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I always wonder how much of this sort of thing is disdain for the specific tool vs. disdain for what working in a mid-to-large org. is like and the overhead it

by bschne 3y ago

I always wonder how much of this sort of thing is disdain for the specific tool vs. disdain for what working in a mid-to-large org. is like and the overhead it usually brings with it.

datadrivenangel 3y ago
The specific tool is often bad, working in mid-to-large orgs is often bad, and the two combined can be catastrophically bad. Poorly configured Jira on top of a poorly run large organization and you end up with an orwellian system that does nothing but punish people and squander productivity and human life.
itronitron 3y ago
Jira + Scrum is a soul crushing nightmare, Jira + Kanban is fine.
- ch4s3 3y ago
  Until someone comes along and tries to put some scrum into your kanban.
  - toomuchtodo 3y ago
    Ahh, someone woke up and chose violence today.
    - ch4s3 3y ago
      hilariously someone hated my joke enough to downvote it, but I think there's a kernel of truth.
- OJFord 3y ago
  I agree that scrum is a soul-crushing nightmare & kanban is fine, but Jira a nightmare of a tool to use regardless of your process, IME.
- teeray 3y ago
  "but once we can get our estimates right, then think of all that we can do with these burndown charts!"
  - breather 3y ago
    Is there a context where time estimation is not employed, even implicitly?
    - scott_w 3y ago
      No, never. I’ve stopped doing story points for this reason. When people want an estimate, I tend to chop things into reasonable same-sized chunks and do my best effort based on that. I prefer the NoEstimates approach and try to use past data to be a bit more “real” but it’s not always possible. The truth is, if someone wants a time estimate, just do that and don’t beat around the bush. It’s too much effort to still be wrong.
  - kstrauser 3y ago
    Chevy Chase in “Christmas Vacation”: “Bend over and I’ll show you.”
- lmm 3y ago
  Disagree; Jira + Kanban is if anything even worse. Since Jira is such a pain to use and Kanban doesn't have any requirement for estimation or timeboxing, people will write one ticket that says "do everything" and work on it for 6 months. While admittedly avoiding Jira for 6 months at a time is good for the soul, when you put your head down and work on something with no context for 6 months you usually end up making something that wasn't actually wanted and has to be thrown away or drastically reworked, which ends up being more soul crushing.
colordrops 3y ago
It's both.
112233 3y ago
It is possible to have terrible poorly made tool, and use it to commit unspeakable atrocities. If JIRA at least had rational design underlaying poor implementation, it would give some reason to bear and hope. Instead, it is an infinite fractal of nope, the likes of which you hardly encounter outside government contract projects.
DarkNova6 3y ago
I am thinking the exact same thing. Right now I wish I could use Jira because I‘m using this IBM equivalent tool „CCM“. CCM is so bad it’s nearly dysfunctional. Image Jira but 3 times the necessary clicks (this is not hyperbole). With Jira I can see the good intentions and how they go awry. But CCM is pure madness from top to bottom.
- username135 3y ago
  Gods, anything thats interactive and IBM related is generally annoying and not user friendly.
- dakial1 3y ago
  Even IBM is getting rid of IBM (or ex IBM) stuff. They are using outlook now, lots of teams use Jira/Trello/Confluence etc...
  - MichaelZuo 3y ago
    They sold their in-house wiki system back in 2019 so they pretty much are forced to.
- emmelaich 3y ago
  Friend in IBM said the tool they used had 10s and 10s of mandatory fields... Which were ignored because everyone found it easier to just read and search the comments. So a thick chunk of commenting became de facto mandatory.
sverhagen 3y ago
My team does a lightweight agile process, we don't hate it. If we used a better tool, we'd love it. We have Jira, and I don't have the energy to change it, nor do I want the responsibility to decide or suggest what other tool that should be. I've always used Jira, I have no suggestions ready. I'm sure it's easy to pick a simple tracker, like GitHub Issues, but I would not know if it'd suffice all our needs and if it would scale, and again, I don't have the immediate energy to invest time into that. But meanwhile Jira is slowly eating away at me. I think the general concepts are acceptable. It's just all the rough edges, all the stupid little design decisions, and its slowness that I hate (passionately).
- emllnd 3y ago
  - Monday.com - Airtable - A giant board on Miro.com with a bunch of notes in frames Of course the scaling needs are different whether it’s for just a single team or if the data needs to be aggregated into some KPI. In my experience it’s better to keep KPI publishing separate from task tracking, though
- lmm 3y ago
  > I'm sure it's easy to pick a simple tracker, like GitHub Issues, but I would not know if it'd suffice all our needs and if it would scale The irony here is that those simple trackers scale a lot better. Jira's complexity is part of why it scales poorly - it's really bad when you have 500 people trying to use it.
karaterobot 3y ago
