you reach principal is director, and there’s usually one director per BU. Principal vs Senior doesn’t have a life changing salary difference either, about 20-30% and you stay there until you retire or die. There are exceptions like Microsoft that offers partnerships, which are incredibly difficult to reach, but at least the possibility is there if you want to stay in the tech side and make a lot of money.
The telco space is weird... I've been on a team where we had a Delivery Manager, Scrum Master, Project Manager, Software Tester, Performance Tester, Integration Tester - all to "manage" 2 ICs - one developer (me) and one devops.
... the saddest bit was that apart from me and devops, everyone else had nothing to do all sprint and so instead created multiple mandatory meetings throughout the sprint to which we had to spend half a day creating slides when the meetings could have all instead been done over email.
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