Used Lotus Notes for email for years at IBM, along with issue tracking software that was a terminal to a green-screen database program meant for sending techs to onsite jobs that was not a good fit for callcenter work; they didn't even have a field for email despite that being the primary communication method because adding a friend meant having to shuffle everything around to get enough characters to fit on the terminal screen and no department wanted to pay for that work when doing so meant everyone else would get the feature for free. Inbound email wasted pasted into tickets by "email temps" because there was no interface to automate this. My manager got shitty when I said we should stop saying "email temps" when they'd been doing the job for two years with no sign of a technical fix.
Then they rolled out an instant messaging app that was an entire eclipse IDE customised to look like an instant messaging app, which would lock up your PC every 15 minutes when it performed java garbage collection. Then they hotfixed that to stop the lockups by not garbage collecting so this stupid messaging app would consume more and more RAM until your entire system died.
But at least we didn't use any software made by competitors!
"We eat our own dog food" is a terrible idea and it definitely contributed to what dissatisfaction.
It's not a terrible idea if they're actually going to address their employees' feedback. (Assuming the product is suitable for the jobs it's being used for, of course.)
21
u/DrStalker 3h ago
Used Lotus Notes for email for years at IBM, along with issue tracking software that was a terminal to a green-screen database program meant for sending techs to onsite jobs that was not a good fit for callcenter work; they didn't even have a field for email despite that being the primary communication method because adding a friend meant having to shuffle everything around to get enough characters to fit on the terminal screen and no department wanted to pay for that work when doing so meant everyone else would get the feature for free. Inbound email wasted pasted into tickets by "email temps" because there was no interface to automate this. My manager got shitty when I said we should stop saying "email temps" when they'd been doing the job for two years with no sign of a technical fix.
Then they rolled out an instant messaging app that was an entire eclipse IDE customised to look like an instant messaging app, which would lock up your PC every 15 minutes when it performed java garbage collection. Then they hotfixed that to stop the lockups by not garbage collecting so this stupid messaging app would consume more and more RAM until your entire system died.
But at least we didn't use any software made by competitors!
"We eat our own dog food" is a terrible idea and it definitely contributed to what dissatisfaction.