Microsoft Outlook, no question:

- It hangs all the time for a few seconds at a time,

- The search is moronic (how about you look on the server and on my computer at the same time instead of hanging for a while and then displaying that dumbass message offering the option to search on my computer instead when there's a problem with the connection?),

- Switching to the unread message view regularly results in a progress doofer that never disappears until you switch to a different view and switch back

- The message list font size gets corrupted by moving between Windows of different DPIs forcing you to switch to a different folder then switch back again to make everything readable

- It asks you whether you want to save changes just because you've clicked a link in a calendar appointment

- Got thousands of emails? It's slow, slow, SLOW, SLOW(!!!), SLOOOOOOOOOOW!!!!!

- Too many modal dialogs

- It's clunky as hell when juggling calendar appointments, booking rooms, etc.

- When opening a meeting series it asks me whether I want to open the whole series or a single meeting every single time. Can I just have a modifier key for this, please, so that I can open whichever way I choose without being prompted?

- Inconsistent and unpredictable behaviour when it comes to inserting images as attachments versus inline in an email

- Losing messages in conversation view

- Difficult to follow conversations/find all messages if you don't use conversation view(!)

- Inconsistent behaviour around contact auto-completion: sometimes people end up in the auto-complete list, sometimes they don't

I could go on. I won't.

I've used Outlook at a lot of companies and can't say I share most of these experiences.

10s of thousands of emails? Not slow.

Hangs for a few seconds? Not in my experience.

Whole series vs a single meeting? Only when editing, which makes sense. Opening to grab the conference ID? I don't get asked that question.

I've had to use Outlook in some way for the last 20 years, and I just live with it, but I'm also saying... what you describe hasn't been normal for me for a long time, at a lot of different companies. Maybe it's something to do with whoever runs your Exchange..?

> Maybe it's something to do with whoever runs your Exchange..?

Well it's 365 so that, unfortunately, is Microsoft.

Yeah, same here.

My company has recently switched to G Suite from Office, and I'm actually starting to consider this as an actual perk of working somewhere, just to avoid Office (Outlook above all, but also Sharepoint, etc…).

I used to love Outlook until my work switched over to Office 365 version of Outlook. Now it is driving me nuts. The small things such as the animations when switching between mail and calendar, the way it displays conversations, the way it searches. I could go on, but I think we are on the same sinking boat here.

I think you're right: company I'm with has been using Office 365 since I joined back in 2017. In many ways it's decent but Outlook is just full of small irritations that really start to add up when you find yourself having to spend a lot of time in it.

The last good version of Outlook was 2010. Ever since they re-wrote the UI form 2013 onward, it's got more progressively worse.

The one feature I love about Outlook is that the inbox can be sorted by Received time, ascending. And the list focus defaults to the most recent entry.

Every SMS and email client that has 'most recent on top' as the only view drives me f*g nuts.

I want my oldest conversations on top so I can see which ones have been awaiting a response or are done and can be archived/deleted, but apparently that's not how anybody works anymore.

I do that too. Hardcoded defaults is a pain. I acctually like desktop Outlook and I wish it just froze in time forever so I don't have to relearn it. I hate when the UIs are changed and I have to relearn where all the buttons are in a program I don't really care much for.

That’s a really great way to get to emails I’m going to try it

Ah, I see you have never had the pleasure of using Lotus Notes. These problems might seem insignificant in comparison.

Haha - yes, you're probably right. Company I contracted at a few years ago (and a big enterprise at that) still had a PC running a long unsupported version of Lotus Notes for obscure, but apparently business critical purposes, and it was becoming a huge problem for them. Fortunately not one that fell under the purview of the team I was on.

You should give the online version at https://outlook.com a try. I've been using it since the corona outbreak and it's actually better than the desktop version imo.

The new web-based Outlook 365 is a lot better, but still quite buggy and massively lacking compared to Fastmail.

Wow! Had a CEO once try to convert the company from Gsuit to office/teams so he could use Outlook. Figured it was great...

If you have any third-party Outlook add-ins enabled, you might try disabling them.

There are a lot of poorly written add-ins out there.

It hasn't changed much in the twenty years since I last used it then.

MS Windows, any version except 3.1 or earlier. MS Outlook, MS Word, MS Excel, McAffe crap, KDE, Gnome, Pulseaudio, CMake (you don't need to configure anything). Android any version. MS would be proud to have the same amount of brain damage as in Android. Any Google software.

I apologize for saying this in advance but I'd have to say for me it's GIMP.

Even after all its feature and popularity I find it extremely hard to use and often end up wasting hours trying to create a simple graphic. As a last resort I always end up booting Windows just to use Photoshop to do the same. I have been trying to move away from Windows to linux and so far I'm super happy with everything. But Photoshop is the only reason I have to keep Windows alive (or atleast use wine)

I'll echo this. Every time I use GIMP, I have to google and re-google what I want to do, skip through a Youtube video for the pertinent parts, discover that the youtube video is for an outdated version, google again, yaddy yadda yadda. Even for something as simple as putting red text over an image, or cropping down a picture, it just takes forever to figure out the magic incantations to get google to return something like what I am looking to do. Yes, I am sure that it is great for complicated image manipulation once I have been using it for a few months. I've even sat down to learn it before, spending a few evenings for a few months trying to grok it. But 95% of the time that I need image processing it's for incredibly simple stuff. Honestly, MSpaint is sufficient for ~90% of my needs and it takes 1/20th of the time just to load, let alone get anything done. GIMP makes great stuff faster than anything else. But I do not want to make great stuff, I just want to put an arrow pointing at a button on a screen capture.

Agree, I kinda hated the GIMP but then I learned it's logic and I started to like it. The problem is when you used Photoshop before. Some things that you can do there with one click take quite tedious procedure in GIMP. For instance drawing simple rectangle with fill facepalm.

Know what you mean, I rarely have to do image editing, if I can't do it in preview, I groan, because it usually means I have to go to GIMP and waste hours doing something that seems very simple. I think last time it was just adding a black border to an image, there seemed to be a border tool, but it insisted on making a picture frame effect and I could not understand why it just couldn't do a simple single colour border. And it seems slow, moving around the image, things like that, it should be far better.

There was recently a post on HN about a GIMP fork called glimpse which aims to improve UI/UX: https://github.com/glimpse-editor/Glimpse or project page at https://glimpse-editor.org/

It's great to see that, but I doubt they can do much about the big UI issues, which come from the way GIMP's internals work. The fact that you still can't select more than one layer, not even to move them around, is a 100% deal-breaker for me and everyone I've shown GIMP to.

Fortunately, Krita has gotten extremely good, even for photo work. If anyone has a shot at clawing back some Adobe market share, it's then.

I think moving multiple layers works in GIMP :o) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TwEPaV1ilc

IMHO, Gimp was much easier to use before they revamped the GUI to imitate Photoshop. For those who didn’t try it, it looked like this: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cleaning_up_Fourie...

The menu layout and structure looks exactly the same, except it's floating, which you get in modern GIMP by default. Can you explain in more depth how it's tangibly different?

The icons are different which still throw me off. The colour select tool is weirdly now stacked behind the cropping tool or some other selection tool.

That's why you learn keyboard shortcuts.

You can move those about though

Um... I think they need a copy of Photoshop if they're going to try to "imitate" it. They imitated it as closely as chopping onions is similar to learning how to drive a car. I checked it out in January, while doing a month of open source alternatives to Adobe. That's a big no.

Adobe is pricey but that money is pumped very well into UI. After playing with some of the open source alternatives... yea, $55 a month is now cheap to me since I now know what crappy UI and ass backwards workflows really look like.

It might've been for you. No discernible difference for me.

