When happy teams are an issue

arendjr@programming.dev to Programmer Humor@programming.dev – 591 points –
114

yeah sure, happy teams start with jira but they end up as angry and sad teams

Yeah, we were also once happy.

And then we started using Jira.

RIP

At least you’re not using Azure Devops boards, Service Now or Basecamp. Those are all worse in my opinion. I miss Jira.

[Actively using Azure Devops and ServiceNow] oh...

For those complaining about Jira... I used to be one of you. After changing jobs and using several alternatives, I am begging to be back on Jira. Manage Engine is currently the bane of my existence.

That might very well be the case, however, why are all of these apps so incredibly bad?

Jira especially seems like the definition of feature creep. It's more bloated than a lactose intolerant child after a tub of ice cream.

Because having more ticked boxes than the competition sells. Doesn't matter if it's of any relevance.

That's the company's fault for using all the features

I also wonder if people complaining about Jira are still on Jira Server. Jira Cloud is a much nicer experience. Certainly not perfect, but I've yet to see an actual viable alternative (once worked someplace that tried to move all project management to Gitlab... 🤮).

Cloud is way worse than server in my experience. Server was only bad because it was usually configured poorly and IT would never give admins to anyone who actually needed it. Cloud is bad because it's slow as hell and can't be configured correctly because the ability to configure it correctly has been sitting in "Gathering Interest" on Atlassian's issue tracker for two years despite thousands of votes and comments.

I find Linear to be reasonably pleasant.

Same. Or Shortcut. They both are good at being useful but not being your fucking LIFE. Do the important bit and go away.

JIRA is a middle management job creation tool. Which is why it's everywhere

I worked at a engineering focused contract where we moved all our project management to gitlab and it saved so much time for everyone. Only hard part was collating data up to management in a way they could understand but I was happy to spend a few hours every few months to do that than using jira in any capacity

I'm sure it's fine for small-scale usage, but overall it's extremely inflexible and doesn't really scale well at all. There's also a lot of very basic functionality that's straight up missing. For example, there's no way to have a global epic priority. You can rearrange epics in an epic board, but the ordering of the epics there is not persisted elsewhere. There were many, many other shortcomings we kept running into.

Oh, and after a lot of our tickets had been imported (which itself was a huge undertaking since the auto import tools are complete trash), it started to be very slow. It feels like a very unfinished, unpolished product.

We use Gitlab's CI/CD features extensively at my current job and it's very, very nice. That's what they are actually good at, not project management.

Jira Server is the on-premise Jira, right?

We had to change to Jira Cloud. (Vendor lock-in, mainly because of time-tracking appendix tools of that.) It's horrendeous. UI and UX is horrendeous. The DOM is horrendeous. Performance is horrendeous.

My CSS Hacks to fix the UI to a degree I can reasonably work with it are a lot more work now with the generated DOM class and ids. Sometimes they at least have test IDs which can be used.

Some things, like the board component quick filter, are not even available anymore.

The interactivity functionality is irritating and annoying most of the time.

The browser extension we use further fucking up doesn't help either of course.

Don't even get me started on Confluence. Which can't even find pages when I type the exact page title, or ranks them low. And editing tables is a hassle beyond belief now that responsive tables (self-sizing) are gone. It's wasteful on space too of course, with huge spacing.

Haha a PM at my job just tried to move everything to gitlab thankfully someone in charge realized how stupid an idea that was...

Honestly 95% of Jira complaints are because people have crap workflows configured. Out of the box Jira is pretty terrible but it's very customisable and you need to adjust it to suit your needs - and they have to be your needs and workflows.

That being said, there's that last 5% that Jira just gets in the way. If anyone has ever had multiple teams working on a single product, Jira is very prescribed about how you're supposed to structure that and If you don't, it's a pain.

I'd suggest that 95% of Jira complaints are actually about corporate culture which is felt most keenly through asshole PMs trying to micromanage you through a ticketing system. It's mostly a fine piece of software - if you have a certified wizard to configure it it can be great... if you have a dummy it's going to be barely usable - but you can say the same thing about github issue tracking.

The unfortunate thing is that the teams most likely to use Jira are also the teams I most likely never want to work on.

