What software you consider so bad it made you happy when you left your job?
I've worked with some pretty rotten software, but management software is easily the most user unfriendly, so my vote goes to HPSM.
I've worked with some pretty rotten software, but management software is easily the most user unfriendly, so my vote goes to HPSM.
I didn't leave the job, but I had my resignation letter written over this since I would have had to maintain it:
My former boss had an absolute hard-on for "AI" and brought in this low-bid, fly-by-night "AI" software to automate all of our processes. I'm a fan of automation in general, but not this.
This "solution" was basically a glorified macro generator that would screen scrape data from our apps and key into our other apps. Not only it was built on the absolute shakiest platform imaginable, but the documentation from the vendor outright told you to setup remote desktop services in a way that was in violation of licensing in order for it to work. The stack it ran on made a Rube Goldberg machine look like sleek, fine engineering.
I repeatedly told him this was bad software, but he persisted to the point where we nearly went to production with it.
The worst part? The applications he was screen-scraping were all internally-developed. We had access to the backend, frontend, everything. Rather than writing proper processes, he threw that piece of garbage at it.
Luckily he retired before it went to production, and the new CTO shut it the fuck down.
So, I didn't quit my job over it, but I was looking and had my resignation letter written.
You know, in a lot of situations, when someone says "the worst part", it's not actually the worst part.
When you use it, it really is the worst part, by far...
Ha, indeed. To elaborate on that part:
He made this demo he was so proud of. Watching it interactively, it was like 70 steps of "move mouse {X,Y}, click, copy, etc". I could literally hear Yakkety Sax in my head as I watched it bumble through.
After that, I went back to my office and wrote a 30 line Python script that accomplished the same thing, only sanely and with the ability to handle errors. He preferred his method since "it's easier for our non-technical folks to automate their stuff this way".
That was the exact moment I started looking for a new job.
Non tech people should ALWAYS ask the support team when they need help automating IT stuff for precisely this reason.
Exactly that. When building a load-bearing business process, it's always critical that the person writing it knows what they're doing.
Before I replace it with something that won't catastrophically collapse when the wind blows the wrong way, I get some sort of sick satisfaction out of doing autopsies on the house-built-of-matchsticks "solutions" that users come up with and I don't know why. Some of them are truly fascinating and make you wonder how someone could possibly arrive at that conclusion based on what they were actually try to achieve.
It's also why if I'm asked to implement something, my first question isn't "When does this need to be done?," it's "What exactly is the problem you're trying to solve?"
What a user asks for and what they actually need very rarely intersect.
Ah yes, my last company bought into that crap. They called it RPA for Robotic Process Automation and they also used it to access internal apps that we had full control of.
It wouldn't have been so bad if they just used it to enter data into third party websites which had no APIs or integrations.
At one point we updated the title of an HTML page and we had to revert the change because the RPA team said it would be a three week turnaround to fix their script.
I noped out of there not long after, it was yet another "project management driven" company where managers and project managers were repeatedly duped by vendors and outsourcing firms instead of hiring and retaining developers.
Cisco Webex.
You think teams or zoom are annoying? This is much worse. The worst part is with some default meeting settings, a loud chime would play every time someone joined. People kept this on for meetings of 300+ people, then they started talking over the beeps once "the popcorn slowed down."
But have you tried Cisco Webex Teams? Or how we liked to call it "My first rails application.example.exe".
Also the default of not auto-muting everyone, then spending 25 minutes of the meeting asking people to mute when there was a button that would also mute everyone đ¤Śââď¸
Germany currently has a whole political scandal because out of it.
On Linux, the desktop client of Webex still does not support the chat feature, so you're forced to use Firefox or whatever browser to join meetings instead. The best part is that some Webex rep said they'd add this feature to the client back on 2023, and it's now 2024 and it's STILL NOT HERE.
I hate Teams, give me Slack
Edit: I left an optional team in teams, and still got a notification for a meeting that isnât on my calendar, my meetings page, nor do I have access to in any other way.
IMO Teams beats all the others on video calling specifically. But everything else it does worse than its competition. The message boards and chat features are abysmal.
I beg to differ. Iâm jumping over from a Zoom workplace to a Teams workplace, and Teams is trash. Worse video, worse audio, worse connectivity, fewer end user features, etc. The only thing thatâs nice is how it archives meeting chats and recordings.
Itâs only used because itâs basically free with enterprise office.
Interesting, teams has the worst video call quality Iâve ever seen. Trying to pair program is painful, canât move too fast or the other person will miss what you did since the screen share frame rate is like 5.
Same VPN connection on slack, no noticeable lag, high frame rate, and very crisp resolution.
That's because it's Skype. MS bought them and integrated it into Teams.
Early on, Teams was kinda doing it's own thing and it wasn't half bad. Then, Microsoft shut down Skype for Business (formerly Lync) and brought most of that team over with all of their baggage. Feature development for Teams went to absolute hell after that point.
FOSDEM 2021 was hosted on Matrix. After that exp no other meetsing app lives up to it. I just want seemless chat with presentation and seemless break out rooms again.
When our company annoucned the switch to Teams I actually offered to pay for the slack licence out of my own pocket instead. But the boss insisted we need the onedrive integration or some shit and declined.
Yeah that was BS. Boss was told to say anything other than âto save moneyâ. Thatâs the entire value prop for Teams.
"it's included in the licenses we already pay for"
Teams tries to do too much.
I had this same discussion at work. My employer is full office 365 and SharePoint for everything. Teams is a catch-all app that does a lot, but none of it well.
Fine but why can't I ever find my chats back? There's so many damn channels and they each have threads that make it even more difficult to find your way I see a channel in my unread area, then I open it, and if I click away, now I can't find it anymore. Annoys me to no end. How do people deal with this? So many different chats, it's insane.
Thereâs a bit of configuration for the channel list that you can do to keep what you want where you want. Sounds like you have a section set to only show unread, thatâs a setting. Also, there are back and forward keys (and shortcuts for them too) to move between a series of chats like a browser.
Teams has absolute dogshit annotation. Literally takes years to start it and then you can't move or change your screen as the presenter
I detest slack, teams is better (but that's a low bar) lol
Now that is an unpopular opinion!
Yes! I've finally done it!
As a messenger, this is objectively wrong. There may be some less than obvious customization options in slack, but it is so much more robust for messaging.
I mean, threads alone put slack in a whole other league.
If youâre being serious, Iâd really like to know what you dislike about slack. Itâs been a minute since I used it as my daily driver, but I find myself quite frequently irritated about not having enough control.
Due to really dumb requirements we had an app that used Python, Visual basic, C and C++, MATLAB, R and JavaScript. I'm not describing an application stack. This was a single binary. The amalgamation was so disturbing that it couldn't even shut down once run, instead asking the operating system to please, please kill me.
Part of the installation procedure involves disabling all SSL certificate verification on company machines.
That sounds actually a bit impressive
It takes skill to fail this badly.
What a bizarre monster. Do you know it's history? Maybe devs changed a couple of times or something? It seems to be a pain to even understand it's insides as a lead with that many languages.
I mean, that sounds completely horrible, but it says something about the world of web, when it is not that different than any regular frontent/backend web stack. I.e. HTML + CSS + javascript + backend language + sql + random shit on top of it, all in the single project. And that's even before talking about native apps for mobile.