Shit, that's exactly what photoshop used to look like (photoshop 7)

For raster drawing there's Krita, for vector drawing there's InkScape, for raster manipulation there's GIMP. GIMP is really not for drawing and is cumbersome for those purposes. Just like you really wouldn't use InkScape for photo manipulation.

This is always surprising to hear, because for me GIMP is substantially more intuitive and productive and easy than Photoshop ever was. Maybe things have changed lately, but every time I've tried to use Photoshop my eyes glossed over, whereas whenever I fire up GIMP I'm pretty quickly able to figure out how to do something. This is especially true with "single window mode" enabled (which pulls those weird sidebar windows into the main window).

I definitely get that if you're already used to Photoshop then GIMP's gonna be an adjustment (and vice versa), and my GIMPing is admittedly not very complicated (mostly just making memes), but it's just weird to hear of people who think that Photoshop's actually easier to use given that I've experienced the exact opposite by pretty much every metric.

Yes, it's called the "baby duck syndrome" [0], and it's stopping lots of professionals from even looking up when it comes to trying something different.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imprinting_(psychology)#Baby_d...

> because for me GIMP is substantially more intuitive and productive and easy than Photoshop ever was.

It took me some time to adjust, but yeah I felt the same.

> I definitely get that if you're already used to Photoshop then GIMP's gonna be an adjustment (and vice versa)

In fact the argument of people finding GIMP unintuitive is that Photoshop is better.

I mainly complain about GIMP's updates breaking changes though.

It’s interesting you say that, because I find myself to be quite productive in GIMP.

I think the basic set of tools are pretty easy to use, and the one or two other windows you need open (like the tool-specific settings) are also pretty understandable. When I stumble upon something new I often find pretty good official docs on the topic.

I don't know man maybe you're right.. But just today I had to edit a small screenshot and draw an arrow from text to a button and after trying all sorts of things like downloading scm scripts from defunct sites to reading two9 tutorials I couldn't do it. Maybe I lack knowledge to understand it. I kinda wasted more than 20 minutes and still don't know how to make arrow. Would take me 10s to do it in PS (plus boot time of Windows).

Regardless I do appreciate the hard work the guys have put in. I feel like such an ingrate to make comments like this about free software. I guess it's time to find an online course and learn it properly and if I still don't get it then that's that.

Have you tried photopea.com? Not affiliated but I use it and switched off Photoshop to this and it works for most purposes.

Only problem with GIMP is their idiotic decision to split saving and exporting.

A bit unintuitive, yes, but it makes sense. In PS, if I save as PSD, do some work, save as PNG, do some more work and save again, it'll be saving into the PNG, not PSD, which will effectively make me lose my work.

Their "Export and overwrite" menu makes it very convenient to do quick edits where you only care about the raster, and the split avoids the above mentioned stupidity when working on bigger projects.

Wow. So glad to hear I am not the only one who struggles with GIMP.

I find myself spending hours to do the most simple of tasks. Anytime I have to search for a tutorial on GIMP, I cringe. I am waiting for that UI/UX fork to come out for Mac.

What other alternatives are there that work on Mac besides Inkscape and Krita???

MS Sharepoint takes the cake. Impossible to navigate, hysterically difficult to use for storing and maintaining content repositories / wiki's.

Also the outlook/skype/teams/lync universe of communication tools is laughably inconsistent, it's very difficult for me to do very simple tasks in these tools.

I burned 4 years making SharePoint intranet sites inside a big corporation. None of those skills transferred to modern development.

I work with SharePoint professionally and it's incredibly frustrating. If I'm trying to find out which list a document was uploaded to, it could be in 3+ locations. Much of my time with SP has been spent figuring out where stuff is and WHY it was uploaded there in the first place.

As someone about to (reluctantly) go down this rabbit hole, I'm not feeling reassured. ;(

I was playing around with Sharepoint Online, the latest version. It was my first time looking at sharepoint and I had something usable working in about 30 minutes. Maybe they fixed things with the cloud version?

I've disliked Sharepoint in the past, and recently also had good experiences. Yes, perhaps they have cleaned up their act.

Program that saved me 100 hours: using LaTeX to write a scientific paper.

Program that wasted me 100 hours: using LaTeX to make the poster for said scientific paper.

LaTeX is great for when you need to focus on your content and don't have much time to spend on the presentation. However, once the presentation is the entire point, LaTeX is not the right tool.

Well, except if you like boring posters.

For me personally, my slides improved significantly when I started using Latex. Imo Latex forces you to give clean, concise presentations. If there is content that takes a lot of fiddling, your presentation is probably overloaded with things that won't reach the audience anyway.

You’ve never had to give a talk with a video inside ? Or have you gotten that to work in latex ?

Tab out to the video. Play. Tab back to presentation.

Video is included as a separate attachment in the email sent around.

Agree with both sides of latex

Factorio?

More seriously, the absolute worst developer experience I've ever had was a weird proprietary environment called "OpenAT" for a mobile module system. Admittely we were in the beta programme because we needed features, but every new firmware update would fix some features of the operating system and break others. At one point while trying to debug terrible sound we noticed that the volume control wasn't at all linear but a sawtooth: the top few bits were getting lost somewhere. Development required Eclipse, and the reboot-download-reboot cycle took several minutes. No real JTAG, only debug logging over USB. Crashes would, however, lose the log buffer, so you couldn't be quite sure where the program crashed, and all the important bits were real-time so couldn't be single-stepped. Debugging all that was extremely slow.

A hundred hours is only just under three work weeks. It's very easy to get led into a dead end that wastes that much development effort on a feature that turns out to be infeasible or a bad idea, or an intractable bug. I think I've had one of those incidents at every job, not necessarily every year but frequent enough that they're not all memorable.

Factorio is great, I don’t see it as a waste! It’s given me a new respect for logistics and advanced planning. I think the whole idea is a massive exercise in programming, producing functions, changing structures and then debugging the problem/expanding the bottle neck. But yeah it’s still a game.

This is why I avoid the more complex games where you build things (Factorio, Kerbal space program, etc.) Playing them scratches some of the same itches I get from writing software. So I avoid playing them and re-direct that energy into using an actual programming language to build a real thing.

There are upsides and downsides. The challenges in a game are designed to be overcome, but the satisfaction of solving real problems is even better than solving puzzles in-game.

Sometimes the parallels for me are uncanny. I'm faffing about with OpenSSL right now and it feels like nothing so much as a badly designed game sub-system. Can somebody please fix OpenSSL so I can get back to the core game please? :)

I used to say that Unity3D is Minecraft for programmers.

In a similar vein, DwarfFortress

I usually play it with DfHack to handle all the labour assignments automatically, and then I play it usually up to the point that I'm tapped into a magma shoot and flooding the magma with water to obtain obsidian.

Then I lose interest, and play the same biome on adventure mode where I attempt to find the ruin of the mine I created before and plunder it.

True. Factorio shows how complicated and power wasting logistics are. And it's already generous enough by not having items that can expire, it makes logistics exponentially harder

Somewhere on the back of an envelope I have written "bipolar train-sistor", as the start of an attempt to do computation in Factorio without using any of the features intended for the purpose like the circuit network. Never got round to actually building it.

(An unloaded train is clearly a "hole" charge carrier..)

Factorio is such a great game! I have easily “wasted” more than 500 hours in that game. It’s one of the most satisfying games out there. The one thing that is incredible is that sometimes your layouts end up looking like circuit boards when zoomed out.

Yeah I've probably wasted 100 hours on Factorio.

The other 900 hours were great though!

:D

Surprised nobody's mentioned systemd yet!

