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I Fucking Hate Jira (2022)

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Re: I Fucking Hate Jira (2022)

#231

Post by SeanKilleen »

Jira is a perfect example of how culture influences tools. I've seen and been a part of environments where I agreed with this sentiment, and also where I felt the opposite. The difference between those places: whether a culture empowers its teams to think on their own and succeed.

In the places where I've hated Jira, it's been locked into overly complicated workflows that didn't match what I needed; into the inability to create new views that provided insight into the work; into many tedious required fields even though we didn't use that data in our work stream at all. I've been locked into "one-size-fits-all" workflow approach.

Turns out: that's pretty much all configurable! Jira doesn't mandate the use of a one-size-fits all approach. Shitty company culture mandates that.

In my current position, I have admin rights to Jira and also a mandate to keep teams empowered and processes simple. Guess what -- Jira is pretty awesome here (I use it to develop, too.) In roughly a day or so, I created an entire automated hiring process via a Jira board [1] that got us phenomenal feedback from candidates. I actively ask teams what parts of the process are annoying, and then automate them or fix them, because I am empowered to care about developer experience.

Once you're a part of a generative culture that truly cares about empowerment and enablement, you start to see how much of your disdain for tooling was actually a disdain for a culture that prevented even very useful tools from having a positive impact.

[1] https://seankilleen.com/2024/01/how-i-created-an-automated-a...

Re: I Fucking Hate Jira (2022)

#232

Post by lmm »

VonGallifrey wrote: post #230
lmm wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The default Workflow in Jira is that all Issues can transition into any status. The default workflow in some newer editions has a transition that allows that yes. But custom workflows don't have those transitions unless and until an admin manually adds them. If the person who set up the workflow didn't think of some edge case, you're SOL.

Since the person that made the workflow is always the Team Lead we are never "SOL". It is a 2 minute thing to fix a workflow. Sounds to me like you probably never edited the Jira workflows yourself. If it takes your company more then an hour to change a workflow then that is a decision to artificially limit things. Also: Custom workflows start with with the "Any" transition on all states and when adding a new status…

> Sounds to me like you probably never edited the Jira workflows yourself. If it takes your company more then an hour to change a workflow then that is a decision to artificially limit things.

I've never been able to edit the workflow, except at one company where I had access to the "beta" Jira but not the "real" one. This is across, like, five or six different companies - again, if it were one company I'd say it's a bad decision by that company, but the fact that it's so consistently done this way tells me it's something about the tool.

> Also: Custom workflows start with with the "Any" transition on all states and when adding a new status it also has the "Any" transition. If that is different in your workflows then that is a deliberate decision.

Wasn't the case as recently as 2020 (the last time I had access to create my own custom workflow, and I'm pretty sure that was a newer version of Jira than many large companies are using). Are you using the cloud version or something?

Re: I Fucking Hate Jira (2022)

#233

Post by wkat4242 »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #152
wkat4242 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to use any tool or methodology.. I just want to do my work.

I'm assuming that's a funny/sarcastic comment, but the scary part is... there's a chance it might be serious! :-O

No I'm serious, the whole 'agile' and Jira thing just wastes my time and distracts me from the work.

I know what to do and how to do it, I don't like the whole unnecessary framework around it. Sure, tools that actually help me to do my job are good. But my job is not one that requires very specific tools. And methodologies I hate because they try to constrain my thinking.

For the same reason I really hate participating in religions, for telling me what to think, to show up in church and pretend I agree and be part of their arbitrary group with its arbitrary rules. I'm more of a free spirit. I'm the opposite of a 'team player'.

But of course people differ and I know some people love the sense of belonging and the guidelines.

Re: I Fucking Hate Jira (2022)

#234

Post by wkat4242 »

fragmede wrote: post #122
wkat4242 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to use any tool or methodology.. I just want to do my work.

how do you want to do work without tools?

Well tools that actually help me to do my job, yes. But Jira doesn't. It's just an impediment.