The biggest company I've ever worked in was 120 people, and I hated using Jira. I also hated Jira at the ~100 person company I used to work for, and the 7 person company I worked for a few years ago. Jira has a lot of problems. I've yet to find the one, true, perfect work management system, but of the half dozen I've tried, Jira is the one I like the least.
- vundercind 3y ago
  I’ve never once been able to figure out WTF actual benefit it provides over GH issues or Gitlab’s equivalent. I was once told we couldn’t use Issues because “non-developers find it confusing” but holy shit that cannot be true, have you seen how much more confusing even a very vanilla Jira is?! It seems to me these tools should be optimized for the majority of their users (developers) and if the PMs need pretty graphs and someone else wants it all in a spreadsheet (OMFG) they could use any of a hundred integrations to extract the data and generate those without more effort than wrangling Jira. Shit, lots of places are already paying for GH or Gitlab (or self-hosting the latter). They just don’t use that part and instead also pay for Jira or Asana or ADO or whatever productivity-murdering junk-drawer-where-information-gets-lost garbage.
viraptor 3y ago
Jira is very crud-like unless you add plugins to make it a bit better. (Unless things have changed since I last used it?) That means lots of unnecessary clicking around and waiting for slow page loads when you just want to achieve something simple. That compounds any corporate-inflicted issues.
ta1243 3y ago
I work in a mid-to-large org. The more agile part use tools like jira and slack. The older part (established in the 1920s) use Remedy and Teams. Jira is brilliant. It is team-led. Different teams have different approaches, some love all the features like components, versions, issue types, assignee, kanban boards, scrumms, reports etc etc. Others like my team use it with subject/description/comments. You make the tool fit what the team needs. Same with slack, you can create and destroy channels around your team -- anyone can create any channel at any point it makes sense -- problem at 3AM, spin up a channel to discuss it, job done. You can integrate and add plugins nice and easy. Remedy and Teams are led top down. They're designed to be organised, not organic. They're not built for the teams doing the work, but for the people wanting reporting. It's more about monthly KPIs than actually improving performance. I have no doubt you can use Jira in a "KPI led" way. I do doubt you can use Remedy in a responsible way, but even if you can, it relies on the culture of those selling the tools. Sadly I fear jira and slack will be next -- they already took Zoom and gave us teams instead, after all we "already pay for teams with office" (which aside from cloud-based email, I, and my teammates, never use). Never has an anti-trust move been so obvious or damaging.
- kstrauser 3y ago
  I can personally vouch that Jira can be inflicted on engineers in a “KPI led” way.
  - freedomben 3y ago
    yes same, in fact the access to metrics (for use in part in KPIs) was a primary driver of our adoption of Jira
  - ta1243 3y ago
    And a screwdriver can be used to destroy. Doesn't mean that's the only way to use it.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- wkat4242 3y ago
VonGallifrey 3y ago
When I clicked on the site the very first opinion called Jira shit because they had 20 different boards for the same thing, 2000 tickets in the backlog and 20 different mandatory fields for each ticket. Which is absolutely not the fault of Jira. Jira does not make you create 20 boards and per default a Title is all you need to create a Ticket. By the complaints own wording they had 2000 tickets because management refused to delete outdated and irrelevant tickets. A new tool would not fix this since I would bet that management would insist that all 20 boards with all tickets in the backlog would need to be transitioned to the new tool. The mandatory fields are obviously also highly important to management, those need to be configured in the new tool as well. Instead of complaining about the obviously bad management they just complain about Jira. That is, I think, very common when complaining about jira.
- sb8244 3y ago
  This hits the heart of it for me. I've used Jira (last job) and Linear (now). I don't really see any compelling reason that Linear is "better" than Jira. Jira was always pretty easy to use and navigate for me, and we had team-focused views for ourselves. Even on this site, several opinions I looked at are about the idea of process or the implementation of a process—not really about Jira. And several of the ones about Jira just came off as whiny nitpicking and not actually meaningful.
  - stackskipton 3y ago
    Linear being strongly opinionated helps keep Project Managers (broad term for manager types) in check. Jira trying to be everything to everyone means KPI management is just a few clicks away.
- michaelt 3y ago
  Would you at least agree that it's bad that Jira is slow as shit, in both its hosted and on-prem forms? Management didn't insist on that.
  - VonGallifrey 3y ago
IshKebab 3y ago
