I’ve worked with some pretty rotten software, but management software is easily the most user unfriendly, so my vote goes to HPSM.
I didn’t leave the job, but I had my resignation letter written over this:
My former boss had an absolute hard-on for “AI” and brought in this low-bid, fly-by-night “AI” software to automate all of our processes. I’m a fan of automation in general, but not this.
This “solution” was basically a glorified macro generator that would screen scrape data from our apps and key into our other apps. Not only it was built on the absolute shakiest platform imaginable, but the documentation from the vendor outright told you to setup remote desktop services in a way that was in violation of licensing in order for it to work. The stack it ran on made a Rube Goldberg machine look like sleek, fine engineering.
I repeatedly told him this was bad software, but he persisted to the point where we nearly went to production with it.
The worst part? The applications he was screen-scraping were all internally-developed. We had access to the backend, frontend, everything. Rather than writing proper processes, he threw that piece of garbage at it.
Luckily he retired before it went to production, and the new CTO shut it the fuck down.
So, I didn’t quit my job over it, but I was looking and had my resignation letter written.
You know, in a lot of situations, when someone says “the worst part”, it’s not actually the worst part.
When you use it, it really is the worst part, by far…
Ha, indeed. To elaborate on that part:
He made this demo he was so proud of. Watching it interactively, it was like 70 steps of “move mouse {X,Y}, click, copy, etc”. I could literally hear Yakkety Sax in my head as I watched it bumble through.
After that, I went back to my office and wrote a 30 line Python script that accomplished the same thing, only sanely. He preferred his method since “it’s easier for our non-technical folks to automate their stuff this way”.
That was the exact moment I started looking for a new job.
Non tech people should ALWAYS ask the support team when they need help automating IT stuff for precisely this reason.
Before I replace it with something that won’t catastrophically collapse when the wind blows the wrong way, I get some sort of sick satisfaction out of doing autopsies on the house-built-of-matchsticks “solutions” that users come up with and I don’t know why. Some of them are truly fascinating and make you wonder how someone could possibly arrive at that conclusion based on what they were actually try to achieve.
It’s also why if I’m asked to implement something, my first question isn’t “When does this need to be done?,” it’s “What exactly is the problem you’re trying to solve?”
What a user asks for and what they actually need very rarely intersect.
I wish I could hire you and a couple other people who replied to this lol. “Match stick architecture” is definitely something we have and I have been trying to shore up / replace for years.
Sorry, I missed this comment. I actually love doing that kind of shit, I get some sort of weird pleasure out of fixing chaotic stuff like that. That tends to be my role almost all the time; I’ll come in, stay a few years, fix everything and get bored, and then move on somewhere else to do it again.
My current job is the only place that I haven’t done that, because it’s probably the best company that I’ve ever worked for.
Ah yes, my last company bought into that crap. They called it RPA for Robotic Process Automation and they also used it to access internal apps that we had full control of.
It wouldn’t have been so bad if they just used it to enter data into third party websites which had no APIs or integrations.
At one point we updated the title of an HTML page and we had to revert the change because the RPA team said it would be a three week turnaround to fix their script.
I noped out of there not long after, it was yet another “project management driven” company where managers and project managers were repeatedly duped by vendors and outsourcing firms instead of hiring and retaining developers.
I hate Teams, give me Slack
IMO Teams beats all the others of video calling specifically. But everything else it does worse than its competition. The message boards and chat features are abysmal.
I beg to differ. I’m jumping over from a Zoom workplace to a Teams workplace, and Teams is trash. Worse video, worse audio, worse connectivity, fewer end user features, etc. The only thing that’s nice is how it archives meeting chats and recordings.
It’s only used because it’s basically free with enterprise office.
Teams beats all the others of video calling specifically.
That’s because it’s Skype. MS bought them and integrated it into Teams.
Early on, Teams was kinda doing it’s own thing and it wasn’t half bad. Then, Microsoft shut down Skype for Business (formerly Lync) and brought most of that team over with all of their baggage. Feature development for Teams went to absolute hell after that point.
Interesting, teams has the worst video call quality I’ve ever seen. Trying to pair program is painful, can’t move too fast or the other person will miss what you did since the screen share frame rate is like 5.
