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Comment by andrewvc | Hacker News Reader

FogBugz in general is terrible. I use it everyday, and it's remarkable insofar as how amazingly bad the UI is. I was shocked to finally use software by Joel, who's essays I'd been reading for years, and discover that it was terrible.

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I remember when I installed trial version of FogBugz many many years ago. Not to use it, but just to see what ideas I can take away from it.

I was shocked at how bad the software actually was in so many aspects. I was shocked because it was Joel who has been constantly talking about how to hire the best developers in NY so naturally my expectations were quite high.

Reflecting back on all of this, I'm sure the software probably wasn't bad, it's just that through Joel's amazing writing he has created very unreasonable expectations.

The lesson I've learned from it was to lower expectations of my users before they use my software, and then exceed them.

Well, Trello is awesome. I don't think anyone can dispute that.

"I was shocked to finally use software by Joel, who's essays I'd been reading for years, and discover that it was terrible."

Spolsky's writings have always seemed to me to be completely vapid and obvious, at best.

To see what a great reputation he has among pointy-headed bosses and developers alike is a sad comment on the state of the industry.

That his company writes crappy software should surprise no one.

Well, I guess I'm just an idiot and a fool. You must be great to work with.

I'm surprised that you're surprised that your incredibly negative comment yielded an incredibly negative response.

The pricing model is also something from another era. It's an incredibly unattractive option for small teams just starting out, especially when compared to all the reasonably priced high quality options out there (github etc.)

I mostly agree. The most interesting thing about it is the Evidence Base Scheduling idea [1] but I have no idea if that actually works in practise. I would like to see more project management and tracking tools implement something like this.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence-based_Scheduling

I think people just get used to Jira's special brand of awful and find it hard to move to anything else.

One of the worst non-free tools I've ever had to work with. Have been extremely skeptical/critical of anything I read of his after dealing with fogbugz.

Edit: toned it down.

I was excited a few years back to finally get FogBugz set up for my new company to use on a project, only to find it incredibly frustrating to use, and dropped it like a stone.

The lesson I learned is that people who write a lot of interesting things about software development (I've read almost everything on Spolsky's site) don't necessarily create good software themselves.

I use it every day, and I think it's great (including the UI). I'm curious to see what, specifically, you find terrible about it, and which bug tracking system you find to be better.

I think the main reason people bash the UI is because it doesn't look shiny. I think the reason people don't like the rest of it is because it forces you to use it a certain way and people don't spend the time to actually learn or get used to it. It's not perfect (speed wise), but if you give into how it wants you to use it, it works well.

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