I’ve worked with some pretty rotten software, but management software is easily the most user unfriendly, so my vote goes to HPSM.
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.
Can confirm JIRA is an unusable mess. Submitting IT tickets was probably the worst thing about my last job. So much time wasted filling out irrelevant fields of information.
Of course, while I’ll agree about Jira being unfortunate, I’ll say from experience it’s the “committee” of people that end up making up tons of fields imagining that they have some utility. Jira is complicit by saying “sure thing, as many required and cross-linked fields as you like!”
We have “Priority”, “Severity”, “Importance” on top of the sort order having some other indication of relative importance, all must be filled. Opening an item in one place requires you to have an item already opened in another place and that one requires a project id from some other tool to know who to charge, in theory. In practice it’s not hooked into any charging system, but they imagine one day departments can charge each other for fixing items. We also have about 4 additional “describe the ticket” fields and in addition to the title, there’s a ‘One line summary’. All required.
I guess we just use a very stripped down version of jira, because it’s really just enter an issue, brief explanation, and further documentation to help whoever comes to fix it solve it faster. If it takes me longer than 5 minutes to create a ticket that means I’ve spent way longer than usual.
I think of it as a good place to keep a record of know issues or desired improvements, so they don’t get forgotten.
The worst thing about it is when you’re trying to move the tickets around. If you assign a ticket to another team the software then drops you into their queue, because I definitely want that to happen.
I think it’s just an issue with the browser caching getting messed up because it doesn’t use the proper version history API
what do you consider a good alternative?
Fwiw their zephyr plugin is pretty good imo
What would you recommend instead?
The sole purpose of jira is to create a shiny thing to distract PMs so they don’t bother the engineers too much.
Jira doesn’t suck, your management does
Jira is literally a shiny keychain which keeps PMs distracted and busy enough so that they don’t start calling people into a million meetings because they have nothing better to do. It is otherwise completely useless and borderline nonsensical, and any perceived productivity gains from its usage can be attributed directly to keeping superfluous managers away from engineers.
Funny I find jira to be very useful for a nice centralized location of where we keep issues that weve come across and will, at some point, handle, but are not going to get to now.
Other than our team lead, I don’t think any of our managers even look at it.
But how else can I force all my self-organising agile teams to follow exactly the same process?
And gives middle managers another way to misinterpret sh1t they don’t understand.
Depends on your issues. If its something esoteric and/or too high level to be useful, yea it sucks. If its issues that are easily reproducible but you can’t address it immediately, adding it to the backlog and having that context in jira really helps. That’s all predicated on the story reporter providing steps to reproduce and good context. But there are some things I would consider it adds which are less than useful, like story points, where its almost bait how it starts a conversations with PMs who don’t know how to ask the right questions over why is it too high or low…
Just wait until your product team gets suckered in by JIRA Align.
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.
Yeah that might be related to its shitty UI that makes no sense and adds nothing over regular folder/file trees.
I’ve been building a sharepoint site at work as that’s what we have “free”. It’s such a poor tool - so clumsy and blunt and it annoys me that all this information I’m putting in to it is essentially in a proprietary inaccessible format. Even the integrations with the rest of the office suite and teams are clunky and a bit shit.
I’d much rather use a separate CMS but Microsoft bundles everything together in Office that you can’t get a look in for something else.
Lotus Notes.
I get into a lot of atheist vs theists arguments and it bothers me a bit that not even once has a theist suggested that the existence of Lotus Notes is evidence of Satan. It does bother me because I admit it would make me lose confidence in my position.
I don’t think it’s possible to agree more with this. This would be the strongest fodder for the existence of pure evil if one were to argue that position.
SAP, closely followed by IBM/Lotus/(I have no idea which random company they were sold to) Notes
I fucking hate this corporate bullshit software
You don’t like 18 different codes to find one piece of information? But why?
And the codes are completely illogical. “Run an 18TZ transaction” the fuck is that?
100 percent. “Remember what this code does”. How?! I have to make a note that it does what it does.
I have absolutely no idea
I got to meet one of the IBM guys who claimed to be a project manager for Lotus Notes. I asked him what it felt like knowing that he has a hand in a tool that has unleashed more human misery than the atomic bomb.
Now that I am proud of myself for doing.
What’d he say?
He just looked at me offended and confused for a bit and I walked away.
Moodle.
Trying to turn it into an enterprise level LMS without paying any money was an interesting nightmare.
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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.
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.
Non tech people should ALWAYS ask the support team when they need help automating IT stuff for precisely this reason.
Exactly that. When building a load-bearing business process, it’s always critical that the person writing it knows what they’re doing.
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.
Oh god, I’m so sorry. That’s exactly what we went through, and yep, same thing. Changing even the tiniest element in the UI would break their whole “automation”.
