4 ms·

From my experience with sales/PM people at google, they refuse to use internal tools and try to get Jira and other shit installed. Regardless of the tool qualit

From my experience with sales/PM people at google, they refuse to use internal tools and try to get Jira and other shit installed. Regardless of the tool quality, just because that's what they learned already. This mostly didn't work out for them back in the day but in more recent times as more and more low quality middle level managers and execs get hired they manage to get approvals. In my org a new VP demanded Jira instance within a month of joining the company and that it be used for technical project reporting. Of course all the developers said fuck no to that so for a while some managers were trying to do two way sync between Jira and Buganizer. When I left it was mostly abandoned and full of tumbleweed...

lenerdenator 1y ago
> From my experience with sales/PM people at google, they refuse to use internal tools and try to get Jira and other shit installed. Regardless of the tool quality, just because that's what they learned already. That's when you're supposed to pull the smooth-talking people that are usually in those roles and ask them a very simple question: "Do you want this tool more than you want to be employed?"
- closewith 1y ago
  Good software salespeople are much rarer than good developers, so it's likely that conversion would be had with the other parties.
  - datadrivenangel 1y ago
    And they're better at selling!
  - sigmoid10 1y ago
    Only if you apply a lower standard for "good" software developers.
    - closewith 1y ago
      You could limit your definition of good to the 99th percentile and it would still be true.
      - sigmoid10 1y ago
        I'm t might seem so if you only ever worked in tech, but there are huge companies out there that employ way more sales people than technical people.
        closewith 1y ago
        Yes, of course, because all industries need sales and salespeople are extremely valuable to the business. But in software, like all industries, the best salespeople are also domain experts, and domain experts in software are rare before you add the need to be able to sell.
  - lenerdenator 1y ago
    From what I have experienced, "good" software salespeople are the ones telling clients lies to seal the deal, that then fall back on the software engineers to fulfill in unreasonable amounts of time that compromise the entire project. I wouldn't call the ability to lie a rare trait.
    - closewith 1y ago
      From a management perspective, that sounds like: * Inspiring client confidence and enthusiasm in our solutions * Motivating engineering teams to tackle ambitious challenges * Delivering high-impact results within accelerated timelines Maybe if the devs hadn't been slacking beforehand, they wouldn't have had to rush to catch up.
      - lenerdenator 1y ago
        But you're using management perspective, and we know that's flawed.
        closewith 1y ago
        From a customer perspective, that sounds like: * Your sales team passionately championing solutions tailored to my needs * Them securing the resources and commitments needed to accelerate delivery * Them inspiring the engineering team to rise to ambitious deadlines, ensuring my project stays on track and delivers real value Maybe if the devs shared their dedication to meeting my goals head-on, they'd be able to ensure my business objectives would be achieved without having to crunch.
        ramses0 1y ago
        I'd like to subscribe to your newsletter (unfortunately...)
        lenerdenator 1y ago
        Also flawed.
- geodel 1y ago
  I think software developer's high pay and relatively consequence free existence have given them a bit of thought leader quality in domains beyond their expertise. But it is not going to be the case for lot of developers soon. So pulling things like > "Do you want this tool more than you want to be employed?" will be harmful to wellbeing of developers rather than sales guys.
  - lenerdenator 1y ago
    > I think software developer's high pay and relatively consequence free existence have given them a bit of thought leader quality in domains beyond their expertise. Just wait until you hear what salespeople get up to and what they make off of it.
kwanbix 1y ago
Jira's raise to power is one of those things I would never understand. Such a horribly designed tool. Today is much better, yes, but it is so over-engineer and at the same time lacks so many things.
- infamouscow 1y ago
  It's very easy to understand, developers just refuse to accept it for undermining their strongly held beliefs regarding success in the software industry. It's true you need working software, but without sales and operations doing their part, the software will be scraped when the company folds. Sales and operations get away with everything because they're the beating heart of any successful organization.
  - dilyevsky 1y ago
    They also know how to pull strings and engineers generally don't
  - bayindirh 1y ago
    Yes, Jira is powerful, flexible and allows tons of stuff to be done. It can really store tons of data, accept workflows, etc. But that thing is slow as a snail. Even if it's an on-prem installation. I want nimble tools. I know it's a very unpopular opinion, but I'll take a fast Redmine over a slow Jira all day, every day. P.S.: Another slow tool like this is OpenStack. Every CLI command, every web UI click means a ping-pong of 20 REST requests. At least, when it works, it works, which is 100% of the time if it's configured correctly.
- Agingcoder 1y ago
  The first time I used it around 2007 I thought it was great. It was basic, but did everything that I wanted ( I’d didn’t care about the project management that maybe didn’t even exist back then I don’t remember ). I think that it’s been diverted from its original purpose,and is now indeed horribly complicated since it’s supposed to be all in one package. I’ve also noted that in large companies the quality of the product for end users, as long as it’s not a massive drag on productivity or on recruitment and is not core business, is irrelevant and that other factors are more important ( costs, contracts , easy to install integrate and maintain, quality of support, breadth of use within the company etc ). This makes atlassian a natural superpower.
sciurus 1y ago
I saw a similar pattern when I worked at Mozilla. We had bugzilla and jira, mediawiki and confluence, irc/matrix and slack, the list goes on... I just checked and https://github.com/mozilla/jira-bugzilla-integration https://github.com/mozilla/jira-bugzilla-integration is alive and well.
- hnlmorg 1y ago
  That doesn’t sound that egregious in my opinion. Bugzilla is a Mozilla product so you’d hope they’d use it themselves (it’s often referred to as “dogfooding”). But Jira is everywhere so I’m sure some project managers argued that it was needed. And once you have Jira then the same people push for Confluence too. But MediaWiki was the de facto standard before everyone jumped on proprietary solutions like Confluence and Notion. In fact I seem to recall that very early versions of Confluence was just a 3rd party Wiki that Atlassian bought. Or at least there was a Java-based Wiki in their early portfolio. You also have to bear in mind that organising docs is an endless and thankless job which nobody wants to do. So these things tend to multiply like vermin once someone starts creating docs on another platform. One startup I worked for somehow managed to have stuff scattered between Confluence, Notion and Google Docs despite only employing 50 people. It was crazy. Another client I recently worked for had Sharepoint, Notion and Confluence as their official tools for documentation. As for IRC and Slack, every company I’ve worked at in the last 5 years had two of either MS Teams, Zoom or Slack. Literally every company. And that’s in addition to email. Go back further and there was Skype, WebEx, and so on and so forth too. It’s almost a meme these days to hear the sentence “how would you prefer to be contacted” because so many solutions are competing against each other with overlapping functionality. Then you have developer-focused tools like GitHub with their own docs and issue tracking too At this point in time, it’s easier to just accept that each org is going to end up with multiple overlapping solutions because you’ll get new people join the team and they’ll want to use their preferred tool because that’s what they’re productive in and so the spiral continues. So if Mozilla managed to keep the options down to just 2 for each product category, then I’d say they were doing better than most other organisations.
  - mook 1y ago
    Bugzilla isn't so much a Mozilla product as something that was home grown at Netscape because there wasn't much else at the time, and they just kept using due to inertia. Though as a developer I'd still prefer that over Jira, but that's probably because I don't really need any reporting functionality.
Wonnk13 1y ago
Man I miss Buganizer... Even in 2017 Google was starting to smell like Accenture and Oracle. Glad i left before Jira was shoved down my throat.
- surajrmal 1y ago
  Buganizer is still the standard and better than ever. There is little reason to try and reach for jira these days.
8n4vidtmkvmk 1y ago
I find this amusing. I have my own preferences too, but I wouldn't dare even suggest an alternative at a trillion dollar/100k+ employee company. Perhaps because I'm fully aware of what a colossal nightmare that would be. There's enormous value in just sticking with what everyone is already using, even if it's objectively worse. There is a breaking point of course, but the more people that are involved.. that other thing better provide tremendous value and you better be prepared to do a lot of convincing.