Trust me it's distain for the tool. Jira is bad on three fronts: 1. It's too configurable. It's like the company wiki. People come in, set up some random projects, processes, fields, statuses, etc. and then move on. There's rarely someone making it all consistent and sensible. This results in task statuses that can be TODO, BACKLOG, PENDING, WAITING, TO DO, etc. etc. etc. You also end up with waaaay too many fields for tasks. Arbitrary distinctions between "Tasks" and "Stories", etc. You're at the mercy of your Jira admin who will definitely make worse decisions than e.g. the developers of Phabricator or Gitlab. Hiding useful fields, adding pointless ones, etc. 2. Despite being super configurable, it can't do some really basic things you'd expect from something whose sole job is task tracking. For example you can only parent tasks 2 or 3 levels deep. A task can't have two parents. Subtasks can't be in different sprints. You can't reorder tasks by priority in the backlog. 3. Most offensively it is just incredibly slow. The main way you add tasks to a sprint is drag and drop on the backlog, but it performs so badly (100% CPU all the time) that they've had to add context menu options to move tasks to the top/bottom or to a sprint. I believe there's also an option to disable animations. A simple web page should not consume 100% of my CPU. It's by far the worst issue tracker I've ever used. Companies still pay for it though because PMs love the pretty burndown charts and being able to add a gazillion fields to tasks. How will they report project status to their bosses if they can't have Jira work out the exact-to-the-second estimated delivery time automatically? And by "automatically" I mean by making someone else do all the work.
- spondylosaurus 3y ago
  Re. your third point, Confluence is also slow as shit. Using both together is like returning to the age of dial-up.
  - toolslive 3y ago
    Not only that. Once you've battled the sucky editor and have the document in confluence, you will realize that if you export it to pdf (or word) it will look like shit. So what's the point? "Confluence is where information goes to die"
- erik_seaberg 3y ago
mrdoops 3y ago
Yeah 100% the root pain is from low agency/trust dynamics of a large org. Jira is just the tool management chooses because nobody-got-fired-for-buying-jira.
kagevf 3y ago
I've wondered the same thing about Microsoft Teams. Is Teams as horrible as people say, or do they just hate it because it's what they happen to use for video meetings at work? Conversely, I don't hear much hate for zoom.
- prepend 3y ago
  I can’t get a modal popup when someone messages me directly on teams. I have to check the list of chats for if someone has messaged me. That’s stupid and a flaw in teams. It’s a bad messaging app. It’s pretty good with meetings though.
  - kagevf 3y ago
    > I can’t get a modal popup when someone messages me directly on teams that's pretty damning ...
  - magicmicah85 3y ago
    Are you on Mac by chance? I use notifications to gather all my pop ups as I’ve never been able to get the modals to work.
    - prepend 3y ago
      Yes. I run on a Mac 99% of the time and it’s frustrating because pretty much every day people message me and they just sit there. The best work around I’ve found is to have my phone nearby and use it for notifications. Seems pretty silly for a messaging app to work so poorly.
      - magicmicah85 3y ago
        Not silly at all cause I do the same. I wonder if it’s a Mac issue displaying modals or a teams thing. I have the same issue with slack messages so I always assume it’s a Mac problem.
- psunavy03 3y ago
globular-toast 3y ago
I've worked in both large and small orgs with Jira. Hate it just as much in small orgs. Maybe more even.
commandlinefan 3y ago
> disdain for the specific tool vs. disdain for what working in a mid-to-large org You're kind of missing the problem here - it's both and neither. It's not the tool (it's awful) or the mid-to-large org itself, it's the concept that a tool as blunt as a ticketing system can meaningfully capture software development management in a useful way. If people just treated it as a "necessary evil" time-tracking type system to make sure people were really working when they said they were, that would be irritating but not damaging. But far too many people without a lot of mental faculties actually take it completely seriously and try to put everything in it and expect meaningful results out of it. It actually ends up being worse than "nothing at all" because it _insists_ on the "only do what can be predicted and whose predictions is measured in hours" model of software development that stupid people think encapsulates creative activities.
- lijok 3y ago
  > But far too many people without a lot of mental faculties actually take it completely seriously and try to put everything in it and expect meaningful results out of it. It actually ends up being worse than "nothing at all" because it _insists_ on the "only do what can be predicted and whose predictions is measured in hours" model of software development that stupid people think encapsulates creative activities. You’re conflating ticketing systems with work estimation.
  - commandlinefan 3y ago
    So are they.
- dboreham 3y ago
  > the concept that a tool as blunt as a ticketing system can meaningfully capture software development management in a useful way. The background to this is : yes it can. I worked in organizations (long pre-Jira) where we developed the bug/ticketing system specifically to drive our development management process. The two evolved in concert. The result was excellent, and sadly has never been re-achieved with any of the modern tools. My take on this is that somebody was told that the bug system can be used to drive project management (which it can) but then implemented a bug system without any real understanding of what that means or how to achieve it.
