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Ask HN: What is the worst software that you have to use?

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Re: Ask HN: What is the worst software that you have to use?

#91
Pivotal Tracker.

First, it's slow and bloated. According to Firefox's dev tools, the main project's page takes 15 seconds to load, transferring 3.6MB of data in 62 HTTP requests. This is with a 2015 MacBook on a 150Mbit connection.

Second, it's a UI nightmare. The most common action for a story (expand details) is a 6x9px light-gray triangle with a 17x24px hitbox—not exactly the easiest target to click on. And Pivotal Labs must offer free LASIK to employees, because the default text size is absurdly small. On a non-retina screen, one is forced to use the "Projector" view. The UI offers few affordances, and many are misleading. eg: Each story's "Close" button doesn't modify the story in any way. It simply navigates back to the project overview page. The whole product is fraught with these sorts of issues.

It's telling that Pivotal Tracker is usually imposed upon dev teams. Few devs freely decide to use it; they're fine with a simple issue tracker. It's management and product teams that want the categorization, time estimates, and hierarchical organization of the borderline-chaos that is software development.

Re: Ask HN: What is the worst software that you have to use?

#92
post #52

My first place award goes to SAP, which I have to use for time entry. The procedure for entering vacation time is "Put in the hours and the code for PTO. Now hit enter. Yes, it'll all turn red and it'll display an error. Hit enter again. Everything else just autofilled." The procedure for changing an SAP password is to click New Password on the login screen[1]. No, not after logging in, if you accidentally did that y…

Fully agree on this. My dear old employer used to switch to SAP. I just needed it to file my working schedules. However, it took me thousands of clicks and shortcuts just to open up the window presenting the right form. Besides, I filed my hole schedules just once a monce, thus I always needed a windows VM and a tutorial all the time.

Re: Ask HN: What is the worst software that you have to use?

#94
post #52

My first place award goes to SAP, which I have to use for time entry. The procedure for entering vacation time is "Put in the hours and the code for PTO. Now hit enter. Yes, it'll all turn red and it'll display an error. Hit enter again. Everything else just autofilled." The procedure for changing an SAP password is to click New Password on the login screen[1]. No, not after logging in, if you accidentally did that y…

I'll have to say with SAP, it's really down to how it's implemented. I've seen AWFUL implementations of it (like the one you're describing) and I've seen amazing ones, generally the ones either done by SAP themselves or by their recommended partners are the best. Having said that, it's a gigantic beast so it's not surprising that there's a lot of broken implementations out there. Good SAP 'guys' aren't very common un…

Maybe you can clear up some confusion I have about SAP. All I know is that it is generally customized to the business. How extensive is that customization? Slapping on business logos? Checking boxes to match the logic to current business procedures? Writing custom code?

Edit: Geeze, it has its own wiki page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAP_implementation

Re: Ask HN: What is the worst software that you have to use?

#97

Asana. I don't want to open links I get by email, because I know it takes always forever to load all the js crap. I also like to use my arm chromebook, which is perfect for tasks, but Asana literally kills it performance wise. Fuck your all fancy javascript, I can make the same app using jquery and it will fly. Unfortunately people I need to use it with wouldn't use my app.

Yes, we use Asana and loading it up is just too painful. I wish they'd at least use service workers or something to keep it cached and ready to go.

Re: Ask HN: What is the worst software that you have to use?

#98

Facebook - not 'required' though Credit Union online banking and mobile app Siri - also not 'required' AWS Web Console

+1 for the AWS Web Console. Whenever I open it I stare in panic for a few seconds as I try to understand where the one thing I'm looking for is.

Re: Ask HN: What is the worst software that you have to use?

#100
* Jira / Confluence (started out well, and now it's became basically useless. WHY NOT ALLOW MARKDOWN BY DEFAULT for a start

* AnkiWeb (great that it exists, but worst interface EVER... >:/

* an enterprise Java based CMS (why why why why)

* OpenOffice (great that it exists, but that interface... >:/

* Hacker News comment formatting

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