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I oversee multiple teams and have one R&D team that I built. Hired every person. They are all far better coders than I. But I’m the outward face negotiating for

I oversee multiple teams and have one R&D team that I built. Hired every person. They are all far better coders than I. But I’m the outward face negotiating for resources. And my team using Jira helps me get them resources. I use Jira with them. I’m also pulling tasks across the board. The brutal reality is it’s my reputation that brings in money and resources. I need to effectively estimate what we can do. And Jira really helps with that. The other teams I oversee use project management tooling too. And I see them. I’m here to tell you there are SOTA companies, led by engineers, that use Gantt charts. I used to think the anti-Jira, anti-management crowd was inherently right. Now I’m quite a bit more skeptical of those views.

aato 4y ago
Can you elaborate on how Jira helps you estimate?
- heisenbit 4y ago
  If you have good developer providing honest estimates, no data protection concerns and they diligently provide actuals agile tooling like in Jira can provide great results. But that all depends on culture. The poster seems to be an engaged manager, pays attention to the data and uses it in a sane way and has hired a group of strong developers. This is not your average setup…
  - re-thc 4y ago
    It's hard to tell. How does someone truly know if the estimates are honest? It's more like the manager "assumes" it's right and fine.
    - killjoywashere 4y ago
      The manager does not assume. OKRs are made or not. The delta is measured. Repeat.
      - yamtaddle 4y ago
        You use an estimate to figure out if another estimate was accurate?
AlotOfReading 4y ago
As someone who is fervently anti-jira, it wouldn't be that hard to make it tolerable. Just make it so that I can't measure page loads with a wall-clock (I've clocked multi-minute loads before) that need 3-7 clicks to get where I need to be. Don't have an abundance of weird subviews that hide half the editable fields I use for another half that I don't. Make the currently active filters clear. So on and so forth, just make it usable. I would still think jira is a bad tool (in the same way that JNCO jeans are bad pants), but at least using it wouldn't be painful.
- climb_stealth 4y ago
  I wonder if self-hosting is the performance difference. I have worked in projects with 15 years of history in Jira. And they were fine. It feels kind of slow but in reality it takes maybe three seconds to load any ticket. But actual minutes to load stuff? That is insane and I can see where the loathing would come from.
  - esperent 4y ago
    > But actual minutes to load stuff? That is insane and I can see where the loathing would come from. It's also a comment from a random internet person who has an axe to grind and no data to back it up. So take it with a grain of salt. It's amazing how a ten second load time can turn into several minutes when it's software you dislike and you're telling people about it later. ...not saying previous commenter is wrong either. Just a reminder to be sceptical about all such claims when they're presented without data.
    - doctor_eval 4y ago
      A ten second load time is about 100x worse than it should be. Exaggerating it to several minutes is less egregious by an order of magnitude.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - re-thc 4y ago
kodah 4y ago
Small Jira instances usually aren't a problem. It's the ones with thousands of projects or plugins. It's the way enterprises force developers to use Jira so they can have "visibility". The problem with the visibility those corporations think they have is that it's incomplete. That incompleteness is a mixture of things: - Jira isn't well integrated to things like GitHub Enterprise or GitLab Enterprise. Instead it tracks on a regex that mars commit history or messages. It's fundamentally disconnected from the VCS workflow. - Enterprises want to manage visibility by team, but Jira provides few if any tools for managing multiple projects within a single Project. The data structure doesn't map to how many enterprises need to use Jira in order to do reporting. - Many enterprises rule over definitions of p0 and p1 for anything. Local context gets rolled over by this and Jira just becomes a kind of table splattered with cards. - Jiras query system is skin deep at best and doesn't support things like querying all issues of a given epic. Much of this is fueled by their plugin API. Do a GET request on any issue and take a look at all the null fields or objects with just pure nonsense in them. There's probably more to this list, but the point is that Jiras problem is mostly its own doing. ZenHub does a great job of filling these gaps.
- namaria 4y ago
  I think the problem with observability/visibility/monitoring is: you need a good internal model of the domain to have any insight. When people see a aesthetically pleasing dashboard that makes sense to them, they think they have insight. It should be the other way around, because once you have a good mental model, you can get the data you need without it being plated for you. But the presentation fools people into thinking they have insight, so they come to depend on the tools that generate this illusion of insight. It's not too dissimilar from powerful people being cut off from reality by sycophants and yes-people. Or managers who say 'bring me solutions not problems'. Once you outsource filtering, you lose control.