psunavy03 3y ago
It's no different than Agile or Scrum. It's just a tool, but if you put it in the hands of morons, you're going to have a bad time. Especially when there are explicit assumptions about how you'll use it built into said tool, and then said morons ignore them. Unfortunately in any medium-to-large org, there are a non-zero number of morons.
irrational 3y ago
I love my job and the people I work with. I hate Jira with a vivid passion. It is, by far, the worst tool I have to work with. In fact, it is the only tool I hate to work with.
tikhonj 3y ago
I worked at a large organization and yet didn't have to put up with anything Jira-like and top-down. Ticket-based development is neither necessary nor sufficient—nor even particularly effective—for coordinating software development at scale. It's a throwback to the superficially compelling but thoroughly ineffective ideas of "scientific management".
mschuster91 3y ago
We did the switch to Atlassian Cloud last year as there was no way to justify going for the 4x markup of a data center edition for self-hosting and oh boy, what a ride. The UI keeps changing around, it's dog slow, for some reason you can't copy a text from a ticket description because the pure act of clicking on the text will switch over to the editor that takes >10 seconds to load even on a high-power machine on a 10 GBit/s uplink... Atlassian desperately needs to pause on new acquisitions and new features for at least two years and rework all of the products they acquired and unify them. Literally every Atlassian product offering has a different way of doing things, no consistency anywhere. Oh, and half of the functionality has no API, and there is no first party Terraform provider so you have to do everything by hand every fucking time. The abusive workflow bullshit by clueless middle managers is another problem in itself, thankfully I'm in the lucky position to tell people "no, we won't do that".
- uzerfcwn 3y ago
  I agree. Cloud vs. Data Center is a big issue that doesn't get brought up enough when bashing Jira. DC (and formerly Server edition) are pretty good products that do their thing fine and are fast enough for typical use. Unfortunately, Server edition was discontinued and DC is too expensive, so formerly happy developers are forced to switch to Cloud edition, which is horrendously slow. Jira Cloud also lacks some loved features, such as the plaintext comment editor [0]. [0] https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-72631 https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-72631
zozbot234 3y ago
JIRA is a silly proprietary system, there's just no clearly stated case case for using it when we've got open alternatives like Phorge (née Phabricator) that also see wide-ranging use.
mac-mc 3y ago
At my last large tech company we moved from Phabricator to JIRA. It was a global downgrade for actual users through and through. Engineering hated it, usage of ticket tracking went down a lot because nobody wanted to interact with that crappy tool. A good chunk of team's tasks just went into more informal google docs, sheets & slack channel bots as a result and the teams responsible for managing the tool had a hard time getting real adoption. We were forced to get off of Phabricator because it was abandoned, but JIRA was still a downgrade in every way. Linear will eat JIRAs lunch and in a decade, it's going to go the way of HipChat as the thing that everyone used but nobody talks about.
jjav 3y ago
> I always wonder how much of this sort of thing is disdain for the specific tool vs. disdain for what working in a mid-to-large org. is like and the overhead it usually brings with it. I used to work in a largish public company (40K+ people). They had a wonderfully functional and flexible bug tracking system. So no, at least in my experience one can be in a large org and enjoy your bug tracking tool, nothing to do with the overhead of a large org. But jira, it is beyond awful.
- warbaker 3y ago
  What was the tool?
  - jjav 3y ago
    A custom tool built in-house. The current era really overestimates the benefit of using third-party cookie cutter tools. Yes they save on development cost of course. But you're stuck with something that has a million complexities you don't need and that is mostly terrible for everyone. So you pay in an infinite stream of small annoyances which add up. There's a lot of value in building in-house tools targeted to work exactly like your team works with zero extra complexity. And look at all the years-and-years-and-years-old jira feature requests that atlassian never bothers to implement and you have to suffer with mediocre workarounds. With an in-house tool you change it in an afternoon to do exactly what you need. It's not for every company but companies of enough size to support building in-house tools should really give it more consideration.
1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
A while back I tried an informal poll on HN, something like "What is the software you hate the most?" The majority of respones said "Jira". I was thinking maybe I could help, that some hated software was something I myself had used at some point. But I have never used Jira. When I investigated what Jira was, I had the same thought: I thought that in this case the software is probably only part of the problem.