But GitHub gives you a prettier rainbow when your repo has more languages!
Oh god, this post will hunt me down via nightmares ...
Sounds like a regular PhD student project.
Didn't leave the job over it, but SAP.
Shitty. Ass. Program.
I havenât worked with SAP directly, but did infra support for a company that used it.
They were always having issues with it and the company they used for SAP support would routinely bill them obscene amounts even for simple tasks like updating file paths.
ScheiĂe aus Prinzip
Sanduhr Anzeige Programm
....
Yeah, fucking Business Objects was the bane of my existence. The worst situations were where the creator of the report used their shitty GUI joins instead of actually writing a SQL load script. It made troubleshooting that much more annoying.
Their GUI is so bad. You had to have lookup tables printed out with various codes to find anything instead of, you know, being able to search for them.
I've used a lot of software in my life and this one is by far the worst.
That was one of two that came to mind(a long with Oracle's Peoplesoft). I was an HR department of one, no training, no documentation, no one who knew how it should work for HR. I often cited it, along with Peoplesoft for the explosion of solutions HR has experienced in the last 15 years.
Slow Arduous Process
Send Another Purchase(order)
SAP is straight from hell.
Iâm a camera operator. I work with different cameras on every movie set. The Sony cameras are known to have the worst menu system of all. Itâs extremely dense, organized in a manner that makes no sense when on set (the frequently used options are buried in sub menus) and the navigation is painful with a crappy clicky roller. Even the sales rep for Sony openly apologized for the menus. This is unacceptable for a $52,000.00 camera. On the opposite side, thereâs ARRI Alexa which has the simplest menu of all. Just a few pages of organized items with simple names. And a lot of common options accessible on the main screen.
Edit:
hereâs the Sony Venice menu simulator
And here is the ARRI Alexa menu simulator.
The differences may not be apparent on the simulator but they become critical when on set with a time constraint.
Same but on the live side. Interestingly Sony has it down pat for their live cameras. The global standard for camera control is a Sony controller almost everyone supports them. Grass valley on the other hand hot garbage software, really good hardware.
Yes I do live as well the P1 menu is great and simple, but live cameras donât need as much controls on the operators side as itâs mostly via CCU. The grassvalley are the worst, itâs kind of impressive how bad they are.
I only do sfx occasionally, so I'm never near a camera. But those menu simulators are actually really neat. I didn't know vendors had that.
Itâs really useful. Not everyone can have easy access to a $50K camera to play around before their first job with it.
Windows.
I did an internship where my main system was Linux, but it was in a VM on one monitor with the windows host on another for using Windows apps.
I work in IT and my first few jobs were working with Windows doing Desktop Support. It was extremely boring and annoying. I've been a long time Linux user and broke into that side, professionally as soon as I could.
Jira. In the Software-as-a-Service world, it's often the tool of choice by Product teams to track issues, by breaking everything down into stories.
It's a horrible, slow, janky mess. The interface is confusing and poorly laid out, you can easily have too many options all over the place, and how its even used can vary dramatically from one company to another.
Salesforce is also trash for very similar reasons. How Sales people around the world all vouched for this thing is beyond me.
Can confirm JIRA is an unusable mess. Submitting IT tickets was probably the worst thing about my last job. So much time wasted filling out irrelevant fields of information.
Of course, while I'll agree about Jira being unfortunate, I'll say from experience it's the "committee" of people that end up making up tons of fields imagining that they have some utility. Jira is complicit by saying "sure thing, as many required and cross-linked fields as you like!"
We have "Priority", "Severity", "Importance" on top of the sort order having some other indication of relative importance, all must be filled. Opening an item in one place requires you to have an item already opened in another place and that one requires a project id from some other tool to know who to charge, in theory. In practice it's not hooked into any charging system, but they imagine one day departments can charge each other for fixing items. We also have about 4 additional "describe the ticket" fields and in addition to the title, there's a 'One line summary'. All required.
I guess we just use a very stripped down version of jira, because it's really just enter an issue, brief explanation, and further documentation to help whoever comes to fix it solve it faster. If it takes me longer than 5 minutes to create a ticket that means I've spent way longer than usual.
I think of it as a good place to keep a record of know issues or desired improvements, so they don't get forgotten.
what do you consider a good alternative?
Fwiw their zephyr plugin is pretty good imo
ServiceNow. I can't wait to say fuck that SaaS
I'm using servicenow. First time and it's pretty bad. But I hear that it is actually worse than normal because they customized the hell out of it trying to make it match the previous solution.
You work where I work?! Lol
I grumbled about ServiceNow for years, and then my company switched to Cherwell.
Now Iâd switch back to ServiceNow in a heartbeat.
That thing has its quirks and annoyances, but there's definitely worse systems out there...
Agreed.
I have sorta Stockholm syndrome with it now. Iâm locked in so may as well enjoy it.
So say we all!
Man, I'm over here crying for servicenow back. We switched to Salesforce a few years back, and it's true, the grass does always LOOK greener.
I left a job over MacOS.
The management was bad. The product was bad. I would have left eventually anyway.
But the constant frustration of using a window manager that does not let you make keyboard shortcuts for most basic window operations, like cycling through windows on the current virtual desktop was too much. And MacOS really does not like you to have multiple monitors in different orientations. There were a whole bunch of other stupid things. I always felt like my computer was fighting me, not working for me.
But on the plus side, it did not have an Ethernet jack, it was really thin so the fans were tiny and made a huge racket, the keyboard sucked to type on, and keys would stop working if a piece of dust with any dimension larger the Plank length got under them.
While I prefer MacOS, I think your choice of OS is important and you should be given options at most jobs.
As someone who is being pressured to move to macOS (M1) from Linux for work, I feel you. I was just having a conversation in another thread about trackpads and I feel that Apple really built the workflow around gestures, which leaves people who would rather use keybindings quite out of luck. I know there is rectangle, but it doesn't even go close to what a good WM gives.
I head up a product org and often have a bunch of folks going from Macs to enterprise Windows machines, and they say the opposite. IMHO, itâs 90% about what you get accustomed to. Both operating systems have different ways to manage apps and windows, and if you get really used to one way of working, switching can feel like youâre wrestling the OS.
As for the keyboard thing, yeah, those couple years of butterfly keyboard were no oneâs favorite. Personally, Iâve experienced far worse laptop keyboards in my day - especially among the cheap stuff enterprises would buy from Dell or HP. But Iâm still not surprised that they got ditched. The scissor design is one of the nicer low profile keyboard designs, and a lot of folks are super happy to have it back.
And as for the rotation thing, I canât say that Iâve had any problems. What was happening on your end?
I have not used Windows to do any real work in 20 years, so I have no idea how good or bad it is nowadays. Last time I used it I used LiteStep.
I have used various window managers on Linux, Solaris, and BSD over the years, and different ones push you into different workflows, and moving between them can involve an adjustment period. But none of them were as anti-keyboard as MacOS is. And you always had the option of switching.
Regarding rotation, it would get confused and resize windows as if they were in the other rotation, menus would open in the wrong places, and if the menubar had so much content that it would not fit (mostly on displays in portrait mode), the results would be inconsistent and sometimes unusable.
I was a Linux SysAdmin and was forced to use OS X for 2 years. It was painful.
My last job had not one, but two programming languages they had created in house over the last couple of decades.
