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.
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Comments399View original on lemmy.world
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.
I wish I could hire you and a couple other people who replied to this lol. "Match stick architecture" is definitely something we have and I have been trying to shore up / replace for years.
Sorry, I missed this comment. I actually love doing that kind of shit, I get some sort of weird pleasure out of fixing chaotic stuff like that. That tends to be my role almost all the time; I'll come in, stay a few years, fix everything and get bored, and then move on somewhere else to do it again.
My current job is the only place that I haven't done that, because it's probably the best company that I've ever worked for.
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.
Oh god, I'm so sorry. That's exactly what we went through, and yep, same thing. Changing even the tiniest element in the UI would break their whole "automation".
That was one of the many things I warned about but was overridden. Lol, thankfully I was saved by his retirement and new CTO agreeing with me.
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 🤦♂️
Germany currently has a whole political scandal because out of it.
Nah. It turned out that one of the callers dialed in using a regular phone number and there classic wiretapping was used.
Still wouldn't surprise me if it would've actually been the software.
Not actually true - it is right that this is by far the most likely vector - but it is not the only one. And tbf, I wouldn't tell the media anything else if I were in the Bendlerblock right now. Because anything else would mean that a lot more people would be in deep shit.
A lot of people should be in deep shit if it's possible to join a "secure" meeting on a regular phone line.
Do you have sources regarding other stack vectors?
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.
We don't normally use it, but one of our clients demanded that we used that 🤢 to contact them.
I'm pretty sure you can disable the bleeps and bloops people are complaining about - get a tool, then don't spend any time to learn it and then suffer using it.
I hate Teams, give me Slack
Edit: I left an optional team in teams, and still got a notification for a meeting that isn’t 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. I’m 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 that’s nice is how it archives meeting chats and recordings.
It’s only used because it’s basically free with enterprise office.
Interesting, teams has the worst video call quality I’ve ever seen. Trying to pair program is painful, can’t 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.
Did fosdem not go back to matrix in 22 and 23? Why not?
It was full remote that year is all
The background noise surpression of Teams is peak quality (vs Webex and Slack, though Webex is somewhat good)..
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 “to save money”. That’s the entire value prop for Teams.
"it's included in the licenses we already pay for"
I know, but the rollout playbook is to pump up the Office integrations, not showcase the cost savings. Because normal end users don’t care.
And then people don't even use the office integrations, which are pretty much the only good thing Teams has. The integration of PowerPoint with meetings is actually pretty good, but the number of presentations I've sat through where someone just screen shared their PowerPoint window is absurd.
They can detect that too, so Microsoft “could” automate the better way.
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.
The file sharing aspect drives me crazy
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.
There’s 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, that’s 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 can’t even set up groups within the chat window other than Pinned. What trash is that? Microsoft has a great track record of taking capabilities from earlier tools or versions and removes them.
I’m looking at you message auto preview ONLY for unread messages.
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 you’re being serious, I’d really like to know what you dislike about slack. It’s been a minute since I used it as my daily driver, but I find myself quite frequently irritated about not having enough control.
I hate Slack, give me Mattermost or Rocket.Chat
I will look into these
Looked at all of these, chose Lark.
Did you check the calender in Teams? Not to be confused with the calender in Outlook, which may or may not overlap.
You must have a nice well maintained slack instance. We just migrated to it from teams and they've added me to 50 + channels some with thousands of people and the whole program churns. It doesn't send timely notifications or sometimes none at all. If I leave any of the bogus channels I get automatically added back. Nobody wants to use it we all want teams back. The worst part is it only keeps DM history for two weeks our teams would keep history for years.
The last point is purely a configuration thing. Our Teams instance only keeps DMs for I think 30ish days -- legal wants to minimize the surface area of discoverable material. Same reason our Exchange instance nukes emails over 12 months old unless you manually move them to an archive.
Adding people back to channels is definitely an admin choice. 2 weeks history is a plan limit, I think only the free tier has it.
You can mute channels / go @s only, create new channels for whatever needs you have. Hopefully you can find a way to make it more usable within the confines of your admins config. Also note, the config may not even be intentional, so it may be worth reaching out to IT
I'm slowly starting to live with it and it's getting better the more channels I mute and group. The notification issue is still real though I've adjusted quite a few settings to get it working better. Including disabling mobile notifications and making slack use it's own notification system and not the system integrated one for Windows. The automation opportunities that exist are exciting too but will take us a while to flesh out.