by bschne 3y ago

I always wonder how much of this sort of thing is disdain for the specific tool vs. disdain for what working in a mid-to-large org. is like and the overhead it usually brings with it.

datadrivenangel 3y ago

The specific tool is often bad, working in mid-to-large orgs is often bad, and the two combined can be catastrophically bad. Poorly configured Jira on top of a poorly run large organization and you end up with an orwellian system that does nothing but punish people and squander productivity and human life.

itronitron 3y ago

Jira + Scrum is a soul crushing nightmare, Jira + Kanban is fine.

ch4s3 3y ago
Until someone comes along and tries to put some scrum into your kanban.
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  Ahh, someone woke up and chose violence today.
  - ch4s3 3y ago
    hilariously someone hated my joke enough to downvote it, but I think there's a kernel of truth.
OJFord 3y ago
I agree that scrum is a soul-crushing nightmare & kanban is fine, but Jira a nightmare of a tool to use regardless of your process, IME.
teeray 3y ago
"but once we can get our estimates right, then think of all that we can do with these burndown charts!"
- breather 3y ago
  Is there a context where time estimation is not employed, even implicitly?
  - scott_w 3y ago
    No, never. I’ve stopped doing story points for this reason. When people want an estimate, I tend to chop things into reasonable same-sized chunks and do my best effort based on that. I prefer the NoEstimates approach and try to use past data to be a bit more “real” but it’s not always possible. The truth is, if someone wants a time estimate, just do that and don’t beat around the bush. It’s too much effort to still be wrong.
- kstrauser 3y ago
  Chevy Chase in “Christmas Vacation”: “Bend over and I’ll show you.”
lmm 3y ago
Disagree; Jira + Kanban is if anything even worse. Since Jira is such a pain to use and Kanban doesn't have any requirement for estimation or timeboxing, people will write one ticket that says "do everything" and work on it for 6 months. While admittedly avoiding Jira for 6 months at a time is good for the soul, when you put your head down and work on something with no context for 6 months you usually end up making something that wasn't actually wanted and has to be thrown away or drastically reworked, which ends up being more soul crushing.

colordrops 3y ago

It's both.

112233 3y ago

It is possible to have terrible poorly made tool, and use it to commit unspeakable atrocities. If JIRA at least had rational design underlaying poor implementation, it would give some reason to bear and hope. Instead, it is an infinite fractal of nope, the likes of which you hardly encounter outside government contract projects.

DarkNova6 3y ago

I am thinking the exact same thing. Right now I wish I could use Jira because I‘m using this IBM equivalent tool „CCM“. CCM is so bad it’s nearly dysfunctional. Image Jira but 3 times the necessary clicks (this is not hyperbole). With Jira I can see the good intentions and how they go awry. But CCM is pure madness from top to bottom.

username135 3y ago
Gods, anything thats interactive and IBM related is generally annoying and not user friendly.
dakial1 3y ago
Even IBM is getting rid of IBM (or ex IBM) stuff. They are using outlook now, lots of teams use Jira/Trello/Confluence etc...
- MichaelZuo 3y ago
  They sold their in-house wiki system back in 2019 so they pretty much are forced to.
emmelaich 3y ago
Friend in IBM said the tool they used had 10s and 10s of mandatory fields... Which were ignored because everyone found it easier to just read and search the comments. So a thick chunk of commenting became de facto mandatory.

sverhagen 3y ago

My team does a lightweight agile process, we don't hate it. If we used a better tool, we'd love it. We have Jira, and I don't have the energy to change it, nor do I want the responsibility to decide or suggest what other tool that should be. I've always used Jira, I have no suggestions ready. I'm sure it's easy to pick a simple tracker, like GitHub Issues, but I would not know if it'd suffice all our needs and if it would scale, and again, I don't have the immediate energy to invest time into that. But meanwhile Jira is slowly eating away at me. I think the general concepts are acceptable. It's just all the rough edges, all the stupid little design decisions, and its slowness that I hate (passionately).

emllnd 3y ago
- Monday.com - Airtable - A giant board on Miro.com with a bunch of notes in frames Of course the scaling needs are different whether it’s for just a single team or if the data needs to be aggregated into some KPI. In my experience it’s better to keep KPI publishing separate from task tracking, though
lmm 3y ago
> I'm sure it's easy to pick a simple tracker, like GitHub Issues, but I would not know if it'd suffice all our needs and if it would scale The irony here is that those simple trackers scale a lot better. Jira's complexity is part of why it scales poorly - it's really bad when you have 500 people trying to use it.