I can type out the entire 10 word long name of my sprint into the searchbar, and it Jira will pull up 22 pages of things that are not even CLOSE to what I searched. It's a nightmare to try and find my current sprint among the 65 other team's sprints every month.

I find jiras search to be decent enough, you might get better results using a filter on sprint name with your current sprint in it.

Right, the entire issue is that it basically acts as a massive layer of insulation between reality and bad management. The whole thing is like a fucking paradox - any time you make a change to workflows or procedures there's this stupid period where you need to "wait for buy in" where it doesn't matter how outwardly idiotic the change is, you can't actually call it obviously fucking stupid for like several weeks, or you are seen as being contrarian, or causing trouble. And the real bullshit is that the "better" the tools are, the more this effect is amplified. So as an engineer, I have paradoxically come to appreciate bad management tools simply because when someone does something stupid with them, I can call it out more easily.

Did you ever try Pivotal Tracker? 🤮

That seriously has to be the worst product I have ever used. I don’t understand how it’s still around.

I so agree. My boss likes it and I find it bizarre that anyone pays for that garbage. We are switching to JIRA now due to a decision over his head :)

No, manage Engine and service now are the two big ones I used.

Oh God. Those are the 2 worst ones. They are mainly used for IT tickets, not for developing software. Jira isn't the worst, but it does lack basic features. It's just when companies use Jira you just know you are going to have to deal with a bunch of PMs who all they care about is velocity.

There are so many other simplified alternatives these days. Basecamp is one.

You are lucky. I've never used those but I can tell you that PT is a huge piece of shit. The UI is among the worst ever. My go-to example for why I hate it is that you can literally be working on a ticket, reading it or writing in it, and if another coworker does something to it that causes it to move positions in the board or list, the fucking thing will literally disappear from your screen in front of your eyes. It feels like the designers have never used software before.

We switched to a different tool that's developed by the same company I work for, and there has been nonstop complaining about it ever since. Jira might not be the best tool, but it's better than the alternatives by miles.

Also technical shit posting on Confluence is just the best. (I don't like Atlassian, I just want to go back to Jira)

The issue is more that all of these planning tools enable bad managers to implement bad management practices and workflows without any actual tracking for what constitutes bad management. Almost without fail, every manager I've worked with who is very attached to these products ends up using them for the sake of using them. And then when that produces shit results it's all about "engineering buy in" and "process learning curves" and they end up doing real damage to products before someone notices that Jira actions are not correlated with protective management.

The biggest issue is that good, effective management tools actually end up being a double edged sword because of how they shield bad managers the illusion of legitimacy.

What the? I thought Manage Engine was mainly for MDM. If they crammed an ITSM in there, there's no way it's as robust as software that was built for it.

Have you tried ClickUp?

Someone else asked about click up, no I haven't even heard of it until this thread.

Manage Engine over commits on what it thinks it can do and it does none of them well.

Company started on Asana, individual teams jumped to Jira, company eventually followed. I was always accidentally creating blank tickets in Asana.

All my homies hate agile, Jira, scrum, kanban, etc.

In truth none of these items are inherently wrong - what's wrong is leadership picking up new tools and adopting management structures expecting them to solve fundamental organizational issues.

Instead they only serve to magnify the outcomes of your existing corporate culture.

It's funny that "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools" is the first of the tenets of agile and the most ignored. I think most people's frustrations with agile are from people worrying too much about processes and tools.

Scrum/Agile has 2 advantages over waterfall.

  • things that don't work get stopped early, without stigma.

  • the team works together towards an overall goal, it is not individuals working on individual tasks.

The "agile" tools themselves rarely encourage either of these practices.

Jira

  • assigns tasks to individuals.
  • treats closed and cancelled differently.

I think you hit the main issue right there. Devs don't hate the tool, they hate that the tool doesn't solve the issue. Like trying to drill a hole with a screw and a hammer.

Strong agree! It drives me crazy how much hate scrum agile gets because when it's implemented intelligently I've found it really helps align everyone's expectations (I'm a dev)

“Atlassian - for when you want make your security team really work”

I use Teams and Jira, and I can't even imagine the amount of wasted time when I click anything in either of them and nothing happens for a good while, just waiting around.

