6,672 classified complaints drawn from more than 20,000 raw items: Reddit (15 work-related subs, collected through the arctic-shift mirror), Hacker News via Algolia, Google Play reviews, App Store reviews via RSS, and the Stack Exchange API. Each item carries a problem label, a severity score from 1–5 and, where the writer mentioned one, the workaround they are using. Every number below comes from that corpus.
Most common across the whole corpus
- Mobile/web builds missing desktop features (mobile_gap): 1,162 mentions, severity 3.32.
- Price, licensing, hard cancellations, minimum seats (pricing_licensing): 1,153 · 3.63.
- Access rights, wrong share links, accounts and IT admin (access_perms): 626 · 3.47.
- Broken process: entering data twice, forgotten steps, drifting numbers (process_break): 430 · 3.70.
- Manual re-keying, copy-paste between systems (manual_rekey): 405 · 2.76.
- AI/Copilot pushed in unasked, slowing things down (ai_bloat): 382 · 3.16.
- Teams/Slack notification floods, old info impossible to find (chat_notify): 370 · 3.04.
- Broken formulas, VLOOKUP, dead VBA macros (formula_breakage): 312 · 2.94.
- Sensitive data in shared files and email, compliance, data loss (security_compliance): 280 · 3.91.
- Email/Outlook overload, poor search, slow sync (email_overload): 245 · 3.38.
Most common is not most painful
Re-sorted by mean severity, the order changes completely. Sensitive data and compliance lead at 3.91 despite only 280 mentions; internet dependency scores 3.75 on 125 mentions; broken process 3.70 on 430. Meanwhile the two volume leaders — missing mobile features (3.32) and pricing (3.63) — are mostly complaints about the product, not about how work gets done. Volume measures how widespread a problem is, severity measures how much it hurts, and the two do not track each other.
Read only Reddit and Hacker News and the list changes
The 1,924 items from Reddit and Hacker News — where people describe real processes — rank differently: manual re-keying 324 (16.8%), access rights 186, sensitive data 152, broken process 135, tool sprawl 122, broken formulas 121, spreadsheets used as databases 104, pricing and licensing 99, manual reconciliation 80, finding old documents 77, recurring manual reports 70, not knowing which file is final 64, AI bloat 60, notification floods 58.
Why the two sources produce two different lists, and which source to read for which question: Choosing the source that shows the process. What people do once the process has already broken: The workarounds.