I was an engineer on Tracker from 2013 to 2020. I’m sad to see it go.
Pivotal Tracker will shut down
211–220 of 271 posts
Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you please elaborate more on this? Price they will pay for changes? Not getting it, is it that the target market is slow forcing owners to lower the price? Doesn’t explain “costs more to run” part.
To a first order approximation, Wikipedia serves everyone the same page. So the cost of pages in Wikipedia is proportional to the rate of edits, not the rate of page clicks and inbound links. Because once I hit Save, the page they display is pretty much the same one they'll show you when I send it to you to ask your opinion. If I show each user of a website a highly customized, user- and workflow-specific page for th…
Thanks for explaining and I am sure you have more experience with this type of scale but wouldn’t you say that ChatGPT is an example of “hand crafted artisanal page”, where not only every person sees a different answer but every interaction with the page results a different response. Of course they have a ton of VC money to burn but could it be that technology optimization (especially on the backend and hosting provider) could be the solution to this cost issue as opposed to blaming product features?
Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down
#213Unfortunate. Of all the PM tools I've used, I hated Pivotal the least. It made it easy to do the things that were frequently done. It limited customization down to a sane level. And it generally seemed to stay out of the way (significant look at Jira).
Out of curiousity, what do you dislike about spreadsheets/google docs? This has been my primary means of tracking progress historically. I've tended to find that all other mechanisms just add unecessary overhead.
Not the person to whom you're responding, but:
Collaborative/online spreadsheets can work. Carefully designed, with appropriate field constraints and filters and sort templates... especially for smaller lists or smaller groups, they can be OK.
A few areas where they break down though:
- No attachments to stories (test cases, screenshots, etc)
- No comments/history view or threaded discussions
- Poor usability of notifications on @mention
- Inflexible UI/data formatting (cells instead of layout)
Sometimes I keep the spreadsheet for internal stakeholder issue reporting. It's a business-familiar tool for gathering input, which then gets synced to the more purpose-built tool for action.
Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
Since VMware sold to Broadcom in 2023, they've been cutting jobs and increasing prices to squeeze every bit of profitability possible out of their remaining customers. I'm actually kind of surprised they aren't offering support past April 30 2025 end-of-life date for 50x the current pricing.
Can someone explain to me how Broadcom's plan is supposed to be profitable in the long term? I don't get it. You buy a company, then deliberately destroy it. How is that profitable? I get that there are tax benefits to being able to show massive losses, but certainly the net at the end is still a loss.
I don't think they're aiming to have massive losses. VMWare had $13 billion in revenue and $1.5 billion profit, and it seems their aim is to cut way back on costs by laying off 40% of engineers etc while maintaining what revenue they can, and reap the unrealized profit potential there by giving up R&D, future growth in the VMWare product categories.
Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I’d rather have a tool that’s more customizable. You think you would, until you do, and by then it's too late. It's important to have good processes, but the point of all those processes is to help you make things more efficiently. Anything that leads to you spending extra time serving the process directly reduces the amount of real work you can do.
> the point of all those processes is to help you make things more efficiently I think this viewpoint -- that these processes somehow could increase efficiency if only they were good -- has a lot to do with why engineers dislike systems like Jira, because they will never see the increased efficiency they are looking for. Let me restate it in a way that I think is a little more nuanced: The point of systems/processes…
I agree with all of that. I understand why there needs to be some kind of rigor applied or else you have a bunch of engineers running around like cats. I'm not saying we shouldn't have process.
But, I've also worked in shops so hidebound that the aim of the organization seemed to be to Follow The Process above all else. Didn't ship anything all quarter? Well, at least we Followed The Process! Customers are screaming? That sucks, but The Process doesn't accommodate their needs this quarter. Principal engineers are leaving? They just don't appreciate The Process!
In my experience, Jira seems to resonate with PMs who adore The Process for the sake of The Process. Lighter, more opinionated systems like Pivotal or Linear seem to help teams deliver features more quickly than teams using Jira to march in line with The Process.
Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down
#216Problem with these trackers is that they are by design super opinionated on how your work flow is gonna be once you get past simple reminders type tracking
Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down
#217I got to work on Pivotal Tracker in 2006 during it's first rewrite. Fun project.
Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would rather just use an actual spreadsheet for issue tracking than Jira. We lost our CTO recently, and he was also the "jira admin" (ie. the only person who knows how the hell to do anything with jira) and it's just been a clusterf*ck ever since.
Excel-as-a-benchmark is a powerful thought argument. If something can't be significantly better than Excel, then product specs probably need refining. It's not that Excel is amazing or perfect in any one thing, but it is a pretty amazing blend of simplicity, flexibility, out of the box features, programmability, and presentation.
this dovetails into my test for whether i’m looking at a good startup idea or not… if existing solutions are all complicated spreadsheets, there’s both a potential market of users, and the problem is complex enough to warrant some code to manage it.
ETA: obviously not all good startup ideas fit into that thesis, just the ones i tend to enjoy working on.
Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down
#219Free business idea: clone Pivotal Tracker as a solo dev / small team. People often ask: how do I find business ideas? Well, here you go: many people publicly saying how they love a product that is going away. This is a validated product: people were paying for it. Apparently quite a lot of people. It doesn't get better than this. All you have to do is to clone the product. You can literally market it as a Pivotal Tra…
Ah, I do love the smell of fresh optimism in the morning! I think the biggest challenges are that a) the vast majority of solo devs capable of pulling this off quickly are well-employed, and b) the timeline for MVP++ is effectively January 1st, else the migrators will make different decisions. And that as soon as migrations happen, your storage costs will balloon, so you need a billing strategy on launch.
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Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
Excel-as-a-benchmark is a powerful thought argument. If something can't be significantly better than Excel, then product specs probably need refining. It's not that Excel is amazing or perfect in any one thing, but it is a pretty amazing blend of simplicity, flexibility, out of the box features, programmability, and presentation.
this dovetails into my test for whether i’m looking at a good startup idea or not… if existing solutions are all complicated spreadsheets, there’s both a potential market of users, and the problem is complex enough to warrant some code to manage it. ETA: obviously not all good startup ideas fit into that thesis, just the ones i tend to enjoy working on.
It's a good test, but also a trap. Because the relevant follow-on question is "Is it possible to design a single solution that will please most of these people?"
Sometimes, the nature of the problem makes flexibility irreducible.