A survey by the well-known Newsletter The Pragmatic Engineer reveals the "Top 10 Most Hated Productivity Tools" among 30,000 global software engineers. These services and software, originally designed to increase efficiency, are now labeled as project progress killers. Let's break them down one by one.
Most Annoying First Place: JIRA
Multiple complex interface levels, slow loading speed, and used by management to monitor subordinates. Engineers are forced to spend time updating tickets instead of writing code.
Second Place: Microsoft Teams
Frequent crashes and notification delays, having to wait for the software to "self-repair" before starting a video call, disrupting team communication rhythm.
Third Place: Confluence
Pages load like running a marathon, inaccurate search results, turning the document knowledge base into a maze.
Fourth Place: Jenkins
Complex plugin interactions, upgrades feel like defusing a bomb. The outdated UI design leaves newcomers confused.
Fifth Place: Azure DevOps
Code review works in small teams, but gets stuck with large numbers of PRs. Lacks real-time static analysis, with security scans dependent on plugins.
Sixth Place: AWS
Billing and service interfaces with too many layers, with past incidents of decade-long data disappearance and AI command execution sometimes going awry.
Seventh Place: Bitbucket
Slow loading of large repositories, noisy UI. During outages, users can only wait for Atlassian's announcement.
Eighth Place: Xcode
Lengthy project settings, CI environments prone to "missing classname for isa key" errors. Code that runs locally may fail in cloud environments.
Ninth Place: GitHub Actions
Complex workflows can take 25 minutes, with usage limits often breaking continuous integration. GitHub officially reminds: Developers must control the merge button.
Tenth Place: Windows
Uncontrollable update times, occasional compatibility issues after updates; performance degrades with long-term use, forcing developers to restart.
After reading the list, do you agree? Can any engineers share their experiences?