karaterobot 3y ago

The biggest company I've ever worked in was 120 people, and I hated using Jira. I also hated Jira at the ~100 person company I used to work for, and the 7 person company I worked for a few years ago. Jira has a lot of problems. I've yet to find the one, true, perfect work management system, but of the half dozen I've tried, Jira is the one I like the least.

vundercind 3y ago
I’ve never once been able to figure out WTF actual benefit it provides over GH issues or Gitlab’s equivalent. I was once told we couldn’t use Issues because “non-developers find it confusing” but holy shit that cannot be true, have you seen how much more confusing even a very vanilla Jira is?! It seems to me these tools should be optimized for the majority of their users (developers) and if the PMs need pretty graphs and someone else wants it all in a spreadsheet (OMFG) they could use any of a hundred integrations to extract the data and generate those without more effort than wrangling Jira. Shit, lots of places are already paying for GH or Gitlab (or self-hosting the latter). They just don’t use that part and instead also pay for Jira or Asana or ADO or whatever productivity-murdering junk-drawer-where-information-gets-lost garbage.

viraptor 3y ago

Jira is very crud-like unless you add plugins to make it a bit better. (Unless things have changed since I last used it?) That means lots of unnecessary clicking around and waiting for slow page loads when you just want to achieve something simple. That compounds any corporate-inflicted issues.

ta1243 3y ago

I work in a mid-to-large org. The more agile part use tools like jira and slack. The older part (established in the 1920s) use Remedy and Teams. Jira is brilliant. It is team-led. Different teams have different approaches, some love all the features like components, versions, issue types, assignee, kanban boards, scrumms, reports etc etc. Others like my team use it with subject/description/comments. You make the tool fit what the team needs. Same with slack, you can create and destroy channels around your team -- anyone can create any channel at any point it makes sense -- problem at 3AM, spin up a channel to discuss it, job done. You can integrate and add plugins nice and easy. Remedy and Teams are led top down. They're designed to be organised, not organic. They're not built for the teams doing the work, but for the people wanting reporting. It's more about monthly KPIs than actually improving performance. I have no doubt you can use Jira in a "KPI led" way. I do doubt you can use Remedy in a responsible way, but even if you can, it relies on the culture of those selling the tools. Sadly I fear jira and slack will be next -- they already took Zoom and gave us teams instead, after all we "already pay for teams with office" (which aside from cloud-based email, I, and my teammates, never use). Never has an anti-trust move been so obvious or damaging.

kstrauser 3y ago
I can personally vouch that Jira can be inflicted on engineers in a “KPI led” way.
- freedomben 3y ago
  yes same, in fact the access to metrics (for use in part in KPIs) was a primary driver of our adoption of Jira
- ta1243 3y ago
  And a screwdriver can be used to destroy. Doesn't mean that's the only way to use it.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
wkat4242 3y ago

VonGallifrey 3y ago

When I clicked on the site the very first opinion called Jira shit because they had 20 different boards for the same thing, 2000 tickets in the backlog and 20 different mandatory fields for each ticket. Which is absolutely not the fault of Jira. Jira does not make you create 20 boards and per default a Title is all you need to create a Ticket. By the complaints own wording they had 2000 tickets because management refused to delete outdated and irrelevant tickets. A new tool would not fix this since I would bet that management would insist that all 20 boards with all tickets in the backlog would need to be transitioned to the new tool. The mandatory fields are obviously also highly important to management, those need to be configured in the new tool as well. Instead of complaining about the obviously bad management they just complain about Jira. That is, I think, very common when complaining about jira.

sb8244 3y ago
This hits the heart of it for me. I've used Jira (last job) and Linear (now). I don't really see any compelling reason that Linear is "better" than Jira. Jira was always pretty easy to use and navigate for me, and we had team-focused views for ourselves. Even on this site, several opinions I looked at are about the idea of process or the implementation of a process—not really about Jira. And several of the ones about Jira just came off as whiny nitpicking and not actually meaningful.
- stackskipton 3y ago
  Linear being strongly opinionated helps keep Project Managers (broad term for manager types) in check. Jira trying to be everything to everyone means KPI management is just a few clicks away.
michaelt 3y ago
Would you at least agree that it's bad that Jira is slow as shit, in both its hosted and on-prem forms? Management didn't insist on that.
- VonGallifrey 3y ago

