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>The problem I have with the incessant Jira bitching is that I rarely feel that bitchers have a true understanding for the extreme difficulty of the organizatio

>The problem I have with the incessant Jira bitching is that I rarely feel that bitchers have a true understanding for the extreme difficulty of the organization-wide problem Jira is trying to solve. I think the core problem with Jira is organizations trying to use it to solve complex organization-wide problems. It is an enormous time sink, and using Jira to rule the workdays of employees is the problem. Anything much more complicated than a checklist is wrong. Jira is an attractor for middle management growth that gives people who don't need to be doing anything something to do, and adding complexity gives more opportunities for more people to not do very much and generally get in the way of execution. It is also a way to give people who aren't very necessary or very good at understanding the big picture something that they can do to do. Take away Jira and tools that you can order other people to use and you end up with middle management that literally doesn't know what to do because they couldn't organize or ease productivity to save their lives. Jira becomes the thing being managed instead of whatever is actually to be done.

synu 4y ago
Agreed, it’s like a big flashing neon sign that promises middle management a stage on which to act out all their worst impulses. It’s the exact opposite of “keep it simple and communicate with each other like humans.”
- bamboozled 4y ago
  100% agree, in my current role it’s used this, if what you’re working on doesn’t have an issue, you’re a naughty person.
oneplane 4y ago
If a company is trying to use JIRA for more than state communication they are doing it wrong IMO. Planning goes into calendars, ephemeral stuff goes into chats and calls, and code and code-level issues goes into repositories. I have seen plenty of attempts to make a product like JIRA the 'interface' between some management person and 'the subordinates' and it never works, simply because trying to place an 'interface' there in itself doesn't work.
- ryanbrunner 4y ago
  I think what other tools miss that JIRA did well is giving engineering managers tools to communicate with upper management. You're right that actually attempting to use JIRA as the medium of communication with people outside the product org is hopelessly, fatally flawed, but being able to visualize an issue like an unmanageable backlog, or team productivity, or quality issues is invaluable, and a lot of simple tools throw the baby out with the bathwater by completely failing to give any tools to analyze how your team is doing. If it's configured properly, JIRA can be a fairly effective tool that mostly stays out of the way of developers but can help team leads and managers communicate things about the team.
  - oneplane 4y ago
    That is indeed what happens with the simpler JIRA clones. On top of that, usually the org has no idea what is going on, who is working on what or what is still waiting to be looked at by anyone. Normally those issues would be handled with a simple 5 minute meeting (DSU or some variant thereof) where everyone shares their current state, and then a few times per month some form of "where are we and where are we going" type of planning. (Be it a sprint planning or something like it) Combining that with a state tracker seems like a fairly obvious thing to do, and having the tools to then report on that over time (graphs can be a helpful visualisation that simple tools usually lack) gives everyone some context as to how healthy the team is. But even that last bit, the concept of periodically having a bit of a check up to see how things are going is often lacking in "we can do it better and simpler" types of setups. In then end, it gets reduced back to the manager walking around with a whip shouting "work harder!" instead of teams having some autonomy and figuring their own state out themselves.
- colechristensen 4y ago
  >If a company is trying to use JIRA for more than state communication they are doing it wrong IMO. This is why tools that don't allow this kind of doing-it-wrong are significantly superior to Jira.
  - oneplane 4y ago

synu 4y ago

Agreed, it’s like a big flashing neon sign that promises middle management a stage on which to act out all their worst impulses. It’s the exact opposite of “keep it simple and communicate with each other like humans.”

bamboozled 4y ago
100% agree, in my current role it’s used this, if what you’re working on doesn’t have an issue, you’re a naughty person.

oneplane 4y ago

If a company is trying to use JIRA for more than state communication they are doing it wrong IMO. Planning goes into calendars, ephemeral stuff goes into chats and calls, and code and code-level issues goes into repositories. I have seen plenty of attempts to make a product like JIRA the 'interface' between some management person and 'the subordinates' and it never works, simply because trying to place an 'interface' there in itself doesn't work.

ryanbrunner 4y ago
I think what other tools miss that JIRA did well is giving engineering managers tools to communicate with upper management. You're right that actually attempting to use JIRA as the medium of communication with people outside the product org is hopelessly, fatally flawed, but being able to visualize an issue like an unmanageable backlog, or team productivity, or quality issues is invaluable, and a lot of simple tools throw the baby out with the bathwater by completely failing to give any tools to analyze how your team is doing. If it's configured properly, JIRA can be a fairly effective tool that mostly stays out of the way of developers but can help team leads and managers communicate things about the team.
- oneplane 4y ago
  That is indeed what happens with the simpler JIRA clones. On top of that, usually the org has no idea what is going on, who is working on what or what is still waiting to be looked at by anyone. Normally those issues would be handled with a simple 5 minute meeting (DSU or some variant thereof) where everyone shares their current state, and then a few times per month some form of "where are we and where are we going" type of planning. (Be it a sprint planning or something like it) Combining that with a state tracker seems like a fairly obvious thing to do, and having the tools to then report on that over time (graphs can be a helpful visualisation that simple tools usually lack) gives everyone some context as to how healthy the team is. But even that last bit, the concept of periodically having a bit of a check up to see how things are going is often lacking in "we can do it better and simpler" types of setups. In then end, it gets reduced back to the manager walking around with a whip shouting "work harder!" instead of teams having some autonomy and figuring their own state out themselves.
colechristensen 4y ago
>If a company is trying to use JIRA for more than state communication they are doing it wrong IMO. This is why tools that don't allow this kind of doing-it-wrong are significantly superior to Jira.
- oneplane 4y ago