Jira is a masterpiece compared to the dumpster fire that is Teams.

Maybe the old, discontinued on-premise version. The cloud version of JIRA is a huge step back.

With that said, Teams is not a good product either.

Teams is the worst product Microsoft has released since IE.

Have you heard of windows millennium?

We do not speak of that one. It was a dark time, a chaotic time. Do not utter that name so casually. Many know not of which we speak. May their souls never experience the curse of that knowledge.

There's still Jira Data Center but nobody wants to pay extra for it so instead we have to deal the the garbage that is Cloud.

I beg to differ.

I've not had a real issue with teams since the early 'new teams' release. Nor have I had issues prior.

Using Jira is actually something I dread every day.
Knowing I have to go through the list of tasks and projects, where each click means another few seconds of staring blankly at the screen as it loads.

In an age where I'm used to every interaction having a near instant reaction, using Jira feels like peeling potatoes with a butter knife.

Maybe you just don't have a reasonable comparison. We just switched from Slack and Zoom to Teams and it has significantly impacted our ability to collaborate and communicate. It's constantly dropping calls, video quality is awful, annotation is awful, the layout is wasteful with tons of wasted space, audio is terrible, there's no closed captioning visible while screen sharing, there are too many problems to list. It's the type of product I'd expect from a high school programming class, not a trillion dollar company.

constantly dropping calls, video quality is awful […], audio is terrible,

I have none of these issues with Teams. Maybe your internet connection sucks?

As an outsider to a lot of such corporate things it sounds like they both suck a lot, just in different ways.

I never had any issues with Zoom or Slack. They do what they're supposed to do. Jira is fine too, but I'm not a PM, so I don't have to deal with anything other than the Kanban board.

Edit: I guess it's relevant that I'm on a MacBook Pro, and not a Windows machine.

Don’t worry teamsters we added 6 new ticket statuses so they can get auto-sorted straight to the abyss.

I absolutely love how this implies that the team is happy before going to Jira.

so not only can Atlassian not write software, they can't develop a usable product, and they can't even market it without insinuating how shitty it is.

I read "happy ___ starts with ___" as stating that happiness was the eventual result of a process that started with ___.

Yes, like most normal people do.

There's a lot of discussion when you're a software dev about the best way to do things, and a lot more is spent on this debate than on actually writing code. One could wonder if there is so much discussion because there are so many good ideas that it's difficult to choose the one that is optimal for the situation.

But then you read one of these posts on lemmy and you are reminded that someone with internet access and thumbs could spare the short time they have to take a shit to egregiously misunderstand a simple fucking slogan, smugly post about their shit take on the internet, and then return to their job where they will then spend hours misunderstanding the simplest of fucking concepts, slowing down everyone else along with them.

Jira is great software if you ignore all the insufferable bugs in it that Atlassian ignores just to make their on-prem option so clunky you have no choice but to use their SAAS offering. I know, I know, "ThEy DrOpPeD sUpPoRt AlReAdY!"

ever had to rebuild a sprint because Jira failed to properly migrate the old cards over to the new one, but instead throws them all into the backlog randomly and now you have to hunt them down over the next hour?

how about when you're writing an update to a card and you're two paragraphs in with log examples and the UI decides to dump your entire content when you accidentally click outside the wysisyg?

But how can I forget the worst one! have you ever had your session timeout while you're writing a detailed bug report with screenshots, logs, and example data, and when you finally submit it you lose EVERYTHING because you need to login again and you can't go back?

I have, and you know what, I'll still use Jira because even the best trash can be better than the worst trash.

yeah, I'll take a fat dump on shitty products all day long because the negligence of Atlassian product development is abhorrent and deserves to be called out.

I've often wondered if Atlassian even uses the products they sell. There's just so many stupid bugs that I would assume no one at Atlassian would put up with if they had to eat their own dog food. Instead, those bugs don't seem to get fixed and seem to linger in their products forever.

ever had to rebuild a sprint because Jira failed to properly migrate the old cards over to the new one, but instead throws them all into the backlog randomly and now you have to hunt them down over the next hour?