Same VPN connection on slack, no noticeable lag, high frame rate, and very crisp resolution.
FOSDEM 2021 was hosted on Matrix. After that exp no other meetsing app lives up to it. I just want seemless chat with presentation and seemless break out rooms again.
Did fosdem not go back to matrix in 22 and 23? Why not?
It was full remote that year is all
When our company annoucned the switch to Teams I actually offered to pay for the slack licence out of my own pocket instead. But the boss insisted we need the onedrive integration or some shit and declined.
Yeah that was BS. Boss was told to say anything other than “to save money”. That’s the entire value prop for Teams.
“it’s included in the licenses we already pay for”
I know, but the rollout playbook is to pump up the Office integrations, not showcase the cost savings. Because normal end users don’t care.
And then people don’t even use the office integrations, which are pretty much the only good thing Teams has. The integration of PowerPoint with meetings is actually pretty good, but the number of presentations I’ve sat through where someone just screen shared their PowerPoint window is absurd.
They can detect that too, so Microsoft “could” automate the better way.
Teams has absolute dogshit annotation. Literally takes years to start it and then you can’t move or change your screen as the presenter
I detest slack, teams is better (but that’s a low bar) lol
Now that is an unpopular opinion!
Yes! I’ve finally done it!
As a messenger, this is objectively wrong. There may be some less than obvious customization options in slack, but it is so much more robust for messaging.
I mean, threads alone put slack in a whole other league.
If you’re being serious, I’d really like to know what you dislike about slack. It’s been a minute since I used it as my daily driver, but I find myself quite frequently irritated about not having enough control.
Teams tries to do too much.
I had this same discussion at work. My employer is full office 365 and SharePoint for everything. Teams is a catch-all app that does a lot, but none of it well.
Fine but why can’t I ever find my chats back? There’s so many damn channels and they each have threads that make it even more difficult to find your way I see a channel in my unread area, then I open it, and if I click away, now I can’t find it anymore. Annoys me to no end. How do people deal with this? So many different chats, it’s insane.
There’s a bit of configuration for the channel list that you can do to keep what you want where you want. Sounds like you have a section set to only show unread, that’s a setting. Also, there are back and forward keys (and shortcuts for them too) to move between a series of chats like a browser.
I hate Slack, give me Mattermost or Rocket.Chat
Looked at all of these, chose Lark.
You must have a nice well maintained slack instance. We just migrated to it from teams and they’ve added me to 50 + channels some with thousands of people and the whole program churns. It doesn’t send timely notifications or sometimes none at all. If I leave any of the bogus channels I get automatically added back. Nobody wants to use it we all want teams back. The worst part is it only keeps DM history for two weeks our teams would keep history for years.
Adding people back to channels is definitely an admin choice. 2 weeks history is a plan limit, I think only the free tier has it.
You can mute channels / go @s only, create new channels for whatever needs you have. Hopefully you can find a way to make it more usable within the confines of your admins config. Also note, the config may not even be intentional, so it may be worth reaching out to IT
I’m slowly starting to live with it and it’s getting better the more channels I mute and group. The notification issue is still real though I’ve adjusted quite a few settings to get it working better. Including disabling mobile notifications and making slack use it’s own notification system and not the system integrated one for Windows. The automation opportunities that exist are exciting too but will take us a while to flesh out.
Cisco Webex.
You think teams or zoom are annoying? This is much worse. The worst part is with some default meeting settings, a loud chime would play every time someone joined. People kept this on for meetings of 300+ people, then they started talking over the beeps once “the popcorn slowed down.”
But have you tried Cisco Webex Teams? Or how we liked to call it “My first rails application.example.exe”.
Also the default of not auto-muting everyone, then spending 25 minutes of the meeting asking people to mute when there was a button that would also mute everyone 🤦♂️
We don’t normally use it, but one of our clients demanded that we used that 🤢 to contact them.
On Linux, the desktop client of Webex still does not support the chat feature, so you’re forced to use Firefox or whatever browser to join meetings instead. The best part is that some Webex rep said they’d add this feature to the client back on 2023, and it’s now 2024 and it’s STILL NOT HERE.
Germany currently has a whole political scandal because out of it.
Nah. It turned out that one of the callers dialed in using a regular phone number and there classic wiretapping was used.