lenerdenator 1y ago

> From my experience with sales/PM people at google, they refuse to use internal tools and try to get Jira and other shit installed. Regardless of the tool quality, just because that's what they learned already. That's when you're supposed to pull the smooth-talking people that are usually in those roles and ask them a very simple question: "Do you want this tool more than you want to be employed?"

closewith 1y ago
Good software salespeople are much rarer than good developers, so it's likely that conversion would be had with the other parties.
- datadrivenangel 1y ago
  And they're better at selling!
- sigmoid10 1y ago
  Only if you apply a lower standard for "good" software developers.
  - closewith 1y ago
    You could limit your definition of good to the 99th percentile and it would still be true.
    - sigmoid10 1y ago
      I'm t might seem so if you only ever worked in tech, but there are huge companies out there that employ way more sales people than technical people.
      - closewith 1y ago
        Yes, of course, because all industries need sales and salespeople are extremely valuable to the business. But in software, like all industries, the best salespeople are also domain experts, and domain experts in software are rare before you add the need to be able to sell.
- lenerdenator 1y ago
  From what I have experienced, "good" software salespeople are the ones telling clients lies to seal the deal, that then fall back on the software engineers to fulfill in unreasonable amounts of time that compromise the entire project. I wouldn't call the ability to lie a rare trait.
  - closewith 1y ago
    From a management perspective, that sounds like: * Inspiring client confidence and enthusiasm in our solutions * Motivating engineering teams to tackle ambitious challenges * Delivering high-impact results within accelerated timelines Maybe if the devs hadn't been slacking beforehand, they wouldn't have had to rush to catch up.
    - lenerdenator 1y ago
      But you're using management perspective, and we know that's flawed.
      - closewith 1y ago
        From a customer perspective, that sounds like: * Your sales team passionately championing solutions tailored to my needs * Them securing the resources and commitments needed to accelerate delivery * Them inspiring the engineering team to rise to ambitious deadlines, ensuring my project stays on track and delivers real value Maybe if the devs shared their dedication to meeting my goals head-on, they'd be able to ensure my business objectives would be achieved without having to crunch.
        ramses0 1y ago
        I'd like to subscribe to your newsletter (unfortunately...)
        lenerdenator 1y ago
        Also flawed.
geodel 1y ago
I think software developer's high pay and relatively consequence free existence have given them a bit of thought leader quality in domains beyond their expertise. But it is not going to be the case for lot of developers soon. So pulling things like > "Do you want this tool more than you want to be employed?" will be harmful to wellbeing of developers rather than sales guys.
- lenerdenator 1y ago
  > I think software developer's high pay and relatively consequence free existence have given them a bit of thought leader quality in domains beyond their expertise. Just wait until you hear what salespeople get up to and what they make off of it.

