> Developers don't like having to have their work parceled out so specifically. But it's not for them. It's for managers and stakeholders who have to report progress and who are responsible for budgets.
As someone who dislikes JIRA but likes process, I agree with this. The way that JIRA structures projects has specific tradeoffs that disadvantage developers and advantage middle managers because it's entirely based around short-term thinking.
First, it provides multiple negotiations for every work stream: "What tickets are part of this project?" and inevitably "what tickets do we need to cut to get this project out the door faster?" The developer quality of life tickets are the easiest for non-engineers to jettison. What's worse, sometimes they're right to want to get rid of those tickets. Quite honestly, developers often don't do the math on "Will we ever get the time back we spend fixing this?"
Second, JIRA-based systems are designed to try to make everything take the minimum possible time. This is a good thing, but developers can bear the burden of it. Quick iteration is good, but it turns into a situation where the most you can undershoot a task is by hours or a few days, but if something is much harder than you expect, it could overrun by weeks. I think this is a necessarily reality of business, and that "evidence-based scheduling" a-la Joel Spolsky is an innovation that could have eased this pain by introducing "how bad are long-tail effects?" into project planning. But as-is, you're in a situation where you're either meeting expectations (since the ticket took more-or-less what people thought), or you're visibly holding a project back (because it was tightly scheduled to within an inch of its life). So the development experience becomes this weird commodity that sometimes has really visible failure modes.
And finally, since JIRA projects/epics/whatever are often prioritized by expected value, it's difficult to raise large engineering concerns. Again, this is a good thing, because time spent engineering is time not spent helping the customer. But because the focus of JIRA is so granular, it's difficult to break out of that. Imagine a company in the 80s that wrote desktop software in assembly, and some engineer is like, "This is crazy, we should invest the time to write modules in C". How do you climb out of that? In the language of agile development, you actually need a lot of foresight to break out of this local maxima, because your prototype will be demonstrably worse - "so we need to set up this compiler toolchain everywhere, and interface with our existing assembly code, which the compiler toolchain doesn't make easy, and it introduces ABI concerns, and your prototype looks worse than just going with this. I think we can safely call this a failed experiment." When the only project language you have is trees, it's difficult to talk about forest. I think this is why healthy engineering organizations that I've worked for tend to spend about 30% of their time working on more ambitious stuff. But it's something that needs to come from the top-down, because the tools won't provide it.
So to developers, the structure imposes a system where successes are minor, failures are visible, it's hard to get negotiation leverage, you lose the forest for the trees, and they need to fight tooth-and-nail for quality of life improvements (or they get a week thrown down from above, as a treat, to address any technical debt).