aato 4y ago

Can you elaborate on how Jira helps you estimate?

heisenbit 4y ago
If you have good developer providing honest estimates, no data protection concerns and they diligently provide actuals agile tooling like in Jira can provide great results. But that all depends on culture. The poster seems to be an engaged manager, pays attention to the data and uses it in a sane way and has hired a group of strong developers. This is not your average setup…
- re-thc 4y ago
  It's hard to tell. How does someone truly know if the estimates are honest? It's more like the manager "assumes" it's right and fine.
  - killjoywashere 4y ago
    The manager does not assume. OKRs are made or not. The delta is measured. Repeat.
    - yamtaddle 4y ago
      You use an estimate to figure out if another estimate was accurate?

AlotOfReading 4y ago

As someone who is fervently anti-jira, it wouldn't be that hard to make it tolerable. Just make it so that I can't measure page loads with a wall-clock (I've clocked multi-minute loads before) that need 3-7 clicks to get where I need to be. Don't have an abundance of weird subviews that hide half the editable fields I use for another half that I don't. Make the currently active filters clear. So on and so forth, just make it usable. I would still think jira is a bad tool (in the same way that JNCO jeans are bad pants), but at least using it wouldn't be painful.

climb_stealth 4y ago
I wonder if self-hosting is the performance difference. I have worked in projects with 15 years of history in Jira. And they were fine. It feels kind of slow but in reality it takes maybe three seconds to load any ticket. But actual minutes to load stuff? That is insane and I can see where the loathing would come from.
- esperent 4y ago
  > But actual minutes to load stuff? That is insane and I can see where the loathing would come from. It's also a comment from a random internet person who has an axe to grind and no data to back it up. So take it with a grain of salt. It's amazing how a ten second load time can turn into several minutes when it's software you dislike and you're telling people about it later. ...not saying previous commenter is wrong either. Just a reminder to be sceptical about all such claims when they're presented without data.
  - doctor_eval 4y ago
    A ten second load time is about 100x worse than it should be. Exaggerating it to several minutes is less egregious by an order of magnitude.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- re-thc 4y ago

kodah 4y ago

Small Jira instances usually aren't a problem. It's the ones with thousands of projects or plugins. It's the way enterprises force developers to use Jira so they can have "visibility". The problem with the visibility those corporations think they have is that it's incomplete. That incompleteness is a mixture of things: - Jira isn't well integrated to things like GitHub Enterprise or GitLab Enterprise. Instead it tracks on a regex that mars commit history or messages. It's fundamentally disconnected from the VCS workflow. - Enterprises want to manage visibility by team, but Jira provides few if any tools for managing multiple projects within a single Project. The data structure doesn't map to how many enterprises need to use Jira in order to do reporting. - Many enterprises rule over definitions of p0 and p1 for anything. Local context gets rolled over by this and Jira just becomes a kind of table splattered with cards. - Jiras query system is skin deep at best and doesn't support things like querying all issues of a given epic. Much of this is fueled by their plugin API. Do a GET request on any issue and take a look at all the null fields or objects with just pure nonsense in them. There's probably more to this list, but the point is that Jiras problem is mostly its own doing. ZenHub does a great job of filling these gaps.

namaria 4y ago
I think the problem with observability/visibility/monitoring is: you need a good internal model of the domain to have any insight. When people see a aesthetically pleasing dashboard that makes sense to them, they think they have insight. It should be the other way around, because once you have a good mental model, you can get the data you need without it being plated for you. But the presentation fools people into thinking they have insight, so they come to depend on the tools that generate this illusion of insight. It's not too dissimilar from powerful people being cut off from reality by sycophants and yes-people. Or managers who say 'bring me solutions not problems'. Once you outsource filtering, you lose control.