The same with 'agile' that's just forced on us not because it is a great idea but because our idiot CIO loves her buzzwords. It's not even implemented right.

Ps I don't do any development work. The problem is they're trying to shoehorn a methodology that doesn't work for us. I'm not even part of a team that do the same as what I do. But in general i don't like the mental restrictions that having to adhere to methodologies brings.

This explains it a bit better: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39338582

Re: I Fucking Hate Jira (2022)

#235

Post by vundercind »

ClimaxGravely wrote: post #222
vundercind wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Teams would be fine with two things: 1) Let a Team channel be a normal-ass chat instead of some weird forum-in-a-chat-interface. Shit gets lost. Creating a new post feels very formal and high friction, because it’ll push everything else out of view (another, minor problem: teams’ padding and whitespace is way out of control). Make it configurable! That’s ok. The weird chat-as-forum thing is fine for a very low-traffi…

2) Is that the equivalent of a slack huddle?

Nah, you can schedule meetings (like, coordinate it through Outlook with a scheduler tool and the invite emails auto send and all that) in a chat, but not a Team channel. Chats in Teams are not in a Team (god the terminology gets confusing) but are more ad-hoc, like direct or group messages. You can pin chats but there’s no “THIS is THE ‘general’ chat for project X, this is THE support chat” et c that looks the same for everyone. The chat interface is separate from the Teams and Team channels. You can’t create a meeting from a Team channel (at least, I’ve not seen a way).

All they goddamn need is a way to permanently attach Chat rooms to a Team, as a channel, basically. The channels are these weird forced-threaded things that are more like… blogging? With comments? In a chat interface? Or a forum but it’s impossible to follow several threads because of the interface? They’re horrid and have a UI so bizarre that I’d buy it as parody.

Re: I Fucking Hate Jira (2022)

#236

Post by wkat4242 »

psunavy03 wrote: post #119
wkat4242 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's slow, it's got a really poorly designed UI. It tries to do too much. It's not configurable enough, very low density

And it was none of these things enough for me to care. I'm not over the moon about it; I just don't despise it either. It's a tool, so I used it.

Despise is not the word I'd use either. But it's this feeling that I have with so many Microsoft's products: Mediocrity.

Something like slack really feels good and intuitive to use. It had to be to make it on its own from nothing. Most alternatives for MS products and services are much better, simply because they have to be, they don't have the installed base to coast on.

With teams it feels like it's mainly chosen because it comes with O365 subscriptions for free anyway and it's not bad enough to justify paying separately for a better product. In fact most Microsoft products have this strong feeling about them. The same with Windows, Office, Yammer, Sharepoint, Edge.. It's not great experiences for the end users, though for the IT guys it's all pretty handy because of the integration. It's that feeling of missed opportunity, that it could actually have been great if someone had cared.

I think part of this is the failure of MS leadership to set a customer-centric vision. There seems to be a lot of infighting within business units. For example, they started out ok with Edge (even though it was just a chrome ripoff) but then some low-level exec had to go and enshittify it with coupon ads and loan schemes to inflate their own department's KPIs, but totally undermining the product and company as a whole. This is really something that a company with a strong vision wouldn't permit.

Re: I Fucking Hate Jira (2022)

#237

Post by VonGallifrey »

lmm wrote: post #232
VonGallifrey wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since the person that made the workflow is always the Team Lead we are never "SOL". It is a 2 minute thing to fix a workflow. Sounds to me like you probably never edited the Jira workflows yourself. If it takes your company more then an hour to change a workflow then that is a decision to artificially limit things. Also: Custom workflows start with with the "Any" transition on all states and when adding a new status…

> Sounds to me like you probably never edited the Jira workflows yourself. If it takes your company more then an hour to change a workflow then that is a decision to artificially limit things. I've never been able to edit the workflow, except at one company where I had access to the "beta" Jira but not the "real" one. This is across, like, five or six different companies - again, if it were one company I'd say it's a…

I am using the Cloud version, but I have been using Jira over the last 10~12 Years at different companies. I can't remember a time where transitions where restricted by default. I always preferred a less restricted workflow if I am working with a I can trust, but I can't remember needing to change workflows to enable transitions from a default.

