ClearCase

Raised as a usability problem by 16 people on Hacker News over 17 years (2009–2025), in 18 threads.

People raised many different problems with ClearCase, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 19 complaints

Administration was complicated, and performance could be slow if misconfigured2025-12-09
Needs a designated admin or several admins to operate2025-09-07
Source control tool with a poor user experience that loses productivity2025-03-22
Hijacked files are a pain to work with; locking strongly encouraged2024-03-04
No way to back out a commit; commands act on one of five confusing views2023-09-08
Must check out a file first, and cannot if someone else has it2023-06-01
Infrequent merges became multi-day, stressful sessions covering thousands of changes2023-05-02
Branching is slow, and non-trivial merges are atrocious to perform2022-01-02
Felt clunky, brittle, not transparent, and needed lots of training to use2021-08-22
Described as unintuitive and hard to maintain2021-08-22
Modifying a file takes minutes, and viewing all changes requires clicking through slow server round-trips2020-11-17
Hard to use, too complicated for the person using it2020-01-31
Reconstructing old project states requires the config spec, whose fallback rules can make it impossible2018-07-08
Easy to miss changes and new files; slow updates; merges silently break code2018-04-11
Installation broke the system and required a full Windows reinstall2018-04-10
Builds so slow that touching one header file ends the workday2018-03-03
Merging is clumsy and the command set is unintuitive, so users wrap it in homegrown scripts2017-02-04
Source control so unintuitive that it needs dedicated staff to keep it working2014-10-20
Too big and cumbersome, used by management to micromanage workflow2009-10-10