Still wouldn’t surprise me if it would’ve actually been the software.
Not actually true - it is right that this is by far the most likely vector - but it is not the only one. And tbf, I wouldn’t tell the media anything else if I were in the Bendlerblock right now. Because anything else would mean that a lot more people would be in deep shit.
We had issues with default settings and scalability 4 years ago. But honestly it’s been pretty flawless since then. Company with nearly 100k employees, maybe 10k regularly active.
Perhaps some people might be dealing with IT teams unable to admin it properly?
I’m pretty sure you can disable the bleeps and bloops people are complaining about - get a tool, then don’t spend any time to learn it and then suffer using it.
Nhygvvgjjjjhh
Due to really dumb requirements we had an app that used Python, Visual basic, C and C++, MATLAB, R and JavaScript. I’m not describing an application stack. This was a single binary. The amalgamation was so disturbing that it couldn’t even shut down once run, instead asking the operating system to please, please kill me.
Part of the installation procedure involves disabling all SSL certificate verification on company machines.
That sounds actually a bit impressive
It takes skill to fail this badly.
I mean, that sounds completely horrible, but it says something about the world of web, when it is not that different than any regular frontent/backend web stack. I.e. HTML + CSS + javascript + backend language + sql + random shit on top of it, all in the single project. And that’s even before talking about native apps for mobile.
But GitHub gives you a prettier rainbow when your repo has more languages!
What a bizarre monster. Do you know it’s history? Maybe devs changed a couple of times or something? It seems to be a pain to even understand it’s insides as a lead with that many languages.
Oh god, this post will hunt me down via nightmares …
Was it called BERTA?
Sounds like a regular PhD student project.
Didn’t leave the job over it, but SAP.
Shitty. Ass. Program.
That was one of two that came to mind(a long with Oracle’s Peoplesoft). I was an HR department of one, no training, no documentation, no one who knew how it should work for HR. I often cited it, along with Peoplesoft for the explosion of solutions HR has experienced in the last 15 years.
Slow Arduous Process
Send Another Purchase(order)
SAP is straight from hell.
I haven’t worked with SAP directly, but did infra support for a company that used it.
They were always having issues with it and the company they used for SAP support would routinely bill them obscene amounts even for simple tasks like updating file paths.
Scheiße aus Prinzip
Sanduhr Anzeige Programm
…
Yeah, fucking Business Objects was the bane of my existence. The worst situations were where the creator of the report used their shitty GUI joins instead of actually writing a SQL load script. It made troubleshooting that much more annoying.
Their GUI is so bad. You had to have lookup tables printed out with various codes to find anything instead of, you know, being able to search for them.
I’ve used a lot of software in my life and this one is by far the worst.
SharePoint
It’s funny how it does everything but nothing well.
FUCK sharepoint
Seriously, I currently work with SharePoint for internal documentation and I audibly grunt every time I’m editing or managing anything using that thing.
We moved from S drive to SharePoint and I honestly don’t know why
The reason is mainly money. SharePoint is cheap and a lot of companies already pay for it even if they don’t use it.
SharePoint is also useful because it integrates seamlessly with teams.
It should be noted that SharePoint is designed for documents and not files.
You should think twice if you are replacing a file share with a SharePoint site because sometimes it will work terribly. CAD files for example is a terrible idea to put on a SharePoint site.
Here where I work we just sync with the user PC, like OneDrive, and the user can’t tell the difference. For them it is just another folder in the Explorer. Some only access through Teams…
OneDrive and SharePoint are very similar in functionality. (In fact every personal OneDrive’s is a SharePoint site) But SharePoint is intended to share files and other information while OneDrive is intended to be personal (with some limited sharing functionality).
Working with other colleagues and having all their files distributed on multiple OneDrive’s is very inconvenient, while having a SharePoint is not.
The best that can be said of Sharepoint, is it could be worse, you could be using Notes.
I’m a camera operator. I work with different cameras on every movie set. The Sony cameras are known to have the worst menu system of all. It’s extremely dense, organized in a manner that makes no sense when on set (the frequently used options are buried in sub menus) and the navigation is painful with a crappy clicky roller. Even the sales rep for Sony openly apologized for the menus. This is unacceptable for a $52,000.00 camera. On the opposite side, there’s ARRI Alexa which has the simplest menu of all. Just a few pages of organized items with simple names. And a lot of common options accessible on the main screen.