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.
Was it called BERTA?
Didn't leave the job over it, but SAP.
Shitty. Ass. Program.
I haven’t 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.
Scheiße 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.
I’m 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. It’s 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, there’s 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:
here’s 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 don’t need as much controls on the operators side as it’s mostly via CCU. The grassvalley are the worst, it’s kind of impressive how bad they are.
](https://youtu.be/8AyVh1_vWYQ?feature=shared) new peice of shit
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.
It’s really useful. Not everyone can have easy access to a $50K camera to play around before their first job with it.
Lotus Notes. I called it Bogus Notes. I do not miss it.
My first programming job out of college was in Lotus Notes. I spent most of my time trying to trick it into doing what I wanted, it was a constant cat-and-mouse game. Kinda fun if it wasn’t so miserable. Had to gtfo after a couple years.
My previous job finally got off of lotus notes in 2019.
My first text job was at a fortune 500 that used Lotus Notes. I think they transitioned off in 2014 or 2015.
What a weird software. They had some whole processes that happened in Notes that were like mini applications and databases.
You gotta respect those early adopters, the trendsetters, the pioneers.
I left a job when the previous notes admin left and they tried to get me to run that hot garbage with no training and no bump in pay.
Oh hell yes, that's a piece of garbage.
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.
Came to comment Windows as well.
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.
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 I’d switch back to ServiceNow in a heartbeat.
That thing has its quirks and annoyances, but there's definitely worse systems out there...
Agreed.
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.
So say we all!
I have sorta Stockholm syndrome with it now. I’m locked in so may as well enjoy it.
Servicenow isn't great, but I'll just say it is a lot better than some of the other ones here (especially jira)
I'm a ServiceNow Technical consultant, the alternatives are all worse. Sorry if you got stuck with some shitty implementation. I'm working somewhere right now where the customer is migrating from ServiceNow to... ServiceNow. They're dumping their old massively butchered implementation to an "out of the box" one. It's so bad that I have no idea how to use their old system and I've been doing this for 10+ years
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 use an external mouse and keyboard and I still hate it. Went from Windows and Linux (I'm fine with either and mostly just use Windows for gaming these days), to Mac for the first time in 20 years. They refuse to give us linux machines for those that want them.
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, it’s 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 you’re wrestling the OS.
As for the keyboard thing, yeah, those couple years of butterfly keyboard were no one’s favorite. Personally, I’ve experienced far worse laptop keyboards in my day - especially among the cheap stuff enterprises would buy from Dell or HP. But I’m 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 can’t say that I’ve 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.
Ah. A butterfly keyboard aficionado!
I have to use a mac for work and haaaaaaaaaaaaaate it. 20+ years of muscle memory just does all the wrong things (lookin' at you, home key). Stuff is so inconsistent between various applications (terminal, for instance), and esepecially our ML repos won't work on them. I have lost so many hours to just not being allowed to use linux, it's frightening. I used to have an iPhone and it was quite neat and easy-to-use when it came out, but I find the desktop experience nightmarish.
Also, it being ARM and not x86 has caused fun headaches with installing some things.
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
There’s actually decent money to be made if you’re 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.
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)
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 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.
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.
25 yr System Administer who has exited IT: Windows
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
Lotus Notes.
SharePoint
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.
Here where I work we just sync with the user PC, like OneDrive, and the user can't tell the difference. For them it is just another folder in the Explorer. Some only access through Teams...
OneDrive and SharePoint are very similar in functionality. (In fact every personal OneDrive's is a SharePoint site) But SharePoint is intended to share files and other information while OneDrive is intended to be personal (with some limited sharing functionality).
Working with other colleagues and having all their files distributed on multiple OneDrive's is very inconvenient, while having a SharePoint is not.
why particularly CAD files? trying to understand why this is a bad idea as it appears that is where we are going
This thread explains it better than I could: https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/15q6hq4/psa_do_not_host_autocad_files_in_sharepoint/
SharePoint apparently has some kind of AutoCAD integration so it might work for you, but watch out. And most importantly don't just import the entire FileShare regardless of what it contains to a single SharePoint site.
The best that can be said of Sharepoint, is it could be worse, you could be using Notes.
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. 🤮
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.
As a former LabVIEW instructor, I was so glad to get out of that nightmare platform.
