CISCO WebEx: the worst.
Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?
51–60 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?
#52Anything which requires me to use a Google captcha or hcaptcha. I generally don't get annoyed very easily but spotting fire hydrants and traffic lights just to login into a site to which you are a paying customer is plain nonsense.
I've actually decided to move my entire infrastructure from Digital ocean to AWS because of this captcha before login nonsense (thankfully DO reverted it just in time)
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?
#53`git`. I mean, its so popular that you get used to it eventually but the commands never make sense or map well to the mental model of what you're doing. And "getting used to it" is a seriously low bar for software IMHO.
Honest question: Which bits don't make sense?
For me it's the other way round, git clicked way faster than other systems.
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?
#54`git`. I mean, its so popular that you get used to it eventually but the commands never make sense or map well to the mental model of what you're doing. And "getting used to it" is a seriously low bar for software IMHO.
I agree git is not user friendly. But there are 2 solutions, that are pretty low friction
1. There are great cheatsheets online that you can just print out and keep on your desk.
2. Write a user friendly cli wrapper on top of git (i think there might already some projects out there)
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?
#55Slack
agreed - it's a massive cpu hog for a basic chat client... it excels primarily at turning my macbook into a toaster
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?
#56Jira. Its WYSIWYG editor is goddamn awful. Runner-up goes to its sibling product, Confluence, for the same reason.
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?
#57Without a doubt: Websphere.
I worked with WebSphere (version 5 maybe?) many, many years ago. The admin console was seemed like it was designed to increase confusion. Eventually a consultant I was working with tipped me off that there was a scripting interface, which came bundled with Python (Jython). This made administration so much easier once I got the hang of the APIs, since I could just automate/script things.
I have no idea if this is still possible with modern WS.
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?
#58`git`. I mean, its so popular that you get used to it eventually but the commands never make sense or map well to the mental model of what you're doing. And "getting used to it" is a seriously low bar for software IMHO.
Even though what you're saying is controversial I strongly agree with you. The number of time I had to Google things wrt is git is insane.
Unfortunately whenever somebody asks what could a better option there are generally no answers except keep at it and you'll get used to it.
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?
#59`git`. I mean, its so popular that you get used to it eventually but the commands never make sense or map well to the mental model of what you're doing. And "getting used to it" is a seriously low bar for software IMHO.
I have observed vastly different opinion of git among people for whom git was the first vs, and people who were using svn or cvs before. The former is mostly fond of git, and the latter highly critical, mostly I assume because the concepts don't map the same way.
While I myself think I am pretty familiar with git cli, I don't really use the cli anymore, since intellij covers all the features in a much more intuitive way. e.g staged edits, rebase.
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?
#60There's this software that one of my customers use called SAP Fieldglass. Fieldglass was a separate company and sold for $1B and it might be - and I'm not exaggerating - the worst software I've ever used, pretty much ever. But the reason is interesting. It's designed as enterprise compliance software and nobody enjoys using it. The enterprise managers hate it. The vendors hate it. The contractors hate it. The finance team hates it. I can't imagine anyone enjoyed writing it. The UI is unintuitive and self-discovery is practically impossible. It's so bad that companies have resorted to making Youtube videos on HOW to take repetitive actions inside the tool. The system is so anti-success that part of me wonders if this is done on purpose; to delay any kind of payments to vendors / etc.
The best part is it doesn't _do_ anything itself. It's just a workflow system for dispatching operations to different systems and teams. It will create an invoice in an existing finance tool. It will issue a ticket to create a physical badge, etc.
Anyway I think that's a massive opportunity, if that's what you're looking for.