Ask HN: What software are you forced to use that you hate? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What software are you forced to use that you hate?

19 pointsArcsech49 comments

For me it's Rally (nee CA Agile Centra). It's dog slow, it has an interface cluttered with a million fields that we never use anymore (if we ever used them in the first place), but management loves it because they can generate a bunch of different reports from.

What's yours?

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Software I'm forced to use ==> What I'd rather use

* Windows ==> macOS

* Jira ==> Trello

* Stash/Bitbucket ==> GitHub

* MS Office ==> Google Drive

* Box ==> Dropbox

* Outlook ==> Gmail

* Skype for Business ==> no chat system

In almost all of these cases, one person (or small group of people) made the purchasing decision for many more people. Likely this was based on price, not utility.

I consider myself lucky that I never have to use Internet Explorer ever. Some people have to use it every day.

装逼 drunbility

I will second you on Skype. I have to use it at work. It's now the defacto corporate conference call software at my office and my voice is consistently dropped during conference calls. I'm forced to always disconnect and then reconnect all the while hearing the, "You're on mute. Are you still there?" refrains from my co-workers. I'm not alone. It happens to everyone! It's crap. We used to use global crossing along with a software package and it was FLAWLESS. F*^K skype! Now I will say I'm also using the USB microphone/headset combo - that may be contributing to my problems. But still - WTF? That shouldn't be an issue. If it is - don't build/sell crappy hardware!

Desktop sharing has been completely broken since we updated to 2016, before then we were really reliant on it. Now we have to use the absolutely horrible but at least functional webex.

Ironically "normal" Skype application is usually flawless. I work from home and use it as my primary communication tool (prefer it to the phone).

Google Drive has its quirks and crashes. The speed of running native apps definitely makes me prefer MS office.

I have to code for internet explorer compatible web apps. Its 100x worse than actually having to "just" use it.

My last gig forced us to use Asana for ticketing (!!!). It's meant as a Basecamp-like tool but I'm not sure if it delivers on that either.

Currently we use Confluence for documentation, which, like many other Atlassian products, is lacking notable features compared to cheaper competitors. Other than that, we're great: Exchange, Slack, Github (including issues), etc

Google for Business or w/e would be great, but there is no way a company this size is gonna do that.

Mind sharing some notable features? Interested to check out some other tools.

My current job requires us to use base ClearCase. It might have been bleeding edge technology at one point in time but now it is so painful to use compared to something like git. Unfortunately there are so many scripts / processes that are tightly coupled to ClearCase that it may take forever to move to something else. What makes it even worse is that we use it in VMs and the performance is woeful.

I still have regular nightmares of a past project where we had to use ClearCase for version control.

Do you work for E/// by any chance?

I had to use that when I was in the defence industry. I've not encountered it since.

OS X. It limits my freedom which I don't like, but I would be okay with if it'd just work. Which of course it doesn't. Maximising windows often leaves them offset a couple pixels one way or the other, and it doesn't work at all if the window is "near maximised" to start with. I've set up the magic mouse to support right-clicking, but sometimes it'll stop working altogether or spuriously detecting right clicks as left clicks. Doing stuff like emptying the trash by default makes obnoxious sounds. Installing programs is entirely non-obvious and not really explained anywhere either. Double-clicking the app instead of draging it into applications first will lead to a mounted disk you can't unmount unless you close the application, and of course after unmounting the application it'll just disappear of course. Window management is hopeless if a program has more than one window, I frequently lose the chrome devtools window. /rant

Windows, at work. I've used Ubuntu part time since about summer of 2011, full time by probably about the beginning of 2012.

Ironically, I also hate using an office suite that is not MS Office 2003, including MS and non-MS products.

Xcode and Interface Builder. I can bare up under Xcode, but I dread using Interface Builder. It's a huge energy sink and frustration piled on top of frustration.

I agree, however IB in since 8.2 (I believe) is bearable. Still annoying that they move the constraints around when you click them..

IBM (Lotus) Notes - Amazingly awful software.

I used that 6 years ago and it felt ancient then! I feel your pain. I hate those templates some people use. Surely most companies are transitioning away from it?

We just got word that they were moving email to Office 365. But for internal stuff, I think it's still going to be Notes. God, I'd take Oracle at this point.

Slack - I really don't like the glossy feel about it. Maybe I just don't like all the bot noise, all the notifications (yes, I can disable them but then I would rather not use it). It might come across as absurd but I kinda preferred Hangouts. Just text. Would have loved something minimal and lighteight, w/o trillion features, and of course with native apps.

Jira. I just hate it. I despise it. What makes matters worse is my manager is a Jira fanatic. I think he is obsessed with it. One needs to shift in his seat "create a bloody Jira ticket". I, and many others, suggested simple ways to do things or even many GTDs. Many others teams use Trello and other tools but he has to use Jira.

Google Docs. Yeah, I don't like it either. Mostly how it's overused and abused.

