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I fucking hate Jira

ifuckinghatejira.com

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Re: I fucking hate Jira

#321

Post by _jal »

mathattack wrote: post #281
asfhagsdf wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The answer is "way more than is sensible, even factoring in how absurd pricing on crap like this has gotten."

We dropped SN a couple years back over this. They were charging us about 6-7x what we pay for Jira, and we still use the on-site enterprise version of Jira.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#322

Post by jedberg »

meibo wrote: post #142
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…

9. The text editor is still busted and I just don't understand why. It's one of the most important parts of the UX, please please fix it. Writing any kind of nicely formatted long form posts is a lost cause.

Amusingly, it used to be great! When I first started using JIRA, it was just markdown. Then they introduced their WYSIWYG editor, but at least they still had the button to see the raw markdown and you could still edit the raw markdown (but the GUI made terrible markdown so if you wanted to use markdown you better start with that and never touch the GUI).

And then I guess at some point they just removed the markdown part?

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#324

Post by jtcruthers »

mattpallissard wrote: post #90
bsuvc wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like shortcut and use it whenever I have a say in the matter. https://shortcut.com/

Shortcut is pretty stripped down and lacks several features conducive to cross team collaboration. In particular I dislike shortcut's lack of internal comments. It's a much bigger annoyance than anticipated. I dislike atlassian products in general, but having some discipline with the config/workflows was much better than shortcut.

> lack of internal comments

What do you mean by this? There's a section to comment in each card/epic/milestone and you can ping team members. Comments also sync with slack so you can get notifications there if you'd like. I don't have a ton of JIRA knowledge, so there's a chance I'm missing something.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#325

Post by shagie »

cogman10 wrote: post #315
shagie wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

Yea... I wrote a redmine to Jira importer. That was... interesting. I'm familiar with Redmine and its table structure. I was able to reverse engineer the json schemas (there are examples at https://support.atlassian.com/jira-cloud-administration/docs... but little in the way of actual schemas and DTOs to work from) and successfully imported everything including a number of custom fields in Redmine and comments and attachments.

The only "oops" part of the Great Import was that the users that were in Redmine but not in Jira (people who left the org and thus were never imported into Jira) had entries created as the sysadmin who ran the import.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#326

Post by femiagbabiaka »

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".

“Data needs to be unified for my executive use case” sounds like an org problem not a JIRA one. I’ve encountered it at companies that didn’t use JIRA at all

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#327

Post by oneplane »

_jal wrote: post #321
mathattack wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The answer is "way more than is sensible, even factoring in how absurd pricing on crap like this has gotten." We dropped SN a couple years back over this. They were charging us about 6-7x what we pay for Jira, and we still use the on-site enterprise version of Jira.

We have a few of those around as well. While they work fine, I don't really get why anyone would want to self-host JIRA or any COTS product like that anymore. Most instances now seem to be just a case of "our hosting company is fully responsible for it and it's pretty cheap and reliable" and until it starts failing or falling behind the cloud offering it'll probably stay like that.

Usually, if it isn't better from a staff-perspective or better for the customer, self-hosting or self-building is less likely to be the answer these days.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#328

Post by wpietri »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #257
wpietri wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> building a generic project management and tracking tool is a really difficult, hard problem I would say building a good one is an impossible problem, because of conflicting needs both across and within companies. The primary job of Jira isn't to help work get done. It's to give managers and executives feelings of knowledge and control even when that makes everything worse. You don't need fancy planning systems to g…

>>"You don't need fancy planning systems to get good work done" I mean, as a single individual, in some circumstances, sure. If we think a bridge or railroad or spaceship get built without fancy planning, we've taken our software engineering paradigm to new level of delusion. Why does engineer or constructor worker understand that you need planning to align thousands of people over many years to build a great big thi…

I was talking about software, not spaceships. Software, being soft, is fundamentally different.

However, you should watch the Poppendieck talk I linked. The Empire State Building had construction start before they finished designing it. The waterfall hallucination, where people imagine perfect results come from perfect plans perfectly executed, has been hugely enabled by software. But if we look at the actual results of heavily planned activities, like buildings, roads, and weapons development, the track record is terrible.

So if modern planning techniques don't work well even in areas, like construction, that they are most suited for, then it should be no surprise that people are skeptical when they are applied to domains that are very different, like software.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#329

Post by shagie »

oneplane wrote: post #327
_jal wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The answer is "way more than is sensible, even factoring in how absurd pricing on crap like this has gotten." We dropped SN a couple years back over this. They were charging us about 6-7x what we pay for Jira, and we still use the on-site enterprise version of Jira.

We have a few of those around as well. While they work fine, I don't really get why anyone would want to self-host JIRA or any COTS product like that anymore. Most instances now seem to be just a case of "our hosting company is fully responsible for it and it's pretty cheap and reliable" and until it starts failing or falling behind the cloud offering it'll probably stay like that. Usually, if it isn't better from a…

Self hosting is sometimes easier to do than to argue with data governance about putting the information out a system that is offprem. The additional precautions for HIPAA or PII data that may show up in the comments or attachments can problematic. There are far too many users of all stripes that copy and paste data that they have access to without doing a check on it to see if it really does belong there (and if it does belong in the issue, then applying appropriate permissions to the object).

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#330

Post by sanderjd »

Sebguer wrote: post #21

The real problem with Jira is that every company adopts it without sufficient support. It needs dedicated admins. You can't just let every single team YOLO things. Unfortunately, what happens is a company adopts it from the start, and then it grows into an impossible-to-use forest where there's no meaningful way to bring things back to actually usable, and everyone is miserable.

I honestly can't imagine trying to hire someone for such a terrible job.
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