6 ms·

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 brilli

by 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
I don't want to use any tool or methodology.. I just want to do my work.
- fragmede 3y ago
  how do you want to do work without tools?
  - wkat4242 3y ago
    Well tools that actually help me to do my job, yes. But Jira doesn't. It's just an impediment. The same with 'agile' that's just forced on us not because it is a great idea but because our idiot CIO loves her buzzwords. It's not even implemented right. Ps I don't do any development work. The problem is they're trying to shoehorn a methodology that doesn't work for us. I'm not even part of a team that do the same as what I do. But in general i don't like the mental restrictions that having to adhere to methodologies brings. This explains it a bit better: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39338582 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39338582
    - ta1243 3y ago
      Where do you track what plates you're spinning? When you look at some function and you go "what does that feature supposed to do", where do you look up the history? Just in git comments on the file? Do you simply not track or communicate at all? Do you store it all in a personal notebook? Do you store everything in emails? Files in dropbox? Or do you rely on memorising everything you do, why you do it, when you do it, for who, etc?
      - wkat4242 3y ago
        > Where do you track what plates you're spinning? When you look at some function and you go "what does that feature supposed to do", where do you look up the history? Just in git comments on the file? Like I said I'm not a developer at all. I don't use git for work. Nor do I collaborate on my tasks with other people. My brain is enough to keep track of things. Yet the company wants everyone to be "agile" regardless of the role.
blueskythinking 3y ago
If by “team lead” you mean the noisy few set the rules and the rest of us have to deal with it, then that also matches my experience of Jira.
- fennecfoxy 3y ago
  Isn't that just human interactions in general? Society etc.
- ta1243 3y ago
  My team is 3 people so we're all the "noisy few"
almostnormal 3y ago
> Jira is brilliant. It is team-led. Different teams have different approaches, [...] That doesn't sound real. There's supposed to be some central department(s) that collect ideas from the process framework of the season or requested by customers (especially those items for levels that are not requested), add their own ideas and create a superset of that as configuration with everything set to mandatory. The result is infliced upon everyone, except of course the department that was responsible for the definition.
vundercind 3y ago
Teams would be fine with two things: 1) Let a Team channel be a normal-ass chat instead of some weird forum-in-a-chat-interface. Shit gets lost. Creating a new post feels very formal and high friction, because it’ll push everything else out of view (another, minor problem: teams’ padding and whitespace is way out of control). Make it configurable! That’s ok. The weird chat-as-forum thing is fine for a very low-traffic announcements channel (and very bad for anything else) so having it as an option is alright. 2) Allow “create a meeting for this Teams channel” that puts any meeting chat directly in the channel. These two problems force conversations away from the “Team” and into meeting-specific chats and DMs. It’s really, really bad. It silos knowledge and makes it hard to tell wtf is going on. Teams is horrible for distributed or hybrid work because of these two deficiencies.
- a1o 3y ago
  There is probably some feature request somewhere in Microsoft weird tech channel with thousands of comments and upvotes and some MS person appearing every three years to let us know they "are looking into it".
  - vundercind 3y ago
    There were a couple years-old ones on public feature request sites last I checked. They’re ignoring them. It’s frustrating because Teams can already do normal chat rooms, and can already schedule meetings. Just not in the most-useful places to have those two features. It’s not brand-new feature development from scratch.
  - ta1243 3y ago
    It's probably somewhere in a Teams channel, and nobody in microsoft can actually find it.
- stackskipton 3y ago
  On Number 2, you can schedule a meeting in a channel that have meeting show in the channel and keep the chat there.
- ClimaxGravely 3y ago
NikolaNovak 3y ago
Interesting; I think this is a demonstration of how much what seems like a "Tool" is actually "organization", because my current experience is completely opposite: * In MS teams, I can create conversations, group chats, organic meetings, and add people (and include history) as I want and desire. I prefer it for quick discussions with my colleagues and to get a rapid problem solving or critical incident conversation where I don't immediately know who I need / what it's about, and it'll scale as I add people. I push a button and talk to people, push a button to add people, push a button to video chat, all seamless. * Slack is structured and formal and based around enterprise-created channels and workgroups, with way too much noise in each massive channel and way too little content that's even remotely relevant to me. Outside of channels, conversations are horribly gimped: A) I can only have one conversation with each set of people, I cannot simply rename a chat and have three different chats with same people around different topics B) If I add people to an existing conversation, it will create a new chat without history (this may have improved recently as I know we sent a TON of feedback to Slack admins). Basically, to get anything done you have to create channels, which is great for "top down, I know ahead of time what I need / want to enforce" structure, but awful for "this started as a one-on-one and is now a massive discussion with 17 people" I'm looking at some of the other comments, and it seems they have some weird gimped version of MS Teams. E.g.: >>"Allow “create a meeting for this Teams channel” that puts any meeting chat directly in the channel." This... is how it works for me. I start a conversation with some people, then I add people, then I click "Call", then we all video call together, then we are done and keep typing in it, repeat as needed. Weird!
