I’ve worked with some pretty rotten software, but management software is easily the most user unfriendly, so my vote goes to HPSM.
CET Designer with in house tools added. Nothing worked well, or even worked as documented for longer than a couple months. And engineering projects using it would last years… We’d go to do as builts and nothing worked the way it did when the project began.
Microsoft dynamics AX.
I raise you Microsoft Dynamics SL
If I never see IMDS and CAMS again it will be too soon.
SAP and nearly every accounting package. And I didn’t have to use them daily, I just had to support them. Ugh.
As an accountant who has to use SAP every day at my current job, fuck everything about SAP and whoever came up with this steaming pile of absolute dogshit needs to be put in front of a firing squad.
What gets me is the price you pay in order to get the abuse of a product that never quite works well enough to be “finished”, and then you get to pay consultants for years to overcome it’s shortfalls. This is a classic C-suite boondoggle that nobody can get around to admitting was a complete waste of money and it’s so expensive that nobody can survive flushing the sunk cost of by getting out. And then it’s intertwined in the ERP of so many supply chains that you can’t not use it because every company above and below uses it (and hates it) so you have to implement it for the B2B interoperability.
It’s a horrendous chain of inevitability, and IBM is laughing all the way to the bank.
SAP is not owned by IBM, no?
My bad, I always dealt with IBM consultants on SAP sites so I assumed it was shitty enough to be an IBM product. I guess not, it’s its own little island of shittiness. But according to Wikipedia, it was started as an IBM project inherited from Xerox and carried on by the 5 engineers at IBM that were on it when it was cancelled and they left to continue with it. So there is a genetic background showing that the shit acorn doesn’t fall far from the shit tree.
So it’s so bad that even IBM abandoned it!
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I have plenty of stories from when I used to work in purchase ledger and customer service.
Klick2Contact is the biggest piece of shit I’ve ever used. Imagine a CRM that randomly crashes and loses your tickets, and where it can take several minutes to assign an email to yourself. Now imagine having to use software that bad whilst logging cases on a separate CRM (because K2C wasn’t fit for purpose) and answering emails within a 10 minute SLA.
Best I used in terms of call centre software was Salesforce. Ironically it’s not specifically designed as a CRM.
Part of the reason I got fired from my old call centre job was trying to deal with K2C.
Worst enterprise level accountancy software I used was probably a tie between JD Edwards and OpenAccounts. Best accounting software was definitely Xero.
I’m so glad I never had to support JDE, everything I’ve seen of it in screen share sessions makes it look like an absolute pain in the ass.
VMware Workspace One.
That shit is so ill suited for management of computers that it’s a wonder they ever sold a single license.
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.
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.
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.
Exactly that. When building a load-bearing business process, it’s always critical that the person writing it knows what they’re doing.
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.
I wish I could hire you and a couple other people who replied to this lol. “Match stick architecture” is definitely something we have and I have been trying to shore up / replace for years.
Sorry, I missed this comment. I actually love doing that kind of shit, I get some sort of weird pleasure out of fixing chaotic stuff like that. That tends to be my role almost all the time; I’ll come in, stay a few years, fix everything and get bored, and then move on somewhere else to do it again.
My current job is the only place that I haven’t done that, because it’s probably the best company that I’ve ever worked for.
Was quite happy to leave Lotus Notes behind. Will be almost as happy to leave MS Dynamics 365 behind at some future point.
You clearly didn’t use it for long enough - I was “stuck” with it for over 20 years. I wouldn’t say I liked it, but it was so familiar I couldn’t dislike it.
I had a coworker who showed me how powerful it could be if you knew what you were doing. He loved it. I didn’t like it at all as an email client.
Lotus. Fucking. Notes.
Never again
Lotus Notes. I called it Bogus Notes. I do not miss it.
My previous job finally got off of lotus notes in 2019.
My first text job was at a fortune 500 that used Lotus Notes. I think they transitioned off in 2014 or 2015.
What a weird software. They had some whole processes that happened in Notes that were like mini applications and databases.
You gotta respect those early adopters, the trendsetters, the pioneers.
I left a job when the previous notes admin left and they tried to get me to run that hot garbage with no training and no bump in pay.
Oh hell yes, that’s a piece of garbage.
My first programming job out of college was in Lotus Notes. I spent most of my time trying to trick it into doing what I wanted, it was a constant cat-and-mouse game. Kinda fun if it wasn’t so miserable. Had to gtfo after a couple years.
The programming language Java. I could rant for half a goddamn hour.
React
Adobe Coldfusion
Autodesk Maya 2016
MyRedVest!
