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I fucking hate Jira

ifuckinghatejira.com

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Re: I fucking hate Jira

#301

Post by jitl »

bko wrote: post #68
felixgallo wrote: post #3

Jira is the worst possible choice, except for all the others.

Has anyone tried to use something like notion? Depending on your size you don't necessarily need all the stuff around it. Whats the difference between a story and an epoch? Most people don't really care. They just need something to track stuff being done, like a glorified to-do list with rich text.

Disclaimer: I work at Notion.

I think Notion works well for tasks if your organization is small, or you are happy with lightweight process. There is no way to ensure all updates to a Notion page follow a strict state machine like Jira. Notion just doesn’t have those kind of validation / restriction tools yet.

For our 100ish engineers it works well especially because planning docs flow seamlessly into project specs and then tasks… but we suffer a bit from loosely defined workflows around 2-week sprints that take more clicking than anyone wants.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#302

Post by oneplane »

colechristensen wrote: post #209
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…

And how long is this going to last before someone further up decides that Jira needs to be unified for reporting purposes? Eventually somebody with the organization obsession is going to get hired and put somewhere important and their goal is going to be making something complicated and unified and dissent will be "discouraged".

Depends on where you work I guess. In reality, reporting really has nothing to do with SWE state tracking. You can also just write a report in a letter and mail it to the board. It's not like they are going to log in to JIRA or even have an account or SSO-allowed credentials since they don't need to be there.

On the other hand, like almost copy-pasted here, if a top-down 'unification make it worse for everyone' effort is started, no vendor or tool is going to stop that and your work will get worse.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#303

Post by shagie »

cogman10 wrote: post #264
bragr wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. eh. I've experienced a number of painful tool and platform shifts in my career that basically came down to "it's cheaper" so I don't buy that companies are unwilling. If someone provides the feature set that is some combination of cheaper and better, then the only thing you really need is a…

> Jira import tool This is the problem. Jira is so highly configurable that without recreating a good chuck of the Jira feature set, an "import" tool will be pretty hard to make. Any competitor in this marketspace will have to invest a considerable amount of their time creating and maintaining such a tool, which I imagine if they ever became a serious contender, Atlassian would put up some anti-competitive road block…

I'll note that most other competitors that are engineer (rather than management) focused don't use a jira workflow approach and instead tend to be more of an adhoc "apply labels" and "we trust you to apply the correct labels".

The Jira complex state table tends to be something that isn't replicated as its part of the "we're not Jira" value proposition.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#304

Post by nlh »

I promise I am not a shill: Our team is on the verge of switching 100% to ClickUp. Are we crazy?

Nobody really loves Jira, and we've gotten our Product, Design, Sales, and Customer Success teams using ClickUp and everyone is really happy so far (especially with the speeeeeeeeeeed. OMG coming from Jira it's a breath of fresh air).

We are chasing the dragoon of having a single tool and everything in one place. So far the eng team seems amenable to give it a shot (although we're going to transition slowly).

Are we crazy?

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#305

Post by Redsquare »

bragr wrote: post #163
colechristensen wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Jira admins....says it all

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#306

Post by MaxBarraclough »

wizofaus wrote: post #219
axlee wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean as hard as when Git obliterated every other VCS within the span of a few years? If products are better, they get adopted. How do you think every single company in the world started to develop for iOS between 2008 and 2010? When the upside is obvious and the path to transition is well-defined, there is very little friction.

I still don't understand how git won the source control battle so decisively. I respect git for what it's good at and its power, but from what I've observed it's far from clearly being the obvious choice of source control for closed source software shops. JIRA I can take or leave, it does the job - it's hard to imagine anyone being driven to hate it, but I can believe having it badly configured would be a serious dra…

> I respect git for what it's good at and its power, but from what I've observed it's far from clearly being the obvious choice of source control for closed source software shops.

At this point git is the incumbent, which is self-sustaining: developers already know git, so you'd need a really compelling reason to use anything else and take on the burden of training your developers to use it.

It helps that git is freely available and is by far the top choice for Free and Open Source projects.

Of course, SVN used to be in the same position, but git is such a great improvement that it was able to win out. I imagine git's origins in Linux kernel development may also have been a factor in its early success.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#308

Post by eterm »

Minor49er wrote: post #294

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 us…

Annotate was the SVN term, have you considered it might just pre-date git?

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#309

Post by zaphar »

Jira's web interface I can live with. I've internalized the workaround for the UI bugs and I've learned to live with the slowness. Sure it reflects all the worst aspects of your organizations structure and process but that's not really it's fault.

What is it's fault is their REST API. In theory it's a well architected API. Follows REST principles. You can tell they read the whitepaper. But you have to jump through a ton of hoops to get any data beyond surface details.

Example: Want to find what epic a User Story is part of? It's a custom field. Which one? depends on how your instance has evolved over time. You'll have to scan through all the fields to find the field id.

This is what happens when an API isn't designed to fulfill a particular need but instead is meant to be infinitely customizable. Ergonomic APIs are impossible.

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