- TJSomething 3y ago
  > Basically, to get anything done you have to create channels, which is great for "top down, I know ahead of time what I need / want to enforce" structure, but awful for "this started as a one-on-one and is now a massive discussion with 17 people" In Slack, you can turn a group DM into a private channel and keep the history. https://slack.com/help/articles/217555437-Convert-a-group-direct-message-to-a-private-channel https://slack.com/help/articles/217555437-Convert-a-group-di...
- Tagbert 3y ago
  That sounds like you have a very top-down organization and they have setup Slack to mirror that dynamic. Slack by itself does not have those restrictions. Individuals can create Slack Channels (often too many channels). You can setup adhoc groups through DM and can add people to that group . You have the choice when adding people to a chat to block the history or give them full access to the history. At any point you can convert a adhoc group into a Channel and decide if it will be private or public. You can click to start a call or to start a zoom with those present in the group or channel. it's pretty seamless, too. It sounds like the difference is your organization.
lmm 3y ago
> 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'd say it's the other way round. Everywhere I've seen Jira, the person who can change the tool settings (e.g. make mandatory fields optional, add a transition to allow you to move a card to the column it should be in (because Jira is deny by default, you can only move things in ways that are specifically allowed) is a very distant part of the org chart from the team doing day to day work on it. "not built for the teams doing the work, but for the people wanting reporting. It's more about monthly KPIs than actually improving performance" is exactly how I'd describe Jira, given how I've seen it used (across a great many organisations, large and small - indeed I'd say switching to Jira is the most reliable indicator that a previously fun company has grown too big and it's time to leave). Some stuff is probably just typical managerial bullshit. But the fact that Jira defaults to working as a slow, drag-and-drop interface with no undo is absolutely an unforced error. > Never has an anti-trust move been so obvious or damaging. Atlassian buying Trello and gradually ruining it is worse than MS giving away crappy products for free.
- ta1243 3y ago
  Your jira seems to be set up to reduce your control My corporate jira gives me full control over the workflows, what fields are shown, etc That's not a jira problem, it's an organisation problem There's no way I could extract any usable metrics from my jira, but that's not its purpose. It can however tell me where we are with the new upgrades to Site 95 (waiting on the people running the fibres), or who wanted that new device in Site 5 and crucially why.
zac23or 3y ago
“Jira is brilliant” I've never read that sentence before! My feeling is... developers hate Jira, managers love Jira. And that is expected. The tendency is for things loved by managers to be hated by developers, such as meetings, metrics, etc. An example of a very misused metric: In one of my jobs, managers started using Scrum Poker results as a productivity measure. “My team scored 100 points in the last sprint.” Imagine the chaos this generated. Quickly teams began to hate the Scrum poker. Jira is probably just a scapegoat in corporate theater, something needs to be to blame. Jira is a good culprit.
- psunavy03 3y ago
  > The tendency is for things loved by managers to be hated by developers, such as meetings, metrics, etc. There's an unfortunate tendency for some people to scoff at the immutable fact that to write software, you have to talk to other human beings. And that if a company is paying you good money to do it, they are going to want to know when it will be done and what ROI they are getting on your salary. Sure, there are stupid meetings and stupid metrics. But to lump "meetings" and "metrics" into a "hated" category is the mark of an immature dev who doesn't understand why he/she has a job and a salary in the first place.
  - cqqxo4zV46cp 3y ago
    It’s why I just can’t take some dev communities seriously. Too many immature / inexperienced people will talk eachother into thinking that their “I should just be able to sit here and code!” mentality is justified or even viable. Who the hell else gets to work like that? The utter hubris.
    - ta1243 3y ago
      I work like that, but I love occasional meetings to catch up with peers. My immediate team of 3 people has a twice-weekly "standup" meeting, and communicate through the rest of the week in a slack channel. I have a weekly catchup with another team and a monthly with a couple more, and once every 3 months a large pan-org community get together in person, typically with a beer and curry. Of course there are terrible meetings too. I currently have a PM who had 5 meetings with me a week on two minor projects. I don't go to those meetings, I just update the jira when there's an update. I need to do that as I am working on 40 things at a time and I don't have the mental capacity to remember how many plates I'm spinning. That's far more efficient, it's asynchronous, easy to keep on top of. I see some colleagues struggling to get anything done because they are in meetings 6 hours a day, they go from one meeting to another without even a pause for a break. In those meetings they then try to half-listen and send emails about other subjects. They don't need to be in those meetings.

