I’ve worked with some pretty rotten software, but management software is easily the most user unfriendly, so my vote goes to HPSM.
My last job had not one, but two programming languages they had created in house over the last couple of decades.
One of them was the primary development language for the whole corporation.
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.
But how else can I force all my self-organising agile teams to follow exactly the same process?
Asana.
Windows.
Whats wrong with windows? Everything just works.
The ads and spyware work great for Microsoft!
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.”
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.
JIRA. Anything made by National Instruments.
Hey now, I’ve got great job security due to being one of the LabVIEW experts at my company. Never change, NI
Is JIRA better or worse than Azure DevOps?
We’re being moved over to JIRA and I’m worried because I hear so much shit about Atlassian
One of the big problems with JIRA is it’s extremely configurable, so your experience depends entirely on how your admins have set it up. If your company is the type to micromanage, JIRA gives them a lot of tools to do that, which I think is why it gets so much hate from devs. I find it tolerable in my current job but it’s definitely designed for managers and not for developers.
This is basically every major enterprise ticketing system. They’re typically extremely customizable over-featured behemoths so that they can check all the buzzword boxes for the people that make purchasing decisions but will never actually use the system.
"It’s a fully integrated Agile ITIL DevOps CMDB that empowers your users while providing generative KPIs to guide business decisions!”
Then, on top of that, ownership of it is generally dropped on a team that is completely incapable of properly managing it from both a technical ability and sheer manpower availability standpoint. So each install ends up becoming an overly complex, confusing, terribly performing mess.
I think I’ve seen one reasonably well managed install in the couple decades I’ve been doing this, a couple of more that were mildly jank but usable, and then everything else has been a pit of despair largely driven by the above.
As a former LabVIEW instructor, I was so glad to get out of that nightmare platform.
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.
The sole purpose of jira is to create a shiny thing to distract PMs so they don’t bother the engineers too much.
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.
Jira doesn’t suck, your management does
Jira.
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.
React
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.
Mac OS and R
Second Mac OS, what the literal fuck! Brain damaged window management, inferior software update management and a bastard of a *NIX environment.
Recently started using OSX and wow, so much better than windows 11. I’m a Linux user at home so it’s nice to have a proper shell and none of the crashy bugs and glitches windows has. The UI is so much better.
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.
Asana is a laggy piece of shit on any hardware with any internet connection if the board is big enough. And they are usually big.
Anything related to XCode is a fucking nightmare.
Mac OS X.