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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?

#731
post #653

Anything Atlasssian. Jira, Bitbucket, confluence. Just frustrating to use, poor UX, and slow. Business types love them however. AWS. It’s UI is honestly baffling, it feels and looks like someone made it in a rush with jQuery and Bootstrap years ago. It’s login and identity and resource management is confusing, and apparently you need a chrome extension which adds a bunch of complicated options I don’t really understa…

The author asked for the worst software. However you listed Atlassian, which is really nice (Try alternatives like CA Rally which is horrible) Git, Linux which are gifts from god Docker, which helped containers become mainstream and enabled the nice infrastructure we can have today Facepalm, I sometimes forget such people exist

I don’t understand how someone can say “this is the worst software I use daily” and then you say “you are wrong.” Maybe you use worse software than them? Also, you seem to implicitly default to comparing each piece of software to others in it's class; you’re grading on a curve. The parent comment is saying “of all software, these are the worst”, and you are saying “but other PM/VC/OS software is worse” which is different.

For example, git is the best version control software; it is also a disaster of a UX.

Your appraisal of Docker is also too generous, I honestly can’t tell if it’s sarcasm

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

#732

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…

The worst thing about Teams is that for no reason they’ve decided to roll their own notifications framework on macOS that doesn’t respect Do Not Disturb settings. That’s the absolute minimum a notifications system should do: stop appearing when told to.

And sometimes the notification window is just a white box until you click on it.

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

#733
macOS has an extremely weird UI to me.

* Why does the maximize button fullscreen by default?

* Why can’t I simply drag windows to the side to split half and half? No, I don’t want to switch to fullscreen mode to do this.

* What is the point of the minimize button and why do things minimize to a special area on the right side of the dock?

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

#734

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…

I've been using Teams at college for over a year now and at work for a couple months. It baffles me that there are simple, obvious bugs that have remained all that time.

For instance, on the Windows desktop app, the word "I've" gets marked as incorrectly spelled. When you click on it to see the spelling suggestions, it suggests "I've". Clicking on the suggestion does nothing and it continues to flag it. This has been an issue in the app for over a year and I refuse to believe that the developers are unaware of it. It's a very common word to be typing.

Another problem is sending files or images. You have to wait for it to finish uploading before it will let you send the message. Not only is it pretty slow (I would estimate 1MB/s, whereas Discord uploads at my full 12MB/s), but sometimes it won't let you send for a couple seconds even after it finishes uploading.

A couple months ago Teams added read receipts, which is really nice, but they don't always work. My work has them globally enabled and everyone is on the latest client, yet each person only sees them for certain other people. I don't see them for anyone, but my coworker sees them for about 50% of our staff.

Notifications are also buggy. Teams will just randomly decide to not give you notifications for messages or calls. I've missed multiple messages in Teams for days because it never alerted me. I had to actually open the specific chat with that person before I saw the message. I've gotten into the habit of checking Teams every 15 minutes because of this. Teams for Android also seems to send notifications a good 30 seconds before the desktop app does, so I usually keep my phone on my desk solely for Teams notifications.

I would also like to point out that Microsoft built a general-purpose notification system into Windows, yet Teams uses a completely custom notification system. This completely baffles me as they aren't even following their own company's best practices.

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

#735

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 use Skype internally but some people have started to use Microsoft Teams. At the risk of sounding like an old curmudgeon, these Microsoft Teams meetings never seem to have a dial-in number (my laptop microphone is horrible). If I try to use my computer's microphone to speak, it asks for camera permission at the same time. I don't want everyone to see me in briefs, just listen to my voice. So it's apparently either…

We have users on remote desktop machines but the microphone/sound doesn't pass through. IT's "solution" was to install the app on your phone and use that for talking and your computer for viewing. Yay.

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

#736

Anything Atlasssian. Jira, Bitbucket, confluence. Just frustrating to use, poor UX, and slow. Business types love them however. AWS. It’s UI is honestly baffling, it feels and looks like someone made it in a rush with jQuery and Bootstrap years ago. It’s login and identity and resource management is confusing, and apparently you need a chrome extension which adds a bunch of complicated options I don’t really understa…

What’s wrong with Confluence? We have a recently-acquired team at work that uses it for everything, and loves it. I’ve used it a bit, and I think it looks awesome, and the pricing is super reasonable. Confluence looks better than everything else I’ve tried/used as a doc platform: Notion, Nuclino, Coda, Sharepoint, OneNote, Azure DevOps wiki, Microsoft Teams wiki...

the one confluence thing that gets me is that when editing, it intercepts the command + 1 keypresses when im trying to switch tabs.

instead, it just makes my current line h1.

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

#737

OSX/MacOS This should be popular It seems so aimed at the consumer market, with everything set up to help with integrating with Apple services. But what about the enterprise features? It is very common for companies to be running Active Directory networks, why do macs work so hard not to fit in? Why not have some kind of AD support for mapping print queues, network drives that kind of thing? Maybe respecting password…

Sound like your problems are actually caused by Active Directory being shit and intentionally trying to lock out non-microsoft operating systems. Let this be a lesson to any future administrators. If you have Mac and Linux users, NEVER chose AD.

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

#738

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…

Sometimes I get signed out, because of VPN/WiFi issues.

It'll have a little text prompt at the top with a Sign In link.

But if I join a meeting, and I'm signed out, I just get a generic error message. It's like they didn't even code to check that I'm signed in when trying to join a meeting and advise me. Sometimes I have to restart the app after signing in to make the meeting link work again. Just feels janky.

I also had to mute it because on my budget work-provided laptop the Windows 10 notifications for every one line message take up a few inches of my screen which is pretty annoying when I'm working.

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

#739
for me it's phpmyadmin. I guess I should just find another tool that does the same, but I don't use it that much, just for quickly changing things around when building prototypes or just looking at things. I've been using it for over a decade and 10 years ago, I loved it. now I hate it. it's inexplicably slow when doing nothing at all, it uses frames for the sidebar so your list of tables goes out of sync constantly (presumably so it doesn't have to reload all dbs/tables on every request, but then why is it still so slow? it takes like 10 seconds to load sometimes when I'm not even doing anything with any data involved). every change they make to the interface makes it worse and more cumbersome to use. the default settings paginate your sidebar after like 40 tables or something ridiculously low. so you have to wait for the slow-ass frame based sidebar to load 3 times before the table you wanted to look at is even in your list. you can change it by modifying some php file somewhere, but it didn't use to have this problem.

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

#740

Anything Atlasssian. Jira, Bitbucket, confluence. Just frustrating to use, poor UX, and slow. Business types love them however. AWS. It’s UI is honestly baffling, it feels and looks like someone made it in a rush with jQuery and Bootstrap years ago. It’s login and identity and resource management is confusing, and apparently you need a chrome extension which adds a bunch of complicated options I don’t really understa…

The git safety net against accidental resets is at https://gist.github.com/chx/3a694c2a077451e3d446f85546bb9278
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