What's the most overengineered tool everyone uses but won't admit sucks?

Question

Looking to build something open source and trying to figure out what tools everyone pretends to love but actually hate.I'll start. Jira. We all use it, we all hate it, nobody admits how much time we waste updating tickets.Did you move it to the right column? Story points aren't filled out. Link it to the epic.Meanwhile the actual work takes 2 hours, documenting it takes another hour.Half the team ignores it, the other half are obsessed with workflows that have 47 different statuses. But try suggesting GitHub issues and suddenly "how will we track velocity??"What tool is supposed to make you productive but just creates busywork?

esperent · Accepted Answer

Next.js:- so many rendering modes - SSG, SSR, ISR, streaming SSR, PPR, client and server components.- de facto Vercel lock in: edge runtime, middleware, image optimization, ISR, and lots more are massively complex to set up or less performant off Vercel.- fragmented ecosystem between app and page router.- so much boilerplate with the app router: layout.js, loading.js, error.js, page.jsNot everything here is bad - in fact some parts are excellent. There's just so much of it, so many ways of doing any single thing and already so much legacy code in a system that's only a few years old, and it's growing in complexity with every release.

abraxas · Answer

Git. Most people have no need for 95 percent of its features and don't have a good mental model of how it works. Just copy and paste commands to get it to work, more or less.

matt_s · Answer

JIRA gets a lot of deserved hate but I think nearly all software work tracking systems suffer from the same issue: marketing over promises about velocity and predictions about project delivery timelines.Have we as an industry gotten any better at delivering projects on time? If you have a lot of dysfunction in your organization no software is going to fix that. Or to put it another way, you can&rsquo;t solve people problems with software.

wsc981 · Answer

Maybe I am the odd one out, but I don&rsquo;t hate JIRA. From my POV it works pretty well. I would agree Github Issues would be nicer though.By the way in last few companies I worked at I&rsquo;ve been using Azure DevOps and that feels over engineered to me. I think much stuff could be done with Github Actions instead.At times I looked at AWS services, but also seems quite complex and I find the website navigation horrible - at least last time I tried.

AnimalMuppet · Answer

JIRA might be like C++. It's OK if you just use a subset, and everyone uses the same one. If you use all of it, though, you get a mess.
The fundamental problem with JIRA is that it's trying to be usable for all the workflows in all companies in all the world. It's hard to do that simply.
And the problem with using it is that companies don't fix their workflow; they just try to port their existing workflow to JIRA. The result is that all the frustrations with the workflow turn into "frustrations with JIRA" (on top of the frustrations that are actually due to JIRA itself).

coldtrait · Answer

The entire javascript ecosystems since the advent of node.

mattl · Answer

Everyone I know who uses Jira hates it. I don’t think there’s a lack of people ready to point out the things they hate about it.
I have one:
I hate that browsers (except Firefox) won’t let me copy a column of data from a table on a webpage. It’s 2025, most tables are going to be data these days, not layout.

bigyabai · Answer

MacOS

muzani · Answer

Jira's a great tool with a terrible UI. You have to heavily customize it, build it into your command line, automate stuff and so on.

pirates · Answer

helm, except everyone I&rsquo;ve ever worked with who has spent enough time with it freely admits that it kind of sucks.