kwanbix 1y ago

Jira's raise to power is one of those things I would never understand. Such a horribly designed tool. Today is much better, yes, but it is so over-engineer and at the same time lacks so many things.

infamouscow 1y ago
It's very easy to understand, developers just refuse to accept it for undermining their strongly held beliefs regarding success in the software industry. It's true you need working software, but without sales and operations doing their part, the software will be scraped when the company folds. Sales and operations get away with everything because they're the beating heart of any successful organization.
- dilyevsky 1y ago
  They also know how to pull strings and engineers generally don't
- bayindirh 1y ago
  Yes, Jira is powerful, flexible and allows tons of stuff to be done. It can really store tons of data, accept workflows, etc. But that thing is slow as a snail. Even if it's an on-prem installation. I want nimble tools. I know it's a very unpopular opinion, but I'll take a fast Redmine over a slow Jira all day, every day. P.S.: Another slow tool like this is OpenStack. Every CLI command, every web UI click means a ping-pong of 20 REST requests. At least, when it works, it works, which is 100% of the time if it's configured correctly.
Agingcoder 1y ago
The first time I used it around 2007 I thought it was great. It was basic, but did everything that I wanted ( I’d didn’t care about the project management that maybe didn’t even exist back then I don’t remember ). I think that it’s been diverted from its original purpose,and is now indeed horribly complicated since it’s supposed to be all in one package. I’ve also noted that in large companies the quality of the product for end users, as long as it’s not a massive drag on productivity or on recruitment and is not core business, is irrelevant and that other factors are more important ( costs, contracts , easy to install integrate and maintain, quality of support, breadth of use within the company etc ). This makes atlassian a natural superpower.

sciurus 1y ago

I saw a similar pattern when I worked at Mozilla. We had bugzilla and jira, mediawiki and confluence, irc/matrix and slack, the list goes on... I just checked and https://github.com/mozilla/jira-bugzilla-integration https://github.com/mozilla/jira-bugzilla-integration is alive and well.

hnlmorg 1y ago
That doesn’t sound that egregious in my opinion. Bugzilla is a Mozilla product so you’d hope they’d use it themselves (it’s often referred to as “dogfooding”). But Jira is everywhere so I’m sure some project managers argued that it was needed. And once you have Jira then the same people push for Confluence too. But MediaWiki was the de facto standard before everyone jumped on proprietary solutions like Confluence and Notion. In fact I seem to recall that very early versions of Confluence was just a 3rd party Wiki that Atlassian bought. Or at least there was a Java-based Wiki in their early portfolio. You also have to bear in mind that organising docs is an endless and thankless job which nobody wants to do. So these things tend to multiply like vermin once someone starts creating docs on another platform. One startup I worked for somehow managed to have stuff scattered between Confluence, Notion and Google Docs despite only employing 50 people. It was crazy. Another client I recently worked for had Sharepoint, Notion and Confluence as their official tools for documentation. As for IRC and Slack, every company I’ve worked at in the last 5 years had two of either MS Teams, Zoom or Slack. Literally every company. And that’s in addition to email. Go back further and there was Skype, WebEx, and so on and so forth too. It’s almost a meme these days to hear the sentence “how would you prefer to be contacted” because so many solutions are competing against each other with overlapping functionality. Then you have developer-focused tools like GitHub with their own docs and issue tracking too At this point in time, it’s easier to just accept that each org is going to end up with multiple overlapping solutions because you’ll get new people join the team and they’ll want to use their preferred tool because that’s what they’re productive in and so the spiral continues. So if Mozilla managed to keep the options down to just 2 for each product category, then I’d say they were doing better than most other organisations.
- mook 1y ago
  Bugzilla isn't so much a Mozilla product as something that was home grown at Netscape because there wasn't much else at the time, and they just kept using due to inertia. Though as a developer I'd still prefer that over Jira, but that's probably because I don't really need any reporting functionality.

Wonnk13 1y ago

Man I miss Buganizer... Even in 2017 Google was starting to smell like Accenture and Oracle. Glad i left before Jira was shoved down my throat.

surajrmal 1y ago
Buganizer is still the standard and better than ever. There is little reason to try and reach for jira these days.

8n4vidtmkvmk 1y ago

I find this amusing. I have my own preferences too, but I wouldn't dare even suggest an alternative at a trillion dollar/100k+ employee company. Perhaps because I'm fully aware of what a colossal nightmare that would be. There's enormous value in just sticking with what everyone is already using, even if it's objectively worse. There is a breaking point of course, but the more people that are involved.. that other thing better provide tremendous value and you better be prepared to do a lot of convincing.