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?

#141

Post by jjav » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 6:44 PM UTC

gmail, by so many orders of magnitude.. Email interface designed by people who seemingly have never tried to read email.

Threading is completely broken, filtering is broken, compose screen is unusable.

At previous companies I've had to use gmail but was able to use a sane email client via IMAP so it was almost ok (although still somewhat broken as gmail doesn't handle IMAP correctly). At current work they disable all access except via the unusable gmail web interface. So definitely gmail is the worst I have to put up with everyday.

jira would be a distant second, but no comparison.

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

#142

Post by tootie » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 6:45 PM UTC

westoque wrote: post #42

JIRA. The most complex simple system I used. Simple in theory (Project Management) but complex in implementation.

JIRA is heavyweight, but I've never been remotely satisfied with any of the competitors. If your team is more than 5 people or you have multiple teams, you're absolute going to need all that sophistication from JIRA. If you ask me what's the worst piece of software I use every day today, it's Asana.

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

#143

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 6:45 PM UTC

[deleted]

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

#144

Post by akshaydeshraj » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 6:46 PM UTC

Slack. Hands down.

No issues with the actual product per se, which is quite nice. But the experience while using Slack goes bad exponentially as the team scales if certain usage guidelines are not put in place.

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

#145

Post by mellow2020 » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 6:46 PM UTC

ypcx wrote: post #133

ConsoleZ on Windows that I use with Cygwin, being on one hand the best terminal app for Windows, on the other there were things that were driving me insane. The main project seems to be sort of abandoned, so I eventually fixed them myself[1]. [1] https://github.com/youurayy/console/releases/tag/1.19.0-pers...

Do you know ConEmu? It has pretty extensive configuration and is under active development. Though I am not that much of a console user so I wouldn't know the pitfalls, if any, I just love it because it's so configurable, and it's been very good to me.

https://conemu.github.io/

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

#146

Post by axegon_ » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 6:46 PM UTC

* Jira - over-engineered, unnecessarily complex and utterly slow.

* Zoom - worst video conference product __EVER__. Can't say a single good word about it.

* AWS admin console - same as jira, at least it's not slow.

* VPNs in general annoy me beyond reason too. At this point I use a raspberry pi to connect to the vpn and I use it as an SSH access server (and tunnel respectively).

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

#147

Post by stunt » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 6:46 PM UTC

Jira & Microsoft Teams

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

#148

Post by d_burfoot » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 6:47 PM UTC

The Apache big data suite (Hadoop/Spark/Yarn/Hive/HDFS/etc).

In several years of big data engineering work, I've believe I've seen only one application that couldn't be refactored into a simple multi-instance framework-free program. People use the big data frameworks as glorified distributed-job management tools, and the resulting systems are more fragile, more complex, more vulnerable to weird version compatibility errors, and less efficient.

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

#149

Post by olav » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 6:47 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…

+1 for MS Teams. I am forced to use it at work, too.

Terrible audio focus on a single speaker, it really forces you to speak like on these old CB radios where you had to say "over" every time you were done talking.

The single window UI follows the mobile-first trend but is awfully inefficient on my three monitor setup, even more so with screen sharing.

Plus, our admins lock the whole MS Office 365 down so that there are no APIs or third-party plugins allowed. Data in it is just trapped.

Such a waste of human potential.

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

#150

Post by daviddaviddavid » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 6:47 PM UTC

ServiceNow.

Perfect storm of abysmal design/UX used to represent a bloated and confusing underlying information architecture. It's possible that I'm using an poorly configured version/instance of the product, but good lord, I'll do anything I can to avoid using it at work.