Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M • Hacker News Board

Re: Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M

#511

Post by jimbokun » Mon, Jan 09, 2017, 10:12 PM UTC

wpietri wrote: post #492

komali2 wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like I'm the only one that likes Jira more than Trello. I started on Trello, then moved to a company that uses Jira, and couldn't be happier. It's just so functional . Why does everyone hate on it?

Personally, I hate it because it is too functional. It has eight zillion features, all of them overlapping. It has so many fields, dimensions, views, and reports that I despair of ever getting a setup that usefully matches an actual workflow. The point of a work tracking system is to bring everybody together, but I regularly see people dealing with Jira by having their own separate tracking methods: docs, emails, spr…

This is probably why I like JIRA better than you do, other people at my company configured everything, I just have to use it.

Re: Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M

#512

Post by tomasduda » Mon, Jan 09, 2017, 10:12 PM UTC

inglor wrote: post #432

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair I've been a part of 3 acquisitions and have seen this story play out tens of times with beloved software. It always starts out this way. "The original folks are going to run it, not the new company!" "Things will stay the same" yadda yadda yadda. 1-3 years down the road, it'll be a different story. It'll be unlikely that the executive team will stick around past whatever agreement they signed with Atlassia…

I think WhatsApp and Waze are both pretty good examples of high profile acquisitions that played out this way. I also feel like (and I realize many disagree) that YouTube largely kept its "feel" and didn't turn into Google Videos 2.0. Of course there are plenty of examples of exactly what you describe. I feel the same way about Java, Hudson (lol) and plenty of other acquisitions.

Windows Phone version of Waze got abandoned after Google's acquisition, so it isn't a good example.

Re: Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M

#513

Post by jimbokun » Mon, Jan 09, 2017, 10:19 PM UTC

briandear wrote: post #426

latj wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you like instead of Jira? I dont like Jira either but I do like bitbucket. I started using it back in the day because besides public hosting they also gave me free unlimited private repos and found it does everything I need.

I hate bitbucket. $12 or so per month for private repos is an extremely small price to pay for an infinitely better UX, better integrations and just all all around better experience. For a tool I use multiple times per hour, "free" doesn't matter much to me. Github isn't perfect, but it's damned close. As far as Jira -- the tool itself isn't bad per se, but the way PMs turn it into their own little power-trip kingdom…

Ah, another reason I like JIRA more than people on here criticizing it.

Most things in our JIRA deployment are configured to just allow anyone to change anything, with only a few exceptions.

Locking things down like that is the project manager's way of making sure people are constantly blocked and work isn't getting done. Not sure why some project manager's try so hard to create this state of affairs.

Re: Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M

#514

Post by allover » Mon, Jan 09, 2017, 10:19 PM UTC

tiglionabbit wrote: post #397

deepuj wrote: post #322

This is depressing. Trello is a beloved software for a lot of people. It's sad that Trello decided to sell off to Atlassian. I can't believe the same company that makes Jira is going to run Trello. SourceTree is the only software that they make that doesn't suck.

Nearly every company I've worked for eventually brings in the Atlassian bullshit despite my protest. It usually begins with hiring some project manager who likes Atlassian and forces the hire of an Atlassian shill to configure Atlassian products full time, but it never becomes any good. They pry us off our existing issue tracker and wiki (github, trac) and force us to use that awful content-editable-based wiki that d…

This probably doesn't need saying, but seems you work in toxic teams. Your first paragraph suggests a ton of blame is being thrown about. If you work at a company like that, get out.

(That of course, or you suck at empathy for your managers, and you're the problem).

The place I work at, Jira is used pretty reasonably. Our devs, in 2 different teams have setup the workflows to show our progress and deployment flow in ways we prefer. The project managers use those workflows happily, they just want them to reflect reality.

I'd rather use Trello, but honestly I'm trying to communicate the work I've done to my proj. managers, so the right tool is basically whatever works for them, not me.

Re: Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M

#515

Post by andrewingram » Mon, Jan 09, 2017, 10:19 PM UTC

aclsid wrote: post #452

iambateman wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure about acquisitions, but compared to github, jira and bitbucket are poor. I tried to figure out what confluence even does and I'm still not sure. Considering I'm forced into the atlassian ecosystem at work, this is my plea for y'all to improve.