One of them was the primary development language for the whole corporation.
Fascinating.
I'm a minor programming language nerd. While I'd never recommend writing an in house language - I can see the appeal for me personally.
What were the languages like? OOP? FP? ...Logic?
Why'd they build 2 languages?
This seems so wild to me - sorry if I'm prying.
Yeah it had an almost sane reason initially - it was an investment bank, so it was designed to model the relationships between types of assets for simulations. But over the years they just got into the habit of using it for everything. It was somewhat like python, but with c-like syntax.
The 2nd language was a haskell-style functional language (but without all the things that make Haskell cool) that was meant to be used for modelling and building internal APIs on all the data that was shared across departments. It was absolutely horrendous.
Amazing.
I'm just starting to learn how language development works and like... of any language to try implementing, Haskell definitely seems like one of the most complex.
Like - one dev could reasonably implement a Forth or Lisp, but you need a long time window to finish a Haskell...
I did freelancing on a project with an custom language, which just compiled down to html/css/js - so nothing brand new. At first I thought it was neat. But as I peeled the onion back, I learned the origins of it was the CEO's brother who left the company. Then I started to see all the other cracks with it, like it was still compiling down to IE9.
After two weeks, I gave them a ultimatum that I either finish the project in a popular language, or I'm out.
I was out.
Salesforce.
What a fucking piece of shit.
And yet a lot of my coworkers have to create integrations with salesforce o.O
Thereâs actually decent money to be made if youâre able to create integrations for Salesforce. But using it is always an awful experience.
Microsoft Windows. I used to be a sysadmin. New job is 100% Linux. Now I never touch Windows unless it's to play a game.
Try steam on Linux. That shit just works now and I was able to fully ditch windows 6 months ago.
For most games. Tried Witcher 2 on Linux a few months ago, what an unstable mess.
I would be so stoked to have a Linux-only job. All my personal machines, servers etc are Linux. I'm an old guy but just got my first IT job and it is all Windows. I love getting blamed for shit Microsoft fucks up haha.
Same. Turning down windows admin jobs has been a career saving move for me. It puts you back tech wise and its just so fucking cumbersome to admin for.
For all the flak it always gets, can I just say I'm relieved nobody said JIRA yet? I think JIRA is great for what to does, but companies are just bad at setting it up right. Either they go overboard with restrictive processes, or they are unorganized mess, there is no in between. But that's not the software's fault. (Braces for downvotes)
Yeah the shitty bespoke markup language and half assed integration of a WYSIWYG editor that fucks up tickets with formatting that is more complex than a few headers and a few lists makes it the worst in my opinion :(
Jira itself is fine. The problem is the "user generated content"
We used Jira at work and when the ticket was set up properly (stories, subtasks, etc..) it worked well.
I would say it is the softwares fault though. Ever heard of "convention over configuration"? Jira is like the opposite of that idea. For a task management app, you need something more opinionated and less configurable I feel like. Something simpler that covers most use cases and doesn't try to cover literally everything cause that just makes it so complicated. Jira is the opposite of KISS as well.
I like JIRA, but you make a good point there. My company lets every team manage their project however they want. They go an extra mile to tailor and customize JIRA in whatever way each team "needs". But having over 100+ teams in my company has made projects a nightmare, I have to write very complex JQLs and filters just to get the results I need from all the projects I'm involved with. There's no pattern at all.
I think JIRA is okay. I've used MUCH worst bug reporting software. The worst thing I can say about JIRA is that it is designed to implement scrum and IMO scrum is cargo cult programming.
25 yr System Administer who has exited IT: Windows
SharePoint
IT or user?
Yes.
Oh. Just noticed IT people seem to really hate it.
The people that wrote the admin UX for sharepoint have no business being employed.
JIRA. Anything made by National Instruments.
JIRA can go die in a dumpster fire. I don't know how it got popular.
When I started working at NI they were still using Lotus Notes. đ¤Ž
Is JIRA better or worse than Azure DevOps?
We're being moved over to JIRA and I'm worried because I hear so much shit about Atlassian
One of the big problems with JIRA is it's extremely configurable, so your experience depends entirely on how your admins have set it up. If your company is the type to micromanage, JIRA gives them a lot of tools to do that, which I think is why it gets so much hate from devs. I find it tolerable in my current job but it's definitely designed for managers and not for developers.
Jira gets double whammy:
Honestly I never had a problem with JIRA.
Over all the project management tools I've used in my decade of work, Atlassian's suite was the most organized for my needs.
The most annoying part is reporting, which I hear a lot of complaints about. But that's not my job, and the reports I need are easy to export the data and build a custom UI to organize it.
We actually moved from JIRA to Azure DevOps. Part of it was that Atlassian dropped the server version of JIRA and we weren't too keen on moving to the crappier cloud version.
I'd say it's different. Some things JIRA does better, some things Azure DevOps does better. You eliminate some pain points, and end up with some new ones.
As a former LabVIEW instructor, I was so glad to get out of that nightmare platform.
SAP, closely followed by IBM/Lotus/(I have no idea which random company they were sold to) Notes
I fucking hate this corporate bullshit software
You don't like 18 different codes to find one piece of information? But why?
And the codes are completely illogical. "Run an 18TZ transaction" the fuck is that?
I have absolutely no idea
I got to meet one of the IBM guys who claimed to be a project manager for Lotus Notes. I asked him what it felt like knowing that he has a hand in a tool that has unleashed more human misery than the atomic bomb.
Now that I am proud of myself for doing.
What'd he say?
He just looked at me offended and confused for a bit and I walked away.
SharePoint
FUCK sharepoint
It's funny how it does everything but nothing well.
Seriously, I currently work with SharePoint for internal documentation and I audibly grunt every time I'm editing or managing anything using that thing.
We moved from S drive to SharePoint and I honestly don't know why
The reason is mainly money. SharePoint is cheap and a lot of companies already pay for it even if they don't use it.
SharePoint is also useful because it integrates seamlessly with teams.
It should be noted that SharePoint is designed for documents and not files.
You should think twice if you are replacing a file share with a SharePoint site because sometimes it will work terribly. CAD files for example is a terrible idea to put on a SharePoint site.
Lotus.
I worked for IBM and all out IBM machines had it, but fortunately I did delivery for another major tech client so had a separate laptop and PC for their MS Enterprise environment and 95% of my work was there.
God I hated Lotus notes and sametime connect
Lotus Notes.
Hello, fellow ex-IBMer.
I worked in IBM for a bit before Notes and it was even worse. Everyone was given terminal software that connected to some mainframe to read email. The terminal didn't even refresh so if you wanted to see if you had gotten email you had to refresh it manually. Fortunately I was only a contractor at the time so didn't get much email although I did get one from an employee apologizing for cheating on me, and a followup saying the message was meant for someone else lol
đ
My employer still uses it
No joke whenever I interview I ask them what browser they use and what email client. Once when they said Lotus Notes I knew I would be turning them down.
It just isn't worth the agony.
