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.
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 🤦♂️
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.
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.
Do you have sources regarding other stack vectors?
A lot of people should be in deep shit if it’s possible to join a “secure” meeting on a regular phone line.
We don’t normally use it, but one of our clients demanded that we used that 🤢 to contact them.
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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.
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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.
Teams beats all the others of video calling specifically.
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.
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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.
I have sorta Stockholm syndrome with it now. I’m 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.
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.
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.
Ah. A butterfly keyboard aficionado!
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)
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.
