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Microsoft motherfucking Windows. (even though its an OS, it's software)
It's always brought me tons of issues and I'm starting to think that Microsoft built in some AI system which identifies when a Windows disliker uses it and starts acting weird/producing issues since (I have to use windows for some stuff at work) I'm always getting issues that nobody else gets in my team, and I've had this since I started using it at all.
And the fact that it has a frontdoor (I don't even think this is a backdoor anymore) built in... I mean, I definitely did NOT give consent to reinstall Microsoft Edge and I don't want it either (it appeared without any updates).
Then, you cannot fully disable telemetry anymore which is kind of a hard requirement for my job, most of the time.
Yes, Microsoft (and) Windows can go die in a fucking fire.13 -
Fuck Optimizely.
Not because the software/service itself is inherently bad, or because I don't see any value in A/B testing.
It's because every company which starts using quantitative user research, stops using qualitative user research.
Suddenly it's all about being data driven.
Which means you end up with a website with bright red blinking BUY buttons, labels which tell you that you must convert to the brand cult within 30 seconds or someone else will steal away the limited supply, and email campaigns which promise free heroin with every order.
For long term brand loyalty you need a holistic, polished experience, which requires a vision based on aesthetics and gut feelings -- not hard data.
A/B testing, when used as some kind of holy grail, causes product fragmentation. There's a strong bias towards immediate conversions while long term churn is underrepresented.
The result of an A/B test is never "well, our sales increased since we started offering free heroin with every sale, but all of our clients die after 6 months so our yearly revenue is down -- so maybe we should offer free LSD instead"5 -
Salesforce.
I mean I hate to be a predictable broken record, but it really is the biggest PITA thing I've come across. Proprietary stuff across the board, arbitrary limits, ridiculously tedious to get sane debug logging turned on and boy, if you've ever had to go through their process for listing an app...5 -
For some reason, Tableau is really heavy. I mean, all reporting software is a little bullshit, but Tableau... The server we had took 45 minutes to restart (no exaggerating - we timed it).
Reading the log files, yes, it WAS doing shit the whole time. Lots of shit. It seemed to be running just... Tons of software.
Tableau seemed to be aware of this because they have a page where you can check the status of everything. I assume that starts up first.
If you're looking into Tableau, two things to consider:
1) No, your braindead financial manager won't be making their own visualizations, no matter how many times the marketing team writes "drag and drop" on the Tableau website.
2) You'll make some nice visualizations but find that when you try to do more complex things, you run into constant roadblocks. If your manager asks "can you make it do x"? No matter how much experience you have, your answer can never be 100% "yes"... Or even "no" for that matter.
Not the worst experience with enterprise software, but definitely a surprisingly bad experience. -
IBM's Urban Code Deploy.
Had to use it at a previous role. It is one of the worst packages. The Web based ui is a terrible, confusing mess.
For example, there are two levels of menus. Depending on which page you are viewing, you would have two menu items with the same label that do totally different things. Also you can set filters, but it doesn't remember them, so you have to recreate them everytime (they're not stored in the url or anything useful like that).2 -
Accounting software- and it’s even not the developers fault but because law is changing so often these days they barely keep up.
So I run sole business and visit my accountant from time to time to chat and give my documents.
Sometimes I also help with accounting software like finding why it’s doesn’t sending this crap and doing what it’s expected to do only in some cases.
It usually takes an hour to find out why something doesn’t work.
Also once I was sending some companies fiscal year summary documents cause no one was able to figure out how to sign those documents and how to fill the form so it’s accepted by the “system”.
Based on how I see bureaucracy is increasing cause of technology instead of decreasing and how stupid are those protocols that are required for sending some financial documents over internet. Seeing that those protocols are changing every year if not half a year and software to send those documents mostly doesn’t work.
I’d say any accounting software is temple of doom.
It’s classic “The trial” by Kafka.2 -
SAP Ariba.
Imagine you can test newly created catalogs, but on error you only receive an error ID, which you have to send to a support email to get the acual error message, but support only responds after maybe 2 weeks if you're lucky.
How hard can it be to implement a log viewer next to your catalog testing forms. -
It's a tie between HP Loadrunner, which is literally older than I am and behaves like it hasn't been updated since release, and ServiceNow, which is just so.. limited and forces you to think real fucking creative to get anything useful done, for me. Working in either is absolutely painful 😖1
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Microsoft Teams 👎
Luckily most of our company uses Zoom, which is great UX-wise. But MS Teams... What a joke!
I've even been on a call with MS engineers for some Office integration support. Of course, they scheduled a Teams meeting. It was embarrassing how bad the quality and connections were. But likely they simply don't know any better...13 -
We have a bespoke management system that was developed in different times by different people, and hence each system acts like the others don't exist. Our current developer (not me) has been with us for around 15 years (he cares too much to leave, but does also have another primary occupation), and has been maintaining this old asp.Net codebase.
I've been slowly trying to plant the seeds of desire for something else, and we might possibly - by the end of the year - begin to use ERPNext to replace at least one of the systems, and then eventually more. -
IBMs Rational Team Concert.
Whole the VCS is okay for a semi-centralized one, the client was based on eclipse.
Who in a bright mind could possibly think that writing the client as an eclipse plugin is a good idea?2 -
ESRI's ArcMap...
Run a geoprocessing tool, now don't dare move the map, or click ANYWHERE on the interface! Don't even breath on the mouse pad! Oh... wait... too late... "ArcMap is not responding". At this point it's a 50/50 of whether it freezes for a long period then successfully completes the task, or it crashes.
