What software you consider so bad it made you happy when you left your job?
I've worked with some pretty rotten software, but management software is easily the most user unfriendly, so my vote goes to HPSM.
I 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.
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.
We don't normally use it, but one of our clients demanded that we used that 🤢 to contact them.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
I would be so stoked to have a Linux-only job. All my personal machines, servers etc are Linux. I'm an old guy but just got my first IT job and it is all Windows. I love getting blamed for shit Microsoft fucks up haha.
Same. Turning down windows admin jobs has been a career saving move for me. It puts you back tech wise and its just so fucking cumbersome to admin for.
For all the flak it always gets, can I just say I'm relieved nobody said JIRA yet? I think JIRA is great for what to does, but companies are just bad at setting it up right. Either they go overboard with restrictive processes, or they are unorganized mess, there is no in between. But that's not the software's fault. (Braces for downvotes)
Yeah the shitty bespoke markup language and half assed integration of a WYSIWYG editor that fucks up tickets with formatting that is more complex than a few headers and a few lists makes it the worst in my opinion :(
Jira itself is fine. The problem is the "user generated content"
We used Jira at work and when the ticket was set up properly (stories, subtasks, etc..) it worked well.
I would say it is the softwares fault though. Ever heard of "convention over configuration"? Jira is like the opposite of that idea. For a task management app, you need something more opinionated and less configurable I feel like. Something simpler that covers most use cases and doesn't try to cover literally everything cause that just makes it so complicated. Jira is the opposite of KISS as well.
I like JIRA, but you make a good point there. My company lets every team manage their project however they want. They go an extra mile to tailor and customize JIRA in whatever way each team "needs". But having over 100+ teams in my company has made projects a nightmare, I have to write very complex JQLs and filters just to get the results I need from all the projects I'm involved with. There's no pattern at all.
I think JIRA is okay. I've used MUCH worst bug reporting software. The worst thing I can say about JIRA is that it is designed to implement scrum and IMO scrum is cargo cult programming.
25 yr System Administer who has exited IT: Windows
Lotus Notes.
Hello, fellow ex-IBMer.
I worked in IBM for a bit before Notes and it was even worse. Everyone was given terminal software that connected to some mainframe to read email. The terminal didn't even refresh so if you wanted to see if you had gotten email you had to refresh it manually. Fortunately I was only a contractor at the time so didn't get much email although I did get one from an employee apologizing for cheating on me, and a followup saying the message was meant for someone else lol
🖖
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.
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.
Honestly I never had a problem with JIRA.
Over all the project management tools I've used in my decade of work, Atlassian's suite was the most organized for my needs.
The most annoying part is reporting, which I hear a lot of complaints about. But that's not my job, and the reports I need are easy to export the data and build a custom UI to organize it.
We actually moved from JIRA to Azure DevOps. Part of it was that Atlassian dropped the server version of JIRA and we weren't too keen on moving to the crappier cloud version.
I'd say it's different. Some things JIRA does better, some things Azure DevOps does better. You eliminate some pain points, and end up with some new ones.
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)
As a former LabVIEW instructor, I was so glad to get out of that nightmare platform.
Measurement Studio didnt seem too bad.
National Instruments
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
I wanted to like JIRA instance I had for a project. It was just so backwards, decided not to use it.
Hey now, I've got great job security due to being one of the LabVIEW experts at my company. Never change, NI
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
SAP Suuuuucks
I agree
I take special pleasure in pronouncing it "Sap". It drives the sappy admins and devs nuts, but IDGAF. You want me to call it S.A.P.? Then get it to fucking work as it should. You dumb fucka are sure making enough for it to.
I have never seen it work properly. I have had so many people tell me that one part or another is randomly not working.
I've been in the industry some time but here are some of my most hated software I've been forced to use:
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.
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.
Lotus Notes
Plot twist... my new employer uses it even more 🤦🏻♂️
I won't accept the job if lotus notes is required.
I had this back in 2014 for a couple of years then again in 2017, it was a horror. :-/
Very niche. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CityTime_payroll_scandal
NYC GOP Mayor Mike Bloomberg's daughter gifted the City a $65 million boondoggle called 'City Time.' Theoretically, every employee was supposed to scan in with a biometric signature. The software didn't account for things like off site work, shift changes, a 24 hour schedule, etc etc. It would have been simpler just to keep the old paper system and imput everything.
SAP and nearly every accounting package. And I didn't have to use them daily, I just had to support them. Ugh.
As an accountant who has to use SAP every day at my current job, fuck everything about SAP and whoever came up with this steaming pile of absolute dogshit needs to be put in front of a firing squad.
What gets me is the price you pay in order to get the abuse of a product that never quite works well enough to be "finished", and then you get to pay consultants for years to overcome it's shortfalls. This is a classic C-suite boondoggle that nobody can get around to admitting was a complete waste of money and it's so expensive that nobody can survive flushing the sunk cost of by getting out. And then it's intertwined in the ERP of so many supply chains that you can't not use it because every company above and below uses it (and hates it) so you have to implement it for the B2B interoperability.
It's a horrendous chain of inevitability, and IBM is laughing all the way to the bank.
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.
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.
Ross Overdrive is hell on wheels
For fun, go get them security-audited. It'll be a gong show.
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.
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).
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.
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
We had one application we used (that got retired two years ago) where Control-C had been mapped to bring up a calendar.
There was no need for a calendar in the application. It didn't enable other features or anything that I could tell.
But the software was also woefully out-of-date. They'd decided not to pay for the updated version.
Pro tip Ctrl -insert does the same as ctrl-c Shift -insert to paste
Good to know, but thankfully I no longer use that software.
In-house "temporary" assembly line monitor written in Object Pascal around 2006, mostly unchanged since, too badly written to be used effectively, but too mission-critical to risk downtime with a potential fix/replacement.
The Foreman/Red Hat Satellite. Many people wont know what it is, but it's the worst, bugiest, slowest piece of garbage I've ever touched.
Also Windows... I'm a Linux sysadmin but my work computer "needs" to use Windows and I've never disliked it as much as when I've been forced to work with it. Why is the virtual desktop experience so trash???
Maybe a bit niche, but the Scanco software for computed tomography analysis. Cant remember what 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
Thinking about this hurts me.
I thought maybe I was misremembering the numlock thing so I looked it up and found a mention in someone’s user manual! See top of page 8here
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.
Mac OS and R
Second Mac OS, what the literal fuck! Brain damaged window management, inferior software update management and a bastard of a *NIX environment.
Recently started using OSX and wow, so much better than windows 11. I'm a Linux user at home so it's nice to have a proper shell and none of the crashy bugs and glitches windows has. The UI is so much better.
Not a job, but I was happy to stop using Blackboard when I left community college lmao.
Microsoft dynamics AX.
I raise you Microsoft Dynamics SL
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.
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.