SAP
They were transitioning from Oracle SBMS which was bad enough already but SAP... that thing was a nightmare taking dedicated employees (which we didn't have) to account for the additional time needed to enter and manage data
Fortunately I was able to get out before the full switch over; friends that still work there occasionally message to inform how horrible the place has become
SAP Suuuuucks
I've been in the industry some time but here are some of my most hated software I've been forced to use:
IBM Clearcase. Absolutely the worst dogshit source control system ever to exist. Complex, fragile, arcane, slow, network intensive. The company had to employ people fulltime on each of its sites whose only job was creating branches and mirroring repos on other sites. The operational & licensing costs of running it must be insane. Some defenders might claim "but it's so powerful!" or "look how we can create fancy layered views" as if that excuses it for being terrible in the most basic ways. Fixing it must have been intractable because IBM Clearcase eventually produced a faster remote client that talked to a proxy of the view running on a server somewhere. More expense and complexity.
IBM/Lotus Notes & Domino. Another complex, arcane, slow, unintuitive, frustrating product by IBM (though owned by HCL now). Originally a content management system with an email / calendar with its own terminology and workflows completely divorced from any other email / calendar system in existence. Various iterations attempted to rework the front end to appear more user friendly but it was illusory - click button or two and you were confronted with dialogs that hadn't changed in 30 years.
Internet Explorer. I've worked in company after company that had some really awful in-house expenses system or clock-in/clock-out or some enterprise junk that NEEDED Internet Explorer and no other browser would do because it was so badly written that it couldn't render properly or it used an ActiveX control.
HP/Microfocus ALM. Another over-engineered, arcane, unintuitive piece of enterprise software. This time for tracking bugs, features, testing etc. Complicated and slow, heavily dependent on Internet Explorer and other deprecated Microsoft tech.
Trend antivirus. Almost every corporate antivirus is bad but this one has been the bane of my existence. I write code which does stuff like encryption and compression/decompression and this piece of shit would constantly trigger warnings and delete binaries I was trying to build and develop. When it wasn't interfering with my work, it would just be constantly hogging CPU and slowing down disk activity.
Enterprise software in general. This crap is sold like Kirby vacuum cleaners - a pushy salesman convinces a clueless CTO to buy junk that can seemingly do everything and a sign contract for $$$. And then this stuff is there FOREVER. Management will ignore complaints and the obvious shortcomings of the system because its paid for and the sunk cost fallacy kicks in.
Your comment about Trend AV triggered a flashback. đ They rolled it out at my company and forced a mandatory full scan on all pcs at noon every day. Everyone just gave up and went to lunch for an hour or longer until the scan finished. The policy existed for a week and then the CTO got heat because everybody was so unproductive. They removed trend within the month.
I'm pretty sure all Enterprise software is sold through a kickback scheme. Otherwise I don't know why these CTOs would be so dedicated to software that everyone is telling him sucks.
I've been involved in enterprise tech sales. The company that flies the CTOs out to a nice destination, take them golfing, and give the CTO an excuse to stay away from their family under the guise of "but my job needs this!"... That's the company that wins usually.
I am attached to a lot of these engagements "just in case" the customer actually cares about the product and needs to know. I'd say 9/10 times I'm not even asked to speak. I'm happy when a prospective customer calls us on the sales bullshit and lets me get down to the meat of the product.
As a Certified Lotus PROFESSIONAL, I take extreme issue with your characterization of Lotus Notes/Domino.
It's a huge steaming pile of dog shit and you're being WAY too easy on it. Why insurance companies and Coca Cola used it extensively is beyond me. But my God did they love it for some reason.
I got a CLP simply because I worked for a managed services vendor at the time and they signed a huge contract with Coca Cola and they needed a Domino admin to help out with a migration. I think it was 4.6 to 5.5 if I recall correctly. Yeah, long time ago. I went on to do a lot of Domino related projects. Lousy certification that probably made me more money than any of the others I have held over the years.
Doesn't matter what job I'm in, Adobe anything is always trash and their seeming monopoly on digital certificate signing in PDFs is disgusting.
Jira is literally a shiny keychain which keeps PMs distracted and busy enough so that they don't start calling people into a million meetings because they have nothing better to do. It is otherwise completely useless and borderline nonsensical, and any perceived productivity gains from its usage can be attributed directly to keeping superfluous managers away from engineers.
Funny I find jira to be very useful for a nice centralized location of where we keep issues that weve come across and will, at some point, handle, but are not going to get to now.
Other than our team lead, I don't think any of our managers even look at it.
Depends on your issues. If its something esoteric and/or too high level to be useful, yea it sucks. If its issues that are easily reproducible but you can't address it immediately, adding it to the backlog and having that context in jira really helps. That's all predicated on the story reporter providing steps to reproduce and good context. But there are some things I would consider it adds which are less than useful, like story points, where its almost bait how it starts a conversations with PMs who don't know how to ask the right questions over why is it too high or low...
But how else can I force all my self-organising agile teams to follow exactly the same process?
Well nobody mentioned the software I designed, so I'm all good.
I know I was doing some worried scrolling
Historically, anything that required at least half of an employee to manage.
We're talking SharePoint, exchange, scom, mom. I'll give backup software a pass in general because in the days of tapes, no it's nothing you could do about it but backup exec can f*** right off.
It's a little thing and I still have to use it, but Cisco Jabber is the most annoying piece of software I have ever used.
It should just boot up and make calls, right? Nope.
It constantly changes the audio output settings dynamically and I can't get it to stick to what I want. Oh, we using the desktop monitor speakers this time the laptop booted up?
It fails to keep credentials and I have to reset it at least once a week.
It does not have a user setting to make it stop taking over as the messaging app. We use Teams for that, which is also pretty crappy but not nearly as annoying as Jabber. Apparently there is a way to address this during installation, but our IT support can't get it to work so I have to manually start up Jabber before Teams because the last one takes over.
Plus all of that is for an occasional phone call that tends to be missed because Jabber decided to forget the credentials again. I have reset Jabber more times than I have received a phone call through Jabber.
I used to do support for a university that used Cisco Jabber internally, and can confirm that's exactly what it was like.
I helped a colleague recently with an issue where Jabber wasnât playing audio. I had a hunch it was related to an issue thatâs cropped up a few times.
So I checked system settings, which were fine. Checked system settings for the Jabber app, and those were fine. Stumped, I poked around in Jabberâs settings, where I discovered it had ignored both the system settings, and the system settings for it, to try to send audio to her speakerless computer monitor.
Oh god, a bunch of my coworkers "used" Jabber at my last job and I was told I could, too. After hearing them complain I said nah and got my own Google Voice number and a cheap headset to use when I was working from home. Jokes on me, though, it meant I didn't have any excuse to ignore client calls like everyone else.
Oracle and a dozen internally developed tools.
Oracle because I'm not an accountant or bookkeeper, but was forced to do a bunch of those tasks anyway.
The internal tools because, while they were "mission critical", they were buggy as hell and there was only a couple of people nationwide who knew how to fix them (or mitigate the damage) when things went wrong.
Clearcase. Some stone age IBM version control system that predates git.
To ensure there are no conflicts with multiple people working on the same file it relies on locking so only one person can work with the file at a time. Super annoying when people forget to unlock their files after use, which everybody will do.
Lotus Notes
Plot twist... my new employer uses it even more đ¤Śđťââď¸
I won't accept the job if lotus notes is required.
