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I think jira isn’t really the issue — it’s actually easier to use (IME) to express a body of work than notion, asana or trello. Like most things, I think it’s

by kgdiem 2y ago

I think jira isn’t really the issue — it’s actually easier to use (IME) to express a body of work than notion, asana or trello. Like most things, I think it’s a people problem. Story points, velocity, burn down, etc are mostly nonsense. Tracking productivity can be largely subjective and unfair, probably better left to judgement of a decent manager. At the end of the day I think it’s systemic incompetence and lack of clear communication, from any combo of product engineering and business, that causes frustration more than creating epics, stories, subtasks and bugs.

hedora 2y ago
Yeah; Jira lets you pick whatever workflow works for your company. I'd love to find a replacement that can do that. Most of the major issues I've seen with Jira come down to a disconnect between engineering and product, sales, etc, etc. Of course, there's a bunch of other stuff they should just fix. For instance, Atlassian should pick one markdown dialect, and then default all their tools to it at setup time. Also, bugs stored in their cloud offering often go unavailable for a few minutes, even with tiny bug databases. (When I say a bug goes unavailable, I mean I can't access issue XX-1234, but other pages load, often including other bugs.) Anyway, it's the least bad bug tracking tool I've encountered.
- nofunsir 2y ago
  Redmine does it just fine. And is way faster. Anything you're thinking of that Jira can "do" while Redmine can't is not needed to make your widget. GUARANTEED.
- piva00 2y ago
  > Yeah; Jira lets you pick whatever workflow works for your company. I'd love to find a replacement that can do that. That's a large part of the issue though, just like any corporate software that promotes its customisability as a major feature: SAP, Salesforce, ServiceNow, it's all a shitshow of dissonance between the technical and managerial sides. Workflows that are designed by a committee of the people who are not going to do the work but will manage it, implemented by consultants that sell themselves as specialists in "integration", usually because the company is too cheap to have its own internal set of good developers to drive such projects. Things breakdown, workflows that are more of a hindrance than a leverage, requiring constant finicking and adjustments, also constantly breaking work because somethings has to be done in the system, while the system itself is not working well for its purpose. It's a mess, and I have no answer to it, there's something more substantial, and generalised going underneath this mechanism of customisable workflow software eating up actual productive work. Being opinionated as a product actually matters in the end, but there's no incentive to not try to reach every single possible customer in a market.
  - kgdiem 2y ago
    > it's all a shitshow of dissonance between the technical and managerial sides. Workflows that are designed by a committee of the people who are not going to do the work but will manage it, implemented by consultants that sell themselves as specialists in "integration", usually because the company is too cheap to have its own internal set of good developers to drive such projects. Preach!! > Being opinionated as a product actually matters in the end, but there's no incentive to not try to reach every single possible customer in a market. Yes undoubtedly so. I’ve seen a lot of companies using Monday.com for non-tech projects and the endless flexibility / generality of the tool leads them to just waste a ton of money and time, in the end they are none the wiser that the issue is them all along.
nofunsir 2y ago
I actually do think it's a jira issue. The death knell of your software engineering team's culture and Real productivity is when the company hires an outsider "engineering manager" whose sole job is to pretend to care about identifying all the different tools all the different engineers need......... and figuring out how to shoehorn in jira. Then an she hires an engineering-side "IT" guy, who spends all day talking to the real IT guy who doesn't know all the ins out and schemas and schema schemas of jira/confluence/fisheye... and ignoring engineer's tickets because that's not his REAL job (he's got "engineering" in his title after all)... and figuring out how to effectively lock down jira so only his boss, the engineering manager, who came from lays potato chips IT intern program, can make changes, wasting 3 entire years of productivity all to make sure the software engineers are relegated to 'software developers' whose sole job is now to optimize their jira ticket churn. What? Jira's slow? That's a feature. Don't add up all the 3-second load times across 1000 clicks per engineer per day. No.
- kgdiem 2y ago
  But isn’t this all a people problem? The incompetent manager, the overly strict rules implemented by IT, the BS metrics by the manager. If me, you and an academic/finance guy/content creator/etc wanted to start working on a project tomorrow, would it matter that much to you if we used jira or a google sheet to communicate the scope and current status of the project? Edit, addendum, I’ve been thinking about the larger picture, the personal and organizational issues in software, for some time now. I’ve come to realize that a serious lack of talent, interest or enthusiasm really gets in the way of enterprise software. I have started to think the solution is to focus on tradecraft; most organizations lack the ability to create decent software for a reasonable cost much in the same way that every company hires outside developers and tradesmen to build a new factory or building.
  - nofunsir 2y ago
    >would it matter that much to you if we used jira Yes, genuinely it would matter to me. I would immediately stop working on said project. I'm not exaggerating when I say I would prefer an excel document named ProjectIdeasAndFinance_final_JohnD_v2_jan23_finalfinal.xls.zip.xls over working in jira
flappyeagle 2y ago
When the selling point of your product is focused on burn downs and story points then it’s as much the fault of the product as it is the user that adopts it
polotics 2y ago
Jira's extreme customizability has been the perfect footgun in any enterprise I've seen. Any misguided over-engineering of attributes, status values, workflows, is made easy and can be project and team-specific. The default from where I stand, having had to automate around many a weird Jira & Confluence setup, synchronizing, pushing summaries to pages, etc... ...is that figuring out the name of a custom field through the hack of setting it to a comical value on your test Jira issue does get old eventually, and much convoluted Atlassian-based cleverness would be easier to deploy, operate, maintain, and so, so, so much snappier, with a straight custom built Django app.
DANmode 2y ago
Yes, it technically offers the features necessary for this cross-world cohesion, but doesn't mention your culture still needs to work, their product isn't a drop-in replacement for a passionatrly well-organized and communicative team.