My worst experience was when I was on a cross-country train writing code for a project whose database was mysql. No internet, intentionally. Something happened with one of my inserts (can't remember what exactly) and I had to restart mysqld. Problem was, with the bad insert, mysqld took longer than 30s to start, which forced systemd to restart it because of a default, undocumented setting to restart a service if it's not up after 30s. Again. And again. And again. Nothing in the documentation hinted that this was a feature of systemd anywhere, and I was stuck troubleshooting that nonsense instead of just writing code.

Systemd is just filled with undocumented crap and features that shouldn't exist by default, leading to headache after headache after headache. Such a pain in the ass.

> Nothing in the documentation hinted that this was a feature of systemd anywhere

Nothing except three paragraphs in systemd.service(5) (TimeoutStartSec=, TimeoutStopSec=, TimeoutSec=), with references to systemd-system.conf(5) where the defaults are described. I wouldn't call that undocumented. Whether it should exist by default is another question; on balance, I'm glad it does.

This seems like the bug I was having at the time: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/3912

Or this: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/227017/how-to-chang...

Or this: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/5773

Or: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/3901

Or: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/2047

I don't remember seeing any documentation at the time, but I'm clearly not the only one who's had issues with this exact problem. The last one has recent examples of people not being able to find it, and understandably so. Their documentation is shit, fullstop, and no reasonable service should restart in a loop by default after 90s. That's just asinine.

This seems to be veering in the direction of the Land of Moved Goalposts and Non-Sequiturs, but I'm game for one more round, because lockdown.

It's rather unlikely that the first issue, which is an ordering problem during service shutdown, has much in common with timeouts during service startup, which you have described as your original issue.

The Stack Exchange question is a straightforward how-to for adjusting the timeouts.

5773 requests a clarification of the documentation of timeouts and signalling behavior.

3901 is a case of misplacing the timeout directive.

2047 is a sort of philosophical problem of reporting uniformity vs. consistency with manual configuration. The systemd team prefers the former, whereas I would prefer the latter for not violating the principle of least surprise, although I understand the reasons for choosing the first option.

Anyhow, I still don't see good support for your assertion of the complete lack of timeout documentation, just tangentially related distractions. A complex set of problems, and service management does qualify, will have edge cases, insufficiently clear documentation, and outright bugs, which is why software is never finished. Older init systems had all of these, but they didn't give you the tools to attempt to rectify the problems, so it was all more or less swept under the rug. Using a facile "shit, fullstop" characterization therefore tells me more about your views than the actual technical merits or documentation quality of systemd.

The post is about how systemd wasted lots of time, in a thread about software that has wasted lots of time. The issues around bad documentation and the specific issue (the last one is probably the issue I had, but this was five years ago lol. Knowing me and arch linux, I probably didn't have the full man pages installed, so the cli tools were the only thing I had available.) wasted me a lot of time and very clearly others, and that's exactly the point of this discussion!

Hell, to troubleshoot that issue, I even ran something like a `find / -exec strings -a '{}' ; | grep timeout` and found nothing that ended up being helpful. But I absolutely had some form of documentation, again likely the last link I provided which isn't simply a philosophical issue when it provides misleading information that would have ultimately fixed the issue if it gave more informative output!

You admit yourself that the documentation can be insufficiently clear with bugs, and it's true: systemd happens to have lots of time killing bugs. The whole point of this thread.

You're missing the forest for the trees, friend.

Never write new code on a train.

I've learned this lesson many times. The WiFi is not reliable, the offline documentation is spotty (with the exception of emacs), and you'll waste more time than needed trying to do things the wrong way instead of searching online for solutions later.

No new code on the train. Optimise existing or fill in some TODOs. No new code on the train.

Nah, I'll keep doing it. Thanks for the suggestion, though.

In addition to the already mentioned MS Office pieces:

• Android programming. Tried it once, wasted many days trying to make sure the app works on all phone models ranging from $10 to $1000. There were some hardware-related parts that are poorly standardized and abused by the manufacturers a lot. And yeah, the $10-$1000 range coverage is a bit too much for such a poorly designed platform.

• Inkscape: if you are a perfectionist who regularly checks the SVG sources generated by Inkscape, then... you may develop insomnia. The bloody thing will stuff the file with garbage by some 90%, and will get all your coordinates un-rouned to some unreasonably distorted numbers. No, it's not the "floating point thing", it's worse. A few times I ened up writing up the SVG file by hand from scratch, while checking it in the browser. Inkscape is outrageously bad.

> Android programming.

Android Studio and Gradle can both die in a fire - how anyone manages to actually write a decent app with those two, is completely beyond me.

I always chuckle when I see a huge franchise app just crashing because I have worked with android and understand how frustrating it can be. It just tells me that I was not the only one struggling with the android development.

Wow! I'm honestly surprised. I find that environment to be great and nearly trouble free. Used it on Windows to build a native multiplayer game.

Nvidia GPU drivers and CUDA installations on Linux. Got better recently but I've spent many nights fixing these installs, wrestling with nouveau etc.

Compilation of deep learning libraries from source on Windows -- don't do it.

Tikz -- LaTeX drawing "language". The images produced can be stuninngly beatiful, but the manual has 1200+ pages and it takes forever to become productive. If only journals accepted hand-drawn images...

Can second this.

Also audio libraries on linux. ALSA vs whatever. Had a lot of issues with my particular hardware & Arch.

Also way back when, X itself. Back when it was likely to not work on many systems (~2001). I spent so many hours going back and forth to use my friend's computer & internet to Altavista some help.

lol +1 for audio libraries / drivers on linux. spent many hours on the "battle of configuration".

Absolutely felt your pain too. So many nights trying to build the latest tensorflow package only to find out I couldn't run it on my current Cuda version, so I need to uninstall it, reinstall the new one only to find out I installed 10.0, then 10.1 but I needed 9. It was just so silly I ended up just never updating once it worked.

To quote Linus: "Fuck Nvidia"

Their proprietary drivers suck and I much prefer using the default Linux ones... but the performance just isn't the same and I always end up relenting and installing their terrible software

This, this, this. I needed to run some code that was only compatible with an older version of tensorflow. Figuring out how to get the proper Nvidia drivers, CUDA version, etc. was an absolute and utter nightmare.

Microsoft Powerpoint (and to a lesser extent Word). I lost count of the number of days I spent trying to make my presentations and documents look good (which for me means pixel perfect).

To be clear, this isn’t a failing of the software per se. PowerPoint is powerful and lets you do a lot of stuff, but I took desktop publishing lessons in high school, and I’m a bit obsessive to start with. I just have to have everything lined up and evenly spaced and just so. Which PowerPoint lets you do easily enough, but then you need to add another box to your diagram... and resize and reposition everything more or less manually.

Similar story for Word, which almost lets you do professional(ish) documents once you know where all the typesetting options are hidden. I’ve given up on Word for technical documents and now use Markdown + pandoc to convert to Latex and then pdf.

At my current company, Powerpoint is used as the main medium for communication and reporting. Powerpoint slide decks are even considered some form of documentation by many, even though they are not really suited for that: Bullet points instead of coherent prose and explanations, ambiguity on the audience of the presentation (internal vs customer), general clunkiness of a ppt files. For many projects, documentation is just a shared directory with a number of powerpoint files from various stages of the project. I hate it and I want to change it, but I am still new to the organization and this behavior is deeply ingrained.

Besides that, Powerpoint is pretty good if you actually want to do a presentation.

On the flip side, I've noticed PowerPoint can bring immense efficiency gains to environments where the standard is to write to a detailed report for every little thing. You don't need a detailed user guide of 20 pages of text if a few ppt do the same job.

So do you have any go to tips or shortcut (keys) that are your favorite?

Same experience here. On PowerPoint, when there is repetitive work (weey presentation etc) i try to get a correct template, but most of the time I spend too much time on it, it's just a pain, and the corporate templates are horrible.

