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Ask HN: Programs that wasted you 100 hours?

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Re: Ask HN: Programs that wasted you 100 hours?

#31

Post by bflesch »

Crazyontap wrote: post #11

I apologize for saying this in advance but I'd have to say for me it's GIMP. Even after all its feature and popularity I find it extremely hard to use and often end up wasting hours trying to create a simple graphic. As a last resort I always end up booting Windows just to use Photoshop to do the same. I have been trying to move away from Windows to linux and so far I'm super happy with everything. But Photoshop is t…

There was recently a post on HN about a GIMP fork called glimpse which aims to improve UI/UX: https://github.com/glimpse-editor/Glimpse or project page at https://glimpse-editor.org/

Re: Ask HN: Programs that wasted you 100 hours?

#33

Post by hunter-gatherer »

lordnacho wrote: post #27

Excel. Mostly because it makes you think you can do anything, and you can. It's a rope to hang yourself with. While Excel is a great prototyping tool, it's really not great for production use. I've seen so many financial calculations attempted on Excel that ended up creating a huge ball of spaghetti, references going all over, VBA code mixed in with DLLs, VLOOKUPS all over, sometimes $A$1 sometimes A$1 (copying behav…

I'm with you. My org tries to do so many things with excel, despite that fact that is fails and breaks on us ever single day. What is worse, is that we use excel sheets and a shared folder to monitor projects, tasks, and even track casework. I hate it so much.

Re: Ask HN: Programs that wasted you 100 hours?

#35

Post by athenot »

isoprophlex wrote: post #22

MS Sharepoint takes the cake. Impossible to navigate, hysterically difficult to use for storing and maintaining content repositories / wiki's. Also the outlook/skype/teams/lync universe of communication tools is laughably inconsistent, it's very difficult for me to do very simple tasks in these tools.

As someone about to (reluctantly) go down this rabbit hole, I'm not feeling reassured. ;(

Re: Ask HN: Programs that wasted you 100 hours?

#36

Post by mr_overalls »

yread wrote: post #21
jtdev wrote: post #3

Every program in the Microsoft Office suite.

Compared to what?

Exactly. I love the spirit and motivation behind Office Libre, but Excel and Word just _work_ for most basic tasks and an amazing number of corner cases. Open-source products just don't even come close.

The only tools people don't complain about are the ones that no one uses.

Re: Ask HN: Programs that wasted you 100 hours?

#37

Post by bartread »

Microsoft Outlook, no question:

- It hangs all the time for a few seconds at a time,

- The search is moronic (how about you look on the server and on my computer at the same time instead of hanging for a while and then displaying that dumbass message offering the option to search on my computer instead when there's a problem with the connection?),

- Switching to the unread message view regularly results in a progress doofer that never disappears until you switch to a different view and switch back

- The message list font size gets corrupted by moving between Windows of different DPIs forcing you to switch to a different folder then switch back again to make everything readable

- It asks you whether you want to save changes just because you've clicked a link in a calendar appointment

- Got thousands of emails? It's slow, slow, SLOW, SLOW(!!!), SLOOOOOOOOOOW!!!!!

- Too many modal dialogs

- It's clunky as hell when juggling calendar appointments, booking rooms, etc.

- When opening a meeting series it asks me whether I want to open the whole series or a single meeting every single time. Can I just have a modifier key for this, please, so that I can open whichever way I choose without being prompted?

- Inconsistent and unpredictable behaviour when it comes to inserting images as attachments versus inline in an email

- Losing messages in conversation view

- Difficult to follow conversations/find all messages if you don't use conversation view(!)

- Inconsistent behaviour around contact auto-completion: sometimes people end up in the auto-complete list, sometimes they don't

I could go on. I won't.

Re: Ask HN: Programs that wasted you 100 hours?

#38

Post by pjc50 »

Factorio?

More seriously, the absolute worst developer experience I've ever had was a weird proprietary environment called "OpenAT" for a mobile module system. Admittely we were in the beta programme because we needed features, but every new firmware update would fix some features of the operating system and break others. At one point while trying to debug terrible sound we noticed that the volume control wasn't at all linear but a sawtooth: the top few bits were getting lost somewhere. Development required Eclipse, and the reboot-download-reboot cycle took several minutes. No real JTAG, only debug logging over USB. Crashes would, however, lose the log buffer, so you couldn't be quite sure where the program crashed, and all the important bits were real-time so couldn't be single-stepped. Debugging all that was extremely slow.

A hundred hours is only just under three work weeks. It's very easy to get led into a dead end that wastes that much development effort on a feature that turns out to be infeasible or a bad idea, or an intractable bug. I think I've had one of those incidents at every job, not necessarily every year but frequent enough that they're not all memorable.

Re: Ask HN: Programs that wasted you 100 hours?

#39

Post by lordnacho »

hunter-gatherer wrote: post #33
lordnacho wrote: post #27

Excel. Mostly because it makes you think you can do anything, and you can. It's a rope to hang yourself with. While Excel is a great prototyping tool, it's really not great for production use. I've seen so many financial calculations attempted on Excel that ended up creating a huge ball of spaghetti, references going all over, VBA code mixed in with DLLs, VLOOKUPS all over, sometimes $A$1 sometimes A$1 (copying behav…

I'm with you. My org tries to do so many things with excel, despite that fact that is fails and breaks on us ever single day. What is worse, is that we use excel sheets and a shared folder to monitor projects, tasks, and even track casework. I hate it so much.

Yeah don't get me started on versioning, lol.

bondspricing_final_2_withswaptions_final_final5.xls. In a folder with 25 similarly named files. Good luck tracing the diffs.

But I guess that's not specifically Excel that causes this, it's people not understanding versioning.

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