You mean Emerson now! :P
I'm a CLA who spent 9 years developing LabVIEW applications for control systems. NI always annoyed me with their terrible decision-making and inability to catch up with modern times in the software world. (Their merge tool is so bad, it's next to impossible to have a multi-developer project)
Ah I see, a fellow tortured soul who had to endure MultiSim I presume?
For people who're not in the loop, if you haven't used MultiSim you categorically do not know what UX nightmares are made of
Hey now, I've got great job security due to being one of the LabVIEW experts at my company. Never change, NI
I wanted to like JIRA instance I had for a project. It was just so backwards, decided not to use it.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
Well nobody mentioned the software I designed, so I'm all good.
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 wasn’t playing audio. I had a hunch it was related to an issue that’s 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 Jabber’s 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.
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.
Lotus Notes
Plot twist... my new employer uses it even more 🤦🏻♂️
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.
So it's so bad that even IBM abandoned it!
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.
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'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!
We are in the future! Rack mounted touch screens are how we know we're in the future.
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.
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.
Quickbooks. Intuit can be burned to the ground.
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 didn’t like it at all as an email client.
Lotus. Fucking. Notes.
Never again
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.
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???
Moodle.
Trying to turn it into an enterprise level LMS without paying any money was an interesting nightmare.
Maybe a bit niche, but the Scanco software for computed tomography analysis. Cant remember what it’s called off the top of my head. It’s 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 “feature” that prevented editing files. No visual representation that editing was locked. Wild
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.
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.
Not a job, but I was happy to stop using Blackboard when I left community college lmao.
The programming language Java. I could rant for half a goddamn hour.
Microsoft dynamics AX.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Mac OS X.
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.
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
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.
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 projects—similarly bloated, clunky, unintuitive nonsense.
Quark touted adding the “eyedropper tool” a few years back in a new release—in 2020 (or maybe the 2019 version, I can’t remember). This software is just as old as InDesign, the fact they didn’t add an EYEDROPPER tool for style selection is beyond confounding. They also hadn’t 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 Adobe’s current subscription model (which don’t 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'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
Windows
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.
Maybe you have heard about a software called Ragtime. It‘s basically a combination of Word and Excel. However, there‘s no option to export any files that can be edited with any other office application, and you can‘t open .xls/.odf etc files with it. Oh, and the best part about it: You can always only undo one action.
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.
Kafka, especially when a company forces you to use their homemade interface to search through topics
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
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 😂 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.
I'm a physical therapist. EMR program called Raintree. So, so cumbersome.
It was legal software called Needles. The firm didn't use email to communicate. They sent Needles messages. I quit after a week.
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 :)
Lots of things are really bad with UTF-8. In Japan, lots of things still use SHIFT_JIS (or CP932 which expands on it), with some companies still using EUC_JP. I think MS application (Excel, etc.) all default to CP932 output instead of UTF-8.
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.
SAS is utter insanity. I took grad-level Stats and we learned how to use it. I almost started to get good at it. When I brought my very first analysis to my grad advisor she told me that all analysis has to be performed by the department's head statistician. All I could think was: "why the fuck are they forcing me to learn a language they won't allow me to use???"
Amazon Chime.
I supported a couple dental offices for a while, and I hope I never have to touch EagleSoft again....
VII, aka V 2, not 7. Just that naming gives you an idea of how unintuitive everything was.
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 ’90s. Want to copy some text? Unless it’s 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 don’t even know how much of it was Xtuple’s fault versus the company’s customizations. Where switching to NetSuite would’ve 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 didn’t work right for several months after we launched.
Because Xtuple didn’t do everything NetSuite did, some functions were moved to outside software, like Customer/Technical Support to Zendesk. The built-in tools in NetSuite weren’t 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 didn’t have that, so all of the data had to be manually entered twice, once in Zendesk, then again in Xtuple. We also didn’t 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 should’ve 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 weren’t 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 wasn’t working 3 years in. They were also cancelling the 4th Xtuple server to control the other 3 because they just couldn’t seem to make it work.
In the end there are a lot of things I don’t miss from that company, but I found Xtuple to be especially x-stupid. Still, I don’t know if it was the software itself or spaghetti code guy. Everyone acknowledged he was a problem when he wasn’t 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.
Windows.
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.
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 😆
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.
QuickBooks, by far. Running that on premise (which we did before they offered it as a service) was an absolute pain.
