Ask HN: What software does your employer/you use, that sucks? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What software does your employer/you use, that sucks?

12 pointscjbarber19 comments

In lieu of Idea Sundays, I'd like to experiment around asking HN for problems, rather than ideas.

Two years ago I was working at a bigco that used Lotus Notes still. It was the cause of quite possibly the most confrontational experiences I have had with an inanimate object.

They also had all this shit custom software that made lotus seem alright.

Ironically the single best piece of software they had was a relic of an intranet site from what must have been the late 90s. It looked like shit, had about 2 lines of Javascript, every click was a page refresh, but it did exactly what it said it would do, what I expected it to do, and it did it without getting in my way in a reasonable amount of time. Bad software apparently makes us remember what is actually good about good software.

SharePoint. Our entire Intranet and project management processes are rooted to SharePoint. It may work great in a homogenous Microsoft environment, but Linux and Mac users are screwed.

OMG came here to post it. Not only the fact that I find so much unfinished/broken/hard, but anything short of a simple spreadsheet displayed on the web seems intensely difficult and just unusable.

This is made worse by the fact that my MS-loving boss has bought into it completely and I was given the impossible task to make it work as a CMS for our websites. I felt so bad for every group we made sites for when asking if we could change how something looked/worked, because without lots of programming (outside my skill level), nope not really possible.

Pretty sure I will be leaving this job within the year despite how nice everyone is partly due to me being the one who gets stuck supporting this POS and I'm not a developer.

Blackboard. Universities use it for managing courses, assignments, grades. It's hideous. You click a link and it takes 30 seconds for the javascript to spin up and render the page. So much feature bloat! And yet they can't even make simple tasks like data entry or file uploads easy.

We use Desire 2 Learn's product. No experience with Blackboard, but I don't really have anything particularly negative to say as a USER of D2L. It seemed fine as a student and they even had a mobile interface up before I graduated (2012).

Notes. Lotus Notes. (plus lots of java and eclipse)

Lotus Notes is the only mail client I used that's WORSE than Outlook.

Windows XP, IE8 (at least I have chrome because I'm the webmaster, but not for the rest of the mortals, because of "security issues").

Also the main business software is a Java webapp that is less than 10 years old but looks, feels and works like it is from the 90s.

EDIT: I wanted to add a desktop flash app for editing web content. This is what sucks the most, it is mostly unusable (for example, you have to create a image object -db record- before you can load a picture) and you have to do a remote desktop session to use it (yes in prod).

BMC BBCA - this was used at my previous company and trust me it sucked big time... It looked like an unfinished product, shipped in an hurry..

I am still confused why they took a decision to change well set MS SCCM into an product that doesn't satisfy half the need...

I'd like to see the next Gmail.

Gmail to me now is only 10% to 20% better than what using my ISP for mail with Thunderbird used to be before Gmail's invention. (As opposed to when it first came out and it was "Oh wow!" better than any competitor.)

Concur. Worst UI ever. (Well, probably not ever, I've heard terrible things about the Halliburton/Schlumberger stuff used in the oil industry, but worst I've come across.)

I've yet to see a usable alternative to Thunderbird on the desktop. (I also don't care about OSX-only products.)

What's wrong with Thunderbird, though?

It is a chore to make the view consistent across folders, I never seem to find the option I'm looking for, and the UI is generally very outdated.

Too bad it's merely a second-class citizen at Mozilla (though I completely understand the reasons.)

I'd like to see better search functionality. It seems I can never find any relevant emails when searching in Thunderbird.

Eagle PCB Designer - terrible UI, feels like twice the work to do anything

IBM Rational DOORS

SharePoint, ugh.

Louts Notes

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