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I have to say, on the one hand Mike Cannon-Brookes seems like an upstanding guy who cares deeply about the environment. One the other hand, he helped create JI

I have to say, on the one hand Mike Cannon-Brookes seems like an upstanding guy who cares deeply about the environment. One the other hand, he helped create JIRA.

ggm 5y ago
I also have to use Jira and hate it, but I will continue to use it and forgive him much for this activism.
rmbyrro 5y ago
Yeah, he could well purchase a controlling stake at Jira and shut it down ahead of schedule as well...
smt88 5y ago
I realize this is a joke, and that you're jokingly elevating Jira's user-unfriendliness to the "evil" level of active environmental destruction. But given how many genuinely evil SaaS companies there are, I think it bears clarification that Jira does not do anything more evil than being a shitty product that people are forced to use by their bosses. They are not, for example, potentially responsible for the eventual collapse of civilization (which cannot be said of the Facebooks and Googles of the world).
- dzqhz 5y ago
- rmbyrro 5y ago
  I think the difference is just a matter of opportunity, not merit. If Atlassian had the opportunity to become a Google-like company, threatening humanity's existence, as you suggest, Cannon-Brookes wouldn't have stopped it. He would in fact pursue it, become a trillionaire and then use a good portion of the money to do charity or green stuff to make it up for the evil he's done. It's what our culture tells people to do since Roman Christianity values were imposed mainstream. You don't have to do it right, just regret, donate your wealth and ask for forgiveness. The actors in the story have changed. There's no confessionals anymore, for instance, but the underlying story is the same...
  - smt88 5y ago
    > If Atlassian had the opportunity to become a Google-like company, threatening humanity's existence, as you suggest, Cannon-Brookes wouldn't have stopped it. This is tantamount to saying, "All companies of equal size are equally evil." Or maybe it's: "No one has morals, given enough opportunity to become wealthy." While I think there is some sort of trend there, you have no justification to speculate that Cannon-Brookes is not an outlier. There are lots of people who are more moral than other, less-wealthy people.
    - rmbyrro 5y ago
      Well, let's clarify two things. One is a fact. The other is an opinion. He wouldn't be able to stop it. That's a fact. Diluting himself by taking loads of VC, subjecting himself to a money-driven Board. He just wouldn't be able to stop it. You can argue he would have not pursued it, that he'd step out before his company became sort of an evil Facebook. My opinion is that the moment he accepted the fact above, it tells me he wouldn't step down. He'd profit from it. And later use the money for good causes to "compensate" and look good to society. I accept he could have been an outlier, just don't think it's remotely likely.
- lmm 5y ago
  How do you figure that? Jira is absolutely the kind of slow drag that destroys civilisation. Facebook and Google make things that empower people, for good or ill; Jira makes it impossible for anyone to do anything. Personally I believe in the positive side of human agency.
  - smt88 5y ago
    > Jira makes it impossible for anyone to do anything This is like arguing that pencils and paper are evil because Trello (or whatever) exists. Jira is slow, but it's faster than what people did before it. And I have efficiently built and shipped ~10 projects on Jira, so I know it's not that bad. I use ClickUp now, and Jira is maybe 5-30 seconds slower per action than Jira. It adds up to, maybe, 30 min of saved time per day across my whole team.
    - lmm 5y ago
      > Jira is slow, but it's faster than what people did before it. That's not my experience. Most of what people do on Jira is stuff they just didn't do before; there's no benefit, only cost. > And I have efficiently built and shipped ~10 projects on Jira, so I know it's not that bad. Hmm, did you have access to edit workflows or something? It can be "not that bad", but the defaults and the way it nudges people mean it's bad unless you - or rather, all too often, the person above you - is making a serious effort to ensure it's not bad.
go_prodev 5y ago
We've just switched from Jira to Azure DevOps. We run a global BI team and we're all really liking it. If you haven't seen it, it could be something worth checking out as it includes the board/wall, wiki, estimation, repos, build pipeline and lots of other stuff in one place.
- philliphaydon 5y ago
  We went from a working Azure DevOps to Jira, now we have an absolute mess but upper management loves it despite it being less productive and causing more problems than it solves.
  - doctor_eval 5y ago
    Yep, JIRA is successful because The Boss Wants It. I’ve seen this repeatedly. No idea how Atlassian pulled that off. It’s not that JIRA is awful. It’s just that it’s not that good, and I don’t understand why it became popular, let alone Unicorn popular. But good luck to them. They got an outcome most of us only get to dream about. And MCB is at least (apparently) doing good with that money, instead of spending his fun time stealing land in Hawaii.
sam_lowry_ 5y ago
I wonder whether making Atlassian tools run some 20% more efficiently would make the world greener than this. IIRC one of the motivations Paul-Henning Kemp said to be having is to optimise software so that the world is greener. While Bitbucket has some good reasons to be a performance hog (better diffs), I can not say the same about JIRA nor Confluence.
- stephen_g 5y ago
  No, not by a some orders of magnitude. AGL reported carbon emissions of 42Mtpa in 2019-20. According to [1], the combined carbon emissions attributed to all the datacenters in the US is 31.5Mtpa, so 75% of AGL's emissions. So even if Atlassian tools around the world used as much processing power as all the datacenters in the US (of course in reality it's orders of magnitude less), the carbon saving of a 20% reduction would only be 6.3Mtpa, or 15% of AGL's emissions. 1. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/abfba1 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/abfba1
- xvilka 5y ago
  Well, you can't build a Java program that isn't resource hog. It should be ported to something natively compiled instead.

