Current mood:

annoyed

Jobmine. If you're reading this, and you happen to go to the University of Waterloo, that word may very well send a chill down your spine.

This has to be one of the worst pieces of software I've had the distinct non-pleasure of using in the past year or so. Its supposed to let students easily apply to jobs, go through a fairly standard interview process, and then accept/decline the resulting job offers. However, its design leaves the user feeling nearly constantly annoyed.

The back button works less than 25% of the time, for no discernible reason. (It isn't even possible to reproduce these successes. The same series of actions may do something completely different the next time.) Several of my friends have had the system mangle their standards-compliant HTML resumes, inserting odd characters and stripping or otherwise modifying tags without warning.

Just today, the system told me I had been scheduled for an interview for a job that the system doesn't think I even applied for. (Unfortunately, I can't remember whether I actually applied for it or not. But the system is still obviously very wrong.) And this is by no means an extensive list of errors.

Why would I complain so much about this? Well, you see, everyone in the Coop program at the University of Waterloo pays a fee of roughly $445 per semester. There are over 10,000 of us. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out exactly how much money that leaves us paying collectively for this marvelous level of service. I mean, with the help of one or two of my friends, I'm sure I'd have no problem building a better system then this over the course of a Coop semester. (And no, this system was not built by incompetent coop students. It was built by PeopleSoft, the same people who build most of the Universities web applications.)

Maybe the bugs will be worked out eventually. But the system has already been in operation for a full semester. It seems like most of the bugs currently in the system will probably be there to stay.