IshKebab 3y ago

Trust me it's distain for the tool. Jira is bad on three fronts: 1. It's too configurable. It's like the company wiki. People come in, set up some random projects, processes, fields, statuses, etc. and then move on. There's rarely someone making it all consistent and sensible. This results in task statuses that can be TODO, BACKLOG, PENDING, WAITING, TO DO, etc. etc. etc. You also end up with waaaay too many fields for tasks. Arbitrary distinctions between "Tasks" and "Stories", etc. You're at the mercy of your Jira admin who will definitely make worse decisions than e.g. the developers of Phabricator or Gitlab. Hiding useful fields, adding pointless ones, etc. 2. Despite being super configurable, it can't do some really basic things you'd expect from something whose sole job is task tracking. For example you can only parent tasks 2 or 3 levels deep. A task can't have two parents. Subtasks can't be in different sprints. You can't reorder tasks by priority in the backlog. 3. Most offensively it is just incredibly slow. The main way you add tasks to a sprint is drag and drop on the backlog, but it performs so badly (100% CPU all the time) that they've had to add context menu options to move tasks to the top/bottom or to a sprint. I believe there's also an option to disable animations. A simple web page should not consume 100% of my CPU. It's by far the worst issue tracker I've ever used. Companies still pay for it though because PMs love the pretty burndown charts and being able to add a gazillion fields to tasks. How will they report project status to their bosses if they can't have Jira work out the exact-to-the-second estimated delivery time automatically? And by "automatically" I mean by making someone else do all the work.

spondylosaurus 3y ago
Re. your third point, Confluence is also slow as shit. Using both together is like returning to the age of dial-up.
- toolslive 3y ago
  Not only that. Once you've battled the sucky editor and have the document in confluence, you will realize that if you export it to pdf (or word) it will look like shit. So what's the point? "Confluence is where information goes to die"
erik_seaberg 3y ago

mrdoops 3y ago

Yeah 100% the root pain is from low agency/trust dynamics of a large org. Jira is just the tool management chooses because nobody-got-fired-for-buying-jira.

kagevf 3y ago

I've wondered the same thing about Microsoft Teams. Is Teams as horrible as people say, or do they just hate it because it's what they happen to use for video meetings at work? Conversely, I don't hear much hate for zoom.

prepend 3y ago
I can’t get a modal popup when someone messages me directly on teams. I have to check the list of chats for if someone has messaged me. That’s stupid and a flaw in teams. It’s a bad messaging app. It’s pretty good with meetings though.
- kagevf 3y ago
  > I can’t get a modal popup when someone messages me directly on teams that's pretty damning ...
- magicmicah85 3y ago
  Are you on Mac by chance? I use notifications to gather all my pop ups as I’ve never been able to get the modals to work.
  - prepend 3y ago
    Yes. I run on a Mac 99% of the time and it’s frustrating because pretty much every day people message me and they just sit there. The best work around I’ve found is to have my phone nearby and use it for notifications. Seems pretty silly for a messaging app to work so poorly.
    - magicmicah85 3y ago
      Not silly at all cause I do the same. I wonder if it’s a Mac issue displaying modals or a teams thing. I have the same issue with slack messages so I always assume it’s a Mac problem.
psunavy03 3y ago

globular-toast 3y ago

I've worked in both large and small orgs with Jira. Hate it just as much in small orgs. Maybe more even.

commandlinefan 3y ago

> disdain for the specific tool vs. disdain for what working in a mid-to-large org You're kind of missing the problem here - it's both and neither. It's not the tool (it's awful) or the mid-to-large org itself, it's the concept that a tool as blunt as a ticketing system can meaningfully capture software development management in a useful way. If people just treated it as a "necessary evil" time-tracking type system to make sure people were really working when they said they were, that would be irritating but not damaging. But far too many people without a lot of mental faculties actually take it completely seriously and try to put everything in it and expect meaningful results out of it. It actually ends up being worse than "nothing at all" because it _insists_ on the "only do what can be predicted and whose predictions is measured in hours" model of software development that stupid people think encapsulates creative activities.

lijok 3y ago
> But far too many people without a lot of mental faculties actually take it completely seriously and try to put everything in it and expect meaningful results out of it. It actually ends up being worse than "nothing at all" because it _insists_ on the "only do what can be predicted and whose predictions is measured in hours" model of software development that stupid people think encapsulates creative activities. You’re conflating ticketing systems with work estimation.
- commandlinefan 3y ago
  So are they.
dboreham 3y ago
> the concept that a tool as blunt as a ticketing system can meaningfully capture software development management in a useful way. The background to this is : yes it can. I worked in organizations (long pre-Jira) where we developed the bug/ticketing system specifically to drive our development management process. The two evolved in concert. The result was excellent, and sadly has never been re-achieved with any of the modern tools. My take on this is that somebody was told that the bug system can be used to drive project management (which it can) but then implemented a bug system without any real understanding of what that means or how to achieve it.