I have to say, on the one hand Mike Cannon-Brookes seems like an upstanding guy who cares deeply about the environment. One the other hand, he helped create JIRA.

ggm 5y ago

I also have to use Jira and hate it, but I will continue to use it and forgive him much for this activism.

rmbyrro 5y ago

Yeah, he could well purchase a controlling stake at Jira and shut it down ahead of schedule as well...

smt88 5y ago

I realize this is a joke, and that you're jokingly elevating Jira's user-unfriendliness to the "evil" level of active environmental destruction. But given how many genuinely evil SaaS companies there are, I think it bears clarification that Jira does not do anything more evil than being a shitty product that people are forced to use by their bosses. They are not, for example, potentially responsible for the eventual collapse of civilization (which cannot be said of the Facebooks and Googles of the world).

dzqhz 5y ago
rmbyrro 5y ago
I think the difference is just a matter of opportunity, not merit. If Atlassian had the opportunity to become a Google-like company, threatening humanity's existence, as you suggest, Cannon-Brookes wouldn't have stopped it. He would in fact pursue it, become a trillionaire and then use a good portion of the money to do charity or green stuff to make it up for the evil he's done. It's what our culture tells people to do since Roman Christianity values were imposed mainstream. You don't have to do it right, just regret, donate your wealth and ask for forgiveness. The actors in the story have changed. There's no confessionals anymore, for instance, but the underlying story is the same...
- smt88 5y ago
  > If Atlassian had the opportunity to become a Google-like company, threatening humanity's existence, as you suggest, Cannon-Brookes wouldn't have stopped it. This is tantamount to saying, "All companies of equal size are equally evil." Or maybe it's: "No one has morals, given enough opportunity to become wealthy." While I think there is some sort of trend there, you have no justification to speculate that Cannon-Brookes is not an outlier. There are lots of people who are more moral than other, less-wealthy people.
  - rmbyrro 5y ago
    Well, let's clarify two things. One is a fact. The other is an opinion. He wouldn't be able to stop it. That's a fact. Diluting himself by taking loads of VC, subjecting himself to a money-driven Board. He just wouldn't be able to stop it. You can argue he would have not pursued it, that he'd step out before his company became sort of an evil Facebook. My opinion is that the moment he accepted the fact above, it tells me he wouldn't step down. He'd profit from it. And later use the money for good causes to "compensate" and look good to society. I accept he could have been an outlier, just don't think it's remotely likely.
lmm 5y ago
How do you figure that? Jira is absolutely the kind of slow drag that destroys civilisation. Facebook and Google make things that empower people, for good or ill; Jira makes it impossible for anyone to do anything. Personally I believe in the positive side of human agency.
- smt88 5y ago
  > Jira makes it impossible for anyone to do anything This is like arguing that pencils and paper are evil because Trello (or whatever) exists. Jira is slow, but it's faster than what people did before it. And I have efficiently built and shipped ~10 projects on Jira, so I know it's not that bad. I use ClickUp now, and Jira is maybe 5-30 seconds slower per action than Jira. It adds up to, maybe, 30 min of saved time per day across my whole team.
  - lmm 5y ago
    > Jira is slow, but it's faster than what people did before it. That's not my experience. Most of what people do on Jira is stuff they just didn't do before; there's no benefit, only cost. > And I have efficiently built and shipped ~10 projects on Jira, so I know it's not that bad. Hmm, did you have access to edit workflows or something? It can be "not that bad", but the defaults and the way it nudges people mean it's bad unless you - or rather, all too often, the person above you - is making a serious effort to ensure it's not bad.

go_prodev 5y ago

We've just switched from Jira to Azure DevOps. We run a global BI team and we're all really liking it. If you haven't seen it, it could be something worth checking out as it includes the board/wall, wiki, estimation, repos, build pipeline and lots of other stuff in one place.

philliphaydon 5y ago
We went from a working Azure DevOps to Jira, now we have an absolute mess but upper management loves it despite it being less productive and causing more problems than it solves.
- doctor_eval 5y ago
  Yep, JIRA is successful because The Boss Wants It. I’ve seen this repeatedly. No idea how Atlassian pulled that off. It’s not that JIRA is awful. It’s just that it’s not that good, and I don’t understand why it became popular, let alone Unicorn popular. But good luck to them. They got an outcome most of us only get to dream about. And MCB is at least (apparently) doing good with that money, instead of spending his fun time stealing land in Hawaii.

sam_lowry_ 5y ago

I wonder whether making Atlassian tools run some 20% more efficiently would make the world greener than this. IIRC one of the motivations Paul-Henning Kemp said to be having is to optimise software so that the world is greener. While Bitbucket has some good reasons to be a performance hog (better diffs), I can not say the same about JIRA nor Confluence.

stephen_g 5y ago
No, not by a some orders of magnitude. AGL reported carbon emissions of 42Mtpa in 2019-20. According to [1], the combined carbon emissions attributed to all the datacenters in the US is 31.5Mtpa, so 75% of AGL's emissions. So even if Atlassian tools around the world used as much processing power as all the datacenters in the US (of course in reality it's orders of magnitude less), the carbon saving of a 20% reduction would only be 6.3Mtpa, or 15% of AGL's emissions. 1. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/abfba1 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/abfba1
xvilka 5y ago
Well, you can't build a Java program that isn't resource hog. It should be ported to something natively compiled instead.