I would never say Github is superior to Bitbucket. I haven't checked if they have changed the rules, but on the startup I was working on, Bitbucket provided superior value by far. They allowed free private repos for teams of up to 5 users. After 6 months we ended up paying for the basic plan to accomodate about 10 users. I am mostly used to command line Git during my daily routine, but the designer/manager was happil…

You seem to be comparing Github to Bitbucket based solely on price. In which case Bitbucket is the easy winner.

To my mind, the UX of Github makes it worth the extra expense.

Re: Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M

#516

Post by willyk » Mon, Jan 09, 2017, 10:20 PM UTC

stonemetal wrote: post #218

ccostes wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They spin out each of their products (Stack Overflow, Trello) as separate corporations so Fog Creek didn't own Trello. Edit: I guess the spinning-out doesn't say anything about ownership (though the article does say Trello did a round of funding after the spin-out)

Stack was never owned by Fog Creek was it? I thought the only relation was that they shared Joel as a co-founder.

that was my understanding as well, although there has occasionally been stuff written that suggested more too.

Re: Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M

#517

Post by josho » Mon, Jan 09, 2017, 10:20 PM UTC

edraferi wrote: post #300

chinhodado wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And don't even get me started on SourceTree. Just about every release since 1.5.2 is a disaster, to the point of almost non-usable right now.

Really? I'm pretty happy with it. Definitely better than Github desktop, and more full featured than the light git extensions you find in most editors. What Git GUI do you prefer?

Gitup for the Mac http://gitup.co

Definitely my favourite client, and OSS to boot. I can't really think of much I'd want changed to improve it.

Re: Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M

#518

Post by parthdesai » Mon, Jan 09, 2017, 10:20 PM UTC

logn wrote: post #405

brianbreslin wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JIRA interface blows. However you're looking at it from a very selfish standpoint. The Trello team has probably been working on this for years with the explicit goal of an exit, better to get bought by likeminded product people and make a big return than to be bought by Google and have the product killed entirely.

The new sprint-related features in Jira are pretty good and actually remind me of Trello.

Jira's interface itself is so clunky and it is so slow.

Re: Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M

#519

Post by throwaway5752 » Mon, Jan 09, 2017, 10:20 PM UTC

omouse wrote: post #425

kstrauser wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I consider JIRA a code smell: if an organization uses it, I probably won't be satisfied working with them. I don't think it's because of anything especially bad with Atlassian (although I was furious when they removed the ability to edit Confluence in raw mode), as that the managers I least want to work for seem especially attracted to it. Your comment just illuminated that for me and I think you're right. It's the m…

>The best I've worked with considered PM tools essentially fungible After taking a class and reading up on project management and trying to get more organized about my own projects, it's basically that. People have been able to orchestrate large projects with nothing more than pencil and paper and then typewriter. The best PMs don't need to force a tool choice.

Yes, but to my point, as you scale up you have to take into account people's varying skill levels and styles. If you can manage a huge project with pencil and paper, you'll do fine with Jira, too. If you are good but borderline, the structure Jira offers (and can be shared between teams/cascaded down) can help.

Re: Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M

#520

Post by gregmac » Mon, Jan 09, 2017, 10:20 PM UTC

briandear wrote: post #426

latj wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you like instead of Jira? I dont like Jira either but I do like bitbucket. I started using it back in the day because besides public hosting they also gave me free unlimited private repos and found it does everything I need.

I hate bitbucket. $12 or so per month for private repos is an extremely small price to pay for an infinitely better UX, better integrations and just all all around better experience. For a tool I use multiple times per hour, "free" doesn't matter much to me. Github isn't perfect, but it's damned close. As far as Jira -- the tool itself isn't bad per se, but the way PMs turn it into their own little power-trip kingdom…

JIRA is _____ [1] because it has a ton of customization options, allowing it to be setup with a simple or complex workflow with user/group/value-based validation rules (among other things).

These can be ignored, used to enforce very simple house-keeping things like filling out a "fix version" or "deploy date" when closing an issue as "fixed", or to exactly codify all the rules in a complex development process based on a bunch of flowcharts someone with "project manager" in their credentials spent two weeks painstakingly creating.

[1] What word you choose here will probably depend on if a PM or developers have admin access in JIRA.