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by joshstrange 15 days ago
> Still, some of these stories are surprising. Zeb Evans, the CEO of project management and productivity software startup ClickUp, proudly declared on X that he had laid off almost a quarter of his employees — 22% — after rolling out about 3,000 AI agents to do internal work.

As someone who is forced to use ClickUp I can tell you that it's not good software. It wasn't good before this layoff and it hasn't improved since [0]. I could write quite a few words on why ClickUp is terrible but I can promise you that throwing more "AI" at it isn't going to fix what's wrong. The issues are deep and not the type of thing LLM excel at IMHO.

My _favorite_ is how crap search is. Sometimes it will take upwards of 5-10s+ to return results and they are often wrong (I search for the exact name and it tells me "no results"). ClickUp has single-handedly driven me deep back into using bookmarks since the search is such trash. That plus random spinners that never go away, lists that re-order themselves when you change anything on a ticket (not a field related to sorting), stale state UI, things randomly disappearing, "Ticket moved to list" only to refresh and find it wasn't moved, it's really annoying and we curse ClickUp every single day.

Last thing I'll say is the amount of flatulence-sniffing going on over there must be at an all-time-high if their 4.0 (or was it 4.1? Who cares) release is any indication. The new design was ho-hum (just moved a bunch of things around and we turned on all the flags we could to get back to the old way since the new way sucks) but was most egregious was this full-page take-over with a big gradient animation announcing the new release. That happened on _every single tab_ you had open. So for a few days after the release I'd open an older tab only to be greeted by the same dog-and-pony show for a product I despise using and and update that only made a bad product worse.

All that to say: Mr Evens does not know what he is talking about.

[0] I have no clue when the layoff happened but it's been consistently shit so I can state that it hasn't improved with complete confidence.

2 comments

I couldn't believe how shitty ClickUp was when I was demoing project management software because it came highly recommended. Actually most of them were shitty. Monday, Asana, and all the others I can't remember. Just absolutely dog slow. I am so confused at how people are productive with these apps. By the time things had loaded, I had already forgotten what I was trying to do.

We settled on Basecamp and it is a joy to work with. Super fast keyboard shortcuts and easy navigation to projects. I'm glad we don't need the more exotic features in the other project management software, but if we ever do, it will probably be OpenProject, which was the runner up.

I agree, search in ClickUp is awful and it’s impossible to find back old cards from previous years. A nightmare. Plus, if consumes gb of memory in the browser.