Ask Lemmy

My company got acquired by a competitor, we had been running on PeopleSoft, and I don't remember the software the new company used but it was a soul sucking black screen with basically a DOS prompt that you had to learn key combinations to use. I had never thought I cared about the beautiful visual interface of PeopleSoft but my God it turned out I did.

Still at the job, but QuarkXPress is such immense garbage and most of our legacy documents were built in it so It still a daily requirement, thankfully InDesign was an option for use a few years after starting so its less of an issue these days. Obviously no piece of software is perfect but the amount of extra steps Quark causes to do basic functions reminds me of back in college when I was forced to use Avid for some class projects—similarly bloated, clunky, unintuitive nonsense.

Quark touted adding the “eyedropper tool” a few years back in a new release—in 2020 (or maybe the 2019 version, I can’t remember). This software is just as old as InDesign, the fact they didn’t add an EYEDROPPER tool for style selection is beyond confounding. They also hadn’t implemented individual cell styling for tables until like 2018. The company also has the nerve to put front-and-center that it will open and convert InDesign files in an attempt to appeal to people sick of Adobe’s current subscription model (which don’t get me wrong, I am equally annoyed with), but let me tell you as a daily user of both: STAY AS FAR AWAY AS YOU CAN FROM QUARK.

I once had to rebuild some legacy code for a digital scoreboard. The code was written in a code mentioned in "Office Space". I think it was called top speed.
Until that day I thought it was a made up language.

• Service Plus
• Salesforce
• Lotus Notes

Maybe you have heard about a software called Ragtime. It‘s basically a combination of Word and Excel. However, there‘s no option to export any files that can be edited with any other office application, and you can‘t open .xls/.odf etc files with it. Oh, and the best part about it: You can always only undo one action.

Man, HPSM was trash but christ I'd take it back for a ticketing system over Salesforce in a heartbeat. Trashfire tries to do too much and excels at none of it.

I think so many people are institutionalized into Microsoft office suite (especially for outlook mail and calendar) and it is just so RIDICULOUSLY bad - I'd never really appreciated gmail or complimented gsuite until my company was acquired and forced to regularly work in outlook.

I immediately took a 50% productivity hit and even daily success towards regular goals just doesn't feel quite like success anymore because I'm always chasing my tail. Luckily I was already an overachiever, so my diminished workload is still good. Stupid company fucked themself out of a lot of wins for such a small, tone deaf decision.

The simplest way I can say it is that before with gsuite I just never thought about productivity apps - they worked in the background to support me well enough. Now that we're in outlook, I have multiple bad interactions that I have to navigate around every single workday.

Kafka, especially when a company forces you to use their homemade interface to search through topics

Windows

Installing Windows with SCCM... without PXEbooting them. I had to use 3 different flash drives for like 8-10 computers at a time, record the MAC addresses, set the hostnames and IPs and then kick it off. I did this daily for weeks.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

It was bad at my old job but I thought I figured out a good workflow. Then I switched to my current role thinking they would use it better, it's just introduced new problems for me.

There's all the regular jank of Marketing Cloud that comes from a bunch of poorly integrated acquisitions. But the worst part for me is trying to pass data from Marketing Cloud to Salesforce.

Data just doesn't go through if it doesn't match perfectly. And neither program tells you because it's between systems.

You can fulfil all of Marketing Cloud's requirements, but nothing will happen if things don't match up on the Salesforce end.

Testing a recent campaign was so stressful I've updated my resume and jumped back on the job sites

I had a gig as a software developer at a company that tried to organize its software development with... the most horrid call center ticketing system I've ever seen.

The software was named "TANSS" (an acronym for "transaction action notification solution system" which... says a lot... in a certain way). It couldn't handle UTF-8 and the company had Asian customers, it placed the signature of a different company under each message sent to a customer and project management might as well have been non-existent (supposedly the crapper of a ticketing system had "projects" but it was just a super naive lining up of tasks without buffer times, burndown/velocity chart or anything).

The expensive p.o.s. was strong-armed into the company, probably because one of the company owners had a background in tech support crap where you're generally chasing billable minutes.

I don't know if it was unprofessional by me, but I quickly refused to interact with the whole thing and handed in my notice (and I had actually liked the company and my tasks up until that point). Even Jira, which many consider a highly unpleasant system to work with, felt lean, responsive and fun after that experience.

It's been over 6 years, but I can state with certainty, if I see that system in use anywhere, my respect is gone and whether customer or employer, they'll be a hot potato in my hands form that moment on :)

Micros cash register software. Endless lines of corrupted database entries.

It was legal software called Needles. The firm didn't use email to communicate. They sent Needles messages. I quit after a week.

During my statistics graduate degree, there was one course we had to do our data analysis using SAS. I absolutely despise it and refuse to work for any employer that would expect me to use it.

SPSS is also crap - at my current job there were some processes that used it's scripting "language". It was both painful but cathartic to slowly rewrite those processes into R.

I'm a physical therapist. EMR program called Raintree. So, so cumbersome.

Amazon Chime.

VII, aka V 2, not 7. Just that naming gives you an idea of how unintuitive everything was.

I supported a couple dental offices for a while, and I hope I never have to touch EagleSoft again....

My company decided to replace selenium with their own in house solution... It didn't work but they kept doubling down on it and tried to present it to all other branches in the org to get them all to buy in. After I left my friend told me it became a dumpster fire and everyone abandoned the project.