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.

Mac OS X.

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

Windows

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

I worked for a company that manufactured products and had been running on NetSuite as the ERP for about a decade when I got there. It had been customized and tweaked and worked pretty well for what we did over that time frame, with lots of time-saving automation. Shortly before I joined the company they were bought by a conglomerate and merged into a division with a couple other somewhat complimentary companies in the central US and west coast. Although it was supposed to be a merger of equals, it soon became apparent the west coast company had won the merger and was calling the shots. They were closer to our largest customer base and while our revenues were pretty similar, they shipped much smaller volumes and had much higher margins (they apparently at one point had a box that just had a Raspberry Pi or something similar inside that they sold for $5k/each). The big difference was we were a big name in a market with a lot of competition, so we had to be efficient and smart with our margins, while they were only big in markets where they had no competition; where they had competition they were often the last choice. While the plan was originally to move everyone to NetSuite, which already had options to run multiple companies/subsidiaries out of one instance, that was abruptly cancelled and we were told we would instead need to switch to Xtuple.

Xtuple was awful. NetSuite runs in a web browser but Xtuple opens multiple windows that look like something written in Java in the late ’90s. Want to copy some text? Unless it’s in an editable text field you can basically forget about it, and even if that field was once editable, many of them can never be edited again after the first time you save, or sometimes even as soon as you click out of it after your first time typing in it.

I don’t even know how much of it was Xtuple’s fault versus the company’s customizations. Where switching to NetSuite would’ve put all the companies in the same instance and allowed for one store to sell all the products, the plan to switch to Xtuple meant a separate server for each company, plus a fourth server to coordinate with each location. When you license Xtuple, you also get access to the source code and can make changes as needed. There was one guy at the west coast company who had total control of the software and no one else had access to it. It seemed like he used this opportunity to create the proverbial million lines of undocumented spaghetti code and guarantee job security. To try and help him with creating all the different Xtuple servers, they hired a consultant directly from Xtuple to create our instance, but when the spaghetti code guy came to integrate it with his part none of it worked, apparently because spaghetti code guy was doing all sorts of things in a non-standard way. This delayed our launch by 3 months because spaghetti code guy then went and rewrote the stuff the consultant did to make it work, and of course a lot of things still didn’t work right for several months after we launched.

Because Xtuple didn’t do everything NetSuite did, some functions were moved to outside software, like Customer/Technical Support to Zendesk. The built-in tools in NetSuite weren’t the best, but it was directly integrated so it pulled customer and product history in and could make an RMA directly in the ERP, so when the product arrived Receiving basically just had to push a button to check it in (the west coast company had never bothered putting their repairs in Xtuple much beyond listing the final price of the repair; they managed the actual repair process in a massive, unwieldy Google spreadsheet). Zendesk didn’t have that, so all of the data had to be manually entered twice, once in Zendesk, then again in Xtuple. We also didn’t put our old customer history into Xtuple, including even just a customer list, partly because the west coast company assured us they already had all the same customers as us (it turned out they maybe had a third of our customers, and that only counts business customers, not individuals). Since we had access to the code it seems like we should’ve been able to tie directly into Xtuple, but spaghetti code guy would only allow custom APIs he created. We never even got that to work because a year or so in the head honchos decided to move to Salesforce instead, so they spent a ton more money trying to make that work. When I left they still weren’t communicating, and people coming in from the conglomerate were starting to ask why millions of dollars had been spent on multiple transitions to rebuild functionality that still wasn’t working 3 years in. They were also cancelling the 4th Xtuple server to control the other 3 because they just couldn’t seem to make it work.

In the end there are a lot of things I don’t miss from that company, but I found Xtuple to be especially x-stupid. Still, I don’t know if it was the software itself or spaghetti code guy. Everyone acknowledged he was a problem when he wasn’t in the room, except maybe the CFO, but no one could do anything about it because it seemed like the businesses would completely halt without him.

Cisco ACI. What a janky, buggy mess. Dozens of clicks to accomplish tasks you used to be able to do in less than 5 seconds from the CLI. And the GUI is laid out like a fever dream. You need to script everything to be even close to efficient, even unique one off tasks, and then you spend more time editing scripts than it used to take to do jobs manually from the CLI. We have one environment with a couple hundred independently managed switches that one guy can manage pretty effectively with little to no automation. It takes a dozen people to manage an environment with about three hundred switches and they are always fixing stupid bugs. The staff turnover there is hilarious. Most people try it for a while and then run for the hills.

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