Same but on the live side. Interestingly Sony has it down pat for their live cameras. The global standard for camera control is a Sony controller almost everyone supports them. Grass valley on the other hand hot garbage software, really good hardware.
Yes I do live as well the P1 menu is great and simple, but live cameras don’t need as much controls on the operators side as it’s mostly via CCU. The grassvalley are the worst, it’s kind of impressive how bad they are.
https://youtu.be/8AyVh1_vWYQ?feature=shared sonys new peice of shit
I only do sfx occasionally, so I’m never near a camera. But those menu simulators are actually really neat. I didn’t know vendors had that.
It’s really useful. Not everyone can have easy access to a $50K camera to play around before their first job with it.
I’ve been in the industry some time but here are some of my most hated software I’ve been forced to use:
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IBM Clearcase. Absolutely the worst dogshit source control system ever to exist. Complex, fragile, arcane. It was so network intensive it was impossible to work remotely with it. Even the company had to employ people and run servers at each site to mirror the repos to make it usable. The costs of running it must have been unbelievable. Aside from being slow, bluescreens were common due to the drivers it installed. Some defenders might claim “but it’s so powerful!” or “look how we can create fancy layered views” as if that excuses it for being terrible in the most basic ways. Fixing it must have been intractable because IBM Clearcase eventually produced a faster remote client that talked to a proxy of the view running on a server somewhere. More expense and complexity.
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IBM/Lotus Notes & Domino. Arcane, slow, unintuitive, frustrating. Originally a content management system with an email / calendar but over time unusable junk that had its own terminology and workflows completely divorced from any other email / calendar system in existence. Various iterations attempted to rework the front end to appear more user friendly but it was illusory - click button or two and you were confronted with dialogs that hadn’t changed in 30 years.
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Internet Explorer. I’ve worked in company after company that had some really awful in-house expenses system or clock-in/clock-out or some enterprise junk that NEEDED Internet Explorer and no other browser would do because it was so badly written that it couldn’t render properly on something else.
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HP/Microfocus ALM. Another over-engineered, arcane, unintuitive piece of enterprise software. This time for tracking bugs, features, testing etc. Complicated and slow, heavily dependent on Internet Explorer and other deprecated Microsoft tech.
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Trend antivirus. Almost every corporate antivirus is bad but this one has been the bane of my existence. I write code which does stuff like encryption and compression/decompression and this piece of shit would constantly trigger warnings and delete binaries I was trying to build and develop. When it wasn’t interfering with my work, it would just be constantly hogging CPU and slowing down disk activity.
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Enterprise software in general. This crap is sold like Kirby vacuum cleaners - a pushy salesman convinces a clueless CTO to buy junk that can seemingly do everything and a sign contract for $$$. And then this stuff is there FOREVER. Management will ignore complaints and the obvious shortcomings of the system because its paid for and the sunk cost fallacy kicks in.
I’m pretty sure all Enterprise software is sold through a kickback scheme. Otherwise I don’t know why these CTOs would be so dedicated to software that everyone is telling him sucks.
I’ve been involved in enterprise tech sales. The company that flies the CTOs out to a nice destination, take them golfing, and give the CTO an excuse to stay away from their family under the guise of “but my job needs this!”… That’s the company that wins usually.
I am attached to a lot of these engagements “just in case” the customer actually cares about the product and needs to know. I’d say 9/10 times I’m not even asked to speak. I’m happy when a prospective customer calls us on the sales bullshit and lets me get down to the meat of the product.
Your comment about Trend AV triggered a flashback. 😭 They rolled it out at my company and forced a mandatory full scan on all pcs at noon every day. Everyone just gave up and went to lunch for an hour or longer until the scan finished. The policy existed for a week and then the CTO got heat because everybody was so unproductive. They removed trend within the month.
As a Certified Lotus PROFESSIONAL, I take extreme issue with your characterization of Lotus Notes/Domino.
It’s a huge steaming pile of dog shit and you’re being WAY too easy on it. Why insurance companies and Coca Cola used it extensively is beyond me. But my God did they love it for some reason.
