I’ve worked with some pretty rotten software, but management software is easily the most user unfriendly, so my vote goes to HPSM.
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.
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.
Oh god, I’m so sorry. That’s exactly what we went through, and yep, same thing. Changing even the tiniest element in the UI would break their whole “automation”.
That was one of the many things I warned about but was overridden. Lol, thankfully I was saved by his retirement and new CTO agreeing with me.
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.”
On Linux, the desktop client of Webex still does not support the chat feature, so you’re forced to use Firefox or whatever browser to join meetings instead. The best part is that some Webex rep said they’d add this feature to the client back on 2023, and it’s now 2024 and it’s STILL NOT HERE.
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.
I’m pretty sure you can disable the bleeps and bloops people are complaining about - get a tool, then don’t spend any time to learn it and then suffer using it.
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.
IMO Teams beats all the others on video calling specifically. But everything else it does worse than its competition. The message boards and chat features are abysmal.
I beg to differ. I’m jumping over from a Zoom workplace to a Teams workplace, and Teams is trash. Worse video, worse audio, worse connectivity, fewer end user features, etc. The only thing that’s nice is how it archives meeting chats and recordings.
It’s only used because it’s basically free with enterprise office.
Interesting, teams has the worst video call quality I’ve ever seen. Trying to pair program is painful, can’t move too fast or the other person will miss what you did since the screen share frame rate is like 5.
Same VPN connection on slack, no noticeable lag, high frame rate, and very crisp resolution.
Teams beats all the others of video calling specifically.
That’s because it’s Skype. MS bought them and integrated it into Teams.
FOSDEM 2021 was hosted on Matrix. After that exp no other meetsing app lives up to it. I just want seemless chat with presentation and seemless break out rooms again.
When our company annoucned the switch to Teams I actually offered to pay for the slack licence out of my own pocket instead. But the boss insisted we need the onedrive integration or some shit and declined.
Yeah that was BS. Boss was told to say anything other than “to save money”. That’s the entire value prop for Teams.
I had this same discussion at work. My employer is full office 365 and SharePoint for everything. Teams is a catch-all app that does a lot, but none of it well.
Fine but why can’t I ever find my chats back? There’s so many damn channels and they each have threads that make it even more difficult to find your way I see a channel in my unread area, then I open it, and if I click away, now I can’t find it anymore. Annoys me to no end. How do people deal with this? So many different chats, it’s insane.
There’s a bit of configuration for the channel list that you can do to keep what you want where you want. Sounds like you have a section set to only show unread, that’s a setting. Also, there are back and forward keys (and shortcuts for them too) to move between a series of chats like a browser.
As a messenger, this is objectively wrong. There may be some less than obvious customization options in slack, but it is so much more robust for messaging.
I mean, threads alone put slack in a whole other league.
If you’re being serious, I’d really like to know what you dislike about slack. It’s been a minute since I used it as my daily driver, but I find myself quite frequently irritated about not having enough control.
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.
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.
I mean, that sounds completely horrible, but it says something about the world of web, when it is not that different than any regular frontent/backend web stack. I.e. HTML + CSS + javascript + backend language + sql + random shit on top of it, all in the single project. And that’s even before talking about native apps for mobile.
Didn’t leave the job over it, but SAP.
Shitty. Ass. Program.
Yeah, fucking Business Objects was the bane of my existence. The worst situations were where the creator of the report used their shitty GUI joins instead of actually writing a SQL load script. It made troubleshooting that much more annoying.
That was one of two that came to mind(a long with Oracle’s Peoplesoft). I was an HR department of one, no training, no documentation, no one who knew how it should work for HR. I often cited it, along with Peoplesoft for the explosion of solutions HR has experienced in the last 15 years.
