
Ask HN: What software are you forced to use that you hate? - Arcsech
For me it&#x27;s Rally (nee CA Agile Centra).  It&#x27;s dog slow, it has an interface cluttered with a million fields that we never use anymore (if we ever used them in the first place), but management loves it because they can generate a bunch of different reports from.<p>What&#x27;s yours?
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meagher
Software I'm forced to use ==> What I'd rather use

* Windows ==> macOS

* Jira ==> Trello

* Stash/Bitbucket ==> GitHub

* MS Office ==> Google Drive

* Box ==> Dropbox

* Outlook ==> Gmail

* Skype for Business ==> no chat system

In almost all of these cases, one person (or small group of people) made the
purchasing decision for many more people. Likely this was based on price, not
utility.

I consider myself lucky that I never have to use Internet Explorer ever. Some
people have to use it every day.

~~~
phlipski
I will second you on Skype. I have to use it at work. It's now the defacto
corporate conference call software at my office and my voice is consistently
dropped during conference calls. I'm forced to always disconnect and then
reconnect all the while hearing the, "You're on mute. Are you still there?"
refrains from my co-workers. I'm not alone. It happens to everyone! It's crap.
We used to use global crossing along with a software package and it was
FLAWLESS. F*^K skype! Now I will say I'm also using the USB microphone/headset
combo - that may be contributing to my problems. But still - WTF? That
shouldn't be an issue. If it is - don't build/sell crappy hardware!

~~~
flukus
Desktop sharing has been completely broken since we updated to 2016, before
then we were really reliant on it. Now we have to use the absolutely horrible
but at least functional webex.

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usingpond
My last gig forced us to use Asana for ticketing (!!!). It's meant as a
Basecamp-like tool but I'm not sure if it delivers on that either.

Currently we use Confluence for documentation, which, like many other
Atlassian products, is lacking notable features compared to cheaper
competitors. Other than that, we're great: Exchange, Slack, Github (including
issues), etc

Google for Business or w/e would be great, but there is no way a company this
size is gonna do that.

~~~
j45
Mind sharing some notable features? Interested to check out some other tools.

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lonewolf72
My current job requires us to use base ClearCase. It might have been bleeding
edge technology at one point in time but now it is so painful to use compared
to something like git. Unfortunately there are so many scripts / processes
that are tightly coupled to ClearCase that it may take forever to move to
something else. What makes it even worse is that we use it in VMs and the
performance is woeful.

~~~
drdeadringer
I had to use that when I was in the defence industry. I've not encountered it
since.

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Doxin
OS X. It limits my freedom which I don't like, but I would be okay with if
it'd just work. Which of course it doesn't. Maximising windows often leaves
them offset a couple pixels one way or the other, and it doesn't work at all
if the window is "near maximised" to start with. I've set up the magic mouse
to support right-clicking, but sometimes it'll stop working altogether or
spuriously detecting right clicks as left clicks. Doing stuff like emptying
the trash by default makes obnoxious sounds. Installing programs is _entirely_
non-obvious and not really explained anywhere either. Double-clicking the app
instead of draging it into applications first will lead to a mounted disk you
can't unmount unless you close the application, and of course after unmounting
the application it'll just disappear of course. Window management is hopeless
if a program has more than one window, I frequently lose the chrome devtools
window. /rant

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thekevan
Windows, at work. I've used Ubuntu part time since about summer of 2011, full
time by probably about the beginning of 2012.

Ironically, I also hate using an office suite that is not MS Office 2003,
including MS and non-MS products.

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oldmancoyote
Xcode and Interface Builder. I can bare up under Xcode, but I dread using
Interface Builder. It's a huge energy sink and frustration piled on top of
frustration.

~~~
wingerlang
I agree, however IB in since 8.2 (I believe) is bearable. Still annoying that
they move the constraints around when you click them..

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dalerus
IBM (Lotus) Notes - Amazingly awful software.

~~~
planteen
I used that 6 years ago and it felt ancient then! I feel your pain. I hate
those templates some people use. Surely most companies are transitioning away
from it?

~~~
dalerus
We just got word that they were moving email to Office 365. But for internal
stuff, I think it's still going to be Notes. God, I'd take Oracle at this
point.

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balladeer
Slack - I really don't like the glossy feel about it. Maybe I just don't like
all the bot noise, all the notifications (yes, I can disable them but then I
would rather not use it). It might come across as absurd but I kinda preferred
Hangouts. Just text. Would have loved something minimal and lighteight, w/o
trillion features, and of course with native apps.

Jira. I just hate it. I despise it. What makes matters worse is my manager is
a Jira fanatic. I think he is obsessed with it. One needs to shift in his seat
"create a bloody Jira ticket". I, and many others, suggested simple ways to do
things or even many GTDs. Many others teams use Trello and other tools but he
has to use Jira.

Google Docs. Yeah, I don't like it either. Mostly how it's overused and
abused.

Okta based login system. Logs me out every 30 minutes even though I choose to
be remembered.

Intelliji or Webstorm or Android Studio. They are just bulky. I tried using
other setups but since everybody else uses them it's difficult. (not forced to
use these though).

~~~
remvee
The IRC gateway to Slack (not on by default) makes it a lot more bearable.