I had this back in 2014 for a couple of years then again in 2017, it was a horror. :-/
Very niche. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CityTime_payroll_scandal
NYC GOP Mayor Mike Bloomberg's daughter gifted the City a $65 million boondoggle called 'City Time.' Theoretically, every employee was supposed to scan in with a biometric signature. The software didn't account for things like off site work, shift changes, a 24 hour schedule, etc etc. It would have been simpler just to keep the old paper system and imput everything.
SAP and nearly every accounting package. And I didn't have to use them daily, I just had to support them. Ugh.
As an accountant who has to use SAP every day at my current job, fuck everything about SAP and whoever came up with this steaming pile of absolute dogshit needs to be put in front of a firing squad.
What gets me is the price you pay in order to get the abuse of a product that never quite works well enough to be "finished", and then you get to pay consultants for years to overcome it's shortfalls. This is a classic C-suite boondoggle that nobody can get around to admitting was a complete waste of money and it's so expensive that nobody can survive flushing the sunk cost of by getting out. And then it's intertwined in the ERP of so many supply chains that you can't not use it because every company above and below uses it (and hates it) so you have to implement it for the B2B interoperability.
It's a horrendous chain of inevitability, and IBM is laughing all the way to the bank.
SAP is not owned by IBM, no?
My bad, I always dealt with IBM consultants on SAP sites so I assumed it was shitty enough to be an IBM product. I guess not, it's its own little island of shittiness. But according to Wikipedia, it was started as an IBM project inherited from Xerox and carried on by the 5 engineers at IBM that were on it when it was cancelled and they left to continue with it. So there is a genetic background showing that the shit acorn doesn't fall far from the shit tree.
I'm a television technical director and Ross Overdrive is hell on wheels... it's a video production system mostly used by local television stations to
consolodate"automate" their control rooms down to one person. There's three major companies that build systems like this: Sony, GrassValley, and Ross. In my experience GrassValley's Ignite is pretty good, it's stable and gets the job done. Sony's ELC is best, going above and beyond what I need it to do (plus their customer service and tech people are just awesome). Hands down, Ross Overdrive is a pile of garbage. Their physical video switchers are really great (super intuitive and built to last), but the Overdrive automation system itself is just a clunky and uncooperative UI. I've had such a bad experience with their system I've turned down jobs when the place uses Ross Overdrive. Ross's Xpression graphics system (or "Chyron") is also a hot mess. I've heard that if you're using all Ross stuff (video switchers, graphics system, video servers, robotics, etc) it runs smoothly and that may be true, but Christ-on-a-pogo-stick have I had nothing but trouble with their software.This is crazy industry specific but a gottdamn good read!
Basically, my job is to edit video... live.
For about four hours every day, I sit in a room filled with about $2 million in equipment next to a studio with an even larger pricetag. For example: a robotic camera can cost upwards of $90k... our studio has four. Thosw robots are my children and I love them with my whole heart.
For fun, go get them security-audited. It'll be a gong show.
Just out of curiosity do you have any examples of quirks or annoyances that you found to be especially egregious? If you can't share due to NDA no worries
No NDA and no problem!
When I last used Overdrive, it was a fresh installation, but the system itself had been around for a few years. The UI was uncooperative, making changes required going into a script instead of just a quick fix in the on-air playlist or changing a few lines of typed coding (like with ELC and Ignite respectively). The program itself was crazy unstable... look, crashes happen with any computer program or system, but this was a daily occurrence (sometimes twice in an hour long show) which is completely unacceptable. Finally, compared to Sony and GrassValley, building new codes was a trial that often required access to the video switcher itself instead of just handling things through the code editor program.
While I haven't worked on an Overdrive system in years, one or our competitor stations in town just got one; they've been having a hell of a time with it and it shows on-air. Been working in broadcasting for almost twenty years and I've launched all three automation systems at one time or another. With Grassvalley and Sony's automation there's seldom a problem at launch... Ross seems to always be a beast that needs to get wrangled. I seriously want to go to that competitor and help them (also, their studio is lit for shit and I want to fix that as well).
What do you do when those crashes happen during a live broadcast? Is that something is viewers might notice at home?
You drop up black and go to commercial. Hopefully, the system is back up when the break is over.
But rack mount programmable touchscreens are sexy!
Lotus Notes.
I get into a lot of atheist vs theists arguments and it bothers me a bit that not even once has a theist suggested that the existence of Lotus Notes is evidence of Satan. It does bother me because I admit it would make me lose confidence in my position.
I don't think it's possible to agree more with this. This would be the strongest fodder for the existence of pure evil if one were to argue that position.
I'm a sysadmin with a background in computer science, so I'll say any fucking enterprise software on the planet. It's all trash and annoying. I'd run Debian every day of the week over Windows or RHEL and the likes.
I never knew how much I love and appreciate open source/free software until I worked in enterprise...
"But VMWare PERFORMS BETTER than Proxmox!". Yeah, with 10 times the chance of making you depressed.
Was quite happy to leave Lotus Notes behind. Will be almost as happy to leave MS Dynamics 365 behind at some future point.
You clearly didn't use it for long enough - I was "stuck" with it for over 20 years. I wouldn't say I liked it, but it was so familiar I couldn't dislike it.
I had a coworker who showed me how powerful it could be if you knew what you were doing. He loved it. I didnât like it at all as an email client.
Lotus. Fucking. Notes.
Never again
LibreOffice Calc.
Pro is that my company is very pro-linux.
Con is that calc is so broken. At first, I thought it was just me. But even our accountants were quietly building spreadsheets in Google Sheets and then "pretending" like they use Calc.
There's a reason people pay for office. As shitty as Microsoft is, they know how to make a spreadsheet.
Excel Desktop > Google Sheets > LibreOffice Calc > Excel Online
Honestly anything you can't do in Google sheets is something a spreadsheet shouldn't be doing in the first place.
Sure sure, but also https://youtu.be/l40YTagEOC4
That was like those people that build working computers in Minecraft. On one hand it's impressive as all hell. On the other...what the fuck?
Quickbooks. Intuit can be burned to the ground.
We had one application we used (that got retired two years ago) where Control-C had been mapped to bring up a calendar.
There was no need for a calendar in the application. It didn't enable other features or anything that I could tell.
But the software was also woefully out-of-date. They'd decided not to pay for the updated version.
Pro tip Ctrl -insert does the same as ctrl-c Shift -insert to paste
Good to know, but thankfully I no longer use that software.
In-house "temporary" assembly line monitor written in Object Pascal around 2006, mostly unchanged since, too badly written to be used effectively, but too mission-critical to risk downtime with a potential fix/replacement.
Moodle.
Trying to turn it into an enterprise level LMS without paying any money was an interesting nightmare.
The Foreman/Red Hat Satellite. Many people wont know what it is, but it's the worst, bugiest, slowest piece of garbage I've ever touched.
Also Windows... I'm a Linux sysadmin but my work computer "needs" to use Windows and I've never disliked it as much as when I've been forced to work with it. Why is the virtual desktop experience so trash???
Maybe a bit niche, but the Scanco software for computed tomography analysis. Cant remember what itâs called off the top of my head. Itâs horribly dated and unintuitive. It does work though! My favorite was when we stopped being able to use it for several weeks, we thought it was busted. We contacted the company for help and they informed us that with a new update the numlock key toggled a âfeatureâ that prevented editing files. No visual representation that editing was locked. Wild
Oracle DB
ORA-600 INTERNAL ERROR [YOUWILLNEVERFINDTHISCODE:0x0608766ef,0,0,0,0]
Asana is a laggy piece of shit on any hardware with any internet connection if the board is big enough. And they are usually big.
