Highlight companies with notably poor/good software from your work experience

There is no good, only bad. The common thread that runs through all the bad software is the relational database and the false illusion that it can represent business semantics.

Far more of the time it's bad management than bad software

It is a very rare piece of non-trivial software that isn't "bad" in some manner (even most trivial software is "bad")

It really comes down to managing expectations, enduser training, known issue mitigation, etc

IBM quantum. Those are not softwares. Those are just a pile of bugs.

You have many ways (data structure) to express the same data, some are efficient and some are not. They implemented like 5 different data structures for user to choose themselves. But the functions inside the same program only support a specific one. They don't even bother to make functions support all data structures that they provided. You don't even know why they make such arbitrary decision to support this DS and not the others. Of course they never mentiom anything until the problem raise error to you, then you check the document, don't know how to fix it because who knows what DS it accepts?

Then there comes a separate team solely from IBM Japan that has zero communication with the original team , make their own stuff said their fork has better performance. Then the stuff became official but the API is no where compatible. You can't drop in replace to gain performance.

The whole company is completely nonsense.

I watched a very well-written piece of software written by a group of brilliant people turn into a pile of bugs by basically the same brilliant people and all this was caused by mismanagement. Many bad decisions by many powerful were made, but a lot of credit needs to be given to one particular poisonous manager who actually managed to corrupt the entire organization into the mess that it is today. He even managed to split the developers into two groups of "us" vs "them". Things got so bad a whole new entire organization was formed to write new software to replace the old one. Recently this poisonous manager was moved to be part of the team developing the new thing.

Epic, a system used for medical records and associates is legendary for being horrible.

You had to go back to the main form for navigation to do anything, over and over... There were arbitrary limits on notes far far too short,1000 characters isn't long enough for a complete medical history.

I hope it has improved, but I doubt it.

I’m gonna have to go with SAP on this one. I know that it’s possible to have a customized polished front end but that costs lots and my company was cheap. I understand that an ERP is a large complicated piece of software but so many basic UI things were awful. Sometimes you hit a check mark to proceed, sometimes a clock with a check mark. The yellow button next to it goes back 1 level, sometimes the red stop does too, sometimes it backs you all the way out. There was no discoverability of commands, you had to know the secret incantation to get the data you needed which resulted in coworkers passing around their ‘favorites’ and home made recipe son how to do things that we did regularly that should have been quicker. “Ok go to transaction IP39, click the square there next to the form, a different search box will open, search for what you’re looking for. Write down all the possible part numbers on this piece of paper over there and then go to transaction SM89 and try each of them.” A real power user opened two windows. Millions of man hours wasted trying to see if there was possibly a lightbulb on the shelf in the warehouse and if there wasn’t, if anyone had ordered more yet.