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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?

#243

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. I don't actually have too many complaints about the features, other than perhaps that the download management is intrusive and inconvenient, but it's SLOW. So SLOW. It's mind boggling how much CPU it uses and how much it stutters when merely typing.

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

#244
Slack: their web UI is ridiculously slow, and I hate how it creates this expectation that I’m online 24/7.

GitHub: we mainly use phabricator now at my day job (which I love love love), but I don’t really derive any joy from using this product anymore. I think great tools are also fun to use, perhaps controversially. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but I find GitHub sort of a drag for some reason.

NodeJS: I absolutely hate dealing with node_modules. My node-based docker images are huge, and that’s after a lot of hand-held optimizations.

Additionally, we definitely avoid a lot of defects from using TypeScript, but its compile time is awful for large projects. I also don’t particularly like the edges: often I’ll hit odd typing inconsistencies from undocumented limitations of TS.

After years of working in the JS ecosystem I sort of hate the complexity in general.

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

#245

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.

Same. We have it at my job (at a very large healthcare org) and I will do almost anything to avoid using it. It's so bad that there are people who avoid it entirely, preferring to use their own instance of some other tracker, who then have an assistant whose FULL TIME JOB is to copy stuff back and forth between the two.

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

#246

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…

We switched over recently too and it suffers from trying to be all things to all people.

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

#248
post #157

Mail.app on macOS. Some macOS apps are really great (Notes or Safari for example), but the average quality is poor. Mail, for example, is slow, search almost never works, etc.

I have used Mail.app and the default mail app on windows 10 a lot. Can you believe that the default windows mail app is even worse? Very basic features are still missing after many years...

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

#249

If websites count: YouTube. It's appalling how such a powerful company can keep so many things so bad for so long.

Use invidious instead. It's a frontend to youtube without the bullshit. Not all videos work (only the ones that allow embedding) but most do. I've got my browser to redirect all youtube.com URLs to invidious and all twitter URLs to nitter and it's made an enormous difference. Experiencing software that works for you and not against you is a remarkable feeling.

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

#250

Maven, since the dependency hell and that __every__ single project requires the same ugly boilerplate and yak shaving tasks, worsened if the infamous release plugin is used. Jira, because it's too slow and bloated from features you never use anyway. IntelliJ, because it freezes on every 6-7 autosuggestions, on projects of 50-80K LOCs.

Heh, one thing I love about Jira is all the UI redesigns. At some point I was using 3 Jiras for the same project - a public open source one, an internal company one, and another one shared with a customer. All 3 were different (but relatively recent) versions and all 3 had considerably different UI.

They really ought to fire all the PMs who justify their existence by moving menus around.

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