psunavy03 3y ago

It's no different than Agile or Scrum. It's just a tool, but if you put it in the hands of morons, you're going to have a bad time. Especially when there are explicit assumptions about how you'll use it built into said tool, and then said morons ignore them. Unfortunately in any medium-to-large org, there are a non-zero number of morons.

irrational 3y ago

I love my job and the people I work with. I hate Jira with a vivid passion. It is, by far, the worst tool I have to work with. In fact, it is the only tool I hate to work with.

tikhonj 3y ago

I worked at a large organization and yet didn't have to put up with anything Jira-like and top-down. Ticket-based development is neither necessary nor sufficient—nor even particularly effective—for coordinating software development at scale. It's a throwback to the superficially compelling but thoroughly ineffective ideas of "scientific management".

mschuster91 3y ago

We did the switch to Atlassian Cloud last year as there was no way to justify going for the 4x markup of a data center edition for self-hosting and oh boy, what a ride. The UI keeps changing around, it's dog slow, for some reason you can't copy a text from a ticket description because the pure act of clicking on the text will switch over to the editor that takes >10 seconds to load even on a high-power machine on a 10 GBit/s uplink... Atlassian desperately needs to pause on new acquisitions and new features for at least two years and rework all of the products they acquired and unify them. Literally every Atlassian product offering has a different way of doing things, no consistency anywhere. Oh, and half of the functionality has no API, and there is no first party Terraform provider so you have to do everything by hand every fucking time. The abusive workflow bullshit by clueless middle managers is another problem in itself, thankfully I'm in the lucky position to tell people "no, we won't do that".

uzerfcwn 3y ago
I agree. Cloud vs. Data Center is a big issue that doesn't get brought up enough when bashing Jira. DC (and formerly Server edition) are pretty good products that do their thing fine and are fast enough for typical use. Unfortunately, Server edition was discontinued and DC is too expensive, so formerly happy developers are forced to switch to Cloud edition, which is horrendously slow. Jira Cloud also lacks some loved features, such as the plaintext comment editor [0]. [0] https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-72631 https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-72631

zozbot234 3y ago

JIRA is a silly proprietary system, there's just no clearly stated case case for using it when we've got open alternatives like Phorge (née Phabricator) that also see wide-ranging use.

mac-mc 3y ago

At my last large tech company we moved from Phabricator to JIRA. It was a global downgrade for actual users through and through. Engineering hated it, usage of ticket tracking went down a lot because nobody wanted to interact with that crappy tool. A good chunk of team's tasks just went into more informal google docs, sheets & slack channel bots as a result and the teams responsible for managing the tool had a hard time getting real adoption. We were forced to get off of Phabricator because it was abandoned, but JIRA was still a downgrade in every way. Linear will eat JIRAs lunch and in a decade, it's going to go the way of HipChat as the thing that everyone used but nobody talks about.

jjav 3y ago

> I always wonder how much of this sort of thing is disdain for the specific tool vs. disdain for what working in a mid-to-large org. is like and the overhead it usually brings with it. I used to work in a largish public company (40K+ people). They had a wonderfully functional and flexible bug tracking system. So no, at least in my experience one can be in a large org and enjoy your bug tracking tool, nothing to do with the overhead of a large org. But jira, it is beyond awful.

warbaker 3y ago
What was the tool?
- jjav 3y ago
  A custom tool built in-house. The current era really overestimates the benefit of using third-party cookie cutter tools. Yes they save on development cost of course. But you're stuck with something that has a million complexities you don't need and that is mostly terrible for everyone. So you pay in an infinite stream of small annoyances which add up. There's a lot of value in building in-house tools targeted to work exactly like your team works with zero extra complexity. And look at all the years-and-years-and-years-old jira feature requests that atlassian never bothers to implement and you have to suffer with mediocre workarounds. With an in-house tool you change it in an afternoon to do exactly what you need. It's not for every company but companies of enough size to support building in-house tools should really give it more consideration.

1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago

A while back I tried an informal poll on HN, something like "What is the software you hate the most?" The majority of respones said "Jira". I was thinking maybe I could help, that some hated software was something I myself had used at some point. But I have never used Jira. When I investigated what Jira was, I had the same thought: I thought that in this case the software is probably only part of the problem.