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...
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.
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.
Well, now that software is back in my memory again. cries
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.
Adobe Experience Manager aka Adobe Designer. Unfortunately I still have to use it occasionally at my current job.
At my last job we used a proprietary rapid application development tool to do .. everything. It had been used for decades and it’s basically a designer window like Microsoft’s 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. I’d regularly find „commit-comments“ (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 didn’t know much about developing outside of in said tool which made everything more complicated. So I’m kinda happy to work with js now.
React
3DS MAX, Zbrush
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.
Anyone ever use Accela?
Oh man im not sure if i hate HPSM more or the in house dumpster fire my corp replaced it with
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.
I'm so glad I never had to support JDE, everything I've seen of it in screen share sessions makes it look like an absolute pain in the ass.
IBM Websphere and Eclipse. What a horrible way to develop a application.
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.
Autodesk Maya 2016
Banner.
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.
Odoo ERP system
Verizon Wireless POS. They went through 3 versions while I was there, and each was as bad as the last.
Every time I get away from JIRA for a while I praise Hopper.
Oracle Secure Global Desktop, it made doing anything in production take 3-5 times longer.
Yardi
Try Propertyware, it's worse. Five years experience with it.
Jira.
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.
VMware Workspace One.
That shit is so ill suited for management of computers that it's a wonder they ever sold a single license.
Ansible.
TheForeman.
What utter trash.
Asana.
Adobe Coldfusion
Aras PLM
Gage Insite, by IndySoft. I don't currently have time to get into it.
Hangul Word Processor. It had (has?) an updater that would pop up ads in the taskbar. Unfortunately the developer, Hancom, is so in-bed with the Korean government, it's mandatory software in many Korean workplaces. Korean support has gotten much, much better in every other word processor, it's hardly necessary anymore.
Harness (a SaaS CI/CD solution)
It is mercilessly opinionated, has a shitty licensing model, bad Git integration, unusable pipeline code (way too complex to write by hand, have to use the visual pipeline editor).
It wasn't the primary reason for leaving that particular job, but it was a factor. The more I worked with it, the more I hated it.
MyRedVest!
Camunda BPM is pretty bad.
VB apps running on IIS is up there; I'm happy to never deal with either again. This was pre-dot-net.
Early 2000s doing tech support in a house-built ticketing+crm system that heavily abused things in JS.
Speaking of tech support, all manner of software mentioned here already.
I spent a ton of time working in healthcare IT and there's all kinds of janky mess there. One was a house-built Perl script to handle certain things. It was like 15k lines (and before you blame Perl, we had a Java class that was over 30k IIRC). Never allowed to rewrite it because of how mission-critical it was, yet there were still bugs with it. Healthcare IT in the US tends to have lots of jank, especially the small clinics that had to start by doing everything they could with what they had.
I don't want to leave my current job, but they make us all use Mac (Apple Silicon) for software engineering and I hate it. Nothing works the way I expect, it's not consistent between apps, certain ML tools we use won't work on it (mostly because not x86 arch), etc.
Paycor is making me leave my job currently. It's just a mess of weird shit that makes no sense with zero support.
Cova for a dispo
Oh, oh, oh! I got one not mentioned yet:
ELK.
Well, not the whole of the ELK stack (Elastic, Logstash and Kibana, though the full stack size is much larger nowadays), but their watchers. A watcher is a piece of JSON with some search specifications on when to trigger and send an alert to email/slack/teams/whatever. We're basically abusing it as an alerting system, and generally it works... Fine... Presuming Filebeat actually ingests our logs (which is partially our fault, as there's a fix, but it takes too damn long to drag 3 teams along to implement what needs implementing to fix that problem).
Anyway, the problem is not the watcher itself, even though it is painful (heh) to learn the structure. It's "Painless", the JVM-based scripting language available in a watcher. It's anything but. It is SO painful to write code, inside of a JSON object, making sure everything is exactly as it should be, having to use the DevTools in Kibana to try and trigger it, wait to see what enormous error comes out while praying it works. No IDE, no nothing. Ah, I lied. It does have Syntax Highlighting, for non-Painless code, IIRC...
Oh, having to dig information out of the data you get is super unintuitive too.
At least the UI/Kibana is good, and Elastic is pretty good too. Fuck Filebeat though. And Painless.
If I never see IMDS and CAMS again it will be too soon.