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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?

#51

Post by obombration »

At work, it's probably JIRA. Tons of UI noise, text markup isn't what I expect it to be and nobody around here can seem to agree on what features should be used for a particular scenario.

Past work, it would have been Identity Finder by a landslide. Awful UI, awful support, super intrusive, a total pain to administer, just bleh. Glad I was able to wash my hands of that.

Personal stuff, iTunes. I genuinely like the interface (at least on macOS) but it's huge and bloated and doesn't do some of the things I want it to. If they ripped out everything that wasn't related to listening to your personal (local) music library, I'd probably like it quite a bit. I wish it would write metadata to file tags rather than its own database, but I forgo that if it got rid of all the other crap.

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

#52

Post by lfowles »

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 you need to log out and try again. (Bonus: you can only tell it's a button after you hover over the innocuously placed text)

I'm not familiar with SAP at all so maybe this is just a failure of a specific implementation and the curse of customization, but it bothers me immensely.

Second place goes to the Jazz web interface for having page content reloads be distinct from page reloads. Oh you opened the work item again? It's still got the old version cached with the banner "The content of this page has changed, click here to refresh."

[1]: Something like this https://technews.blog.olemiss.edu/files/2012/12/SAP-Logon.pn...

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

#54

Post by Xcelerate »

MayaVi. So. Many. Bugs. And dependencies — pretty sure it never installs correctly without manually installing seventeen other packages (specific versions too). Even downloading the Enthought Canopy Suite isn't enough for it to work correctly on the first try. Also, strange rendering issues appear where the depth is out of order for density plots. And then as soon as a new version is released, the whole thing breaks and I have to "compatibility search" all the packages again.

Unfortunately, I can't find a good, scriptable alternative. I've heavily been considering writing my own 3D plotting library, because I honestly think it would be faster than installing MayaVi again.

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

#55

Post by corobo »

danpalmer wrote: post #41
corobo wrote: post #23

Basecamp 3. Projects list is a pain in the arse and the layout is weird. Emailing a client involves witchcraft and switching to some whole new client interface. Doesn't have time tracking, have to use yet another garbage app to do that. People keep using Campfire instead of Slack. Everyone gets a notification for everything by default. So much goddamn white space on this thing. MY BROWSER IS MASSIVE, USE IT. The time…

Basecamp is Omakase.

I can only assume (without Googling the answer) that's that Japanese thing where someone pokes another person in the backside with their two index fingers because that's what using Basecamp feels like.

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

#58

Post by mjolk »

jakebasile wrote: post #38

Slack. - It's slow on every platform I use (iOS, macOS). - I often don't get notifications at all, on either platform. - The Mac client crashes too often. - The Mac client uses more resources than it should. - Threads are useless. - Settings are split into too many different views. - I dislike the design. It's too spaced out (even with the "compact" setting). There's no dark mode. I don't like the icon. Everything is…

> so much so that even open source projects use it over IRC.

Remove the small amount of technical know how to "properly" use IRC and make chats (and permissions) persistent, and I imagine you'd end up with something that looks eerily like Slack.

That said, I think the Slack load-time in-browser is silly-long and I get spammed with notifications. As for threads, Zulip (https://github.com/zulip/zulip) does things "right" and I wish Slack would rip off their approach (central topic is the "room" and threads are independent, visually-separate-when-highlighted chats within a central topic).

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

#59

Post by nxc18 »

blaerk wrote: post #31

VMware vcenter, hey, let's make vcenter fresh and modern, let's make the management tool in freaking flash! This was even after the 'rise of' html5. It is by far the most painful tool I've ever used, it's so bad that you eventually start to miss the horrid Windows only client

Been there. It was the worst tech-related experience of my life. I think possibly worse than installing the Oracle db client on a RHEL server.

I now understand why the sysadmins in my life are so hardened/grumpy at times.

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