Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I fucking hate Jira

ifuckinghatejira.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 539 posts

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#311

Post by andy_ppp »

msbarnett wrote: post #158
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…

The central problem with JIRA is that, once you've gotten beyond the overly customizable functionality and difficult-to-reason about permissions, and once you've managed to avoid organizations that go too far off of the deep-end and once you've finally found a happy simplicity in a kanban-ish board, once you've done all of that, it is still unbelievably, unjustifiably, just incredibly and amazingly so very very godda…

There’s a screen in jira if you change multiple items with a progress bar. I looked once and the operation seems to happen instantly and the progress bar is just there because of some bad designers ego…

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#312

Post by avh02 »

I tried giving atlassian some feedback recently when they asked for it (via email). Unfortunately the very end of their survey had some fancy widget to upload a recording (which was absolutely unnecessary). The widget didn't load, and because of that the form didn't allow a submission - so I didn't bother figuring out how to give them my feedback, even after i had done a 3 page survey.

I hope it was a widespread issue.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#313

Post by thedougd »

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 was asked during a merger, which work management tool do you think we should keep/use? I replied, don't ask me, I'll hate it anyways.

It's not because I hate Agile, Scrum, or even Waterfall (although I do hate SAFe). I just know these tools all suffer from similar drawbacks, and somebody will ultimately codify all our organizational problems into the tool. Then, rather than spend an hour a week of their own time, they'll create a new mandatory field and ask thousands of people to spend an hour a week each populating that field.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#314

Post by ratww »

ZainRiz wrote: post #296
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 s…

Yep. We often talk about enterprise software, and how it's often bad and, has superfluous features and almost no UX design because it is made for buyers rather than for the real users. Well, guess what. We're the users now.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#315

Post by cogman10 »

shagie wrote: post #303
cogman10 wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I don't disagree, but just to point out the issue with transitioning, even in a basic sense, is that Jira allows and can invisibly create new states for pretty critical pieces.

Your case might be in a "Closed" state on the UX, but internally that can be "custom state 48083232" because some wingus decided to first start by naming it "to be closed" and then changed it to just "Closed". That can be different for every project.

This is why an import tool is a complex thing to figure out. You have to translate all the potential custom states into the "we're not Jira"'s states that make sense.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#317

Post by oneplane »

colechristensen wrote: post #211
oneplane wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a company is trying to use JIRA for more than state communication they are doing it wrong IMO. Planning goes into calendars, ephemeral stuff goes into chats and calls, and code and code-level issues goes into repositories. I have seen plenty of attempts to make a product like JIRA the 'interface' between some management person and 'the subordinates' and it never works, simply because trying to place an 'interface'…

>If a company is trying to use JIRA for more than state communication they are doing it wrong IMO. This is why tools that don't allow this kind of doing-it-wrong are significantly superior to Jira.

That's a nice theory, but in practise people have been mailing to Slack, using meetings to read emails and using JIRA to track Git commits.

Tools are just slaves to reality, not the other way around. If a legacy top-down organisation wants you do to a certain thing a certain way, and you have no recourse but to do as you're told, that's your organisation's fault and nothing else. You can either gain a position where you can make changes, or leave the company. Complaining about a tool that has no influence over your work process really doesn't change anything.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#318

Post by teilo »

This is not a rant about Jira. This is a rant about doing Agile in the enterprise.

I can rant about Jira, but it's about the horrible UI. It's buggy. The settings system is a mess. It's not intuitive. Even clever people need hand holding to figure out what's going on. Things randomly break for no apparent reason.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#319

Post by oneplane »

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 think the comparison mostly stems from the legacy enterprise where badly configured tools are pushed top-down and workers are told to 'deal with it'. Either you'll be a developer mostly using JIRA or a non-developer mostly using ServiceNow, and if you're really unlucky in such an organisation you'll be using both.

Having a Service Desk that actually provides usable and composable tooling is a benefit for all. Having a random contractor "implement" ServiceNow because Gartner said so is a pain for all. This is of course a bit of opposing extremes, but the same applies to JIRA and AD and pretty much anything else. Hard-pushed bad implementation will ruin your workday.

Teams that are capable and allowed to self-steer and deviate from company policy if they come up with a good enough reason seems to be the sweet spot of attainable & realistic.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#320

Post by sanderjd »

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 think the answer to your question is that it's because the complaints aren't actually mostly about the tool, but about the processes the tool targets. Jira competes both with different tools and with different processes that use neither Jira nor its competitors.
Post reply on HN