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It's because many of us have worked at companies that use JIRA extensively. It's a tool that marks the sign that a company cares more about the management of st

It's because many of us have worked at companies that use JIRA extensively. It's a tool that marks the sign that a company cares more about the management of staff as units, instead of caring about employees as breathing and creative forces. It makes management's job easier, but it does nothing for the managed, except lead to frustration and hundreds of emails that have to be waded through for that 5% chance of relevancy. Their integration seems particularly targeted to JIRA, when they've lapsed on many other useful features and improved UX implementations. It reflects GH's priorities as a company. It's a sign that github is catering to management over the programmer. Contrast that to gitlab, whose implementations are designed to make the programmer's job easier.

babyjoeyjump 8y ago
> It's a sign that github is catering to management over the programmer. Contrast that to gitlab, which is going the route of making the programmer's job easier. wat?
kasey_junk 8y ago
The worst part is there is no evidence it makes managements job easier. The saying is JIRA is yo project management what PowerPoint is to public speaking. For people who are good it can marginally improve the output but for most people it’s an easy way to wank away your time convincing yourself you are working on the right thing as you ignore the real issues.
- Aeolun 8y ago
  Nobody ever got fired for picking Jira
- Rapzid 8y ago
  > easy way to wank away your time convincing yourself you are working on the right thing as you ignore the real issues. Replace "yourself" with "others" and you have the answer as to how Jira makes managements life easier ;)
- drb91 8y ago
  I’m not entirely convinced eg Trello or Asana would do much better here, and you need to organize planned work somewhere. Personally I’m a fan of a physical Kanban board. This definitely scales far worse than JIRA does.
  - kasey_junk 8y ago
    > his definitely scales far worse than JIRA does. Does it? I think there are compelling arguments against it wrt remote employees. But I've seen no evidence that once you get bigger than a project that requires more than a physical Kanban boards any project synchronization becomes a farcical activity.
ahi 8y ago
I work in a shop that had effectively no project management. When jira was introduced it was a godsend. Obviously email and slack requests aren't better, so what is the alternative system that has people hating on jira? Honest question.
- bpchaps 8y ago
  How long has your company been using JIRA for? JIRA has a tendency to.... decay. New ticket types are created with custom fields that aren't ever kept up to date. Everyone starts to choose random entries because they have no choice, and no way to add new ones. Once that starts, things fall into chaos because nobody knows the "right" way to file tickets. Tickets soon become immeasurably immeasurable. Projects become categorized incorrectly on a constant basis. The only people who know how to use JIRA effectively are the ones who know how to ignore all the noise. Once those people leave, you're left with pure, unadulterated chaos. And then you get people who try to fix it by adding a new ticket type or project group, etc. Rinse, repeat. If you haven't already, then you should check out JIRA's query language and its API. The query language is... special (and doesn't support wildcards, last I checked). Its API, instead of displaying field names as you see it in their interface, shows "fieldname_21234". No joke. You have to run another api request for all of the field names and associate them yourself. It's painful To your point - sure, JIRA can be used effectively. Though, any bad tool can be used well if enforced. But that's not what most of us have seen in the wild. JIRA eventually just becomes a behemoth of a tool.
  - Latteland 8y ago
    That's a great point about Jira, about decaying and left over ticket types. But I used TFS (team foundation server) in a job, and it had some of the same problems. Someone always felt the need to edit the dang project and team paths and it was just a pain in a big company with constant churn. One level deep labels is much easier to deal with.
  - meetbryce 8y ago
    That sounds a lot like a human problem, not a tool problem.
dabber 8y ago
What are some alternatives you (or others) would suggest to Jira? I don't mean that to come across snarky at all; I'm honestly curious what people are using and enjoy.
- hvidgaard 8y ago
  We use YouTrack. It works well for us.
- Michielvv 8y ago
  I learned about clubhouse.io last week. Testing it now, but it seems very nice. Just enough configuration and structure. (We are coming from Trello which just doesn't deal well with a large number of tickets as you have only one view on them.)
_wmd 8y ago
^ disenfranchised programmer alert Jira's just a tool, a tool with an API, if it burns you so much then set up an email filter and spend a weekend on some GitHub-workalike wrapper or whatever other tool you believe does a better job. God I hate the damned thing, but placed beside all other similar tools in its class, I'd recommend it any day of the week, including over the joke of a system GitHub supplies - hell the ancient Bugzilla even compares favourably with GitHub.
- bpchaps 8y ago
  Yep :) The sad part is... yeah, you're right. It's the best ticketing tool I've used, too. I'm not sure what the solution is. My naive thought has always been that good management can mitigate most of the need for JIRA - even at large companies. Management like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_Johnson_(engineer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_Johnson_(engineer), perhaps.
stinos 8y ago
It's a tool that marks the sign that a company cares more about the management of staff as units, instead of caring about employees as breathing and creative forces That's almost too easy to counter, having worked at a startup with just 3 employees, all devs, and no typical managment whatsoever. Jira was and after like 10 years still is, the go-to tool for bug tracking and it does the job just fine, after a one-time and somewhat lengthy setup phase. Which is obviously nothing compared with the years of use..
ken 8y ago
Exactly. Opportunity cost. No software organization can do everything at the same time. What GitHub is saying with this is "It's more important for us to integrate with this thing that your management wants, than to fix any of those bugs you filed". I was afraid the acquisition by Microsoft was going to lead to it becoming more enterprise-oriented and less user-oriented, and it appears like that's exactly what's happening.
dsumenkovic 8y ago
Hello, thank you for mentioning GitLab. Speaking of >making programmer's job easier<, we could say that GitLab Auto DevOps eliminates the complexities of getting going with automated software delivery by automatically setting up the pipeline and necessary integrations, freeing up yourself to focus on the culture part. That means everyone can skip the manual work of configuration, and focus on the creative and human aspects of software creation. Here's more about it https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/topics/autodevops/ https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/topics/autodevops/

babyjoeyjump 8y ago

> It's a sign that github is catering to management over the programmer. Contrast that to gitlab, which is going the route of making the programmer's job easier. wat?

kasey_junk 8y ago

The worst part is there is no evidence it makes managements job easier. The saying is JIRA is yo project management what PowerPoint is to public speaking. For people who are good it can marginally improve the output but for most people it’s an easy way to wank away your time convincing yourself you are working on the right thing as you ignore the real issues.