Anything related to XCode is a fucking nightmare.
Custom made software for controlling electro -plating factory.
It runned on 2 win10 machines, used some combination of excel and proper database software. Multiple people needed to have access, so remote access tool ...
So basically they added multiple features in 10 years and by the time I worked there it was a mess.
Carbon Black. As a software developer, running unknown/untrusted binaries is kind of a big part of my job. We also had a MITM SSL-intercepting proxy which made my life miserable, especially when dealing with Docker containers. I actually ended up patching Docker to automatically inject the certificates and proxy environment variables.
On the plus side I learned a lot about certificate errors which has made me the go-to guy for any SSL issues in my current job.
Mac OS and R
Second Mac OS, what the literal fuck! Brain damaged window management, inferior software update management and a bastard of a *NIX environment.
Recently started using OSX and wow, so much better than windows 11. I'm a Linux user at home so it's nice to have a proper shell and none of the crashy bugs and glitches windows has. The UI is so much better.
The programming language Java. I could rant for half a goddamn hour.
You can't just rant about java.
You have to pick a timeslot, get at least 5 signups, get a building assignment, get department signoff from the department head, write a syllabus, assign a TA...
Thats right, even a rant about java has to be a class.
Microsoft dynamics AX.
I raise you Microsoft Dynamics SL
Not a job, but I was happy to stop using Blackboard when I left community college lmao.
Oh, and Tivoli Storage Manager/IBM Storage Protection. What a fucking garbage "data protection" application. Fucker couldn't even give me a reliable system state restore in modern OSs.
How the fuck did I suppress the name Tivoli until just now.
Holy shit.
I once had to rebuild some legacy code for a digital scoreboard. The code was written in a code mentioned in "Office Space". I think it was called top speed.
Until that day I thought it was a made up language.
Man, I feel spoiled after reading some of the stories on here, but for me, Solidworks. After being trained on Creo, moving to Solidworks is like Fisher-Price CAD.
Many things I'd gotten used to having a dedicated, robust tool for become having to trick the program into doing what you want it to do. The biggest offender is the drawings package - I swear this has not left the 90s in terms of UX design.
A custom built CRM and email replacement system built using MS Access as the front end and MSSQL server running on SBS2003 as the back end.
I left in 2010 and they were still using it.
Almost sounds like we worked at the same place
I'm not leaving, but damn I have no love for AS400. The 80s are over, but not when it comes to tracking our production.
I discovered I had a career because of AS400. I worked for a 1-800 computer sales company that was failing and they lost access to their GUI POS and had to rely on direct access to the AS400 to do a sale. They handed me a huge binder and said what can you do?
I turned the process into a 20 step how to and it kept the business going for a while. The old ladies I worked with loved me for saving their jobs
Mac OS X.
My company got acquired by a competitor, we had been running on PeopleSoft, and I don't remember the software the new company used but it was a soul sucking black screen with basically a DOS prompt that you had to learn key combinations to use. I had never thought I cared about the beautiful visual interface of PeopleSoft but my God it turned out I did.
Maybe you have heard about a software called Ragtime. Itâs basically a combination of Word and Excel. However, thereâs no option to export any files that can be edited with any other office application, and you canât open .xls/.odf etc files with it. Oh, and the best part about it: You can always only undo one action.
Why would anyone use it?
Several decades ago, it must have been as good as other comparable products on Mac OS. And when thereâs no compatibility, the switch isnât that easy. You basically have to build your templates from scratch.
That being said, we have decided to switch to MS Office, but my boss will probably use Ragtime until retirement.
Kafka, especially when a company forces you to use their homemade interface to search through topics
Wow, I'm surprised to see a Kafka hater! My experience of it has been mostly positive, and it seems to solve a lot of problems for people, if they use it as it should be used and not as a source of truth database.
And thats exactly why i hate it -my old company used it as a source of truth db. It was such a mess and id get calls in the middle of the night because data was being moved or held correctly.
Maybe one day ill use it as it was intended
Man, HPSM was trash but christ I'd take it back for a ticketing system over Salesforce in a heartbeat. Trashfire tries to do too much and excels at none of it.
Still at the job, but QuarkXPress is such immense garbage and most of our legacy documents were built in it so It still a daily requirement, thankfully InDesign was an option for use a few years after starting so its less of an issue these days. Obviously no piece of software is perfect but the amount of extra steps Quark causes to do basic functions reminds me of back in college when I was forced to use Avid for some class projectsâsimilarly bloated, clunky, unintuitive nonsense.
Quark touted adding the âeyedropper toolâ a few years back in a new releaseâin 2020 (or maybe the 2019 version, I canât remember). This software is just as old as InDesign, the fact they didnât add an EYEDROPPER tool for style selection is beyond confounding. They also hadnât implemented individual cell styling for tables until like 2018. The company also has the nerve to put front-and-center that it will open and convert InDesign files in an attempt to appeal to people sick of Adobeâs current subscription model (which donât get me wrong, I am equally annoyed with), but let me tell you as a daily user of both: STAY AS FAR AWAY AS YOU CAN FROM QUARK.
I think maybe it's older, I remember it being around at the same time as Aldus PageMaker, which became Adobe InDesign.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
It was bad at my old job but I thought I figured out a good workflow. Then I switched to my current role thinking they would use it better, it's just introduced new problems for me.
There's all the regular jank of Marketing Cloud that comes from a bunch of poorly integrated acquisitions. But the worst part for me is trying to pass data from Marketing Cloud to Salesforce.
Data just doesn't go through if it doesn't match perfectly. And neither program tells you because it's between systems.
You can fulfil all of Marketing Cloud's requirements, but nothing will happen if things don't match up on the Salesforce end.
Testing a recent campaign was so stressful I've updated my resume and jumped back on the job sites
During my statistics graduate degree, there was one course we had to do our data analysis using SAS. I absolutely despise it and refuse to work for any employer that would expect me to use it.
SPSS is also crap - at my current job there were some processes that used it's scripting "language". It was both painful but cathartic to slowly rewrite those processes into R.
Sas is awful but I will say doing mixed linear models and doing contrasts was pretty easy compared to r.
I think so many people are institutionalized into Microsoft office suite (especially for outlook mail and calendar) and it is just so RIDICULOUSLY bad - I'd never really appreciated gmail or complimented gsuite until my company was acquired and forced to regularly work in outlook.
I immediately took a 50% productivity hit and even daily success towards regular goals just doesn't feel quite like success anymore because I'm always chasing my tail. Luckily I was already an overachiever, so my diminished workload is still good. Stupid company fucked themself out of a lot of wins for such a small, tone deaf decision.
The simplest way I can say it is that before with gsuite I just never thought about productivity apps - they worked in the background to support me well enough. Now that we're in outlook, I have multiple bad interactions that I have to navigate around every single workday.
So many frustrations here! I just switched companies and forced back into outlook&teams.
Would you like to know who's attending a meeting? We hid this very deep in the meeting options.
Want to see all emails sent to Jack? Here are all emails from Jack instead.
Want to see when Jack is available for a quick chat? Please schedule a meeting and use the scheduling tool just to see if he's even in the office today
I fucking hate Outlook and if I have to pick between two similar jobs I'd pick the one with gsuite over Microsoft any day.
