Ask HN: What's the most overengineered tool everyone uses but won't admit sucks?

#1

Post by fazlerocks » Thu, Jun 05, 2025, 2:05 AM UTC

Looking to build something open source and trying to figure out what tools everyone pretends to love but actually hate.

I'll start. Jira. We all use it, we all hate it, nobody admits how much time we waste updating tickets.

Did you move it to the right column? Story points aren't filled out. Link it to the epic.

Meanwhile the actual work takes 2 hours, documenting it takes another hour.

Half the team ignores it, the other half are obsessed with workflows that have 47 different statuses. But try suggesting GitHub issues and suddenly "how will we track velocity??"

What tool is supposed to make you productive but just creates busywork?

Re: Ask HN: What's the most overengineered tool everyone uses but won't admit sucks?

#2

Post by mattbrewsbytes » Thu, Jun 05, 2025, 2:10 AM UTC

JIRA gets a lot of deserved hate but I think nearly all software work tracking systems suffer from the same issue: marketing over promises about velocity and predictions about project delivery timelines.

Have we as an industry gotten any better at delivering projects on time? If you have a lot of dysfunction in your organization no software is going to fix that. Or to put it another way, you can’t solve people problems with software.

Re: Ask HN: What's the most overengineered tool everyone uses but won't admit sucks?

#3

Post by fazlerocks » Thu, Jun 05, 2025, 2:13 AM UTC

mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #2

JIRA gets a lot of deserved hate but I think nearly all software work tracking systems suffer from the same issue: marketing over promises about velocity and predictions about project delivery timelines. Have we as an industry gotten any better at delivering projects on time? If you have a lot of dysfunction in your organization no software is going to fix that. Or to put it another way, you can’t solve people proble…

Right. We're optimizing for the wrong metrics. Hours spent arguing if something is a 3 or 5 story points could've been spent just building it.

The obsession with predictability in an unpredictable process is the real problem, especially in copilot and cursor era. :D

Re: Ask HN: What's the most overengineered tool everyone uses but won't admit sucks?

#4

Post by bigyabai » Thu, Jun 05, 2025, 2:23 AM UTC

MacOS

Re: Ask HN: What's the most overengineered tool everyone uses but won't admit sucks?

#5

Post by fazlerocks » Thu, Jun 05, 2025, 2:23 AM UTC

bigyabai wrote: post #4

MacOS

[flagged]

Re: Ask HN: What's the most overengineered tool everyone uses but won't admit sucks?

#6

Post by wsc981 » Thu, Jun 05, 2025, 2:28 AM UTC

Maybe I am the odd one out, but I don’t hate JIRA. From my POV it works pretty well. I would agree Github Issues would be nicer though.

By the way in last few companies I worked at I’ve been using Azure DevOps and that feels over engineered to me. I think much stuff could be done with Github Actions instead.

At times I looked at AWS services, but also seems quite complex and I find the website navigation horrible - at least last time I tried.

Re: Ask HN: What's the most overengineered tool everyone uses but won't admit sucks?

#7

Post by abraxas » Thu, Jun 05, 2025, 2:33 AM UTC

Git. Most people have no need for 95 percent of its features and don't have a good mental model of how it works. Just copy and paste commands to get it to work, more or less.

Re: Ask HN: What's the most overengineered tool everyone uses but won't admit sucks?

#8

Post by drekipus » Thu, Jun 05, 2025, 3:05 AM UTC

bigyabai wrote: post #4

MacOS

Big one, but I've had a few people who admit that it's shit.

It's shit but it's just enough to get the job done/get out of your way, As long as you play by its rules

Re: Ask HN: What's the most overengineered tool everyone uses but won't admit sucks?

#9

Post by duttish » Thu, Jun 05, 2025, 3:15 AM UTC

fazlerocks wrote: post #3

mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #2

JIRA gets a lot of deserved hate but I think nearly all software work tracking systems suffer from the same issue: marketing over promises about velocity and predictions about project delivery timelines. Have we as an industry gotten any better at delivering projects on time? If you have a lot of dysfunction in your organization no software is going to fix that. Or to put it another way, you can’t solve people proble…

Right. We're optimizing for the wrong metrics. Hours spent arguing if something is a 3 or 5 story points could've been spent just building it. The obsession with predictability in an unpredictable process is the real problem, especially in copilot and cursor era. :D

If people are arguing between 3 and 5 points just pick one and move on.

If people are arguing between 3 and 21 points there's a mismatch in understanding what the work entails.

Re: Ask HN: What's the most overengineered tool everyone uses but won't admit sucks?

#10

Post by esperent » Thu, Jun 05, 2025, 3:15 AM UTC

Next.js:

- so many rendering modes - SSG, SSR, ISR, streaming SSR, PPR, client and server components.

- de facto Vercel lock in: edge runtime, middleware, image optimization, ISR, and lots more are massively complex to set up or less performant off Vercel.

- fragmented ecosystem between app and page router.

- so much boilerplate with the app router: layout.js, loading.js, error.js, page.js

Not everything here is bad - in fact some parts are excellent. There's just so much of it, so many ways of doing any single thing and already so much legacy code in a system that's only a few years old, and it's growing in complexity with every release.