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I fucking hate Jira

ifuckinghatejira.com

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Re: I fucking hate Jira

#71

Post by cogman10 »

sefrost wrote: post #4

I wish the comments were more specific about which features they don’t like. For me a particularly frustrating aspect is the way the UI moves around a lot. I’m quite anxious to click anything until all the loading spinners have stopped in case I click the wrong thing. Then I could be taken to a page or feature I’ve never seen before. Also it’s really annoying when I try to copy something from a ticket description but…

What I hate about jira is it's flexibility.

The biggest issue I have with jira is it's so dead simple for braindead process zombies to cram another field, another label, another required text box, 4 new transition states, 20 difference confusing priorities, etc. Then, require everyone to follow through with this (with 90% of the time putting some form of "not applicable" in the boxes they added).

It is built for anal retentive "rule enforcers" to jump in and chastise you because you checked box 4a but didn't fill out sub box 3c.

FFS, I have an easier time filling out my taxes than some project's jira setups. (And I live in the US).

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#72

Post by jrockway »

epalm wrote: post #54

Ok, it's slow, and navigation sucks, and lots of other things. Workflows are easy to get out of hand, but as long as you keep your workflows lean/tame/flexible, it's mostly "good enough". I suspect a sizable portion of the "Jira sucks" crowd are under the thumb of a maniacal administrator creating intense workflows. That said, which competitor has a visual workflow editor, to which I can add custom statuses/transitio…

Linear is much nicer. Very quick issue entry and very nice looking sprint summary/status and roadmap tabs. It's everything I want. Most importantly, it's fast. I work with issues a lot, so a slow tool like jira just isn't acceptable.

Jira exists to check every checkbox so you feel serious remorse if you pick anything else, but in terms of day-to-day productivity, it doesn't do too well. "Nice to look at" and "Fast" aren't checkbox items for managers. They're eventual problems for someone to solve when they notice engineers never touch the bug tracker.

At my current org, my advice to use Linear was overruled in favor of jira, and I'm pretty sure I'm the only engineer that regularly touches jira.

(I intentionally write "jira" in all lowercase because I like to call it JIRA, but jira's built-in text editor unconfigurably autocorrects "JIRA" to "Jira". That's the feature they spent engineering time on? Fuck them.)

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#73

Post by WorldMaker »

Sebguer wrote: post #55
zippergz wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dedicated admins make it even worse, because they have the bandwidth and inclination to do all kinds of crazy customization, which is what takes jira from merely bad to terrible. The worst jira instances I've ever seen are the ones that had full-time people customizing them.

You've clearly not worked in places where it's people part-time customizing them, because I guarantee the outcome is worse!

You are both right! What you really want is a place that doesn't customize Jira at all, and if you find such a place you'll find out that they eventually switched to something else because everyone also hates Jira's default out of the box behaviors.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#74

Post by outworlder »

Sebguer wrote: post #55
zippergz wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dedicated admins make it even worse, because they have the bandwidth and inclination to do all kinds of crazy customization, which is what takes jira from merely bad to terrible. The worst jira instances I've ever seen are the ones that had full-time people customizing them.

You've clearly not worked in places where it's people part-time customizing them, because I guarantee the outcome is worse!

I don't know, because the part-time customizers are scratching some itch. Maybe they are messing up because they don't know any better.

The full time customizers need to justify their salary.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#75

Post by akamaka »

I’m starting to wonder if one of the best features of Jira is that it directs all of the developer hatred away from management and toward the task-management software. I’ve worked on projects that used Jira very effectively, so I’m convinced that all of the complainers actually not fully aware of how bad their managers are.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#76

Post by Lammy »

sefrost wrote: post #4

I wish the comments were more specific about which features they don’t like. For me a particularly frustrating aspect is the way the UI moves around a lot. I’m quite anxious to click anything until all the loading spinners have stopped in case I click the wrong thing. Then I could be taken to a page or feature I’ve never seen before. Also it’s really annoying when I try to copy something from a ticket description but…

The composer in general. I often have to intersperse log/code lines with prose, and there’s no telling what the Formatting menu will do. Some times selecting a formatting will apply to selected text, sometimes not. Sometimes it will apply when choosing a formatting then pasting text, some times not. Some times it seems to apply to a selection as well as everything after it. It does support Markdown with backticks for monospace, but that’s a lot of manual editing I would rather not do.

I also get annoyed at the subtle ways the top-level Issue composer is different from the comment composer, most frequently with the top-level composer’s refusal to allow image embedding/positioning. You can only add images to a new Issue as file attachments displayed as a row of tiny thumbnails under all the Issue text, so I will frequently create a mostly blank Issue and then write what I want to say as the first comment where I can embed images and talk about them inline.

In the interest of also saying something nice, I think it’s cute how the JIRA logo seems to be a Jera/“j” rune :)

https://wac-cdn.atlassian.com/dam/jcr:e348b562-4152-4cdc-8a5...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C4%93ran

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#77

Post by sshine »

I don't remember Jira as being that bad.

It was mostly the Scrummy culture that seemed like a bit of a waste of time.

I wasn't a big fan of the wysiwyg editor. This seems to address mostly non-technical people. I would always go for "Markdown with preview" (HackMD split-screen, or GitHub issue tabs, or Discord apply-formatting-to-codes).

I also don't like that it isn't an integrated part of a pull request system. GitHub/Gitea issues inter-linking with PRs in the same namespace is... golden. With the right habits, you can become an effective time-traveler.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#78

Post by zmxz »

epalm wrote: post #54

Ok, it's slow, and navigation sucks, and lots of other things. Workflows are easy to get out of hand, but as long as you keep your workflows lean/tame/flexible, it's mostly "good enough". I suspect a sizable portion of the "Jira sucks" crowd are under the thumb of a maniacal administrator creating intense workflows. That said, which competitor has a visual workflow editor, to which I can add custom statuses/transitio…

> I get it, Jira sucks, I agree, but what's the go-to competitor?

You started to ask hard questions but you hit nail on the head.

Jira is bad because it's slow and doesn't telepathically adjust itself to everyone's needs.

Perhaps the author can buy ifuckinglovejiragotocompetitor.com to provide us with the answer.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#79

Post by rsstack »

I was one of the Jira admins two jobs ago (in additional to more normal responsibilities of product management & engineering). I finally got back to Jira at my current company and I texted an ex-colleague who was also an admin of the same Jira server (also part-time):

"We're starting the migration to Jira. The next sprint will be entirely in Jira. Honestly, I kind of missed it."

She replied: "That's the real test of a tool. Not 'would you recommend it to a friend?', but 'if you were to start a company, would you use it again?'"

And - I would and did with Jira. If you know the tool well, and your company doesn't have stupid technical workflows and human processes, it's just great. Too many people suffered from using it wrong or suffered from using it with the wrong colleagues.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#80

Post by system16 »

Examples escape me at the moment, but there have honestly been so many times I've hit a wall trying to do - what seem to me like - basic things in JIRA; I couldn't comprehend how such a complex tool could not accommodate them.

And the stuff that can be done is often so comically painful it's mind-blowing. Trying to do something as seemingly simple as create a useful saved search in JIRA is so painful I can't imagine its creation was not an act of sabotage.

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