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I fucking hate Jira

ifuckinghatejira.com

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Re: I fucking hate Jira

#161

Post by oneplane »

colechristensen wrote: post #118
vosper wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I've been defended Jira here in the past, too. My opinion is that Jira reflects the organisation that manages it. It's basically a whole lot of customizable UI and permissions hanging off a user-defined state machine. You can set it up so that individual teams can fully administer their own projects, or you can go all the way in the other direction and have centralized, locked-down management where you beg some…

Jira doesn't just reflect, it drives convoluted unhelpful bureaucracy. The tool drives the organization to look like the tool wants it to, which is disorganized half broken "organization" with silly overcomplicated rules that give people something to discuss enthusiastically instead of the actual work that needs doing. Jira is organization poison, not just a reflection of what an organization is.

No, it isn't. We have plenty of setups in multiple organisations where even within the org only the administrative settings of the server are locked down and everyone else is free to do whatever they need. Lots of teams just use it as a kanban board, while others setup a state machine-based funnel to process user/business input into usable tickets.

JIRA in its default configuration essentially lets you create anything, anywhere in any state. Anything beyond that is just bad product configuration. Now, there are plenty of products out there that suck no matter how you configure it (looking at you, ServiceNow).

Especially the comments about "I would rather use trello" seem extremely uninformed as you pretty much *are* trello when you just stick to one kanban board and one project.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#163

Post by bragr »

colechristensen wrote: post #118
vosper wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I've been defended Jira here in the past, too. My opinion is that Jira reflects the organisation that manages it. It's basically a whole lot of customizable UI and permissions hanging off a user-defined state machine. You can set it up so that individual teams can fully administer their own projects, or you can go all the way in the other direction and have centralized, locked-down management where you beg some…

Jira doesn't just reflect, it drives convoluted unhelpful bureaucracy. The tool drives the organization to look like the tool wants it to, which is disorganized half broken "organization" with silly overcomplicated rules that give people something to discuss enthusiastically instead of the actual work that needs doing. Jira is organization poison, not just a reflection of what an organization is.

Jira is highly flexible and customizable, almost to a fault. One Jira can look and operate almost totally different to another with enough customization. If Jira feels inflexible and bureaucratic to you, I'd argue that's only a reflection of how your Jira admins operate or the rules they are forced to implement.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#165

Post by sophacles »

devoutsalsa wrote: post #111
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…

I still can’t figure out how to search it

This is a solved problem. The most efficient way to search Jira is to type random characters into the search bar until you find the ticket you were looking for on page 3 of the results.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#166

Post by easytiger »

sto_hristo wrote: post #29

I've seen absolutely ridiculous workflows on Jira. Things like - "i'm gonna make the most ridiculous workflow out of spite and boredom just to troll you." From that perspective it's easy to hate it, but you hate the actual use of the tool not the tool itself. Currently i enjoy more sane use of it. Simple workflow. You get in, read the ticket, clicky a button, get out. Slowness in that regard is very tolerable.

Wait till you hear about servicenow

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#167

Post by oneplane »

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?…

> embedded into the core of how a company works.

Doubtful. Unless you are working for a shitty company in the first place, bad tools essentially just get skipped and disused by autonomous teams and none of this matters. If the company 'embeds' a product in place of a workflow, that's not something a product is ever going to fix, that's an organisational problem.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#168

Post by Ensorceled »

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.

No, I have a really good understanding of that. My problem is that Jira, in actual implementation, tends to be how some parts of the organization (often Product) tries to exert fine grained control over other parts of the organization (design, qa, development, operations, etc.) by micromanaging the process.

Also, sometimes your organization is just not that complicated. I've been in startups using Jira with dozens of states, with complicated transitions and approval steps, that would have been over kill in medical companies I've worked at.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#169

Post by Jach »

amerine wrote: post #62

One word: GUS. IYKYK

The worst part about it is that it's actually not the worst, proved if only by getting worse over time, but also that Jira can easily be configured by management to be worse...

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#170

Post by judge2020 »

vosper wrote: post #107
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…

Yeah I've been defended Jira here in the past, too. My opinion is that Jira reflects the organisation that manages it. It's basically a whole lot of customizable UI and permissions hanging off a user-defined state machine. You can set it up so that individual teams can fully administer their own projects, or you can go all the way in the other direction and have centralized, locked-down management where you beg some…

> It's faster, there are options for simpler configuration, and more stuff out-of-the-box (assuming you're on Cloud, but isn't everyone these days?).

My understanding is that the Cloud offering is the slower one, assuming you can dedicate a beefy server (but probably under $200/mo on hetzner or ovh for most businesses) to running your Atlassian stuff.

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