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?
- 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.js
Not 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.
I'm sure someone will chime in with "skill issue", and that's true to some extent, but you gotta admit it's an over-engineered "solution".
Then they pivoted to the overengineered insanity that is RSC and the app router.
I have yet to see a project or developer use that to its potential. I don't know who they're targeting anymore, feels like some sort of mythical 100x developer who loves hyper optimizing every paragraph differently.
I work in support (for another company) now and several times a week I see Next users confused by all the different options. Their documentation isn't great at explaining all the differences either. They're moving way too fast and leaving all the developers behind and adding more and more black box magic optimized for Vercel hosting.
Enshittification as always, I suppose.
Maybe it's time to fork it into something simpler and stabler? I would be perfectly happy with Next from four or five years ago. Prev.js?
I think if the interface were better, fewer people would be copy pasting git commands.
Maybe we’ll have more agentic SCM that auto solves merges and all that fun stuff in the future. But for now we are stuck with a pretty challenging piece of software
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’t solve people problems with software.
I’ve never worked on a team where any nontrivial task could be done by any two people in roughly the same amount of time.
Experience, skill, subject area familiarity — everyone is different.
It is utter madness to estimate sprints before assigning the work!
I said I had no idea. I just put how I felt. Some things looked simple but gave me a bad feeling; the bad feeling was always mostly justified.
Every day I'd add up all the emojis for the day, which adds up to ~8 hours. After a week, we add them up again for ~40 hours. Eventually we got a pretty decent estimate that :) meant half an hour and the vomiting one would be at least 3 days.
Some emojis like the grimacing were an indicator that we needed to run a spike on this - it just wasn't groomed enough. Some are an indicator that we didn't trust the other person expected to handle this.
Everyone has different emojis just as they have different emotions about the same task. One person may like refactoring, another may be better at UI.
None are entirely accurate but such is the nature of software. Story points are misleading because they are precise but inaccurate.
The obsession with predictability in an unpredictable process is the real problem, especially in copilot and cursor era. :D
If people are arguing between 3 and 21 points there's a mismatch in understanding what the work entails.
By the way in last few companies I worked at I’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.
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).
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.
It really does not "just work", unless you're treating the Mac like an iPad. 20 years ago the Mac compiled software just as good as anything else, today it can't install Vulkan headers because third-party software scares Apple. Simply holding Apple to the standards of their contemporaries reveals that they're paranoid and do not trust their users.
In my house I have Apple branded hardware running:
Mac OS
Mac OS X Server
Mac OS X
OS X
macOS
iOS
iPad OS
tvOS
watchOS
homeOS
audioOS
And now I’ll have the strange honor of having two Macs, one running Mac OS X Server 1.23 and one running macOS 26.
homeOS doesn’t exist yet for the public, does it?
The only outlier is iOS, which should have been called phoneOS or iPhoneOS.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/UX
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach_(kernel)
Hey, you should pick up some carrier-grade Cisco routers and switches, and run IOS to tie 'em all together!
It's shit but it's just enough to get the job done/get out of your way, As long as you play by its rules
"Just enough" isn't going to cut it when the rest of the experience is subscription slopware, dark patterns and hidden advertisements. Microsoft doesn't get a free pass for it and neither does Apple - OSes weren't always like this!