by ta1243 3y ago

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

I don't want to use any tool or methodology.. I just want to do my work.

fragmede 3y ago
how do you want to do work without tools?
- wkat4242 3y ago
  Well tools that actually help me to do my job, yes. But Jira doesn't. It's just an impediment. The same with 'agile' that's just forced on us not because it is a great idea but because our idiot CIO loves her buzzwords. It's not even implemented right. Ps I don't do any development work. The problem is they're trying to shoehorn a methodology that doesn't work for us. I'm not even part of a team that do the same as what I do. But in general i don't like the mental restrictions that having to adhere to methodologies brings. This explains it a bit better: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39338582 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39338582
  - ta1243 3y ago
    Where do you track what plates you're spinning? When you look at some function and you go "what does that feature supposed to do", where do you look up the history? Just in git comments on the file? Do you simply not track or communicate at all? Do you store it all in a personal notebook? Do you store everything in emails? Files in dropbox? Or do you rely on memorising everything you do, why you do it, when you do it, for who, etc?
    - wkat4242 3y ago
      > Where do you track what plates you're spinning? When you look at some function and you go "what does that feature supposed to do", where do you look up the history? Just in git comments on the file? Like I said I'm not a developer at all. I don't use git for work. Nor do I collaborate on my tasks with other people. My brain is enough to keep track of things. Yet the company wants everyone to be "agile" regardless of the role.

blueskythinking 3y ago

If by “team lead” you mean the noisy few set the rules and the rest of us have to deal with it, then that also matches my experience of Jira.

fennecfoxy 3y ago
Isn't that just human interactions in general? Society etc.
ta1243 3y ago
My team is 3 people so we're all the "noisy few"

almostnormal 3y ago

> Jira is brilliant. It is team-led. Different teams have different approaches, [...] That doesn't sound real. There's supposed to be some central department(s) that collect ideas from the process framework of the season or requested by customers (especially those items for levels that are not requested), add their own ideas and create a superset of that as configuration with everything set to mandatory. The result is infliced upon everyone, except of course the department that was responsible for the definition.

vundercind 3y ago

Teams would be fine with two things: 1) Let a Team channel be a normal-ass chat instead of some weird forum-in-a-chat-interface. Shit gets lost. Creating a new post feels very formal and high friction, because it’ll push everything else out of view (another, minor problem: teams’ padding and whitespace is way out of control). Make it configurable! That’s ok. The weird chat-as-forum thing is fine for a very low-traffic announcements channel (and very bad for anything else) so having it as an option is alright. 2) Allow “create a meeting for this Teams channel” that puts any meeting chat directly in the channel. These two problems force conversations away from the “Team” and into meeting-specific chats and DMs. It’s really, really bad. It silos knowledge and makes it hard to tell wtf is going on. Teams is horrible for distributed or hybrid work because of these two deficiencies.

a1o 3y ago
There is probably some feature request somewhere in Microsoft weird tech channel with thousands of comments and upvotes and some MS person appearing every three years to let us know they "are looking into it".
- vundercind 3y ago
  There were a couple years-old ones on public feature request sites last I checked. They’re ignoring them. It’s frustrating because Teams can already do normal chat rooms, and can already schedule meetings. Just not in the most-useful places to have those two features. It’s not brand-new feature development from scratch.
- ta1243 3y ago
  It's probably somewhere in a Teams channel, and nobody in microsoft can actually find it.
stackskipton 3y ago
On Number 2, you can schedule a meeting in a channel that have meeting show in the channel and keep the chat there.
ClimaxGravely 3y ago

NikolaNovak 3y ago

Interesting; I think this is a demonstration of how much what seems like a "Tool" is actually "organization", because my current experience is completely opposite: * In MS teams, I can create conversations, group chats, organic meetings, and add people (and include history) as I want and desire. I prefer it for quick discussions with my colleagues and to get a rapid problem solving or critical incident conversation where I don't immediately know who I need / what it's about, and it'll scale as I add people. I push a button and talk to people, push a button to add people, push a button to video chat, all seamless. * Slack is structured and formal and based around enterprise-created channels and workgroups, with way too much noise in each massive channel and way too little content that's even remotely relevant to me. Outside of channels, conversations are horribly gimped: A) I can only have one conversation with each set of people, I cannot simply rename a chat and have three different chats with same people around different topics B) If I add people to an existing conversation, it will create a new chat without history (this may have improved recently as I know we sent a TON of feedback to Slack admins). Basically, to get anything done you have to create channels, which is great for "top down, I know ahead of time what I need / want to enforce" structure, but awful for "this started as a one-on-one and is now a massive discussion with 17 people" I'm looking at some of the other comments, and it seems they have some weird gimped version of MS Teams. E.g.: >>"Allow “create a meeting for this Teams channel” that puts any meeting chat directly in the channel." This... is how it works for me. I start a conversation with some people, then I add people, then I click "Call", then we all video call together, then we are done and keep typing in it, repeat as needed. Weird!