I got a CLP simply because I worked for a managed services vendor at the time and they signed a huge contract with Coca Cola and they needed a Domino admin to help out with a migration. I think it was 4.6 to 5.5 if I recall correctly. Yeah, long time ago. I went on to do a lot of Domino related projects. Lousy certification that probably made me more money than any of the others I have held over the years.
-
SAP
They were transitioning from Oracle SBMS which was bad enough already but SAP… that thing was a nightmare taking dedicated employees (which we didn’t have) to account for the additional time needed to enter and manage data
Fortunately I was able to get out before the full switch over; friends that still work there occasionally message to inform how horrible the place has become
SAP Suuuuucks
I agree
Windows.
I did an internship where my main system was Linux, but it was in a VM on one monitor with the windows host on another for using Windows apps.
I work in IT and my first few jobs were working with Windows doing Desktop Support. It was extremely boring and annoying. I’ve been a long time Linux user and broke into that side, professionally as soon as I could.
My last job had not one, but two programming languages they had created in house over the last couple of decades.
One of them was the primary development language for the whole corporation.
Fascinating.
I’m a minor programming language nerd. While I’d never recommend writing an in house language - I can see the appeal for me personally.
What were the languages like? OOP? FP? …Logic?
Why’d they build 2 languages?
This seems so wild to me - sorry if I’m prying.
Yeah it had an almost sane reason initially - it was an investment bank, so it was designed to model the relationships between types of assets for simulations. But over the years they just got into the habit of using it for everything. It was somewhat like python, but with c-like syntax.
The 2nd language was a haskell-style functional language (but without all the things that make Haskell cool) that was meant to be used for modelling and building internal APIs on all the data that was shared across departments. It was absolutely horrendous.
I did freelancing on a project with an custom language, which just compiled down to html/css/js - so nothing brand new. At first I thought it was neat. But as I peeled the onion back, I learned the origins of it was the CEO’s brother who left the company. Then I started to see all the other cracks with it, like it was still compiling down to IE9.
After two weeks, I gave them a ultimatum that I either finish the project in a popular language, or I’m out.
I was out.
ServiceNow. I can’t wait to say fuck that SaaS
I’m using servicenow. First time and it’s pretty bad. But I hear that it is actually worse than normal because they customized the hell out of it trying to make it match the previous solution.
You work where I work?! Lol
That thing has its quirks and annoyances, but there’s definitely worse systems out there…
Agreed.
I have sorta Stockholm syndrome with it now. I’m locked in so may as well enjoy it.
So say we all!
I’m a ServiceNow Technical consultant, the alternatives are all worse. Sorry if you got stuck with some shitty implementation. I’m working somewhere right now where the customer is migrating from ServiceNow to… ServiceNow. They’re dumping their old massively butchered implementation to an “out of the box” one. It’s so bad that I have no idea how to use their old system and I’ve been doing this for 10+ years
25 yr System Administer who has exited IT: Windows
Lotus Notes. I called it Bogus Notes. I do not miss it.
My first programming job out of college was in Lotus Notes. I spent most of my time trying to trick it into doing what I wanted, it was a constant cat-and-mouse game. Kinda fun if it wasn’t so miserable. Had to gtfo after a couple years.
My previous job finally got off of lotus notes in 2019.
My first text job was at a fortune 500 that used Lotus Notes. I think they transitioned off in 2014 or 2015.
What a weird software. They had some whole processes that happened in Notes that were like mini applications and databases.
You gotta respect those early adopters, the trendsetters, the pioneers.
I left a job when the previous notes admin left and they tried to get me to run that hot garbage with no training and no bump in pay.
Oh hell yes, that’s a piece of garbage.
Lotus Notes.
Hello, fellow ex-IBMer.
I worked in IBM for a bit before Notes and it was even worse. Everyone was given terminal software that connected to some mainframe to read email. The terminal didn’t even refresh so if you wanted to see if you had gotten email you had to refresh it manually. Fortunately I was only a contractor at the time so didn’t get much email although I did get one from an employee apologizing for cheating on me, and a followup saying the message was meant for someone else lol
🖖
My employer still uses it
No joke whenever I interview I ask them what browser they use and what email client. Once when they said Lotus Notes I knew I would be turning them down.
It just isn’t worth the agony.