Aeolun 8y ago
Nobody ever got fired for picking Jira
Rapzid 8y ago
> easy way to wank away your time convincing yourself you are working on the right thing as you ignore the real issues. Replace "yourself" with "others" and you have the answer as to how Jira makes managements life easier ;)
drb91 8y ago
I’m not entirely convinced eg Trello or Asana would do much better here, and you need to organize planned work somewhere. Personally I’m a fan of a physical Kanban board. This definitely scales far worse than JIRA does.
- kasey_junk 8y ago
  > his definitely scales far worse than JIRA does. Does it? I think there are compelling arguments against it wrt remote employees. But I've seen no evidence that once you get bigger than a project that requires more than a physical Kanban boards any project synchronization becomes a farcical activity.

ahi 8y ago

I work in a shop that had effectively no project management. When jira was introduced it was a godsend. Obviously email and slack requests aren't better, so what is the alternative system that has people hating on jira? Honest question.

bpchaps 8y ago
How long has your company been using JIRA for? JIRA has a tendency to.... decay. New ticket types are created with custom fields that aren't ever kept up to date. Everyone starts to choose random entries because they have no choice, and no way to add new ones. Once that starts, things fall into chaos because nobody knows the "right" way to file tickets. Tickets soon become immeasurably immeasurable. Projects become categorized incorrectly on a constant basis. The only people who know how to use JIRA effectively are the ones who know how to ignore all the noise. Once those people leave, you're left with pure, unadulterated chaos. And then you get people who try to fix it by adding a new ticket type or project group, etc. Rinse, repeat. If you haven't already, then you should check out JIRA's query language and its API. The query language is... special (and doesn't support wildcards, last I checked). Its API, instead of displaying field names as you see it in their interface, shows "fieldname_21234". No joke. You have to run another api request for all of the field names and associate them yourself. It's painful To your point - sure, JIRA can be used effectively. Though, any bad tool can be used well if enforced. But that's not what most of us have seen in the wild. JIRA eventually just becomes a behemoth of a tool.
- Latteland 8y ago
  That's a great point about Jira, about decaying and left over ticket types. But I used TFS (team foundation server) in a job, and it had some of the same problems. Someone always felt the need to edit the dang project and team paths and it was just a pain in a big company with constant churn. One level deep labels is much easier to deal with.
- meetbryce 8y ago
  That sounds a lot like a human problem, not a tool problem.

dabber 8y ago

What are some alternatives you (or others) would suggest to Jira? I don't mean that to come across snarky at all; I'm honestly curious what people are using and enjoy.

hvidgaard 8y ago
We use YouTrack. It works well for us.
Michielvv 8y ago
I learned about clubhouse.io last week. Testing it now, but it seems very nice. Just enough configuration and structure. (We are coming from Trello which just doesn't deal well with a large number of tickets as you have only one view on them.)

_wmd 8y ago

^ disenfranchised programmer alert Jira's just a tool, a tool with an API, if it burns you so much then set up an email filter and spend a weekend on some GitHub-workalike wrapper or whatever other tool you believe does a better job. God I hate the damned thing, but placed beside all other similar tools in its class, I'd recommend it any day of the week, including over the joke of a system GitHub supplies - hell the ancient Bugzilla even compares favourably with GitHub.

bpchaps 8y ago
Yep :) The sad part is... yeah, you're right. It's the best ticketing tool I've used, too. I'm not sure what the solution is. My naive thought has always been that good management can mitigate most of the need for JIRA - even at large companies. Management like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_Johnson_(engineer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_Johnson_(engineer), perhaps.

stinos 8y ago

It's a tool that marks the sign that a company cares more about the management of staff as units, instead of caring about employees as breathing and creative forces That's almost too easy to counter, having worked at a startup with just 3 employees, all devs, and no typical managment whatsoever. Jira was and after like 10 years still is, the go-to tool for bug tracking and it does the job just fine, after a one-time and somewhat lengthy setup phase. Which is obviously nothing compared with the years of use..

ken 8y ago

Exactly. Opportunity cost. No software organization can do everything at the same time. What GitHub is saying with this is "It's more important for us to integrate with this thing that your management wants, than to fix any of those bugs you filed". I was afraid the acquisition by Microsoft was going to lead to it becoming more enterprise-oriented and less user-oriented, and it appears like that's exactly what's happening.

dsumenkovic 8y ago

Hello, thank you for mentioning GitLab. Speaking of >making programmer's job easier<, we could say that GitLab Auto DevOps eliminates the complexities of getting going with automated software delivery by automatically setting up the pipeline and necessary integrations, freeing up yourself to focus on the culture part. That means everyone can skip the manual work of configuration, and focus on the creative and human aspects of software creation. Here's more about it https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/topics/autodevops/ https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/topics/autodevops/