Previous company handled everything over email. No Kanban, no Git, no organization - everything was still handled as it was in a random accounting office back in the 90's. I spend half of my worktime searching for who-said-what-and-when emails to code feature x, and then had to email it back to another dev.
There was also zero drive to improve anything. I was yelled at for 5 mins straight for suggesting to add a placeholder to a dateinput (which was declared as '', instead of ''), because the correct format 'YYYYMMDD' was never mentioned anywhere on the form or in error mesages, and people keept having issues.
Installing Windows with SCCM... without PXEbooting them. I had to use 3 different flash drives for like 8-10 computers at a time, record the MAC addresses, set the hostnames and IPs and then kick it off. I did this daily for weeks.
Harsh. Pxebooting makes so much sense in a deployment setting.
Yeah, it was, especially when you have ADHD đ I eventually got fired because I got really bored with it and my performance suffered.
Their reasoning for not PXEbooting was that when they tried to before, it was too slow. They tried to fix it, failed, gave up and made us do it that way. This was the Windows XP EOL to 7 upgrade.
Windows
Micros cash register software. Endless lines of corrupted database entries.
I had a gig as a software developer at a company that tried to organize its software development with... the most horrid call center ticketing system I've ever seen.
The software was named "TANSS" (an acronym for "transaction action notification solution system" which... says a lot... in a certain way). It couldn't handle UTF-8 and the company had Asian customers, it placed the signature of a different company under each message sent to a customer and project management might as well have been non-existent (supposedly the crapper of a ticketing system had "projects" but it was just a super naive lining up of tasks without buffer times, burndown/velocity chart or anything).
The expensive p.o.s. was strong-armed into the company, probably because one of the company owners had a background in tech support crap where you're generally chasing billable minutes.
I don't know if it was unprofessional by me, but I quickly refused to interact with the whole thing and handed in my notice (and I had actually liked the company and my tasks up until that point). Even Jira, which many consider a highly unpleasant system to work with, felt lean, responsive and fun after that experience.
It's been over 6 years, but I can state with certainty, if I see that system in use anywhere, my respect is gone and whether customer or employer, they'll be a hot potato in my hands form that moment on :)
It was legal software called Needles. The firm didn't use email to communicate. They sent Needles messages. I quit after a week.
I'm a physical therapist. EMR program called Raintree. So, so cumbersome.
My company decided to replace selenium with their own in house solution... It didn't work but they kept doubling down on it and tried to present it to all other branches in the org to get them all to buy in. After I left my friend told me it became a dumpster fire and everyone abandoned the project.
Like they wrote their own platform to automate front end automation? Thats... a choice
Yes... It went about as well as you could imagine đ
Cisco ACI. What a janky, buggy mess. Dozens of clicks to accomplish tasks you used to be able to do in less than 5 seconds from the CLI. And the GUI is laid out like a fever dream. You need to script everything to be even close to efficient, even unique one off tasks, and then you spend more time editing scripts than it used to take to do jobs manually from the CLI. We have one environment with a couple hundred independently managed switches that one guy can manage pretty effectively with little to no automation. It takes a dozen people to manage an environment with about three hundred switches and they are always fixing stupid bugs. The staff turnover there is hilarious. Most people try it for a while and then run for the hills.
I worked for a company that manufactured products and had been running on NetSuite as the ERP for about a decade when I got there. It had been customized and tweaked and worked pretty well for what we did over that time frame, with lots of time-saving automation. Shortly before I joined the company they were bought by a conglomerate and merged into a division with a couple other somewhat complimentary companies in the central US and west coast. Although it was supposed to be a merger of equals, it soon became apparent the west coast company had won the merger and was calling the shots. They were closer to our largest customer base and while our revenues were pretty similar, they shipped much smaller volumes and had much higher margins (they apparently at one point had a box that just had a Raspberry Pi or something similar inside that they sold for $5k/each). The big difference was we were a big name in a market with a lot of competition, so we had to be efficient and smart with our margins, while they were only big in markets where they had no competition; where they had competition they were often the last choice. While the plan was originally to move everyone to NetSuite, which already had options to run multiple companies/subsidiaries out of one instance, that was abruptly cancelled and we were told we would instead need to switch to Xtuple.
Xtuple was awful. NetSuite runs in a web browser but Xtuple opens multiple windows that look like something written in Java in the late â90s. Want to copy some text? Unless itâs in an editable text field you can basically forget about it, and even if that field was once editable, many of them can never be edited again after the first time you save, or sometimes even as soon as you click out of it after your first time typing in it.
I donât even know how much of it was Xtupleâs fault versus the companyâs customizations. Where switching to NetSuite wouldâve put all the companies in the same instance and allowed for one store to sell all the products, the plan to switch to Xtuple meant a separate server for each company, plus a fourth server to coordinate with each location. When you license Xtuple, you also get access to the source code and can make changes as needed. There was one guy at the west coast company who had total control of the software and no one else had access to it. It seemed like he used this opportunity to create the proverbial million lines of undocumented spaghetti code and guarantee job security. To try and help him with creating all the different Xtuple servers, they hired a consultant directly from Xtuple to create our instance, but when the spaghetti code guy came to integrate it with his part none of it worked, apparently because spaghetti code guy was doing all sorts of things in a non-standard way. This delayed our launch by 3 months because spaghetti code guy then went and rewrote the stuff the consultant did to make it work, and of course a lot of things still didnât work right for several months after we launched.
Because Xtuple didnât do everything NetSuite did, some functions were moved to outside software, like Customer/Technical Support to Zendesk. The built-in tools in NetSuite werenât the best, but it was directly integrated so it pulled customer and product history in and could make an RMA directly in the ERP, so when the product arrived Receiving basically just had to push a button to check it in (the west coast company had never bothered putting their repairs in Xtuple much beyond listing the final price of the repair; they managed the actual repair process in a massive, unwieldy Google spreadsheet). Zendesk didnât have that, so all of the data had to be manually entered twice, once in Zendesk, then again in Xtuple. We also didnât put our old customer history into Xtuple, including even just a customer list, partly because the west coast company assured us they already had all the same customers as us (it turned out they maybe had a third of our customers, and that only counts business customers, not individuals). Since we had access to the code it seems like we shouldâve been able to tie directly into Xtuple, but spaghetti code guy would only allow custom APIs he created. We never even got that to work because a year or so in the head honchos decided to move to Salesforce instead, so they spent a ton more money trying to make that work. When I left they still werenât communicating, and people coming in from the conglomerate were starting to ask why millions of dollars had been spent on multiple transitions to rebuild functionality that still wasnât working 3 years in. They were also cancelling the 4th Xtuple server to control the other 3 because they just couldnât seem to make it work.
In the end there are a lot of things I donât miss from that company, but I found Xtuple to be especially x-stupid. Still, I donât know if it was the software itself or spaghetti code guy. Everyone acknowledged he was a problem when he wasnât in the room, except maybe the CFO, but no one could do anything about it because it seemed like the businesses would completely halt without him.
Amazon Chime.
Windows.
Whats wrong with windows? Everything just works.
VII, aka V 2, not 7. Just that naming gives you an idea of how unintuitive everything was.
I supported a couple dental offices for a while, and I hope I never have to touch EagleSoft again....
