LinkedInNoteEngineering Leadership

The most loved tools

Editors and developer tools dominate the favorites list. Jira dominates the hate list. The complaints are often as much about management as they are about the tool itself.

LinkedIn
July 17, 2025
Read time
2 min
Language
English
Engineering LeadershipJul 17, 2025English
  • IDEs and editors such as VS Code, JetBrains, Cursor, Neovim, Vim, Zed, and Emacs rank at the top. Linear, for lightweight issue tracking, and Expo, the cross-platform mobile framework, also score highly.

The most disliked tools

  • JIRA is the overwhelming #1, with more negative mentions than #2 through #5 combined.
  • Confluence, MS Teams, Jenkins, Microsoft Teams, Slack, Notion, and Zoom also show up frequently in complaints.

Main reasons people dislike tools

  • slow
  • buggy / frequent crashes
  • inconvenient UX redesigns
  • complexity / too many features

Some of the frustration with JIRA may really be frustration with management rather than the tool itself:

  • it reflects the developer mindset of "we don't like making tickets and documenting everything"
  • "Maybe the real reason people hate JIRA is not the tool itself, but that managers force it on them."

https://lnkd.in/gkhdgPeW

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