Microsoft Teams is a red flag

When a company runs on Microsoft Teams and Outlook, I assume one thing about how it makes decisions: the tools its people spend all day in were chosen by someone who barely uses them, and whose deciding factor was a line in a licensing spreadsheet.

Teams came bundled with Microsoft 365, and that’s how most companies ended up on it. It’s the default choice for IT, because who needs another procurement contract to get Slack or set up Mattermost?

Using Teams instead of Slack saves you the equivalent of 10 minutes a month of a senior engineer’s salary.¹ If the tooling costs someone more than that in friction, the company is paying extra for a worse tool.

Switching tenants is slow and requires a full reload, file sharing involves SharePoint for some reason, and search is abysmal.

Most companies on Teams pretend it’s about compliance or fleet management, when in reality it’s just the easy default.

When you tell me you use Teams, what I read from it is who made the call and what they were optimizing for. A company that minimizes license cost per seat while ignoring what an hour of its people costs has its accounting upside down. I’d bet the same reasoning picked the laptops and the VPN too, since it’s the same people working from the same spreadsheet.

Microsoft priced Teams so that it looks free. It only looks that way to the people who don’t have to use it.