Okta based login system. Logs me out every 30 minutes even though I choose to be remembered.

Intelliji or Webstorm or Android Studio. They are just bulky. I tried using other setups but since everybody else uses them it's difficult. (not forced to use these though).

The IRC gateway to Slack (not on by default) makes it a lot more bearable.

Gulp, grunt, npm, bower, NuGet, Salesforce, Unfuddle, Sharepoint, AdvancedInstaller, SameTime, Lotus Notes, Excel, Word, SVN, DB2, Yammer, IIS, Windows Server 2012+ (who thought the Metro start screen was appropriate on a server?), the mishmash of different shit APIs for Lync/Skype for Business. FusionCharts. GotoMeeting. Cisco vpn software.

So much fail piled on top of each other.

Wow why don't you write your own tools and make a company out of it?

Altium Designer. I've never had to put up with such an unstable buggy (and expensive) piece of software before. Just reading the changelog makes it apparent that they have no regression testing, and every feature seems to start out as a great idea, but get implemented with one critical function missing or unreliable.

Oh man. Hate to say this, but Altium is a blessing. Spend a few days in the Cadence or Mentor EDA suites...

I actually totally agree with you. Altium is the least-worst, but that's why I get so annoyed; I'm deliberately choosing to use it, but it's still such an unsatisfying experience.

That's fair.

I'm quite liking KiCAD for personal projects these days. Feels like the good parts of Cadence (unix-y, super scriptable) without the cruft and bizarre UX. Sadly it's not nearly powerful enough for 'real' work. Also still a tad buggy, in true open-source fashion :).

I used to hate some MS things especially Outlook, although I haven't forced to use it in previous gig, I recently found after I moved on that I hated it because I was forced to support issues arising from it. (It was a small company I had to do some "help desk" tasks...)

Workamajig. It is agency management software that comes in two flavors: slow Flash-based and buggy inscrutable "flat design" HTML. No API and bans all interoperability with any other software, probably because of the despairing mess underneath. This isn't just an engineer's whining; the opaqueness of business functions it creates leaves millions on the table.

But that's agency management software. Orbiting categories like project management, kanban, communication and time-tracking have many good options but integrating them in a way that can "check off all the boxes" enough to satisfy risk-averse partners and controllers is difficult.

If you work in IT, 90% of your users are on Windows. And the enterprise applications just work there. I hate having to support the Mac an Linux users in a corporate environment; nothing seems to work there.

GitHub: I'm coming from bitbucket where the PRs are... sane. I want a single view with the diff and online comments that nest, which allow for traversable conversations. The new GH review process is logically impenetrable.

Bitbucket has native LGTMs (approves) without having to click the "Files" tab, the "Review" button, the "approve" radio option, then "Okay".

RhodeCode has a similar system, in addition, you can have a versioned PRs which show you diffs across updates of PR for easier and faster reviews.

Office 2007.

The lesson, I think, isn't that corporations are dumb - it's that compatability has substantial value.

SSIS. Luckily I've moved teams so I'm done with SSIS but holy shit does that product suck. The running joke on my team is that it was built by interns. So many visual studio features just don't work despite it being in Visual Studio.

Forced to use : Like to change to

- Windows10 : Ubuntu/Arch

- Outlook : Gmail

- Eclipse : Jetbrains

- Skype : Slack

- EXTjs : Vue

- SVN : Git

- Jira : ANYTHING ELSE!

Finally, someone who prefers Jetbrains to Eclipse!

Rockwell Logix 5000 (PLC programming) - Note, all PLC/Industrial software is garbage.

Ewon (industrial remote VPN)

Atmel studio

Angular 1

Quickbooks

Eagle (PCB design)

Confluence

Onsip (all others I have used are bad also)

It's pretty easy to avoid Atmel Studio by using the gcc tool chain. It builds the same binaries as Studio, so you shouldn't have compatibility issues.

IBM WebSphere. It is truly awful.

What reports do they want? Could one get such reports from github's API?

Microsoft Access --> any other reasonable DB

Citrix --> any native app

Spring

Hibernate

maven

KDB+ (but now I love it)

>KDB+ (but now I love it)

What changed ?

Using it. The first demo I saw was somebody just typing K into the REPL and I didn't realize all the work it was doing. The language was a mess I thought, etc.. the usual.

When I went looking into it further, the language was so clean. The concepts so simple and clear. My first programming language was Scheme so it was almost like sitting down in CS61A again and learning to program from simple constructs.

And the amount of data I could pump though was incredible.

There were a lot of hump and ideas I had to get over. This workspace idea it had (back in K2). Strange trigger and dependency system that a GUI was even built on. But I did get over them, and really enjoyed them. I even used some of the trigger/dependency ideas for a risk management system I worked on.

It is still my favorite database. One day, just so I can say I did, I'll work at Kx for a little while if Arthur lets me :)

Microsoft Windows.

Slack.

Eclipse

hipchat

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