Everytime I can go away with a very simple presentation I do it, but for some reason we are partly judged on powerpoint appearance. I once did an animated background for a presentation as a joke, and was praised by everyone for it instead of my team being blamed for doing useless things on work time.

And I don't really see an alternative. It's more of a cultural issue.

I have a hard time using word, and corporate templates used to be good and complete but aren't anymore. Fortunately we usually have competent secretaries who do the formatting and some editing work.

For less official work I use markdown or latex most of the time.

You do presentations for your audience. Adjust the contents, adjust the style.

If your audience doesn't need pixel perfect, don't do it. In my experience, the speed of adapting a PP presentation is more important than it's "beauty" by some abstract definition.

Aesthetics help to be taken seriously. But are you delivering the content or the design?

TBH doing it all in LaTeX you end up down the same rabbit hole, looking for the One True Way to do this and that, at least for me. I do enjoy it a lot as it teaches me about typesetting internals, but it's not faster with one or the other technology.

Because the bottleneck is not the tool, but rather your decision making process.

Personally: Linux desktop environments in general. Still couldn't figure out how to manually save session states since last upgrade (using Linux Mint Cinnamon now), took me a few hours to make hibernation work, and every time I upgrade, Korean IME is either broken, does something slightly differently, or first broken and after lengthy troubleshooting does something slightly differently. (After last upgrade, for some reason it's not working only on Facebook on Chrome. Fine, who needs to view Facebook on Linux anyway.)

At work: saltstack - a machine provision framework that's trying hard to sound cute (pillar? grain? what the hell are they?) while making you write jinja templates which generate a yaml file while calling arbitrary python functions in a remote server, which is then sent to another remote server to be transformed into a sequence of commands in arbitrary order. Good luck debugging anything.

Excel.

Mostly because it makes you think you can do anything, and you can. It's a rope to hang yourself with.

While Excel is a great prototyping tool, it's really not great for production use. I've seen so many financial calculations attempted on Excel that ended up creating a huge ball of spaghetti, references going all over, VBA code mixed in with DLLs, VLOOKUPS all over, sometimes $A$1 sometimes A$1 (copying behaviour), huge Rube Goldberg contraptions.

And people love it, they often don't think about maintainability or ease of understanding for newcomers.

I'm with you. My org tries to do so many things with excel, despite that fact that is fails and breaks on us ever single day. What is worse, is that we use excel sheets and a shared folder to monitor projects, tasks, and even track casework. I hate it so much.

Yeah don't get me started on versioning, lol.

bondspricing_final_2_withswaptions_final_final5.xls. In a folder with 25 similarly named files. Good luck tracing the diffs.

But I guess that's not specifically Excel that causes this, it's people not understanding versioning.

Blame the software industry for still not having a decent GUI for version control.

Version control has been "solved" for the better part of 20 years but the tools are awkward and only make sense if you're a software developer.

People unironically suggest you should learn more about tree structures to understand and work with git. That's just about acceptable for developers, but for non-developers that's a complete no-go.

One day there'll be a killer GUI for git or svn (or even just basic whole-file linear version histories) but until then, people are doomed to email files named like Presentation_FINAL_2_EJB_Edit.xlsx sitting under a "FINAL - DO NOT DELETE" folder.

But they all have timestamps, right? Newest is current, and then you have a time history of prior work....

(How it was explained to me once... that person swore they were worked to the bone to keep everything updated but they were SO inefficient and refused to listen to any constructive input because THIS IS HOW I HAVE TO DO IT.)

I have gotten a pretty good workflow down on Excel sheets and version control thanks to gnumeric's ssconvert. Worth looking into IMHO.

China Great Firewall - no comments, just a huge idiotic waste of time and a major, major, major PITA for every normal person that lives in China.

Webpack - I ain't no frontend dev, coming back to it episodically to discover that FooBarPlugin is now BarBazPlugin, moved from alice: setting to bob:, XxxPlugin just stopped working at all and unsupported (after like 9 months), and ZzzPlugin now nukes the entire dist/ dir as a side effect.

XPS 15 9570 fans, they're controlled by BIOS and start at 45C specifically to annoy people to no end. So under Linux, after much googling, you need to build the dell-bios-fan-control utility which sometimes works, sometimes doesn't, in shamanic ways. E.g. running lspci resets fans and they spin up again. Load kvm modules, spin up again. I've spent probably way more than 100 hours to make the laptop quiet.

PVCS, a versioning system so weird and inconsistent that developers actively tried to hide source code from the repository managers. When we announced a migration to subversion, project managers were literally standing in line begging to be the guinea pig for testing the migration procedure.

Some of its many random crimes againt humanity:

* Delete irrecoverably obliterates a file from history.

* The function that you should use instead of delete is almost impossible to find.

* If you do use that function, it is so buggy it causes corruption in your database, effectively obliterating the whole project.

* Acces rights management is insane. Never seen anything like it. It took 20 minutes of calculating effects from interfering rules to give someone access to a file without removing some other random person's access rights.

* Gui looks like the win31 era, and is so bad people prefer to manually update the database. Which was more trustworthy anyway.

* Multiple tree structures representing data blobs. Only one represents files. It is possible for the later part of a checkout to accidentally overwrite the early part.

* I've witnessed a team spending 6 months merging 2 weeks of development. 100 hours doesnt come close to the time wasted.

* Storage is an oracle db for metadata, and a file system for data. No deltas, changing 1 byte in a 1gb file writes out the whole gb.

* Commits over multiple files are not atomic, but the gui tries to pretend otherwise.

Now the weird thing was, it was so bad, management did not actually believe a product could be this big of a waste. Even when multiple developers gave it as a reason for leaving the company, they were brandished as whiners and no attempt to even validate the truth of the statement was made. Software stockholm syndrome is actually a thing.

I used it years ago over and VPN and it would literally take a day to pull the latest branch.

Not technically a program. But what we call “Agile” where I work wastes one third of my day. It is essentially a way to paper over incompetence. Didn’t make deadline? Feature is unusable? Need to revisit how we are doing Agile again. Plus more meetings are needed. Never mind the fact Albert Einstein cannot follow the train of thought of many of our product owners and scrum masters.

Couldn't agree more. For simple 2 lines you sometimes need 4 Meetings without he whole team involved and not even discuss about the indentation.

But sometimes, it seems to work ...

Lol, amen to that. A popular management fad. People suddenly start to feel important when they get labels like that stuck onto them. Oh boy...

Gmail.

At some point they redesigned the UI and it's been a horrible experience since. It hasn't wasted 100 hours, but it certainly feels like it: - It takes multiple tries to delete files or select them as read. If you select the options to mark as read, or delete a message. For some reason it 'forgets' that I've done this when I exit the browser, and so I usually have to perform this operation at least twice. - There's some sort of annoying animation that pops up when the inbox loads. Why?

Good luck trying to delete hundreds of messages in one go. Quite often it will just glitch out half way through and display generic Google errors for the next 10 minutes when I try to reload the page.

I switched back to the HTML version.

How does a company go backwards?

Many do and it is inevitable. No good thing ever lasts.

One step at a time.

Microsoft Word, every single time I have to produce a document in which there is a lot of content. Edit a table, it screws up the image legends, which in turn screws up the table of contents. Fix the table of contents, and the something else in the document breaks. I curse my existence every time I have to use anything from microsoft in my job. Having done consulting for many clients across a myriad of environments and configs, whenever anything microsoft was involved, it was a given that any task would take at least double the time and require more resources. Using MS Word however is the thing, that almost every time, drives very close to jumping out of window.

Desktop Linux. Always something needs to be set up, always something breaking, always something needed to be fixed, always had a problem to solve.

Definitely agree with others: you might have had the wrong distro.

I have been running Ubuntu for about 6 years and have had less day-to-day config or issues than Windows had.

