I’ve worked with some pretty rotten software, but management software is easily the most user unfriendly, so my vote goes to HPSM.
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.
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.”
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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.
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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.
We don’t normally use it, but one of our clients demanded that we used that 🤢 to contact them.
Germany currently has a whole political scandal because out of it.
I hate Teams, give me Slack
Edit: I left an optional team in teams, and still got a notification for a meeting that isn’t on my calendar, my meetings page, nor do I have access to in any other way.
IMO Teams beats all the others on 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.
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
I didn’t leave the job, but I had my resignation letter written over this since I would have had to maintain it:
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 and with the ability to handle errors. 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.
Didn’t leave the job over it, but SAP.
Shitty. Ass. Program.
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.
Slow Arduous Process
Send Another Purchase(order)
SAP is straight from hell.
Scheiße aus Prinzip
Sanduhr Anzeige Programm
…
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.
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.
Lotus Notes. I called it Bogus Notes. I do not miss it.
ServiceNow. I can’t wait to say fuck that SaaS
Jira. In the Software-as-a-Service world, it’s often the tool of choice by Product teams to track issues, by breaking everything down into stories.
It’s a horrible, slow, janky mess. The interface is confusing and poorly laid out, you can easily have too many options all over the place, and how its even used can vary dramatically from one company to another.
Salesforce is also trash for very similar reasons. How Sales people around the world all vouched for this thing is beyond me.
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.
Edit:
here’s the Sony Venice menu simulator
And here is the ARRI Alexa menu simulator.
The differences may not be apparent on the simulator but they become critical when on set with a time constraint.
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.
SharePoint
IT or user?
Yes.
Oh. Just noticed IT people seem to really hate it.
The people that wrote the admin UX for sharepoint have no business being employed.
Microsoft Windows. I used to be a sysadmin. New job is 100% Linux. Now I never touch Windows unless it’s to play a game.
Try steam on Linux. That shit just works now and I was able to fully ditch windows 6 months ago.
For most games. Tried Witcher 2 on Linux a few months ago, what an unstable mess.
Bummer, I was skeptical until I tried starfield and it just worked. Have been waiting 20 years to play AAA games at launch on Linux.
How ya feel can make it real.
Moodle.
Trying to turn it into an enterprise level LMS without paying any money was an interesting nightmare.
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Ansible.
TheForeman.
What utter trash.
Why ansible? It’s the best tool I know of for configuring systems when tyou can’t build a premade image. I’ve tried puppet and chef but really like not needing any agent on the target system despite the pain of YAML syntax.
Why ansible?
Because it’s trash. It’s sad. It’s a slow, unreliable mishmash of suck that I loathe to work with.
Not needing an agent?!? You write “caching shit so we can run our remediation in under a century and one pass” funny. I build new machines in 3-4 minutes with a full remediation and like 300 data points to check with the good tools. But it takes tower 3-4 min to net started before actually doing anything, and then another few minutes for ~30 datapoints. I do NOT want to see it with an actual payload.
The only thing going for Ansible is the network effect of “everybody using it” and especially not learning well enough about anything else.
I left a job over MacOS.
The management was bad. The product was bad. I would have left eventually anyway.
But the constant frustration of using a window manager that does not let you make keyboard shortcuts for most basic window operations, like cycling through windows on the current virtual desktop was too much. And MacOS really does not like you to have multiple monitors in different orientations. There were a whole bunch of other stupid things. I always felt like my computer was fighting me, not working for me.
But on the plus side, it did not have an Ethernet jack, it was really thin so the fans were tiny and made a huge racket, the keyboard sucked to type on, and keys would stop working if a piece of dust with any dimension larger the Plank length got under them.
As someone who is being pressured to move to macOS (M1) from Linux for work, I feel you. I was just having a conversation in another thread about trackpads and I feel that Apple really built the workflow around gestures, which leaves people who would rather use keybindings quite out of luck. I know there is rectangle, but it doesn’t even go close to what a good WM gives.
I use an external mouse and keyboard and I still hate it. Went from Windows and Linux (I’m fine with either and mostly just use Windows for gaming these days), to Mac for the first time in 20 years. They refuse to give us linux machines for those that want them.
While I prefer MacOS, I think your choice of OS is important and you should be given options at most jobs.
I’m a television technical director and Ross Overdrive is hell on wheels… it’s a video production system mostly used by local television stations to
consolodate“automate” their control rooms down to one person. There’s three major companies that build systems like this: Sony, GrassValley, and Ross. In my experience GrassValley’s Ignite is pretty good, it’s stable and gets the job done. Sony’s ELC is best, going above and beyond what I need it to do (plus their customer service and tech people are just awesome). Hands down, Ross Overdrive is a pile of garbage. Their physical video switchers are really great (super intuitive and built to last), but the Overdrive automation system itself is just a clunky and uncooperative UI. I’ve had such a bad experience with their system I’ve turned down jobs when the place uses Ross Overdrive. Ross’s Xpression graphics system (or “Chyron”) is also a hot mess. I’ve heard that if you’re using all Ross stuff (video switchers, graphics system, video servers, robotics, etc) it runs smoothly and that may be true, but Christ-on-a-pogo-stick have I had nothing but trouble with their software.Just out of curiosity do you have any examples of quirks or annoyances that you found to be especially egregious? If you can’t share due to NDA no worries
No NDA and no problem!
When I last used Overdrive, it was a fresh installation, but the system itself had been around for a few years. The UI was uncooperative, making changes required going into a script instead of just a quick fix in the on-air playlist or changing a few lines of typed coding (like with ELC and Ignite respectively). The program itself was crazy unstable… look, crashes happen with any computer program or system, but this was a daily occurrence (sometimes twice in an hour long show) which is completely unacceptable. Finally, compared to Sony and GrassValley, building new codes was a trial that often required access to the video switcher itself instead of just handling things through the code editor program.
While I haven’t worked on an Overdrive system in years, one or our competitor stations in town just got one; they’ve been having a hell of a time with it and it shows on-air. Been working in broadcasting for almost twenty years and I’ve launched all three automation systems at one time or another. With Grassvalley and Sony’s automation there’s seldom a problem at launch… Ross seems to always be a beast that needs to get wrangled. I seriously want to go to that competitor and help them (also, their studio is lit for shit and I want to fix that as well).
What do you do when those crashes happen during a live broadcast? Is that something is viewers might notice at home?