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douche
Gulp, grunt, npm, bower, NuGet, Salesforce, Unfuddle, Sharepoint,
AdvancedInstaller, SameTime, Lotus Notes, Excel, Word, SVN, DB2, Yammer, IIS,
Windows Server 2012+ (who thought the Metro start screen was appropriate on a
server?), the mishmash of different shit APIs for Lync/Skype for Business.
FusionCharts. GotoMeeting. Cisco vpn software.

So much fail piled on top of each other.

~~~
rs86
Wow why don't you write your own tools and make a company out of it?

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sephamorr
Altium Designer. I've never had to put up with such an unstable buggy (and
expensive) piece of software before. Just reading the changelog makes it
apparent that they have no regression testing, and every feature seems to
start out as a great idea, but get implemented with one critical function
missing or unreliable.

~~~
kjdndisneinj
Oh man. Hate to say this, but Altium is a blessing. Spend a few days in the
Cadence or Mentor EDA suites...

~~~
sephamorr
I actually totally agree with you. Altium is the least-worst, but that's why I
get so annoyed; I'm deliberately choosing to use it, but it's still such an
unsatisfying experience.

~~~
kjdndisneinj
That's fair.

I'm quite liking KiCAD for personal projects these days. Feels like the good
parts of Cadence (unix-y, super scriptable) without the cruft and bizarre UX.
Sadly it's not nearly powerful enough for 'real' work. Also still a tad buggy,
in true open-source fashion :).

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unsignedint
I used to hate some MS things especially Outlook, although I haven't forced to
use it in previous gig, I recently found after I moved on that I hated it
because I was forced to support issues arising from it. (It was a small
company I had to do some "help desk" tasks...)

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1123581321
Workamajig. It is agency management software that comes in two flavors: slow
Flash-based and buggy inscrutable "flat design" HTML. No API and bans all
interoperability with any other software, probably because of the despairing
mess underneath. This isn't just an engineer's whining; the opaqueness of
business functions it creates leaves millions on the table.

But that's agency management software. Orbiting categories like project
management, kanban, communication and time-tracking have many good options but
integrating them in a way that can "check off all the boxes" enough to satisfy
risk-averse partners and controllers is difficult.

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doggydogs94
If you work in IT, 90% of your users are on Windows. And the enterprise
applications just work there. I hate having to support the Mac an Linux users
in a corporate environment; nothing seems to work there.

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FLGMwt
GitHub: I'm coming from bitbucket where the PRs are... sane. I want a single
view with the diff and online comments _that nest_ , which allow for
traversable conversations​. The new GH review process is logically
impenetrable.

Bitbucket has native LGTMs (approves) without having to click the "Files" tab,
the "Review" button, the "approve" radio option, then "Okay".

~~~
marcinkuzminski
RhodeCode has a similar system, in addition, you can have a versioned PRs
which show you diffs across updates of PR for easier and faster reviews.

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tedsanders
Office 2007.

The lesson, I think, isn't that corporations are dumb - it's that
compatability has substantial value.

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jetti
SSIS. Luckily I've moved teams so I'm done with SSIS but holy shit does that
product suck. The running joke on my team is that it was built by interns. So
many visual studio features just don't work despite it being in Visual Studio.

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Raed667
Forced to use : Like to change to

\- Windows10 : Ubuntu/Arch

\- Outlook : Gmail

\- Eclipse : Jetbrains

\- Skype : Slack

\- EXTjs : Vue

\- SVN : Git

\- Jira : ANYTHING ELSE!

~~~
rochak
Finally, someone who prefers Jetbrains to Eclipse!

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karmicthreat
Rockwell Logix 5000 (PLC programming) \- Note, all PLC/Industrial software is
garbage.

Ewon (industrial remote VPN)

Atmel studio

Angular 1

Quickbooks

Eagle (PCB design)

Confluence

Onsip (all others I have used are bad also)

~~~
kjdndisneinj
It's pretty easy to avoid Atmel Studio by using the gcc tool chain. It builds
the same binaries as Studio, so you shouldn't have compatibility issues.

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TP4Cornholio
IBM WebSphere. It is truly awful.

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art187
What reports do they want? Could one get such reports from github's API?

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rubatuga
Microsoft Access --> any other reasonable DB

Citrix --> any native app

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jnordwick
Spring

Hibernate

maven

KDB+ (but now I love it)

~~~
shiv86
>KDB+ (but now I love it)

What changed ?

~~~
jnordwick
Using it. The first demo I saw was somebody just typing K into the REPL and I
didn't realize all the work it was doing. The language was a mess I thought,
etc.. the usual.

When I went looking into it further, the language was so clean. The concepts
so simple and clear. My first programming language was Scheme so it was almost
like sitting down in CS61A again and learning to program from simple
constructs.

And the amount of data I could pump though was incredible.

There were a lot of hump and ideas I had to get over. This workspace idea it
had (back in K2). Strange trigger and dependency system that a GUI was even
built on. But I did get over them, and really enjoyed them. I even used some
of the trigger/dependency ideas for a risk management system I worked on.

It is still my favorite database. One day, just so I can say I did, I'll work
at Kx for a little while if Arthur lets me :)

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aaronmdjones
Microsoft Windows.

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kekebo
Slack.

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planteen
Eclipse

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Papirola
hipchat

