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

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

#951

Post by jbeam »

retromario wrote: post #555
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…

My biggest annoyance with Teams is its shitty search functionality. You search for a topic you discussed with a colleagues a few weeks ago. It'll show you the direct hits, but there's zero way to jump to that point of the conversation and see the context, the message before or after. It's so infuriating.

I once had to scroll for 30 minutes to find a critical piece of information because of this. I could find the time stamp of a related message but needed the context. So I just had to scroll. And scroll. And scroll some more.

Mind boggling that continues to make it past UAT.

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

#952

Post by guu »

kfogel wrote: post #707

(Question for OP) Just curious: Were you inspired to ask this question by the recent CoRecursive Podcast interview with Jim Blandy ( https://corecursive.com/054-software-that-doesnt-suck/ ) in which he talks about how the motivation to design a CVS replacement come from the question "What's the worst software that you use every day?"

I was! Thanks for being a part of creating Subversion.

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

#953

Post by JeffDClark »

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…

Piling on the Blackboard is horrible train, my kids school system uses Blackboard, Fairfax County, VA, FCPS. Its true awfulness was on full display when the school system tried to switch to FT remote schooling back in the Spring. Parents, students, and teachers all clamored to not use Blackboard. Administration did not listen. It did not go well. From the time schools shut down until the end of the school year it was essentially no school. The Director of IT for the FCPS took the fall, but Blackboard was at root the problem. Blackboard tried to shunt all blame onto FCPS. I suppose in a sense FCPS was at fault, in that they bought the steaming pile of crap in the first place.

https://wjla.com/news/local/technical-issues-latest-on-virtu... https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/fairfax-schoo... https://www.tysonsreporter.com/2020/04/21/fcps-dropping-blac...

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

#954

Post by mcswell »

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?

git mv foo.bar /

It loses all history of foo.bar. I guess if you pull up a version before the mv, you can still see it, but as far as git is concerned, foo.bar in the new location has no relationship to foo.bar in the old location.

Many people have complained about this over the years, but it's still that way. Because (they say) Linus likes it that way.

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

#955

Post by etaioinshrdlu »

etaioinshrdlu wrote: post #535
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…

Interesting perspective about AWS. I like it. It is boring and functional. It’s not pretty but it doesn’t need to be. If anything I wish they would just change it even less than they do. It does have its buggy areas though, which could be a lot better.

Another thought, I think I like it for the same reasons many here like Windows 2000...

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

#956

Post by mcswell »

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Adobe Acrobat here; maybe techies view/edit their pdfs in ed.

I have to admit that I don't use it every day--I have PDF-XChange Editor on my home computer (and a couple other PDF viewers), but when I do have to use it, I hate it. The UI has gone through lots of changes in the past few years, and each time it's worse. Most everything is icon-based--tsort of like Microsoft's Ribbon, except these icons are randomly displayed above, or to one side of, the doc you're working with, leaving little room for that doc to be displayed. You can get a menu, but its primary use seems to be to bring up rows or columns of icons. And the icons are both large and ugly (and often indecipherable).

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

#957

Post by AtomicOrbital »

AWS console set of web pages ... granted any big shop most certainly automates all their commands so rarely if ever needs to use that site ... evidently AWS console is a victim of its own success in continuing to have a 1990's look and feel ... yet being such a cash cow AWS should launch an entire re-write ... the underlying SDK and cli are great and they deserve a better UI

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

#959

Post by txbuck »

Fiserv's Signature UI (their Desktop Teller is also trash but not near as bad). I don't even know where to start with how bad it is, but I'd need a BAC of at least .1 to get through it all. I've seen high school Comp Sci assignments designed and implemented with more finesse.

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

#960

Post by jodrellblank »

dukeofharen wrote: post #862
superasn wrote: post #52

Anything which requires me to use a Google captcha or hcaptcha. I generally don't get annoyed very easily but spotting fire hydrants and traffic lights just to login into a site to which you are a paying customer is plain nonsense. I've actually decided to move my entire infrastructure from Digital ocean to AWS because of this captcha before login nonsense (thankfully DO reverted it just in time)

This is so true. And the bonus is, it works terribly on Firefox, to the point that when I am forced to use it, I just skip the site altogether.

Ebay's side project Gumtree throws up captchas if you so much as open two links in new tabs, for "moving through the site at superhuman speed".
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