The only issues that stick out are either trying to use apps that haven't been maintained or trying to do something Linux just isn't good at (games).

I use Windows 10 for games, but day-to-day I am on Ubuntu 18.04.

I am well past 10,000 hours of waste on this one.

Still, I vastly prefer it due to the greater ability to customise my graphical environment based on my own preferences and ergonomic needs. The biggest advantage for me is being able to choose my own window manager. I use bspwm + sxhkd now, which I haven't quite mastered, but has allowed me to choose how it works, rather than forcing me to adopt its own vision.

I even split my time between a MacBook Pro and my Linux laptop for ~4 years just to try it out. OS X is almost hassle-free, and relatively well-designed, but not as openly customisable.

The biggest time sinks on desktop Linux for me have been the usual suspects:

- graphics

- monitors

- sound

- poor battery life

- wifi (although I have not had issues since I adopted iwd)

- sleep/hibernate (or rather, awakening from them reliably, 100% of the time)

- and, of course, having to deal with outsiders who expect you to have things like Adobe Acrobat, and then you have to find a workaround or go to the library to use a Windows box.

I admit that some of these are self-inflicted, and would likely not be a problem if I just used something like Ubuntu in its default setup.

While I actively use Linux as a desktop OS, I have to agree with this. I've spent hours upon hours tuning things, but there's always some small detail that's off — macOS and Windows have their share of problems, but they're much better in this regard.

For example, HiDPI scaling works great on GNOME, but KDE doesn't scale a lot of margins, which makes it look cramped. GNOME's window snapping stopped working for me in a recent update. It's made me contemplate running WSL on Windows many times, but at the end of the day I'm still on Linux because I prefer the overall experience.

I wish some major hardware vendor would just hire some engineers to keep up on OS maintenance for the hardware they provide. Maybe I would pay a small premium on the hardware for the service of maintaining the OS. /s

(Why I currently only run Linux on servers)

I think that depends a lot on your use case, hardware, and distribution choice.

Perhaps a loose interpretation of “wasted”, but multiple different games have wasted a lot of time I would otherwise have spent doing more productive things. E.g. currently I have a side project that is actually really interesting to me but I have been spending my limited free time (with a toddler and an infant to keep up with) playing Deus Ex Mankind Divided. I may not end up spending an actual 100 hours in it, but I did a few years back with its predecessor Human Revolution.

Try to give yourself some slack. I too enjoy those games and have a toddler and an interesting side project. What works for me is to let myself unwind with some game time. And similarly reframe any time put into the side project as a win, even just a few minutes.

While I do get a rush from being productive it can be exhausting to always be 'on'. Games are one way to turn 'off', bring some variety to life, and experiment without guilt. Just remember that you don't have to finish the game or win every match.

Leisure and fun are often unproductive, some people include "unproductive" as part of their definitions.

LaTeX. Compiler errors, add-ons from the 80s, and unhelpful defaults. No problem to write Chinese chara… oh, in this environment? Sorry.

C++ compiler (or even better: linker) errors. They are just not meant to be read by humans, lacking any pointers on what's really the issue.

Also the Makefile. I still cannot write customized Makefile for my side project now

Windows as a porting target for desktop applications. I've written a few for work (using PyQt5), and about 10% of my effort typically goes into getting the application working on Linux. The other 90% goes into wrestling with Windows doing everything in its power to fucking ruin my week.

Fman Build System (fbs) helps quite a bit, I've found, but there are still more often than not some really annoying rough edges (not to mention that Windows' file access performance is abysmal, so startup times for a PyQt5 app are anywhere from multiple seconds to a full minute on Windows v. instantaneous on Linux).

I've been looking into .NET Core w/ Avalonia as a potential replacement, both because it's easier to cross-compile and because hopefully being more designed-for-Windows will make it less of a royal pain in the ass. Not being subject to the GNU GPL is a nice bonus (for internal stuff this ain't much of a problem, but I generally prefer my FOSS projects to be as compatible with as many other FOSS projects as possible; I'd rather proprietary software be able to "steal" my work than prevent non-GPL FOSS projects from being able to incorporate it).

Cross platform is always a pain, I suspect Avalonia will just present different problems.

I suspect the Sublime guys went the right way, have a very thin UI layer for each platform and a common backend.

fbs author here. Thank you for the mention :-)

Of course! Thank you for the awesome tool. Probably would've lost my marbles entirely without it.

Without a blink, McAfee.

This abomination has the ability to put more than decent computer into a miserable slug. I cannot imagine how much my client would have saved in productivity from all its employees and contractors if that thing was uninstalled.

Not to mention the video to remove it, hilarious but completely useless: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKgf5PaBzyg

On a similar note, Norton.

Every single failed project that I ever worked on.

I've built a lot of useful software but there have been years where I've worked on projects that nobody ever used or will use. Half the time the cause is the dysfunctional organization that I'm working for, that doesn't understand their responsibility or won't listen to good advice.

The other portion of the time it's a side project that I never finished.

Microsoft Access. I think the main problem is I keep expecting it to behave like a normal database. Perhaps if you go in without those expectations you'll have a better time? I don't know, and hopefully I'll never have to find out.

When I had to work with it on a semi-regular basis I kept this list of WTFs that I'd add to each time I finished tearing my hair out trying to fix some seemingly simple thing https://github.com/bourbonspecial/AccessFail/blob/master/why...

Wordpress. After banging on it over and over with themes and templates etc etc I realized I should have just stuck with a static hosted Jekyll site, so thats what I did.

The Unity game engine. Backwards compatibility is low; documentation is scant or out-dated; error messages are misleading or opaque; stack traces for crashes are sometimes impossible to reason about.

I've become wiser over the years, but the top 3 were

3: Windows/Symantec Defrag (pre-Vista era) When I had 10-40GB hdds it used to be mesmerising watching the blocks fly around the screen. Eventually I find something else to do and pretend the computer's broken.

2: Macromedia/Adobe Flash. Sometimes animations just didn't want to work. Tweens are notoriously random with complex drawings. Delete and start all over again.

1: Editing HTML after using a WYSIWYG editor. Code clean-up. It takes ages.

Defrag felt so good knowing things were getting put where they belonged.

that brought back memories of early teen.

Jira and confluence

I'd say Atlassian products in general. Jira has had a notorious bug for nearly a decade (still ongoing, I believe) that would delete a description/comment if you accidentally hit escape in the middle of writing it. Bitbucket also changed the term "blame" to "annotate" because "blame" was a strong word that hurts feelings (seriously, this is the reason) and didn't bother telling anyone until people started wondering why blame wasn't supported. Also there was the time they displayed a huge ascii rainbow logo every time you pushed a commit, which is pretty distracting, considering you're expecting to find info related to your push while you're working (you had to turn off this info altogether to stop seeing this logo). I could go on, but basically, Atlassian isn't terribly interested in your productivity.

IntelliJ also uses annotate instead of blame.

Annotate is a valid git command though right?

https://git-scm.com/docs/git-annotate

Visual Studio calls it Annotate as well, when using TFS and/or Git.

Never really thought about the why.

Jira is slowwwwwwwww. Like using index cards on a whiteboard would be faster.

If you want to make sure no one ever reads a document, put it in Confluence. Unless you've bookmarked it, you'll never find it again, let alone anyone else.

All atlassian tools. I wonder how many layers of abstraction are involved in typing a comment...

.. and misconfigured jenkins

In recent times, Angular. It’s utter rubbish and needlessly complex for doing even the smallest of things.

I'm curious, can you share an example of what you mean? My experience has typically been the opposite.

Don't know what exactly he means, but I have a similar feeling. My area is a performance-oriented close-to-metal backend, but when I have to do something in the UI I find it extremely opinionated and 90% of the code you read is to make angular work while 10% is for your actual task.

