
Ask HN: What software does your employer/you use, that sucks? - cjbarber
In lieu of Idea Sundays, I&#x27;d like to experiment around asking HN for problems, rather than ideas.
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BWStearns
Two years ago I was working at a bigco that used Lotus Notes still. It was the
cause of quite possibly the most confrontational experiences I have had with
an inanimate object.

They also had all this shit custom software that made lotus seem alright.

Ironically the single best piece of software they had was a relic of an
intranet site from what must have been the late 90s. It looked like shit, had
about 2 lines of Javascript, every click was a page refresh, but it did
exactly what it said it would do, what I expected it to do, and it did it
without getting in my way in a reasonable amount of time. Bad software
apparently makes us remember what is actually good about good software.

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treerex
SharePoint. Our entire Intranet and project management processes are rooted to
SharePoint. It may work great in a homogenous Microsoft environment, but Linux
and Mac users are screwed.

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xcrunner529
OMG came here to post it. Not only the fact that I find so much
unfinished/broken/hard, but anything short of a simple spreadsheet displayed
on the web seems intensely difficult and just unusable.

This is made worse by the fact that my MS-loving boss has bought into it
completely and I was given the impossible task to make it work as a CMS for
our websites. I felt so bad for every group we made sites for when asking if
we could change how something looked/worked, because without lots of
programming (outside my skill level), nope not really possible.

Pretty sure I will be leaving this job within the year despite how nice
everyone is partly due to me being the one who gets stuck supporting this POS
and I'm not a developer.

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joeclark77
Blackboard. Universities use it for managing courses, assignments, grades.
It's hideous. You click a link and it takes 30 seconds for the javascript to
spin up and render the page. So much feature bloat! And yet they can't even
make simple tasks like data entry or file uploads easy.

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xcrunner529
We use Desire 2 Learn's product. No experience with Blackboard, but I don't
really have anything particularly negative to say as a USER of D2L. It seemed
fine as a student and they even had a mobile interface up before I graduated
(2012).

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nudpiedo
Notes. Lotus Notes. (plus lots of java and eclipse)

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fsk
Lotus Notes is the only mail client I used that's WORSE than Outlook.

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singold
Windows XP, IE8 (at least I have chrome because I'm the webmaster, but not for
the rest of the mortals, because of "security issues").

Also the main business software is a Java webapp that is less than 10 years
old but looks, feels and works like it is from the 90s.

EDIT: I wanted to add a desktop flash app for editing web content. This is
what sucks the most, it is mostly unusable (for example, you have to create a
image object -db record- before you can load a picture) and you have to do a
remote desktop session to use it (yes in prod).

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bluerail
BMC BBCA - this was used at my previous company and trust me it sucked big
time... It looked like an unfinished product, shipped in an hurry..

I am still confused why they took a decision to change well set MS SCCM into
an product that doesn't satisfy half the need...

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27182818284
I'd like to see the next Gmail.

Gmail to me now is only 10% to 20% better than what using my ISP for mail with
Thunderbird used to be before Gmail's invention. (As opposed to when it first
came out and it was "Oh wow!" better than any competitor.)

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nostrademons
Concur. Worst UI ever. (Well, probably not ever, I've heard terrible things
about the Halliburton/Schlumberger stuff used in the oil industry, but worst
I've come across.)

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pestaa
I've yet to see a usable alternative to Thunderbird on the desktop. (I also
don't care about OSX-only products.)

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lumberjack
What's wrong with Thunderbird, though?

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pestaa
It is a chore to make the view consistent across folders, I never seem to find
the option I'm looking for, and the UI is generally very outdated.

Too bad it's merely a second-class citizen at Mozilla (though I completely
understand the reasons.)

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nicholas73
Eagle PCB Designer - terrible UI, feels like twice the work to do anything

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sc00ty
IBM Rational DOORS

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rman666
SharePoint, ugh.

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tomasz207
Louts Notes

