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I fucking hate Jira

ifuckinghatejira.com

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Re: I fucking hate Jira

#291

Post by NonNefarious »

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…

You need SOME kind of tool to provide a repository of issues and assignments, and Jira could probably be fine.

But the simplest things are baffling in Jira. Any issue-tracking system that requires the users to learn some obscure syntax (or even to use SQL to refer to its internal data structures is a failure.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#292

Post by colechristensen »

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.

I have only ever seen servicenow used for… well, service requests. Reset my password, grant access, create this resource. Always administration, never product development.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#293

Post by markshead »

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…

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

This is key. The problem with Jira is less about Jira as a tool and more about how we approach project management.

I've seen some teams thrive with Jira. I wouldn't say they "loved" Jira but they had a light weight project management structure that let them get work done and enough control over Jira to set it up to stay out of their way. They didn't give Jira credit for their ease of working because it was their processes that were good. Jira just gave them a way to not have to write everything down on paper.

I've seen other organizations create a horrible project management structure and then use Jira to "enforce" those structures in ways that magnify all the worst aspects of what they are doing. In those situations it is usually more politically palatable to blame Jira rather than the management processes. Those type of organizations usually blame the tool while hoping that a different tool will force the organizational changes that are needed to make life better.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#294

Post by Minor49er »

The problems with Jira can be extended to the rest of Atlassian and all of their offerings. Their company culture is very much one of "we're right, no matter how many people bring up the same issues." Things like:

- Shoving political messaging into git terminal messages - Renaming "blame" to something else without notifying the userbase ("annotate"? It's been a while) because, despite "blame" being a git term, its usage hurt someone's feelings (yes, seriously, even though no proof or elaboration has ever been provided) - Not fixing a bug for 6+ years where, if someone's typing a comment and accidentally hit the escape key, the entire post gets deleted with no option to recover it (I'm not sure if this ever actually was resolved)

That said, for a while, Jira had a lot of good things going for it. But by now, enough competitors have popped up with similar offerings that are easier to use without all of the unnecessary self-importance buried within it.

For a Jira alternative specifically, I've been using Linear.app for the last 8 months and enjoying it overall

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#295

Post by msla »

colechristensen wrote: post #286
oneplane wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"The tool can't do it" is an excuse. Excuses aren't tolerated. Now, make it happen.

Tools can't prevent bad management because bad managers don't care about tools. They care about getting what they want, and if the tool doesn't enable it, that's their underlings' problem, not theirs. Jira doesn't stand in their way because nothing stands in their way.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#296

Post by ZainRiz »

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?

Jira is the way it is because Jira ISN'T built for developers.

Devs may have to use Jira, but they're not the ones who have to pay for it.

I wrote about this a while back:

"Who is Jira’s target customer? It’s certainly not the poor developer who struggles to add a link to his bug report. (I’m still mad at them)

Take a look at Jira’s site and see what they emphasize:

Those pages glamorize having an overview of what work your employees are doing. It’s a tool made for managers. Especially higher level ones. The VP won’t be filing work items, but they’ll be very interested in the insights those dashboards offer.

Jira spends all their software cycles building new features for that VP, ignoring what you and I might consider critical user bugs."

Source: https://www.zainrizvi.io/blog/never-focus-on-the-user#jira-s...

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#297

Post by 01100011 »

shadowtree wrote: post #279

The people hating on JIRA never worked in a shop without it. If you're old enough to remember before Atlassian came along - just how was it better? Spreadsheets? Trax? You don't want structured workflow? Don't work in a company with more than 5 people. "I am an accountant and hate ERP" .. tough shit, for real.

For the first 20 years of my career I worked with organizations that used Gantt charts and MS project combined with a dedicated project manager to keep things in sync with actual progress. It was minimally invasive to engineers and didn't require them to do the soul-sucking JIRA dance. It also generally delivered dozens of projects on time or with reasonable delays and surprises.

Even when working on 'buckets of tasks/bugs' where Gantt charts don't make sense, a locally customized version of Bugzilla or other bug tracking software(i.e. Phabricator or whatever) worked very well.

There is a generation of engineers that has only known Agile, 2 week sprints, and shitty software to manage it. After having used Jira at two companies for the last 4 years I can say it is one of the worst pieces of software I have ever been forced to use and lowers productivity from multiple angles.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#298

Post by cogman10 »

midasuni wrote: post #210
cogman10 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Isn’t there problem the people cramming those things in? We use jira as a way to track ongoing tasks, we use subject, description, comments/attachments, and assigned to.

> Isn’t there problem the people cramming those things in?

Yes.

However, the feedback loop for "that's a dumb mistake" both takes too long and is easily ignored.

Even with CRs, spaghetti code still gets written. There's no CR for a Jira workflow change. Further, the people making such changes are frequently unimpacted by them (or they like them because they are the aforementioned anal retentive process zombies)

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#299

Post by serial_dev »

lamontcg wrote: post #138
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…

> 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 problem is that Jira is optimized for productivity theater and top-down management. When an organization deploys Jira it is usually because upper management thinks that it needs a deluge of task tracking so that everyone can stay perfectly "aligned" all the time. Thi…

> Jira is optimized for productivity theater and top-down management

Hit the nail on the head.

I don't hate Jira.

I hate working for companies and with "micromanagers" that prioritize bs metrics over improving customer satisfaction, and busywork over impactful projects. And these kinds of people / companies always use Jira.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#300

Post by oneplane »

colechristensen wrote: post #286
oneplane wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

JIRA really doesn't encourage anything in any direction except writing down what you are up to in a reasonably friendly way. Anything beyond that is up to the implementors, and there is nothing in the world that can prevent bad top-down behaviour within a company.
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