I’ve worked with some pretty rotten software, but management software is easily the most user unfriendly, so my vote goes to HPSM.
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 🤦♂️
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.
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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.
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 hate Slack, give me Mattermost or Rocket.Chat
I will look into these
I detest slack, teams is better (but that’s a low bar) lol
Now that is an unpopular opinion!
Yes! I’ve finally done it!
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.
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.
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.
](https://youtu.be/8AyVh1_vWYQ?feature=shared) new peice of shit
I only do sfx occasionally, so I’m never near a camera. But those menu simulators are actually really neat. I didn’t know vendors had that.
It’s really useful. Not everyone can have easy access to a $50K camera to play around before their first job with it.
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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.
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.
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.
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
Lotus Notes. I called it Bogus Notes. I do not miss it.
My first programming job out of college was in Lotus Notes. I spent most of my time trying to trick it into doing what I wanted, it was a constant cat-and-mouse game. Kinda fun if it wasn’t so miserable. Had to gtfo after a couple years.
My previous job finally got off of lotus notes in 2019.
You gotta respect those early adopters, the trendsetters, the pioneers.
I left a job when the previous notes admin left and they tried to get me to run that hot garbage with no training and no bump in pay.
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.
Same. Turning down windows admin jobs has been a career saving move for me. It puts you back tech wise and its just so fucking cumbersome to admin for.
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.
For all the flak it always gets, can I just say I’m relieved nobody said JIRA yet? I think JIRA is great for what to does, but companies are just bad at setting it up right. Either they go overboard with restrictive processes, or they are unorganized mess, there is no in between. But that’s not the software’s fault. (Braces for downvotes)
We used Jira at work and when the ticket was set up properly (stories, subtasks, etc…) it worked well.
I think JIRA is okay. I’ve used MUCH worst bug reporting software. The worst thing I can say about JIRA is that it is designed to implement scrum and IMO scrum is cargo cult programming.
SAP
They were transitioning from Oracle SBMS which was bad enough already but SAP… that thing was a nightmare taking dedicated employees (which we didn’t have) to account for the additional time needed to enter and manage data
Fortunately I was able to get out before the full switch over; friends that still work there occasionally message to inform how horrible the place has become
I take special pleasure in pronouncing it “Sap”. It drives the sappy admins and devs nuts, but IDGAF. You want me to call it S.A.P.? Then get it to fucking work as it should. You dumb fucka are sure making enough for it to.
SAP Suuuuucks
I agree
SharePoint
It’s funny how it does everything but nothing well.
FUCK sharepoint
Seriously, I currently work with SharePoint for internal documentation and I audibly grunt every time I’m editing or managing anything using that thing.
We moved from S drive to SharePoint and I honestly don’t know why
The reason is mainly money. SharePoint is cheap and a lot of companies already pay for it even if they don’t use it.
SharePoint is also useful because it integrates seamlessly with teams.
It should be noted that SharePoint is designed for documents and not files.
You should think twice if you are replacing a file share with a SharePoint site because sometimes it will work terribly. CAD files for example is a terrible idea to put on a SharePoint site.
Here where I work we just sync with the user PC, like OneDrive, and the user can’t tell the difference. For them it is just another folder in the Explorer. Some only access through Teams…
OneDrive and SharePoint are very similar in functionality. (In fact every personal OneDrive’s is a SharePoint site) But SharePoint is intended to share files and other information while OneDrive is intended to be personal (with some limited sharing functionality).
Working with other colleagues and having all their files distributed on multiple OneDrive’s is very inconvenient, while having a SharePoint is not.
why particularly CAD files? trying to understand why this is a bad idea as it appears that is where we are going
This thread explains it better than I could: https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/15q6hq4/psa_do_not_host_autocad_files_in_sharepoint/
SharePoint apparently has some kind of AutoCAD integration so it might work for you, but watch out. And most importantly don’t just import the entire FileShare regardless of what it contains to a single SharePoint site.
The best that can be said of Sharepoint, is it could be worse, you could be using Notes.
SharePoint
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.
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.
Lotus.
I worked for IBM and all out IBM machines had it, but fortunately I did delivery for another major tech client so had a separate laptop and PC for their MS Enterprise environment and 95% of my work was there.
God I hated Lotus notes and sametime connect
I’ve been in the industry some time but here are some of my most hated software I’ve been forced to use:
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IBM Clearcase. Absolutely the worst dogshit source control system ever to exist. Complex, fragile, arcane, slow, network intensive. The company had to employ people fulltime on each of its sites whose only job was creating branches and mirroring repos on other sites. The operational & licensing costs of running it must be insane. Some defenders might claim “but it’s so powerful!” or “look how we can create fancy layered views” as if that excuses it for being terrible in the most basic ways. Fixing it must have been intractable because IBM Clearcase eventually produced a faster remote client that talked to a proxy of the view running on a server somewhere. More expense and complexity.
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IBM/Lotus Notes & Domino. Another complex, arcane, slow, unintuitive, frustrating product by IBM (though owned by HCL now). Originally a content management system with an email / calendar with its own terminology and workflows completely divorced from any other email / calendar system in existence. Various iterations attempted to rework the front end to appear more user friendly but it was illusory - click button or two and you were confronted with dialogs that hadn’t changed in 30 years.
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Internet Explorer. I’ve worked in company after company that had some really awful in-house expenses system or clock-in/clock-out or some enterprise junk that NEEDED Internet Explorer and no other browser would do because it was so badly written that it couldn’t render properly or it used an ActiveX control.
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HP/Microfocus ALM. Another over-engineered, arcane, unintuitive piece of enterprise software. This time for tracking bugs, features, testing etc. Complicated and slow, heavily dependent on Internet Explorer and other deprecated Microsoft tech.
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Trend antivirus. Almost every corporate antivirus is bad but this one has been the bane of my existence. I write code which does stuff like encryption and compression/decompression and this piece of shit would constantly trigger warnings and delete binaries I was trying to build and develop. When it wasn’t interfering with my work, it would just be constantly hogging CPU and slowing down disk activity.
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Enterprise software in general. This crap is sold like Kirby vacuum cleaners - a pushy salesman convinces a clueless CTO to buy junk that can seemingly do everything and a sign contract for $$$. And then this stuff is there FOREVER. Management will ignore complaints and the obvious shortcomings of the system because its paid for and the sunk cost fallacy kicks in.
Your comment about Trend AV triggered a flashback. 😭 They rolled it out at my company and forced a mandatory full scan on all pcs at noon every day. Everyone just gave up and went to lunch for an hour or longer until the scan finished. The policy existed for a week and then the CTO got heat because everybody was so unproductive. They removed trend within the month.
As a Certified Lotus PROFESSIONAL, I take extreme issue with your characterization of Lotus Notes/Domino.
It’s a huge steaming pile of dog shit and you’re being WAY too easy on it. Why insurance companies and Coca Cola used it extensively is beyond me. But my God did they love it for some reason.
I got a CLP simply because I worked for a managed services vendor at the time and they signed a huge contract with Coca Cola and they needed a Domino admin to help out with a migration. I think it was 4.6 to 5.5 if I recall correctly. Yeah, long time ago. I went on to do a lot of Domino related projects. Lousy certification that probably made me more money than any of the others I have held over the years.
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Lotus Notes
Plot twist… my new employer uses it even more 🤦🏻♂️
I won’t accept the job if lotus notes is required.
I had this back in 2014 for a couple of years then again in 2017, it was a horror. :-/