TJSomething 3y ago
> Basically, to get anything done you have to create channels, which is great for "top down, I know ahead of time what I need / want to enforce" structure, but awful for "this started as a one-on-one and is now a massive discussion with 17 people" In Slack, you can turn a group DM into a private channel and keep the history. https://slack.com/help/articles/217555437-Convert-a-group-direct-message-to-a-private-channel https://slack.com/help/articles/217555437-Convert-a-group-di...
Tagbert 3y ago
That sounds like you have a very top-down organization and they have setup Slack to mirror that dynamic. Slack by itself does not have those restrictions. Individuals can create Slack Channels (often too many channels). You can setup adhoc groups through DM and can add people to that group . You have the choice when adding people to a chat to block the history or give them full access to the history. At any point you can convert a adhoc group into a Channel and decide if it will be private or public. You can click to start a call or to start a zoom with those present in the group or channel. it's pretty seamless, too. It sounds like the difference is your organization.

lmm 3y ago

> 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'd say it's the other way round. Everywhere I've seen Jira, the person who can change the tool settings (e.g. make mandatory fields optional, add a transition to allow you to move a card to the column it should be in (because Jira is deny by default, you can only move things in ways that are specifically allowed) is a very distant part of the org chart from the team doing day to day work on it. "not built for the teams doing the work, but for the people wanting reporting. It's more about monthly KPIs than actually improving performance" is exactly how I'd describe Jira, given how I've seen it used (across a great many organisations, large and small - indeed I'd say switching to Jira is the most reliable indicator that a previously fun company has grown too big and it's time to leave). Some stuff is probably just typical managerial bullshit. But the fact that Jira defaults to working as a slow, drag-and-drop interface with no undo is absolutely an unforced error. > Never has an anti-trust move been so obvious or damaging. Atlassian buying Trello and gradually ruining it is worse than MS giving away crappy products for free.

ta1243 3y ago
Your jira seems to be set up to reduce your control My corporate jira gives me full control over the workflows, what fields are shown, etc That's not a jira problem, it's an organisation problem There's no way I could extract any usable metrics from my jira, but that's not its purpose. It can however tell me where we are with the new upgrades to Site 95 (waiting on the people running the fibres), or who wanted that new device in Site 5 and crucially why.

zac23or 3y ago

“Jira is brilliant” I've never read that sentence before! My feeling is... developers hate Jira, managers love Jira. And that is expected. The tendency is for things loved by managers to be hated by developers, such as meetings, metrics, etc. An example of a very misused metric: In one of my jobs, managers started using Scrum Poker results as a productivity measure. “My team scored 100 points in the last sprint.” Imagine the chaos this generated. Quickly teams began to hate the Scrum poker. Jira is probably just a scapegoat in corporate theater, something needs to be to blame. Jira is a good culprit.

psunavy03 3y ago
> The tendency is for things loved by managers to be hated by developers, such as meetings, metrics, etc. There's an unfortunate tendency for some people to scoff at the immutable fact that to write software, you have to talk to other human beings. And that if a company is paying you good money to do it, they are going to want to know when it will be done and what ROI they are getting on your salary. Sure, there are stupid meetings and stupid metrics. But to lump "meetings" and "metrics" into a "hated" category is the mark of an immature dev who doesn't understand why he/she has a job and a salary in the first place.
- cqqxo4zV46cp 3y ago
  It’s why I just can’t take some dev communities seriously. Too many immature / inexperienced people will talk eachother into thinking that their “I should just be able to sit here and code!” mentality is justified or even viable. Who the hell else gets to work like that? The utter hubris.
  - ta1243 3y ago
    I work like that, but I love occasional meetings to catch up with peers. My immediate team of 3 people has a twice-weekly "standup" meeting, and communicate through the rest of the week in a slack channel. I have a weekly catchup with another team and a monthly with a couple more, and once every 3 months a large pan-org community get together in person, typically with a beer and curry. Of course there are terrible meetings too. I currently have a PM who had 5 meetings with me a week on two minor projects. I don't go to those meetings, I just update the jira when there's an update. I need to do that as I am working on 40 things at a time and I don't have the mental capacity to remember how many plates I'm spinning. That's far more efficient, it's asynchronous, easy to keep on top of. I see some colleagues struggling to get anything done because they are in meetings 6 hours a day, they go from one meeting to another without even a pause for a break. In those meetings they then try to half-listen and send emails about other subjects. They don't need to be in those meetings.