That is the point though. Front end is a hot mess, so Angular makes it opinionated so you don't have to spend time on lots of small design decisions.

I think you might be using a battleship go cross a puddle.

Na, it's one of those giant enterprise applications with design by committee input forms, and so on. It's Angular's intended use-case.

WYSIWYG editors...

worst: confluence, bottom: desktop office suites, still bad: google docs

Oh my goodness: #### that WYSIWYG editor in Confluence hard. It's like an extremely buggy version of Word 95. I've outright banned its use in our company.

And I can't count the hours I spent converting from org-mode or markdown to WYSIWYG, only to be stripped of my beloved editing tool at the point I need to share a doc.

Docker. Images without command line tools(best practice!) Obscure init systems. Unmountable overlay FSes. Dangling images eating all the disk, not removable by prune. Root permissions everywhere and general necessity to debug images way too often. and looong checkout times for every image update.

Slack: It refuses to accept that it is a webapp, so even though firefox fully supports the relevant audio/video api:s I need to open another browser or fiddle around with XWayland (electron/chrome does not support wayland) just to be able to use it.

Microsoft Teams: Same as above, but with multiple login prompts each time.

Jira/Confluence: I swear every click/hover requires a network roundtrip to the server because that's the only way it can be so sluggish. Also, 30s loading times.

Webpack/Babel/Parcel/WhateverJS: Either kill me or kill IE so I can stop using these tools to get even a moderately modern stack.

Making a more usable Jira must be a potential billion dollar business. Outside it support/development It's used by many orgs because for their vague use cases nothing else is available.

It's amazing to me that there's 1000s of 'more useable Jira' variants out there, but IME every team that tries to use one inevitably ends up back using Jira.

but almost none with both markdown and dark mode.

Microsoft Windows. I lose 10-20 minutes 1-5x a day just logging in to Windows in the NHS...

I second that. I loose 5 to 10 minutes every time I want to change a network setting. No idea how it got messed up so bad. What used to be two mouse clicks away from the desktop in XP is now hidden away by the "settings" app that doesn't contain any settings at all.

Funny thing is, the real settings app in windows is still more or less the same as xp and still just two clicks away. I think they just put the new fake settings app in there to fool people.

You can still open Control Panel in Win10 and get the prior behavior, almost. I just Start menu search for it and done.

I hope the other side of this pandemic NHS finally get their computer system replaced and not reliant on a single proprietary OS or DB.

I imagine if one were to add up all the estimated time wasted using that system and compare it to writing a client agnostic one from scratch it would probably turn out to be a massive saving.

I hope they don't try and do another massive centralised system. It failed before and will fail again.

And then when you just want to shut down your laptop so you can put it away but Windows insists on spending 20 hours installing updates first...

I think it's commonly accepted that it's the NHS IT infrastructure that's b0rked, and not Windows per se.

I remember one site where I would arrive in the morning and login. Then go downstairs, cross the street to Starbucks, queue up, buy a cup of coffee and if I was lucky the login would have finished by the time I got back.

Perforce. The more I learned of it, the worse it got. Take the worst parts of CVS and Subversion, and then toss them in the bin, because they're too good to be in Perforce.

Oh yeah - perforce is such a stupid crap, I simply don't understand why they still exist.

sshd on Synology NAS [1].

It took me two weeks of troubleshooting, cross-compiling binaries and reverse engineering the source code, until I figured out that I wasn't doing anything wrong - Synology had actually changed their version of sshd to add all sorts of proprietary crap [2].

Another one was the "Mouse battery low" alerts on Gnome under Ubuntu [3]. The root cause was in upowerd, but Gnome developers could have applied more sane defaults (e.g., no need to show the same alert several times per day, and even worse considering they don't go away unless you click to dismiss). Certainly not 100 hours, but much more time than I'd like.

[1] https://serverfault.com/questions/458553/cant-log-in-via-ssh...

[2] https://wrgms.com/reverse-engineering-synology-openssh/

[3] https://wrgms.com/disable-mouse-battery-low-spam-notificatio...

Would you mind sharing your overall experience with synology? I'm planning on purchasing one for my home and all the reviews are positive, but I'm always eager to hear the bad side.

Despite my misgivings with some of their practices (e.g., modified sshd [1], hardcoded telnet password [2]), for the most part I'm very satisfied with their product and frequently recommend it to friends and family.

You may need to jump through some hoops to get the GPL code, but their product is (or was? it has been a while since I last played with their source code) reasonably open and full-featured, and works nicely out of the box. They also release frequent updates, have a decent set of options for backup / logging / media sharing out of the box, alerts are effective, and you also have an appstore-like for 3P apps.

Also, they use Linux as the base, and in some models you can even get access to the serial console with some effort, so you're not totally locked in on a proprietary system, should something go really bad [3][4].

I have a RS815+ and an old DS212+, and both are very reliable. Not terribly fast, but wouldn't expect much more from spinning disks anyway.

[1] https://wrgms.com/reverse-engineering-synology-openssh/

[2] https://wrgms.com/synologys-secret-telnet-password/

[3] https://wrgms.com/recovering-a-failed-synology-diskstation-d...

[4] https://wrgms.com/entering-single-user-mode-on-a-synology/

Thank you so much for the thorough response! I read through your articles and then the rest of the blog post as well. On a side note, blog more, on the topic - you have convinced me to grab them!

Probably not quite 100 hours, but proprietary "enterprise" VPNs. Everyone needs a different version (universally outdated), many need hand-holding to work on an up-to-date OS, need workarounds to have them not break routing entirely, ...

Docker For Mac / OSXFS - steaming pile of garbage...

Internet Explorer 6

I wasted a lot more than 100 hours coding workarounds for its numerous CSS bugs. Probably millions of hours wasted world-wide. I hate Microsoft for the way they screwed web developers.

I almost switched careers early on due to IE6. At the time - 2006 or so, it was every new junior developer's job to get up to speed with the codebase by tackling a few of those outstanding IE6 glitches.

So for months on end, it was just 8 hours a day of Googling, scouring blogs and mailing lists for obscure CSS and JS hacks to get something to work in IE, while not breaking it in every other browser.

Luckily the recession ended a few of those jobs for me, and once hiring picked up again, there was enough demand for real work, and IE6 was no longer considered (probably about the time that YouTube refused to cater to IE6 users), and it quickly died off.

Dial-up modems and sound cards and IRQ settings. Getting them to work simultaneously.

The AWS Management Console.

AWS has had an unusual approach to console development. There seems to be an internal opinion that a software engineer can do the job of a frontend developer just fine. And a small percentage of them do an excellent job of just that, but the majority don’t. People are trying hard to address that, but it’s a lot of work.

Thank you. It blows my mind how rarely I see anyone talk about what an utter disaster of a product this frontend is.

I like to tell people that you can measure how bad the AWS console is by looking at the valuation of companies like Heroku and Digital Ocean. Both wouldn’t exist if AWS has a better console, the former was even built atop EC2!

Python Net-SNMP. Python GPG. My Python ecosystem as I drag it from place to place. I ask myself why I do this, frequently.

In the distant past, Solaris 9 for x86 on a laptop. I was younger (and dumber) then. Took much longer than 100 hrs and aged me beyond death.

Tools without good open standards forcing me in to their UI or restricted file formats:

jira, microsoft exchange, horribly sceumorphic PDF, anything with DRM

Visual Studio + UWP. I can't say the result is not good, but the wasted time is waaaay over 100 hours in the span of roughly 9 months. And by waaay over 100 hours, I would say it's probably 1.5-2 hours/day , 7 days/week.

At this point, Chrome, VSCode or Eclipse. I can't open all 3 in my laptop. All these 3 consuming soo much CPU. At this point, Opera is better and instead of VSCode going back to sublime and I have a terminal window separately open.

