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I fucking hate Jira

ifuckinghatejira.com

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Re: I fucking hate Jira

#281

Post by mathattack »

asfhagsdf wrote: post #269
oneplane wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 anythin…

It amazes me how much hate Jira gets compared to ServiceNow. My last two roles have been heavy on the ServiceNow, and I'd take a fresh breath of Jira any time. My guess is it's because Jira actively targets SMB, while ServiceNow is almost strictly enterprise, and folks in enterprise have already resigned to their fate.

And try to get a straight answer on pricing from the ServiceNow rep…

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#282

Post by thefaux »

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…

It's not that I think is a particularly good or bad implementation of project management software (though I think as others have pointed out, in its effort to be all things to all people, I think it has converged on a lowest common denominator solution). I reject the concept of general purpose project management software. I think that at best these tools are primarily surveillance tools for middle management. They disempower workers and make them fungible. The workers are evaluated on tool points rather than the actual value they create (sometimes these may be alignment, but often they are not). At worst, I think they actually lower product quality because of the poor incentives that are inherent in a system that rewards closing issues and creating "features".

I believe the best workers (at both the management and IC level) are not going to want to waste a significant chunk of their professional lives in Jira world and the worst workers just want to keep their paycheck coming every month so they will just submit to it and keep cashing their checks. The organization will thus rot and converge on the lowest common denominator employee, which is indeed what the tool kind of promised: fungible, low skill workers with predictable (low) output.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#284

Post by Tade0 »

My Jira experience improved a lot when I wrote a tool that parses and serves the content of HTTP Archive files - not having to wait for all those panels, menus etc. was a huge boon, even if this view was necessarily read-only.

Also I'm pretty sure Jira saved my friend's marriage because he used the free version to coordinate finishing up their house.

Lastly while JQL has limited capabilities, it's better than having a bunch of API endpoints.

That being said it still baffles me how badly some UI elements are done there. Especially the menus would benefit greatly from some caching or preloading.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#285

Post by SamuelAdams »

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…

This applies to all enterprise software. It’s also called Conway’s Law:

Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_law

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#286

Post by colechristensen »

oneplane wrote: post #239
colechristensen wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it attracts somebody 4 layers up to tell somebody 3 layers up to come up with a common Jira platform for everybody and then you don't control how your project is run and then Jira becomes the enemy, a faceless micromanager driving your work life that has strong opinions on how you do everything, a dozen steps that need to be done "right" or you get your half a dozen managers asking if you read the memo about…

So that is not a JIRA problem since you can do a > it attracts somebody 4 layers up to tell somebody 3 layers up to come up with a common with pretty much everything, including a spreadsheet or a plain text file. Conflating bad business practises with tool configuration or products in general doesn't help anyone. If a business is very stiff and scared of its employees, they will try out all sorts of useless control m…

The point is that there are tools that enable and encourage bad behavior. The kinds of organizational toxicity simply aren’t possible with some tools, sure an ambitious executive could try but the attempt would fail very quickly. Such attempts to do the broken overburdened nonsense that frequently comes with Jira don’t fail, they are enabled and encouraged. What is technically possible and what is likely are two very distant things.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#287

Post by cuteboy19 »

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

Find the person in your organization who knows JIRA. After he doesn't manage to find it, open outlook and search for it in the notifications@jira folder, where you would most likely find it

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#288

Post by conradfr »

tommoor wrote: post #57
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a tool for the boring part of software engineering- I don't expect it to spark joy. I wish it were faster, scaled the full width of my monitor, allowed external editors, etc. Overall it gets the job done well. Everything else that I've used is horrible which makes it the best in my experience but that's still not saying much.

But what if it _did_ spark joy… https://linear.app/readme

We use it at my current work and I'm not impressed. We even moved back some workflow steps to Notion because of lost work in the editor.

Frankly, I miss the limited GitHub PM tools we used at my previous job.

Even their one true limitation, no sub-issues, is very meh on Linear.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#289

Post by cogman10 »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #141
cogman10 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> moving from CVS/Subversion to git

Was that really painful? We did that transition and it amounted to having teams one by one run the "git-svn" script on their repos to port over to git. Even with over a million commits on our central SVN server, the whole process generally took around 5 minutes per project. Even in the worst cases, it was something like 1 hour.

The most painful part we had was putting a rate limiter in place to keep our SVN server from toppling over.

> moving from on-prem to the cloud, moving from Windows to Mac, moving from hipchat to Slack, moving from Oracle to postgres

These are certainly all more difficult but also things that aren't central to the way the company operates AND can be done a piece at a time. Moving from Jira->something else can't really be done in a piecemeal fashion.

The other big problem here is Jira has a wider audience than just the dev department. Dev saying "Let's go from svn to git" is something that doesn't hardly need involvement from the C levels. They never (usually) touch or look at the VCS interface. In fact, the only thing you listed that I think would be a hard sell to C levels is switching from windows to mac. Though, I suspect a lot of them are using macs anyways. Try getting your C levels to agree to switch from mac or windows to linux and I bet that'd never fly in any organization.

> I fully believe that if a project management solution came along and all stakeholders went "holy shit, this is so much better than Jira"

I just disagree. The best counter example is Internet Explorer. Both Firefox and Chromium have been better than IE for a long time (10->15 years). So why didn't every corporation switch to Firefox? Why did Chrome end up winning for desktop web browser even though it came so much later (2008)?

The answer is simple, chrome advertised on media that stakeholders watched.

Chrome eventually won, but it got there through deep pockets and advertising. If there's anything that will topple atlassian, it will have to be through the same route. That product/product set has to be better AND they have to spend a lot of capital advertising so that other shareholders find out they exist. Without doing both those things, toppling atlassian will be a long nearly impossible slog.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#290

Post by Sebguer »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #254
Sebguer wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an inane take. Almost every system we use in a business requires support, and management to be used effectively. You wouldn't fire the people responsible for maintaining your other services. You can either have something incredibly powerful, like Jira, with a lot of sharp edges, or you can use something incredibly similar. The latter would be more like 'no-code' since it's going to be drastically limited in t…

> You can either have something incredibly powerful, like Jira, with a lot of sharp edges... It's powerful. But I think a bunch of the dislike is because the edges are not sharp. They're very dull. That's why it's so clumsy to use. (Sure, it's still easy to cause damage, but that's not the same thing...) Disclaimer: I have never actually had to use Jira. This is just my impression from listening to others complain.

The point of something being sharp is doing damage with minimal effort, which I think fits here! Though, I won't disagree that a lot of parts of the Jira UX are more blunt-force.
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