Doesn't matter what you are doing - open the editor tool bar, create a database connection, make a table join. All will result in the same issue, such an unstable piece of software with no real market competitors to make the organisation build anything better (ArcGIS Pro wasn't much of an improvement, just another GPU Junkie).2 -
The one in which I am rn is the reason why so many people dislike php, jquery and Java on the server.
Then previous to this one, classic ASP for the web interface and our desktop components were delphi (OLD ass delphi)
Mind you, these are all tech stacks that I do like (php, java and O Pascal in particular) but really dislike in:
php: we have just your standard procedural spaghetti php on some old ass shit.
Classic ASP: Same as with php, no proper structure, made more apparent by the intense limitations of VBScript, I did enjoy the language tho, had it evolved better It would have been more tolerable, but the hoops i had to take to build a propee API in it....boooooy that shit was an eye opener.
Delphi: Not bad in itself, but the original dev had a shit notion about how architecture should work.....or what architecture is for that matter.
The Java one: this shit was coded when Spring was already an alternative to just fucking around with JSP, or any other framework for that fucking matter. Dude tried....TRIED to implement design patterns in it and it failed on every single fucking component. Worst of all, it was coded in such a shit way that during certain...err...conditions, the bottleneck proved too massive of an ubdertaking and the app chokes and needs to be restarted ... constantly
their use cases for jquery are not bad, but loading all of jquery for the shit they mostly do could have been easily done with just standard vanilla JS.
I got more, but thede are just from the top of my head
I love php, mind you, but shit like this makes me see why some people GREATLY dislikes it.
I alsp have some old web forms in c# and vb net that I loathe, funny enough the code for thise in vb.net is more elegant, almost as if it were from a different developer.3 -
Got a few
Crystal reports - words cannot describe how much I loathe this
Sybase ASE or IQ - both are just a hot mess to setup properly
Not a service now fan either
Esri map processing - basically entirely undocumented, slow, old fucking hate it
Arc GIS online - ridiculous licensing issues, undocumented APIs are given as official answers from the dev team, massive pain in the arse3 -
Worst enterprise software experience... I was fresh out of college, and needed money. I was working in a call center, fielding IT helpdesk calls for a major US telecom company, who had just acquired a competitor. One day I got to work and about ten of us were given a new desk, new phone number, an an email address at the newly acquired company. My manager said to us "We have no clue how any of their proprietary systems work, what servers they run on, or how to login to them. Your phones are ringing, make sure you take good notes so the Tier-1s can help out next week. Good luck."
Trial by shit-storm fire, all while trying to convince the caller that yes, I did know what I was talking about. It was a lot of cold calling random employees whose job title in the corporate directory looked even remotely close to somebody I could escalate a ticket to. They didn't use the same ticketing system we used, so it was a lot of copy/pasting between two ticketing systems. To this day, I still have no clue what happened to their original call center staff. I'm sure they must have had one, but it seemingly just dissolved overnight.
That job was the springboard to my development career. I left for a gig in software helpdesk, then to quality assurance, automated testing, and now I'm a senior DevOps engineer. It was worth it. -
For me that would be Proxmox. I know, people like it - but for no apparent reason it decided to nuke half my ZFS datasets in a pool, with no logic behind it whatsoever. All disks were tested, all came out good. Within the same pool there were datasets that were lost and some that remained.
I really don't get it. Looking at Proxmox' source code, it's more or less the command line tools and then there's the web interface (e.g. https://github.com/proxmox/...). Oh and they have the audacity to use their own file extension. Why not I guess?
Anyway, half my data was gone. I couldn't tell how or why or what the fuck even happened there. But Proxmox runs Debian underneath and I've been rather pissed about Proxmox' idea of "don't touch the host system aaa" for a while at that point. So I figured, fuck it I'll just take pure Debian then and write my own slightly better garbage on top of that. And as such the distribution project was born. I've been working on it for a little over a year now. And I've never had such issues again.
I somewhat get the idea of "don't touch the host" now, but still not quite. Yes, the more you do in the containers, the better. And the less you do on the host in terms of reconfiguration, the longer it will stay alive for. That goes for any system - more reconfiguration means usually means less stability and harder to replace. But sometimes you just have to work from the host. Like say migrating a container between hosts, which my code can do. You can't do that from a container, at all. There are good reasons to work with the host. Proxmox isn't telling that. Do they expect their users to be idiots? Only enterprise sysadmins amirite?
So yeah, that project - while I do take inspiration from it in mine - I don't like it. It's enterprise, it has the ZFS and the Ceph and the LXC and the VM's - woohoo! Not like anyone could implement that on a base Debian system. But they have the configuration database (pmxcfs), the distributed configuration database of a couple MB large and capped there, woah!
Ok sure it isn't Microsoft or IBM or Oracle or whatever, and those are definitely worse. But those are usually vendor lock-ins.. I avoid those on that premise alone :)3 -
eva viva3. very specific german healthcare erp. bloated but with the false features, insufficient data dumping, expensive, bad service. needs a lot of devops workarounds. unfortunately you don't skip easily with 10+ years of customer data.
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RES software
They got bought up by Ivanti but such assmonkeys evrything is next next finish untill something doesn't work or comply 🥲
Then it's backtrack backtrack undo till you find out what is wrong, within the development cycle they assume alot everything works, and you want the settings they recommend ... LOL
Errors are a thing for professionals. -
Worst enterprise software must be 'foglight' from quest.
I have ranted about this before...
Whenever you see the name 'quest software' or foglight, NOPE the fuck outta there.
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