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Ask HN: What's the most overengineered tool everyone uses but won't admit sucks?

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Re: Ask HN: What's the most overengineered tool everyone uses but won't admit sucks?

#21

Post by ivape »

fazlerocks wrote: post #3
mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #2

JIRA gets a lot of deserved hate but I think nearly all software work tracking systems suffer from the same issue: marketing over promises about velocity and predictions about project delivery timelines. Have we as an industry gotten any better at delivering projects on time? If you have a lot of dysfunction in your organization no software is going to fix that. Or to put it another way, you can’t solve people proble…

Right. We're optimizing for the wrong metrics. Hours spent arguing if something is a 3 or 5 story points could've been spent just building it. The obsession with predictability in an unpredictable process is the real problem, especially in copilot and cursor era. :D

It's used to justify jobs of scrum/pm people and I'm tired of being polite about it. Imagine we enter a tech company, decide it's LARPing time, and create DnD rules for a completely made up role and then pay someone to do it. That is literally what has been happening in the tech industry.

Re: Ask HN: What's the most overengineered tool everyone uses but won't admit sucks?

#22

Post by nis0s »

bigyabai wrote: post #4

MacOS

It's not what you'd expect for a linux machine but it just works and has a reliable ecosystem with iOS. The worst is trying to understand how it stores information, but again if you're expecting control like in a linux machine, prepare to be disappointed.

Re: Ask HN: What's the most overengineered tool everyone uses but won't admit sucks?

#23

Post by scarface_74 »

mattl wrote: post #18
scarface_74 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is naming an OS differently when it is actually a different OS with shared features?

What are the differences between OS X El Capitan and macOS Sierra?

You listed a bunch of OS’s for other hardware.

Re: Ask HN: What's the most overengineered tool everyone uses but won't admit sucks?

#24

Post by mattl »

scarface_74 wrote: post #23
mattl wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the differences between OS X El Capitan and macOS Sierra?

You listed a bunch of OS’s for other hardware.

iPads used to run iOS now they run on iPadOS.

It just feels so far from Steve Jobs 2x2 grid of products.

Re: Ask HN: What's the most overengineered tool everyone uses but won't admit sucks?

#25

Post by Someone »

mattl wrote: post #12
bigyabai wrote: post #4

MacOS

Related. Apple is turning into Sony with their naming of stuff. In my house I have Apple branded hardware running: Mac OS Mac OS X Server Mac OS X OS X macOS iOS iPad OS tvOS watchOS homeOS audioOS And now I’ll have the strange honor of having two Macs, one running Mac OS X Server 1.23 and one running macOS 26.

That’s spanning decades. The current lineup is highly consistent: macOS, iPadOS (I don’t think Apple uses a space here), tvOS, watchOS, audioOS all use product categoryOS.

homeOS doesn’t exist yet for the public, does it?

The only outlier is iOS, which should have been called phoneOS or iPhoneOS.

Re: Ask HN: What's the most overengineered tool everyone uses but won't admit sucks?

#26

Post by a_tartaruga »

abraxas wrote: post #7

Git. Most people have no need for 95 percent of its features and don't have a good mental model of how it works. Just copy and paste commands to get it to work, more or less.

I have to disagree with this strongly. Git is probably the perfect software. It is designed around a mental model that is exactly matched to its use case. Far from copy pasting experienced developers are often fluent in the git model and use it intentionally. I took a look at the man page out of curiosity given your 95 percent comment and I would agree that the majority of ancillary and log level commands are unused. But looking only at the main porcelain commands I would say I regularly use 80 percent of them.

Re: Ask HN: What's the most overengineered tool everyone uses but won't admit sucks?

#27

Post by rienbdj »

a_tartaruga wrote: post #26
abraxas wrote: post #7

Git. Most people have no need for 95 percent of its features and don't have a good mental model of how it works. Just copy and paste commands to get it to work, more or less.

I have to disagree with this strongly. Git is probably the perfect software. It is designed around a mental model that is exactly matched to its use case. Far from copy pasting experienced developers are often fluent in the git model and use it intentionally. I took a look at the man page out of curiosity given your 95 percent comment and I would agree that the majority of ancillary and log level commands are unused.…

The git model is great but the interface is not carefully designed.

I think if the interface were better, fewer people would be copy pasting git commands.

Re: Ask HN: What's the most overengineered tool everyone uses but won't admit sucks?

#30

Post by swah »

abraxas wrote: post #7

Git. Most people have no need for 95 percent of its features and don't have a good mental model of how it works. Just copy and paste commands to get it to work, more or less.

On the other hand, I don't feel punished for not using the complex stuff. Still miss (some parts of) Darcs, though... it was so "user first" compared to this.
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