by kgdiem 2y ago

hedora 2y ago

Yeah; Jira lets you pick whatever workflow works for your company. I'd love to find a replacement that can do that. Most of the major issues I've seen with Jira come down to a disconnect between engineering and product, sales, etc, etc. Of course, there's a bunch of other stuff they should just fix. For instance, Atlassian should pick one markdown dialect, and then default all their tools to it at setup time. Also, bugs stored in their cloud offering often go unavailable for a few minutes, even with tiny bug databases. (When I say a bug goes unavailable, I mean I can't access issue XX-1234, but other pages load, often including other bugs.) Anyway, it's the least bad bug tracking tool I've encountered.

nofunsir 2y ago
Redmine does it just fine. And is way faster. Anything you're thinking of that Jira can "do" while Redmine can't is not needed to make your widget. GUARANTEED.
piva00 2y ago
> Yeah; Jira lets you pick whatever workflow works for your company. I'd love to find a replacement that can do that. That's a large part of the issue though, just like any corporate software that promotes its customisability as a major feature: SAP, Salesforce, ServiceNow, it's all a shitshow of dissonance between the technical and managerial sides. Workflows that are designed by a committee of the people who are not going to do the work but will manage it, implemented by consultants that sell themselves as specialists in "integration", usually because the company is too cheap to have its own internal set of good developers to drive such projects. Things breakdown, workflows that are more of a hindrance than a leverage, requiring constant finicking and adjustments, also constantly breaking work because somethings has to be done in the system, while the system itself is not working well for its purpose. It's a mess, and I have no answer to it, there's something more substantial, and generalised going underneath this mechanism of customisable workflow software eating up actual productive work. Being opinionated as a product actually matters in the end, but there's no incentive to not try to reach every single possible customer in a market.
- kgdiem 2y ago
  > it's all a shitshow of dissonance between the technical and managerial sides. Workflows that are designed by a committee of the people who are not going to do the work but will manage it, implemented by consultants that sell themselves as specialists in "integration", usually because the company is too cheap to have its own internal set of good developers to drive such projects. Preach!! > Being opinionated as a product actually matters in the end, but there's no incentive to not try to reach every single possible customer in a market. Yes undoubtedly so. I’ve seen a lot of companies using Monday.com for non-tech projects and the endless flexibility / generality of the tool leads them to just waste a ton of money and time, in the end they are none the wiser that the issue is them all along.

nofunsir 2y ago

I actually do think it's a jira issue. The death knell of your software engineering team's culture and Real productivity is when the company hires an outsider "engineering manager" whose sole job is to pretend to care about identifying all the different tools all the different engineers need......... and figuring out how to shoehorn in jira. Then an she hires an engineering-side "IT" guy, who spends all day talking to the real IT guy who doesn't know all the ins out and schemas and schema schemas of jira/confluence/fisheye... and ignoring engineer's tickets because that's not his REAL job (he's got "engineering" in his title after all)... and figuring out how to effectively lock down jira so only his boss, the engineering manager, who came from lays potato chips IT intern program, can make changes, wasting 3 entire years of productivity all to make sure the software engineers are relegated to 'software developers' whose sole job is now to optimize their jira ticket churn. What? Jira's slow? That's a feature. Don't add up all the 3-second load times across 1000 clicks per engineer per day. No.

kgdiem 2y ago
But isn’t this all a people problem? The incompetent manager, the overly strict rules implemented by IT, the BS metrics by the manager. If me, you and an academic/finance guy/content creator/etc wanted to start working on a project tomorrow, would it matter that much to you if we used jira or a google sheet to communicate the scope and current status of the project? Edit, addendum, I’ve been thinking about the larger picture, the personal and organizational issues in software, for some time now. I’ve come to realize that a serious lack of talent, interest or enthusiasm really gets in the way of enterprise software. I have started to think the solution is to focus on tradecraft; most organizations lack the ability to create decent software for a reasonable cost much in the same way that every company hires outside developers and tradesmen to build a new factory or building.
- nofunsir 2y ago
  >would it matter that much to you if we used jira Yes, genuinely it would matter to me. I would immediately stop working on said project. I'm not exaggerating when I say I would prefer an excel document named ProjectIdeasAndFinance_final_JohnD_v2_jan23_finalfinal.xls.zip.xls over working in jira

flappyeagle 2y ago

When the selling point of your product is focused on burn downs and story points then it’s as much the fault of the product as it is the user that adopts it

polotics 2y ago

Jira's extreme customizability has been the perfect footgun in any enterprise I've seen. Any misguided over-engineering of attributes, status values, workflows, is made easy and can be project and team-specific. The default from where I stand, having had to automate around many a weird Jira & Confluence setup, synchronizing, pushing summaries to pages, etc... ...is that figuring out the name of a custom field through the hack of setting it to a comical value on your test Jira issue does get old eventually, and much convoluted Atlassian-based cleverness would be easier to deploy, operate, maintain, and so, so, so much snappier, with a straight custom built Django app.

DANmode 2y ago

Yes, it technically offers the features necessary for this cross-world cohesion, but doesn't mention your culture still needs to work, their product isn't a drop-in replacement for a passionatrly well-organized and communicative team.