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I fucking hate Jira

ifuckinghatejira.com

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Re: I fucking hate Jira

#141

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

cogman10 wrote: post #95
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #58

I feel like hating on Jira is the pastime that is now passed down from each generation of programmers to the next. I'm going to stick up for Jira. I certainly don't "love" Jira, though I do think they've made significant improvements with "new Jira" (I think they call them team-managed projects now). The problem I have with the incessant Jira bitching is that I rarely feel that bitchers have a true understanding for…

> why don't you think some other company has come along and toppled the Jira crown? Because it's really hard to kill off the market leader when the market leader is embedded into the core of how a company works. I don't buy that it's a matter of competitors not being better. It is more about inertia. The argument you have here could equally be applied to C++ or Cobol "Why is new code being written in these languages?…

I disagree with this. Absolutely, once Jira (or any particular project management tool) gets it's "tentacles" into a sizable enterprise, it's very difficult to dislodge.

But I've seen tons of other examples in my career of companies making larger, more difficult transitions because they clearly felt the risk/benefit was worth it: moving from CVS/Subversion to git, moving from on-prem to the cloud, moving from Windows to Mac, moving from hipchat to Slack, moving from Oracle to postgres, yada yada yada.

I'm certainly not saying it's easy, but I fully believe that if a project management solution came along and all stakeholders went "holy shit, this is so much better than Jira", that many companies would make the switch. This hasn't happened, and honestly if you hear people complain about Fogbugz or Asana or whatever that it's probably an equal "per-capita" bitch rate.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#142

Post by meibo »

blowski wrote: post #93

OK, so what don't I like about Jira? 1. It's extremely slow. 2. It's difficult to predict the effect of making any kind of change. 3. The permissions system is so convoluted, I can be the admin of a board, and yet not have permission to see a ticket on it. 4. It relegates the conversation to a second-class UI element, when this is the most important part of any project management system. 5. Trying to operate on a bun…

9. The text editor is still busted and I just don't understand why. It's one of the most important parts of the UX, please please fix it. Writing any kind of nicely formatted long form posts is a lost cause.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#143

Post by apocalyptic0n3 »

Jira isn't perfect, but it fit our agency's needs well enough and the short comings haven't been bad enough to cause us to rethink it.

The truth is that there's very few project management tools out there that offer the flexibility to run individual projects the way an individual team wants to. When you're an agency with hundreds of projects in the system, that's invaluable. I researched 2-3 dozen competitors to find a better solution and there just wasn't. Other than maybe Redmine and its derivatives, which the team basically dismissed for being too outdated.

ETA: I should clarify that I'm using Jira Cloud and we don't have many issues with speed (at least today, anyway. Maybe in a few years, who knows)

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#145

Post by synu »

colechristensen wrote: post #113
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #58

I feel like hating on Jira is the pastime that is now passed down from each generation of programmers to the next. I'm going to stick up for Jira. I certainly don't "love" Jira, though I do think they've made significant improvements with "new Jira" (I think they call them team-managed projects now). The problem I have with the incessant Jira bitching is that I rarely feel that bitchers have a true understanding for…

>The problem I have with the incessant Jira bitching is that I rarely feel that bitchers have a true understanding for the extreme difficulty of the organization-wide problem Jira is trying to solve. I think the core problem with Jira is organizations trying to use it to solve complex organization-wide problems. It is an enormous time sink, and using Jira to rule the workdays of employees is the problem. Anything muc…

Agreed, it’s like a big flashing neon sign that promises middle management a stage on which to act out all their worst impulses. It’s the exact opposite of “keep it simple and communicate with each other like humans.”

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#146

Post by SilverBirch »

Shout out to the programme manager at my old company. His attitude was "Use jira in the way that works for you". He could set up and modify workflows for me, he had good useful advice, and in total I probably spent 20 minutes a week dealing with jira. Which as a manager of a decent sized team I think is fairly good. As one of the comments on that site said "I'd rather use trello" I disagree, it was much better for having multiple views on things and by standardising across the company it was much easier to just get an informal view on what other teams were doing.

Most of the problems with jira are the people using it.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#147

Post by yAak »

greatgib wrote: post #9

I used to hate Jira, and then, I had to use Asana...

Yeah, I've yet to use something that doesn't make me sad and aggravated at the same time.

On my "hate" list: Jira, Asana, Zenhub &/or Github Issues, Trello.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#149

Post by BlargMcLarg »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #58

I feel like hating on Jira is the pastime that is now passed down from each generation of programmers to the next. I'm going to stick up for Jira. I certainly don't "love" Jira, though I do think they've made significant improvements with "new Jira" (I think they call them team-managed projects now). The problem I have with the incessant Jira bitching is that I rarely feel that bitchers have a true understanding for…

>The problem I have with the incessant Jira bitching is that I rarely feel that bitchers have a true understanding for the extreme difficulty of the organization-wide problem Jira is trying to solve.

This is a lot of hearsay which tends to devolve into a debate of "we absolute need this!" vs "no you don't, see X".

>Obviously some of the complaints (speed, stability) are very valid

I don't think people defending it fully grasp just how important speed and stability are, or at least live in a corporation where Jira was optimized better than the average corporation does. Given not everything is the fault of Jira, but when Jira is expected to be the place you go to all the time and it is that slow, it becomes very impactful to morale.

>"Jira is the worst project management tool, except for all the others".

This doesn't work until big corps actually try something different, but pretty much all of them push back on the mere idea of trying alternatives. If you can't invest a few months trying a different system, you can't judge it. And since those few months are seen as a "great risk", no manager is going to push the issue any further, even if Jira's costs per developer could easily run into the hundreds (or thousands, for 6-figures) a year on morale loss and time loss alone.

And this is the crux of the matter. Management likes concrete numbers. Management likes mimicking what other successful companies do. Management does not like fairly abstract things with great risks. Management does not like big risks with abstract rewards.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#150

Post by mberning »

These people are pampered brats. Try being forced to document all your time and projects in Rally or Version1. You will beg to get Jira back. Software “engineers” are such divas. “I don’t play other people’s song.” As if they are some kind of celebrity.
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