Groupwise. What an ugly, barely functional piece of crap. I'd set notifications for recurring tasks and sometimes it would remind me and then randomly stop for a while. Sending email felt like the early days of AOL. I left for about a year and when I came back, they'd switched to Outlook, which I don't love, but it's miles better than what we had.
The job I worked at for that year had a custom Salesforce thing that made me want to find whoever built it and throw something at them. It was supposed to track what benefits clients were receiving, like SNAP, disability, etc, but it was borderline impossible to read, case notes would cut off, and searches would routinely just not work. It soured me on Salesforce permanently if that's the kind of garbage they're releasing.
CET Designer with in house tools added. Nothing worked well, or even worked as documented for longer than a couple months. And engineering projects using it would last years... We'd go to do as builts and nothing worked the way it did when the project began.
Sorry but FreeCAD, it's just not made for professional use. I don't blame it, I blame my boss for being so tight he had us on Linux cos of that and then plus wouldn't buy me a CAD program.
Back then Web based options like Onshape didn't exist so there wasn't much else..
Startup life for you...
FreeCAD has come leaps and bounds but it still isn't where it needs to be.
If this was back way before web applications didn't exist, I can only imagine how much worse FreeCAD was then
Outlook mail server in 1999.
Only used for 2 weeks while doing some Y2K relief on site.
Eeeeewww. Felt gross after.
For context, I was using Exim4 at home at the time.
Most people wouldn't know about the tool but the ECO suite of tools for ISPs to manage devices is shit (unless they rewrote it since I last worked on it). Companies paid millions in licensing and the damn thing barely worked. It could take two hours to install despite being bundled as an RPM. Code was also a mess of overrides and black magic techniques that made it near impossible to trace and test. And I just remembered the UI was written in Java and it was source controlled by SVN.
QuickBooks, by far. Running that on premise (which we did before they offered it as a service) was an absolute pain.
Adobe Experience Manager aka Adobe Designer. Unfortunately I still have to use it occasionally at my current job.
React
I would agree and disagree.
Agree because God damn it, React is so full of ugly anti patterns and shoved it's stupid framework into the hands of so many boot camps that we have a bunch of newbies coders teaching newbie coders creating garbage projects for the past decade.
Disagree because before React, we had the nightmare that is Angular, or the spaghetti that is jQuery. React is a major improvement. And React lately has gotten significantly better and more experienced devs are providing better examples to teach noobs how to write better React.
I guess what I'm saying is React isn't bad. It's just we've been seeing a lot of react garbage for years. For the old heads, it's PHP all over again.
At my last job we used a proprietary rapid application development tool to do .. everything. It had been used for decades and itâs basically a designer window like Microsoftâs asp net stuff and pseudo code in the background for multi Plattform Desktops and web Applications. The rad in itself is okay: it is written in c++, reasonably fast and has node and js integrations. Buut as said the tool had been used for decades without major refactorings or rewrites or what not. So the codebase was a mix of awful ( you can name variables if so if if is possible ) and straight up outdated. Iâd regularly find âcommit-commentsâ (the integrated vcs is also shit) written before I was born. It was a pain to work with. And we never used the js or node integrations since the new dev lead didnât know much about developing outside of in said tool which made everything more complicated. So Iâm kinda happy to work with js now.
IBM Websphere and Eclipse. What a horrible way to develop a application.
Banner.
Anyone ever use Accela?
I have plenty of stories from when I used to work in purchase ledger and customer service.
Klick2Contact is the biggest piece of shit I've ever used. Imagine a CRM that randomly crashes and loses your tickets, and where it can take several minutes to assign an email to yourself. Now imagine having to use software that bad whilst logging cases on a separate CRM (because K2C wasn't fit for purpose) and answering emails within a 10 minute SLA.
Best I used in terms of call centre software was Salesforce. Ironically it's not specifically designed as a CRM.
Part of the reason I got fired from my old call centre job was trying to deal with K2C.
Worst enterprise level accountancy software I used was probably a tie between JD Edwards and OpenAccounts. Best accounting software was definitely Xero.
Clearcase and Clearquest. Fortunately we didn't use it for very long.
I work in manufacturing and haven't left yet so I still suffer, but my God will I be so happy to leave Visibility behind...
What an absolute nightmare, shit system... 2 years in and we're still suffering every day from it. No one here likes it at all.
Oh man im not sure if i hate HPSM more or the in house dumpster fire my corp replaced it with
3DS MAX, Zbrush
Oh man, outlook? Mostly just because I hate email. Or slack because I hate people being able to just grab my attention from what I'm working on.
Right now, I'm getting super fed up with SCVMM. I'm used to vcenter and having to migrate everything last minute to hyper-v keeps showing me why I've always gone VMware for everything. It's just a clunky, unoptimized UI, giving me cryptic errors with surprisingly little online documentation. I feel like Microsoft really, really could do better but they don't want an alternative to Azure so they make it intentionally hard. It's just unoptimized software with too much overhead for a hypervisor.
Getting this deployed and configured is a battle of two steps forward and one step backwards.
I just came off 15 years at Outlook companies to a Google everything office and I love not having Outlook for any reason. It's so nice. Just hearing the alert noise would raise my blood pressure after awhile.
Windows server and all the half-working crap it comes with it. I ended up replacing most functionalities with third party tools because Microsoft doesn't know about good UX. OS deployment? Replaced, GPO? Replaced where possible. Patch management? Replaced.
Sungard Apsys.
It's a banking software I used in one of my first jobs for the frontend of a trading & clearing house, and it's the most convoluted and unintuitive UI that I've seen in my entire life.
Note that it might have changed since, I was working with it prior to 2013.
Verizon Wireless POS. They went through 3 versions while I was there, and each was as bad as the last.
Yardi
Try Propertyware, it's worse. Five years experience with it.
Ansible.
TheForeman.
What utter trash.
Why ansible? It's the best tool I know of for configuring systems when tyou can't build a premade image. I've tried puppet and chef but really like not needing any agent on the target system despite the pain of YAML syntax.
What's wrong with ansible? I use it day to day. I get the usual gripes about python syntax but all in all its an ok tool.
They also mention Foreman. I like Ansible, but anything in combination with Foreman was terrible experience, so perhaps it's that.
Also you can do terrible Ansible configuration that's then nightmare to maintain.
Totally get The Foreman. Worst piece of garbage I've ever used.
I do use ansible to set up my own repository management/lifecycle environment servers nowadays, specifically to get rid of Foreman.
Why do you dislike ansible? Got to say that I love it, especially compared to stuff like Puppet and SaltStack.
Ansible isn't that bad, it's just quirky.
Odoo ERP system
Darn I was hoping odoo was good, what did you not like about it?
âManufacturing software that doesnât suck!â
𤎠yeah right
Oracle Secure Global Desktop, it made doing anything in production take 3-5 times longer.
Ugh. Amy interaction I've had with oracle enterprise software has involved myriad scripts, package installation in a particular order (skip a step and start over, yay!), tech shaming, incoherent support and lacklustre results. How they are still in business is beyond me.
Every time I get away from JIRA for a while I praise Hopper.
Autodesk Maya 2016
VMware Workspace One.
That shit is so ill suited for management of computers that it's a wonder they ever sold a single license.
Jira.
Adobe Coldfusion
Aras PLM