What I wanted to get across is that Jira makes it very easy to give control to the Team that is using a specific Board or Workflow. If your company don't trust their Teams with that then that is a failure of the company and not a failure of Jira.

Re: I Fucking Hate Jira (2022)

#238

Post by cqqxo4zV46cp »

zac23or wrote: post #176
ta1243 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in a mid-to-large org. The more agile part use tools like jira and slack. The older part (established in the 1920s) use Remedy and Teams. Jira is brilliant. It is team-led. Different teams have different approaches, some love all the features like components, versions, issue types, assignee, kanban boards, scrumms, reports etc etc. Others like my team use it with subject/description/comments. You make the tool…

“Jira is brilliant” I've never read that sentence before! My feeling is... developers hate Jira, managers love Jira. And that is expected. The tendency is for things loved by managers to be hated by developers, such as meetings, metrics, etc. An example of a very misused metric: In one of my jobs, managers started using Scrum Poker results as a productivity measure. “My team scored 100 points in the last sprint.” Ima…

Yes, but orgs that want to do this would likely have done it regardless of the use of Jira. I have my team use story points yet I don’t ever use them to measure team or individual velocity. The fact that Jira enables incompetent managers (which is not the same thing as ‘managers’, one is necessary and one is not) to be incompetent is in my opinion a fairly low-level mark against it.

The reality is that most developers don’t know what degree of organisation / visibility is required for it to even be tenable to do their job in the context of a wider organisation. ICs, and the experience of ICs, should certainly be taken into consideration when picking PM tooling, but it’s not a bad mark against an org to also take into consideration the very real needs of management, PMs, etc.

There are always going to be those people that will categorically associate management with ‘bad’ and I just simply cannot respect that opinion. It’s the equivalent of being mad at your parents for setting a bedtime. Some of the Jira hate definitely comes from people with that mindset.

Re: I Fucking Hate Jira (2022)

#239

Post by cqqxo4zV46cp »

psunavy03 wrote: post #206
zac23or wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Jira is brilliant” I've never read that sentence before! My feeling is... developers hate Jira, managers love Jira. And that is expected. The tendency is for things loved by managers to be hated by developers, such as meetings, metrics, etc. An example of a very misused metric: In one of my jobs, managers started using Scrum Poker results as a productivity measure. “My team scored 100 points in the last sprint.” Ima…

> The tendency is for things loved by managers to be hated by developers, such as meetings, metrics, etc. There's an unfortunate tendency for some people to scoff at the immutable fact that to write software, you have to talk to other human beings. And that if a company is paying you good money to do it, they are going to want to know when it will be done and what ROI they are getting on your salary. Sure, there are…

It’s why I just can’t take some dev communities seriously. Too many immature / inexperienced people will talk eachother into thinking that their “I should just be able to sit here and code!” mentality is justified or even viable. Who the hell else gets to work like that? The utter hubris.

Re: I Fucking Hate Jira (2022)

#240

Post by croo »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #152
wkat4242 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to use any tool or methodology.. I just want to do my work.

I'm assuming that's a funny/sarcastic comment, but the scary part is... there's a chance it might be serious! :-O

Read as a feeling instead of a rational thought I can deeply empathise. I recently had my first experience with Jira that enforces sprints and an illogical workflow for a team that should work in kanban with several types of tickets of witch at least two should exist for any work to be getting done, often more because you need a different ticket for the managerial problem and a different for the techical part of the solution and an additional one for the analysis of the problem at hand all written up so anyone could do any task, nicely linked.

It is horrible. I just want to work. It's two lines of a fix in a config file. It does not need such a ceremony but a message on teams.

In my case this is a solution to a problem of fluctuation and growth so described processes can make everyone redundant. I bet the people set this up never even read the agile manifesto.

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