Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?

#581

Post by zmmmmm » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 10:18 PM UTC

ivalm wrote: post #476

pachico wrote: post #316

Jira is my daily nightmare. I guess the "no CTO was ever fired for choosing SAP" applies to Jira too. It just does the opposite of that it tries to do, which is making development tracking easy (not to mention those silly ideas coming from agile coaches to use Jira to measure wrong things, which makes of it a horrible combo).

So what is like Jira but good? I use jira at work and I like it. But our use case is maybe more limited/liberal. For us it is: 1) list tasks to do and how tasks are linked 2) archive discussion about issues and integrates with butbucket (so in commit it will link to ticket to read about why something was done; similarly from issue discussion I can see the relevant commits; this also goes well with history either by l…

You'd probably do great with Gitlab then. It lacks some features of JIRA but the ones it lacks are mostly what you don't use. But it's interface and simplicity is a joy compared to JIRA. Literally everything is keyboard driven via markdown and built in actions in text. The API is simple and crazy powerful.

NB: Not associated with Gitlab the company in any way.

Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?

#582

Post by protomyth » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 10:18 PM UTC

klancaster wrote: post #474

busyant wrote: post #404

Sorry, but everything listed here is rank amateur stuff when compared to Blackboard Learn ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackboard_Learn ). First, the user interface is designed as if the programmers were incentivized to maximize the number of clicks required to get anywhere. Second, it has the responsiveness of continental drift. Third, editing and formatting text is an exercise in torture. When I want to delete t…

I just moved to a new university that uses Canvas, and while it is not perfect, it actually does not cause physical pain when entering data.

We use Moodle since we can not afford the privilege of paying a lot of money for such a crappy experience. I notice a lot of other schools went with Canvas for the same reason.

Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?

#583

Post by tqwhite » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 10:19 PM UTC

Oh yeh!! Also, Trac.

There is literally nothing good about that issue management program except that it is free. It is impossible to understand what you are looking at. It is just awful.

Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?

#584

Post by Ozzie_osman » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 10:20 PM UTC

lloydatkinson wrote: post #370

Anything Atlasssian. Jira, Bitbucket, confluence. Just frustrating to use, poor UX, and slow. Business types love them however. AWS. It’s UI is honestly baffling, it feels and looks like someone made it in a rush with jQuery and Bootstrap years ago. It’s login and identity and resource management is confusing, and apparently you need a chrome extension which adds a bunch of complicated options I don’t really understa…

Agree 100% with everything except for Linux and Git.

Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?

#585

Post by jimnotgym » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 10:20 PM UTC

Someone1234 wrote: post #35

Microsoft Teams. I am forced to use it (work) and it is missing really basic features that messenger software had in the 1990s like Push-To-Talk, real multi-window (even with the recent "pop-out" functionality), and its UI is all the worst modern trends. You cannot extend it or fix these issues (e.g. plugins, custom CSS styles, etc). Plus it is buggy, I keep not getting calls/messages/etc, and every time my computer…

I am going to go against the grain and say I rather like Teams. Video calls work really well. Voice calls are clear. Screen sharing occasionally doesn't work as some have noticed, but restarting the call seems to fix it. It is so much better than Webex though. I think it is still suffering from the teething troubles of trying to bring so many things under one umbrella, Sharepoint (which already had groups), Skype for business, Onedrive and chat. This has created some quirks which will need ironing out.

The killer feature really is that it is a dream to deploy for admins who already had AD. I pushed it by group policy and sent an email telling people to log in with their existing Office credentials. I can't remember what I did with macs, I think I may have just told users to grab it from the appstore.

Think of all the admins faced with having to move their whole company to home working with no notice for Covid-19, you can see why Teams is an app that has found it's moment. Teams has been the saviour of many companies during the crisis. I'm sorry but minor UI niggles (which I personally don't find problematic) just pale into insignificance.

Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?

#586

Post by nabogh » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 10:20 PM UTC

I work as a control systems engineer and ClearSCADA is my biggest pain point.

Crashes all the time on both the front and back end. Bloated mess of user displays that you have to drag and drop elements on by hand. Oh and let's not forget that I'm usually interacting over a slow RDP connection.

Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?

#587

Post by michaelt » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 10:22 PM UTC

jamil7 wrote: post #407

lloydatkinson wrote: post #370

Anything Atlasssian. Jira, Bitbucket, confluence. Just frustrating to use, poor UX, and slow. Business types love them however. AWS. It’s UI is honestly baffling, it feels and looks like someone made it in a rush with jQuery and Bootstrap years ago. It’s login and identity and resource management is confusing, and apparently you need a chrome extension which adds a bunch of complicated options I don’t really understa…

Don’t agree with you about git at all, I find it’s one of the few tools I work with that behaves expectedly and gets out of my way, if you want that workflow of stash, pull and reapply a stash why not make an alias for it?

If you want to change from a git-lover to a git-hater, just join a project that uses submodules.

Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?

#588

Post by goatinaboat » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 10:24 PM UTC

BusterStatus wrote: post #547

lloydatkinson wrote: post #370

Anything Atlasssian. Jira, Bitbucket, confluence. Just frustrating to use, poor UX, and slow. Business types love them however. AWS. It’s UI is honestly baffling, it feels and looks like someone made it in a rush with jQuery and Bootstrap years ago. It’s login and identity and resource management is confusing, and apparently you need a chrome extension which adds a bunch of complicated options I don’t really understa…

Atlassian does not seem to have an interest in listening to their users. My workflow would be so much better if they implemented browser or desktop notifications, but they only support email or extensions/add-ons if you self-host. Our company uses cloud though, so despite all the countless threads asking for native functionality, they insist it is not important for users.

Atlassian does not seem to have an interest in listening to their users.

But they do. Their users are project managers. The genius of Atlassian is how they’ve managed to convince so many programmers that it’s for them. It never was!

Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?

#589

Post by cs702 » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 10:24 PM UTC

The software that powers almost every appliance or device on the "Internet of Things" that I've ever used.

The manufacturers of those appliances and devices really do NOT know how to develop usable, secure software.

See https://twitter.com/internetofshit?lang=en for egregious examples.

Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?

#590

Post by MapleWalnut » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 10:24 PM UTC

SurgeonCoder wrote: post #469

Trakcare [0] electronic medical record system. As far as I can tell this is a demo EMS from Intersystems, they provide Cache [1] to companies developing real EMS with modern user interfaces. They don't sell this product in the USA (so not to upset their customers), but have dumped it on the rest of the English speaking world. I suspect here is some sort of NDA with those unfortunate Hospitals taking this pile of stin…

Intersystems purchased Trakcare, which was developed by an Australian company. They'd love to sell it in the US, but Epic is Intersystems largest customer and they have an agreement to not compete in the US.

Cache is the most archaic and least usable programming environment I've ever experienced. Unit tests are not a thing. MUMPS, which underlies the whole system, is stringly typed. The entire stack is junk, so it's no surprise that Trackcare is either.