Ask HN: Programs that wasted you 100 hours?
In the spirit of "Programs that saved you 100 hours?" ¹, - I'm curious to hear of experiences with software systems, languages, apps, or services that led you down an unproductive rabbit hole, only to come out at the other end (if ever) with not much to show for the effort.
260 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 264 ms ] threadTo 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.
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?
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.
Besides that, Powerpoint is pretty good if you actually want to do a presentation.
The only tools people don't complain about are the ones that no one uses.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
worst: confluence, bottom: desktop office suites, still bad: google docs
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.
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.
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)
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imprinting_(psychology)#Baby_d...
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.
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???
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.
Video is included as a separate attachment in the email sent around.
Never really thought about the why.
https://git-scm.com/docs/git-annotate
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.
Minecraft
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.
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.
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.
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.
(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.)
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.
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...
- 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.
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.
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..?
Well it's 365 so that, unfortunately, is Microsoft.
There are a lot of poorly written add-ins out there.
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.
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.
(An unloaded train is clearly a "hole" charge carrier..)
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.
The other 900 hours were great though!
:D
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.
• 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 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.
jira, microsoft exchange, horribly sceumorphic PDF, anything with DRM
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.
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.