How many windows/tabs do you have open? I often have two WebStorm/IntelliJ windows, VSCode, a dozen Chrome tabs, and at least one Electron application open (usually Slack) and it's not too bad on the CPU.

Python. Mostly other people’s python, but also everything I’ve ever written in python.

My experience too, but I recovered when I stopped to make the code "pythonic". If you use it basically as C with automatic memory management, it's OK. But other people's python is still pythonic, of course.

I'm surprised no one mentioned openstack. I never deployed it, but by mere reading its deployment docs, its going to be a mess in production and its not doable by a solo dev. Anybody care to correct me?

I'll be eager not to correct you: it's such a complex tangle that it's a liability. Also, it is huge, and full of inconsistencies that sweep through the documentation, code, interfaces... It guarantees that anyone that wants to use this professionally needs help sooner or later -- and you can guess where that help comes from.

A somewhat obscure one, but Xenword. In theory the idea was a good one; connect a XenForo install to a WordPress install so people could sign up/login with the former and get access to various settings on the latter.

In practice on the other hand, I found the integration a complete nightmare, and everything was very prone to breaking for random reasons, making it either impossible to login or so the data wasn't pulled in properly etc.

And it's been a similar story with quite a few other software bridges/integrations. So much so in fact, that I realised it's almost always more practical to either find a solution that does both A and B at the same time, or to just build something yourself with the features needed rather than spend hours debugging an integration between two separate programs.

Edit: Oh, and Adobe Target. Even for an A/B testing tool this thing is frustrating as hell to use, and has a ton of design decisions that make no sense at all. For instance, you can't track clicks on an element by class/ID if the class/ID doesn't exist on that page at the time you use the editor, meaning you can't track clicks on an element that exists on some of the pages you want to test but not others, or all items in a list/feed. You also can't easily run the same test on multiple different pages with different URLs, so you have to 'add a page' in the editor for each URL pattern and copy the code over to it again.

Fixing plsql errors in Oracle. Only a c++ compiler in a bad mood gives more errors or as inscrutable ones ...

Skype for Business - I really hate this shit. Random disconnects, errors, no offline message support, idiotic message history in Outlook, random errors "Text is too long" etc.

You forgot mangling urls by inserting underscores in the url, not being able to copy and paste part of a message cleanly, stuttering audio or video when your internet connection is perfect, and screen sharing that doesn’t start or drops whenever it feels like. Oh and abysmal workflow around picking the right audio device.

Most NoSQL databases, for sure. I tried plenty, but will avoid naming and shaming specific ones here.

- Eclipse, Eclipse and Eclipse (at least till 2016 then I finally used IntelliJ) ... mainly the maven integration but to be honest everything, android and gradle integration was also just pain.

- Jira this splits up in 3 categories - because of project member think they need a complicated workflow, mostly in conjunction with time tracking - installation - integrating with other applications

Microsoft Defender. It gradually went from an invisible safety check to a massive tax on battery, I/O and productivity.

I disabled it recently after it got into an incomprehensible endless CPU loop. It's suddenly like having a new computer - it boots faster, I can switch tabs without grinding, just everything is faster.

I can't think how much time it must have cost me - on every interaction in years.

`material-ui` react component library. obscene amounts of boilerplate + every update would require refactoring the mess they made me make.

What? <Typography> elements are not intuitive to you with variants? All text is Typography after all ...

I always say Material is such an aesthetically good looking UI, that developers forfeit their common sense to leverage it.

Salesforce (using their API). Our boss insisted on importing 4 years worth of past data in to Salesforce so he could print some graphs via Tableua. I tried to explain that it would be far easier just to leave Salesforce out of the equation completely, but they had paid a small fortune for it, so insisted on the wasted effort. Terrible platform from a developer perspective.

Then they bought Marketing Cloud, again terrible. Its supposed to be point and click enough that non technical users can use it, but its too complicated for them and absolutely terrible as it took 7 clicks to the edit page any HTML email.

These two things make my current platform and all it's technical debt seem like an absolute dream.

I don't want to mention individual projects and services, but the two most common experiences are:

1. Documentation. A chat provider and a serverless framework where the documentation or the typescript definitions weren't kept up to date with the code. Having to check types and their REST API and 'suck it and see' to actually find out how it works. If you want contributors, your OSS project should have working demos. If you want customers, the same.

2. Unnecessary complexity. I think there's going to be a major change in the front end world in the next few years as people realise they can already achieve reactive data binding without the complexity of popular frameworks.

Datadog on Kubernetes, lately. Its blackbox nature creates tricky issues in my company's infrastructure.

OTOH, I used New Relic with PHP website 6..8 years ago, and it was awesome in everything, except the price.

I guess it all depends on the context.

Heroku.

It just isn't good. I tried it way back and most of the time it turned into a struggle that wasted hours.

I recently went back to it, thinking that it should be good now; it isn't.

My typical environment for a site is supervisor + nginx. Nothing crazy, super simple.

For whatever reason, the heroku instance refused to take in my config (set with `heroku config` and it was showing up in the Heroku console... but my service was like "nope, not there". The keys existed on process.env but were empty).

After about an hour I said "whatever" and stood it up on nginx + supervisor in 15 minutes.

I once wanted to deploy a React front end (only), not served by Node. I spend 4 hours just to do a simple deploy and the app kept crashing. Finally, an obscure build pack command that needs to be executed surfaced on a blog post which solved my problem, which was not to be found ANYWHERE else!

first time hacking on Mac OS Carbon. I had to port my open source project (which ran on linux and Win32), to Mac (circa 2008?). I'd never built a thing on a mac before.. at that point, Mac dev wasn't as big as it is now (and then it was C++).. so Googling no help at all.. compiler errors, linker errors.. 6 months of 15 hour days.. completely lost most of the time.

Without a doubt: perl.

"There is more than one way to do it" is such a boneheaded idea when you have to work with other people on the same codebase.

Emacs. Spent a lot of time writing up my on config, switched to Doom eventually. Been a happy user since then.

Witcher 3

Hacker News! (But in a good way...)

- Counter-Strike 1.6

- Quake 3 Arena

Windows 10. Mostly the forced updates and the fact that it randomly turns the laptop on at night (to check for updates?) and spinning fans wake ME up, resulting in worse productivity the day after due to interrupted sleep.

I've disabled all the common wakeup culprits (mouse, network, and USB activity waking up the computer), and while it has made things significantly better, I am still sometimes greeted in the morning by a powered on PC. And the wakeup log isn't helpful at all. It's driving me up the wall.

If it wakes ME up that's going to cost 2000 XP

Is THAT what that is?! I can't have Windows as my primary OS anymore because something kept turning on my damn computer. Doesn't happen when Ubuntu was the last running os.

Debezium: reads mysql bin logs, feeds to kafka connect, then a kafka consumer, and then replicates given tables into a separate db. Wasted around 100 hours myself on it. As an org, we wasted closer to 2000 hours. Why? It can't handle 0000-00-00 dates due to a Java issue. They don't plan to fix it as it is "not their problem." It can't replicate cascade deletes. We seeded our replicated tables working through those issues and then the tables had different numbers of records. I could have written a custom data migration utility in the time wasted. I know because I have multiple times.

Chef: at one point, we had Chef Consultants come to help us with our monstrosity. They said that we had something more complex and full featured than anything they had ever seen and declined helping. I've lost weeks and weeks to fighting against what we eventually grew.

Sysdig: personally, I lost maybe a few hours. As an org, we lost hundreds on people trying to get it to work similar to Grafana. Sysdig, at the time, did not support math operations. How this got passed on down to engineering is a different story, but when you can't compute derivatives on counters, you can't make decisions based on rates of change, something we require.

