I’ve worked with some pretty rotten software, but management software is easily the most user unfriendly, so my vote goes to HPSM.
Didn’t leave the job over it, but SAP.
Shitty. Ass. Program.
I haven’t worked with SAP directly, but did infra support for a company that used it.
They were always having issues with it and the company they used for SAP support would routinely bill them obscene amounts even for simple tasks like updating file paths.
Quickbooks. Intuit can be burned to the ground.
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.”
But have you tried Cisco Webex Teams? Or how we liked to call it “My first rails application.example.exe”.
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 🤦♂️
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.
Non tech people should ALWAYS ask the support team when they need help automating IT stuff for precisely this reason.
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.
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.
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.
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?
JIRA. Anything made by National Instruments.
As a former LabVIEW instructor, I was so glad to get out of that nightmare platform.
Hey now, I’ve got great job security due to being one of the LabVIEW experts at my company. Never change, NI
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.
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 television technical director and Ross Overdrive is hell on wheels… it’s a video production system mostly used by local television stations to
consolodate“automate” their control rooms down to one person. There’s three major companies that build systems like this: Sony, GrassValley, and Ross. In my experience GrassValley’s Ignite is pretty good, it’s stable and gets the job done. Sony’s ELC is best, going above and beyond what I need it to do (plus their customer service and tech people are just awesome). Hands down, Ross Overdrive is a pile of garbage. Their physical video switchers are really great (super intuitive and built to last), but the Overdrive automation system itself is just a clunky and uncooperative UI. I’ve had such a bad experience with their system I’ve turned down jobs when the place uses Ross Overdrive. Ross’s Xpression graphics system (or “Chyron”) is also a hot mess. I’ve heard that if you’re using all Ross stuff (video switchers, graphics system, video servers, robotics, etc) it runs smoothly and that may be true, but Christ-on-a-pogo-stick have I had nothing but trouble with their software.Just out of curiosity do you have any examples of quirks or annoyances that you found to be especially egregious? If you can’t share due to NDA no worries
No NDA and no problem!
When I last used Overdrive, it was a fresh installation, but the system itself had been around for a few years. The UI was uncooperative, making changes required going into a script instead of just a quick fix in the on-air playlist or changing a few lines of typed coding (like with ELC and Ignite respectively). The program itself was crazy unstable… look, crashes happen with any computer program or system, but this was a daily occurrence (sometimes twice in an hour long show) which is completely unacceptable. Finally, compared to Sony and GrassValley, building new codes was a trial that often required access to the video switcher itself instead of just handling things through the code editor program.
While I haven’t worked on an Overdrive system in years, one or our competitor stations in town just got one; they’ve been having a hell of a time with it and it shows on-air. Been working in broadcasting for almost twenty years and I’ve launched all three automation systems at one time or another. With Grassvalley and Sony’s automation there’s seldom a problem at launch… Ross seems to always be a beast that needs to get wrangled. I seriously want to go to that competitor and help them (also, their studio is lit for shit and I want to fix that as well).
What do you do when those crashes happen during a live broadcast? Is that something is viewers might notice at home?
Odoo ERP system
Darn I was hoping odoo was good, what did you not like about it?
I left a job over MacOS.
The management was bad. The product was bad. I would have left eventually anyway.
But the constant frustration of using a window manager that does not let you make keyboard shortcuts for most basic window operations, like cycling through windows on the current virtual desktop was too much. And MacOS really does not like you to have multiple monitors in different orientations. There were a whole bunch of other stupid things. I always felt like my computer was fighting me, not working for me.
But on the plus side, it did not have an Ethernet jack, it was really thin so the fans were tiny and made a huge racket, the keyboard sucked to type on, and keys would stop working if a piece of dust with any dimension larger the Plank length got under them.
