What is the worst SaaS you've ever used? | Hacker News Reader

What is the worst SaaS you've ever used?

8 pointslevleontiev27 comments

GA4 — an overcomplicated one. Some people say Jira is awful.

What's your experience?

JIRA gets multiple mentions in this list. Does anyone still think that there's room for another dev tracking tool especially after how Linear has dominated adoption by startups?

Is there a reason Linear can't be used by companies later than start up?

I've never heard of Linear. Most of the companies I Work with use JIRA. Small agency to medium sized E-Commerce. (Germany based.)

On-premise Jira is always deployed on underpowered hardware, making it an even bigger pain to use than otherwise.

Have you ever used ServiceNow? That puts Jira into "shame".

Indeed, Jira is not fit for purpose and ServiceNow is an abomination.

EPIC is a horrible healthcare patient record system. For years I'd hear about how the ER ran much faster without it. It had awful navigation, you would always have to start from the main screen to do anything, and arbitrary field size limits in things like descriptions of the patients history limited to 1000 characters.

Why does JIRA survive despite all grievances?

Because jira understands that customers and users are two distinct groups.

As an analogy - who are YouTube's customers, and who are their users?

Lots of people who (have to) use Jira are their users. But they are not the people who pay for it, they are not the customers.

Jira succeeds because it is optimised for the people who pay, it delivers what -they- need. Since the goals of management are seldom the goals of engineers it's not surprising to see that engineers don't like it, but managers do.

Incidentally, performance issues aside, most of the "dislikability" users ascribe to "jira" is more fairly described as "I don't like the way management has configured jira".

I hate stock Jira, but it's actually a really pleasant system when properly set up in my current job. It handles automation really well. I can make and pull tickets from command line and a quick script, and ChatGPT understands the Jira API well enough to just write code for whatever I need.

It is a pain to config and stuff, and configuring it is mandatory a good experience. But once you have the workflow set up, it's chill.

Zoom used to be good. It’s a mess since they’re trying to be a product suite. Feels like the app is run by 4 product teams with the following team names:

Top Navigation Bottom Navigation Left Navigation Right Navigation

Mailchimp.

Their email template editor has an incredible amount of bugs. Many times the entire window just starts shaking for no reason. Templates suddenly change/break entirely after a minor change. Very cluttered interface and hard to find what you need.

Notion, specifically in situations that actually call for Jira.

I am apparently extremely weird for this, but I despise Notion, and I'm deeply concerned about anyone whose mind finds it intuitive.

Plenty of startups reskin Vtiger and sell it to people who have never heard of a CRM (or Vtiger itself). They end up doing other features as well and it ends up being a database, a HR system, orders management system, and so on.

Adobe Target. Heck, honestly Adobe anything outside of the Creative Suite. That was such a clunky mess to use for A/B testing, with an interface that could not be more confusing if it tried. The visual editor errors out at seemingly random, the JavaScript code generated for selectors could not be more brittle if it tried (an example from a previous test was 'document.querySelector(‘div:nth-of-type(3) > div:nth-of-type(1) > div:first-of-type’)' and you can''t even load it in a safe browsing context.

If I can avoid ever using that tool (or any like it) ever again, that would be a blessing.

Google Workspace. Would it hurt to use an image once in a while? :)

Teams in the browser… after 20 min the tab becomes irresponsible and starts looping into a cycle of doom.

A company I cannot name selling enterprise email services. Had me sign an NDA prior to the demo. I knew it the moment they asked for the NDA and so do they. But hey, enterprise sales.

Most low code solutions I’ve seen are half baked and with atrocious security - usually need full access to google drive or similar. No way Jose.

I think the hype / shittiness ratio award must go to ChatGPT. 100% hallucinated results combined with outright lies about GIA, combined with active effort to convince businesses that it’s possible to replace their employees with the new tech. Followed by actual efforts to apply the hallucinating chatbots as actual interfaces using them on real people. Instant agony at scale. Definitely takes the cake.

iCIMS for applicant tracking, I can deal with any other backoffice system but not this one

Salesforce, GA4, JIRA, Zoom, Slack

only saw the headline, then started typing... then you wrote it

yes Jira

The UX is horrendous

I've only used Jira and Rally. And Jira felt miles better than Rally. It was a little busy yes, but it was more intuitive in parts. Rally just felt like a pain to use.

for me I prefer trello

holy smokes. GA4 is the biggest pile of horse shit I have come across and even though Google is bad in general with UI/UX, GA4 takes the cake when it comes to "could it get any shittier". They took a decent product (UA) and converted into a dumpster fire.

A lot of people are listing good examples of pieces of software that were always bad. Some software just starts bad and becomes the incumbent and stays bad. But Google Analytics' regression in GA4 is just unfathomable.

It's actually impossible to overstate just how much of a regression GA4 was to its predecessor.

I'm not aware of a single piece of software that regressed the way this one did.

Google Analytics was an absolute delight and they just threw it away. I would _love_ to hear the internal politics that lead to this and the usage/satisfaction metrics that they are looking at - there has a to be a reason it happened.

Microsoft 365

Jira.

schoology rest api.

artifactory

jama requirements management

google cloud ui

azure ui

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