That was one of the many things I warned about but was overridden. Lol, thankfully I was saved by his retirement and new CTO agreeing with me.
Doesn’t matter what job I’m in, Adobe anything is always trash and their seeming monopoly on digital certificate signing in PDFs is disgusting.
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.”
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 🤦♂️
But have you tried Cisco Webex Teams? Or how we liked to call it “My first rails application.example.exe”.
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.
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.
Do you have sources regarding other stack vectors?
A lot of people should be in deep shit if it’s possible to join a “secure” meeting on a regular phone line.
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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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25 yr System Administer who has exited IT: Windows
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.
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.
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.
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.
The background noise surpression of Teams is peak quality (vs Webex and Slack, though Webex is somewhat good)…
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
Teams beats all the others of video calling specifically.
That’s because it’s Skype. MS bought them and integrated it into Teams.
Teams has absolute dogshit annotation. Literally takes years to start it and then you can’t move or change your screen as the presenter
Did you check the calender in Teams? Not to be confused with the calender in Outlook, which may or may not overlap.
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.
Teams can’t even set up groups within the chat window other than Pinned. What trash is that? Microsoft has a great track record of taking capabilities from earlier tools or versions and removes them.
I’m looking at you message auto preview ONLY for unread messages.
I detest slack, teams is better (but that’s a low bar) lol
Now that is an unpopular opinion!
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.
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.
The last point is purely a configuration thing. Our Teams instance only keeps DMs for I think 30ish days – legal wants to minimize the surface area of discoverable material. Same reason our Exchange instance nukes emails over 12 months old unless you manually move them to an archive.
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.
Maybe you have heard about a software called Ragtime. It‘s basically a combination of Word and Excel. However, there‘s no option to export any files that can be edited with any other office application, and you can‘t open .xls/.odf etc files with it. Oh, and the best part about it: You can always only undo one action.
Why would anyone use it?
Several decades ago, it must have been as good as other comparable products on Mac OS. And when there‘s no compatibility, the switch isn‘t that easy. You basically have to build your templates from scratch.
That being said, we have decided to switch to MS Office, but my boss will probably use Ragtime until retirement.
I think so many people are institutionalized into Microsoft office suite (especially for outlook mail and calendar) and it is just so RIDICULOUSLY bad - I’d never really appreciated gmail or complimented gsuite until my company was acquired and forced to regularly work in outlook.
I immediately took a 50% productivity hit and even daily success towards regular goals just doesn’t feel quite like success anymore because I’m always chasing my tail. Luckily I was already an overachiever, so my diminished workload is still good. Stupid company fucked themself out of a lot of wins for such a small, tone deaf decision.
The simplest way I can say it is that before with gsuite I just never thought about productivity apps - they worked in the background to support me well enough. Now that we’re in outlook, I have multiple bad interactions that I have to navigate around every single workday.
So many frustrations here! I just switched companies and forced back into outlook&teams.
Would you like to know who’s attending a meeting? We hid this very deep in the meeting options.
Want to see all emails sent to Jack? Here are all emails from Jack instead.
Want to see when Jack is available for a quick chat? Please schedule a meeting and use the scheduling tool just to see if he’s even in the office today
I didn’t really get it until you listed these. Yeah, I’ve run into every single one of these.
Btw, if you want to see who’s attending a meeting, you can just pretend you want to email them and reply all to the invite. Because of course these are the natural ways to handle these use cases.
Previous company handled everything over email. No Kanban, no Git, no organization - everything was still handled as it was in a random accounting office back in the 90’s. I spend half of my worktime searching for who-said-what-and-when emails to code feature x, and then had to email it back to another dev.
There was also zero drive to improve anything. I was yelled at for 5 mins straight for suggesting to add a placeholder to a dateinput (which was declared as ‘<input type=“text”>’, instead of ‘<input type=“date”>’), because the correct format ‘YYYYMMDD’ was never mentioned anywhere on the form or in error mesages, and people keept having issues.
I fucking hate Outlook and if I have to pick between two similar jobs I’d pick the one with gsuite over Microsoft any day.
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.
Sounds like a regular PhD student project.
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.
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.
Weird, it’s marked as both Native and Proton compatible on Proton DB, which I find reliable. People are saying the native version can be broken but Proton works. You can run non steam games (e.g. GOG version) via Proton too by adding the game to steam as a “non steam title”.
For witcher 2: https://www.protondb.com/app/20920
Perhaps they fixed it, but I experienced random crashes at least once an hour.
I would be so stoked to have a Linux-only job. All my personal machines, servers etc are Linux. I’m an old guy but just got my first IT job and it is all Windows. I love getting blamed for shit Microsoft fucks up haha.