Twisted Python: Factories with mixins where a variable you are trying to discover where it came from turns out to be a parent class's parent class's mixin's parent class's mixin's parent class. True story. Dealing with cases where someone raised an exception somewhere in the code years ago, but now the section you are working in, you realize you cannot use Deferrals because Twisted uses exceptions as control flow, and now the exceptions at some other part of the code trigger ErrBack code somewhere else. As for the python part itself, not knowing the actual type for the variable incoming on a function is a pain. String? Int? Slice? Who knows! Add some print statements or read a bunch of code to find out. Honorable mention to time lost on SQL Alchemy. I can write SQL no problem. Every time I have to do something in SQL Alchemy, I start with SQL which is done in 30 seconds, then I spend the next hour going over documentation and experiments to get the query to build via SQL Alchemy.

AnyEvent Perl: 40 functions deep and not having a method signature. Yeah, time to read through hundreds of lines of code with branches that could send any number of parameters down to your function that you are looking at, or put print statements to know _what_ has been stuffed into your parameter list. Large systems benefit so much from strict typing. 40 functions deep and you know _exactly_ what is coming into your function and what it should return.

Go Modules. I've probably not hit the 100 hours yet, but I'd not be surprised to be in the 20 hour range. The module system was rolled out shoddily in my opinion. We went from things Just Work(tm) to multiple environment variables and language servers and editor issues. All I want is "is a vendor dir there? Use it. Else, use GoPath." Can't have that though. With private repos, proxies, vendor directories, environment variables, and varying levels of support from editors, it is just a mess. With Go 1.14, modules are getting better, but I'm still fighting the proxy servers in combination of vendor directory and private repos. I _love_ Go. I hope it goes back to sanity.

react native packaging into an Android app. More specifically: the @react-native-community/cli followed by metro bundler.

Every single time I have to upgrade react-native, I have no problems with the code base,

but with these horrible 'put a js config file here', put 'node_modules' there, set environment variable this way -- kind of tools.

This is approximately equivalent in frustration, trying to build a Linux-kernel with a new network-interface driver in early 90s.

..may be even worth than that.

The web browser by several orders of magnitude...e.g. this.

All my own open-source projects. Thousands of hours wasted

I would like to hear your thoughts on why you would think they were wasted.

Because I never benefited from them.

And they are too niche (Pascal, LaTeX, XQuery), so I did not learn anything of relevance.

And all that programming has high opportunity costs and physical costs (back pain, worsening eyesight, vitamin D deficit).

Instana. It helped me troubleshoot some really nasty bugs in production but it always takes me ages to find the information I'm looking for.

Bash; windows; safari mobile browser; the stock android samsung ships with their phones; Tizen

This list is not exhaustive. You can help by expanding it.

Definitely sbt, the absolutely terrible scala build tool (and it used to be called the simple build tool, ha!)

PeopleSoft's PeopleTools and nVision might be one of the worst out there. Randomly hangs and crashes

redux

redux sagas

2fa in general

those fucking cookie banners that no one gives a shit about

recaptcha

webpack

Let me add to the list:

- Trying to test isolated components with a mock Redux store

- Figuring our how to set up tests for ‘connected’ components

- The long walks I go on after looking at an actions file that I need to work with

- The long walks Redux has made me go on

BMCRemedy. Anything over 4000 records will kill you.

MUDs, in my teens.

Except with muds it wasn't 100 hours, it was more often 100 days character age..

Writing game cheats. This was me 5 years ago.

Video games. Notable EVE Online

Jenkins FML

2fa

Drupal

SAS

Minecraft

Minecraft has potential to develop creativity though :D It's a hard one to quantify, but I think sometimes things like MineCraft, lego can boost cognition if used in a deliberate way and one actually takes some learnings from it.

git. Most of which was googling basic commands.

Healthshare

Every program in the Microsoft Office suite.

Compared to what?

Not using them. Its amazing what you can accomplish with a plain text editor and your brain. Ever seen a presentation that didn’t rely on PowerPoint? It’s such a refreshing thing to witness. How many Excel “applications” have you used that actually worked as intended consistently and weren’t just a giant time suck that would be better spent building a simple form over data app?

Ask yourself this: When was the last time you truly needed MS Office to produce something of value? Not imaginary enterprise “I look busy so I must be getting things done” value... but true value.

Tell me how you format your PhD thesis in a plain text editor without wasting countless hours on LaTEX?

Sure, designers create beautiful presentations outside PowerPoint, but I can grab master slides, plomp down the stuff that I wrote in a plain text file and bam - presentation ready in 10 minutes.

Excel - I'm a programmer but even I use Excel for quick data tasks - cleanup, remove duplicates, create histogram and summary, build a pipeline for data where I see intermediate values for every step for every data point. I might be an exception but I sometimes even copy data from an SQL client to Excel to drill into it.

Or Access? Entire departments of non-technical people are running on this stuff.

If Office didn't provide anything of value nobody would use it.

> Tell me how you format your PhD thesis in a plain text editor without wasting countless hours on LaTEX?

I've never written a thesis (at all, let alone for a PhD), but my impression from people who have is that the academic institution typically already has a LaTeX .sty or template or whatever, so literally all you're doing is writing content (and the minimal amount of markup necessary for document structure).

That said, I can see how this might quickly go sideways as soon as you start using TikZ, or if you do indeed have to create your own style (though in the latter case the defaults seem reasonable, and indeed seem common if the numerous academic papers I've read over the years are any indication). I've written my fair share of technical documentation with LaTeX and it can definitely be a rabbit hole, albeit usually a self-inflicted one.

And that's definitely true about Excel and Access. Virtually every company has at least one Excel spreadsheet or Access database that's effectively mission-critical, lol.

Perceived value isn't the same as actual value, especially in the enterprise and academia.

Google Sheets and Apple Pages/Keynote, for me. They work so much better. I don't have any facts or list of features to back this up, they are just less stressful to use and don't bother me about licenses or corrupt files.

Exactly. I love the spirit and motivation behind Office Libre, but Excel and Word just _work_ for most basic tasks and an amazing number of corner cases. Open-source products just don't even come close.

The only tools people don't complain about are the ones that no one uses.

At least Libre Writer has sane ways to anchor a picture to a paragraph / section / page.

I've lost my 100 hours trying to get Word to consistently place images in technical docs, only to wind up fighting some of the most unpredictable placement calculations I've ever encountered. I want to punch my screen right now just thinking about it.

The sad thing is that LaTeX can be quite temperamental with image placement too.

I just gave up years ago and put all pictures inline.

I think one of the big problem of Word is that it is routinely used for things it was not designed for and which are still out of Microsoft target.

It's a tool for not too long technical documents, for secretarial work, for basic marketing text, for quick an dirty but decently presented invoices, for writing a resume.

It has never been meant for writing novels, for page setting, for writing hundreds of pages of technical documentation, and yet... it is used for that. Everyday.

Simply because it's available everywhere.

But mainly because there are no viable alternatives that are available in multiple platforms, cost less or the same than Word, and do things significantly better.

InDesign is infinitely better for typesetting, but you're the learning curve to get something presentable is higher than LaTeX, because you have to know design, and more expensive than Word.

LyX is the only tool that comes close to replacing Word. It's free, significantly better typesetting, easy to use, and available in most platforms.

Exactly. I'd love something that works better but gave up on Libre/Open officer after sending people's dozens of docs that opened looking a complete mess.

Even OneNote? Outlook/Exchange?

Windows, all of it. Random hard drive spin and you think to yourself maybe all computers are like this? Maybe the 1000$ I spent on. A laptop wasn’t good enough? And then you go back to your 200$ Linux laptop and get things done.

Hard drives shouldn't spin anymore; it's 2020.