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I fucking hate Jira

ifuckinghatejira.com

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Re: I fucking hate Jira

#211

Post by colechristensen »

oneplane wrote: post #173
colechristensen wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The problem I have with the incessant Jira bitching is that 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 core problem with Jira is organizations trying to use it to solve complex organization-wide problems. It is an enormous time sink, and using Jira to rule the workdays of employees is the problem. Anything muc…

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.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#212

Post by matwood »

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 agree. I routinely explore JIRA replacements b/c of various JIRA annoyances, but none of the ones I find will hook into our process as neatly as JIRA.

JIRA is a lot like agile though where everyone is using a different version ranging from this works fine, to this is a dumpster fire.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#213

Post by tootie »

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 medium that cranky devs interact with disinterested managers. It's just a vessel for data and metadata. And as far as I'm concerned it's one of the best at doing what it does. There's no tool I prefer to JIRA. Asana is a joke by comparison. TFS is just Bad JIRA. Issue trackers like Trello or GitHub issues are fine for creating a dumping ground for ideas but not for organizing.

If you can get away with less structure than JIRA affords then congratulations for not having a budget or timeline but the rest of us need some deniability. Every other problem in the world of software projects is human and can't be solved with tickets.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#214

Post by BitwiseFool »

simonbarker87 wrote: post #160

I’ve used it at three companies and thought it was fine. Maybe my tastes aren’t refined enough or something but I thought it was fine. Confluence is terrible but that’s a different product.

For me, the worst part is how the search feature naturally defaults to searching over the entire organization and there is no setting to preserve space preference. I'm sure a product manager or sales person pitched this as a wonderful thing, but in a massive organization I really only want to search within a small number of spaces, over and over again. I rarely, if ever, want to access the entire company's confluence but that's what the search bar does.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#215

Post by tshaddox »

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’m not sure what “the usual complaint” about Jira is. It sounds like you perceive the usual complaint to be about feature bloat. You only briefly mention speed, which is the only complaint I had about using Jira as an IC developer. From the perspective of an IC I think all these systems are incredibly similar. Jira is the only one that was, very simply, ridiculously slow. As in 5-10 seconds to load any page.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#216

Post by colechristensen »

oneplane wrote: post #201
Ensorceled wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> JIRA in its default configuration essentially lets you create anything, anywhere in any state. Anything beyond that is just bad product configuration. That's kind of the point, JIRA has been made into monstrosity at many organizations because the "create anything" mindset.

How does that make it a monstrosity? Unless we're talking about things that are shared across multiple teams, does it really matter how people use it? Nobody is going to care what someone else does in JIRA when they aren't touching that part anyway. Even with 1000 differently configured projects, your 1 or 2 projects you actually work with and configure are the only ones that matter.

Because it attracts somebody 4 layers up to tell somebody 3 layers up to come up with a common Jira platform for everybody and then you don't control how your project is run and then Jira becomes the enemy, a faceless micromanager driving your work life that has strong opinions on how you do everything, a dozen steps that need to be done "right" or you get your half a dozen managers asking if you read the memo about TPS reports, er, Jira tickets.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#217

Post by randomdata »

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'm not sure that is quite the right take. When someone says "Jira" they are referring to the style of product management that Jira enables, not the specific tool. Like how "Google" is used to refer to web search, even if one actually uses Bing.

Jira, the software, is far from perfect, but when one talks about hating Jira, they are really talking about the people who use Jira. The same people moving over to a competing product that offers the same feature set perfectly implemented would still leave people hating it. The software itself doesn't matter that much here. It's a people problem.

So, why do people cling to a project management style that everyone hates? There is a lot of friction. Nobody wants to be the guy who pushed for an alternative that turns out to be just as bad. "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM", as they say. You know that IBM will deliver a failure, so everyone is ready when it does fail. If you hired Mom and Pop, you are doing so expecting them to be better than IBM, so when they fail equally there is a buildup of blame to go around. That's not a comfortable position to be in.

I would suggest that winds of change are in the air, but it is indeed a slow process to find a critical mass willing to take new risks.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#218

Post by audunw »

kerblang wrote: post #139

In my experience, Jira is the dog that begins to resemble its owner. If you are working in a toxic, dysfunctional organization, Jira will reflect that: - Giant forms with dozens upon dozens of nonsensical fields (preferably with abbreviations as names, like "IFE App.") half of which are required so you just stuff random words in them to make it shut up - Thousands of tickets that would probably take 30+ software devs…

> - Thousands of tickets that would probably take 30+ software devs 100+ years to implement

I feel like the company I'm working for has a reasonable attitude towards Jira, and they recently just batch closed all tickets that were older than some date in many projects. So you'd have to actively re-open tickets you had created to keep them alive, if needed. Great decision IMO.

It's an interesting exercise to be forced to deal with old tickets you've created. It gets you thinking.. "well, this thing should probably be done at some point, but then if it's actually important we'll probably think of it again and can re-create the ticket then". Might give you experience that encourages you to be careful when creating new tickets too.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#219

Post by wizofaus »

axlee wrote: post #153
cogman10 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why don't you think some other company has come along and toppled the Jira crown? 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. I don't buy that it's a matter of competitors not being better. It is more about inertia. The argument you have here could equally be applied to C++ or Cobol "Why is new code being written in these languages?…

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 drain on productivity.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#220

Post by hammock »

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…

>It's always taken on from the position of "well, it didn't make my specific use case easy", but never with an appreciation with some of the complexity that Jira needs to solve for other users

Your insight is the same reason why people hate boarding selection for planes, or McDonalds breakfast ending at 10:30am or fill in the blank.

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