No, never. Did you maybe not select the ‘move to new sprint’ option when closing the old one?

how about when you’re writing an update to a card and you’re two paragraphs in with log examples and the UI decides to dump your entire content when you accidentally click outside the wysisyg?

That has never happened to me, either.

congrats, you've had a far better experience than I have. just because you haven't had the joys of experiencing Jira in its true form doesn't negate the atrocious UX many others have. if Jira was the perfect product that you claim, then why is there so much vitrol and hate for the product at all?

I started my career as a big supporter of Jira. It made the work so easy to manage and report on. then sometime in 2020 an update came through that absolutely shit on my already over-burdened workload.

I used to deal with the sprint problem every kickoff, and yes I did select migrate to new sprint. no it doesn't work when the process breaks in the middle and doesn't recover or rollback. now I don't handle kickoff, so not my problem anymore but I witness it happen literally every kickoff.

I also used to deal with the WYSIWYG issue daily. now I don't post updates to cards outside of one-liners like "check the logs at this time" or "fixed upstream in xy branch".

I get why people share their hate online because misery loves company, but I just don't get why anyone would waste so much effort on defending it. example; I use spaces over tabs. lots of hate either way online. never have I defended or argued over one vs the other. it's a preference much like Jira. forced to use it at work and have to make the best of it.

so, why be a white knight for Atlassian if you're not employed by them? and if you are employed by them, why be so dismissive about the issues brought up?

Wow, you are touchy. All I said was that I never experienced these two issues you report.

why be a white knight for Atlassian if you’re not employed by them

I don’t know. I’ll never share an opposing view ever again. All points I encounter shall from now on be taken as the one and only truth. I will never again engage in discourse, I promise.

jira made me quit software dev (not by its own, but a significant factor)

I hate jira because it slots your work stupidly by the management, or so I feel it.

A manager usually works with time slots, say 8 a day (or whatever), they are all mostly disconnected, like do meeting with A, go to standup of team B, PMD for dev C etc etc. Dev isn't like that but everyone seems to start thinking it is: how many "items" was finalised last "sprint" etc and other stupid metrics.

Am I alone here or is there even worse things with jira in your opinions?

Now imagine a very large company implementing that shit software for other kinds of engineering projects! Yey! Lot's of great engineers have quit because of it.

Jira, we'll brain drain your company and make it seem more productive!

Next thing you know....well the guy who understood that is no longer here. But we can take our best guess.... should the door pop inward or outward during a flight?

They have a predatory business model. "Hey we're cheaper than the competition". Once you're soaking in it and need features, they have options but it'll cost you. I reckon they have slick sales people who know how to pander to the egos of middle management as well. You know ... The people who don't actually have to use the tool but sure like to feel like they somehow matter.

Friends don't let friends use JIRA

"I'm not your friend. By the way, if you don't use Jira you're fired." -Middle Managment

"I hate Jira too. you're fired"- Senior management.

Seriously though - JIRA isn't always a massive pain in the ass. It's just the way it's used that sucks. Workflow restrictions so devs can't move tickets from testing back to in progress, dozens of mandatory fields, etc.

When your tools start dictating your workflow rather than the other way around then it's time to switch tools.

And the metrics, "we see many back and forth between the dev and test" -> devs stops doing it.

Idk man, better than a post it Kanban... which is where I came from.

If Jira is shit, it's not Jira, it's your Manager. It takes some effort to learn and use, but when it's set up and maintained, it helps a lot, especially for Virtual Teams.

Edit: But their Ai is shit. They gave it for free and now want to charge money for it. Nah bro, not for that retard.

Yeah, jira is going alright for us at work, but there are a lot of supporting people maintaining it and prioritizing things in meetings that we engineers don’t have to attend.

Everybody gangs up on hating Teams instead!

Teams and the entire Office-Package is pure pain on Linux. We have mixed OS (based on preference) but we all use Office and it's a dread for our SW-Department. =[

I know teams is probably the most hated product in tech savvy corporate America, but I do at least give MS credit that I can let it live in a Firefox tab and my audio & video work fine for meetings.

But when anybody tries to use a Teams-equipped conference room? Whoo boy!

Audio working in Teams? If I accept a call and then plug in my worthless usb headset, it just doesn't function.

One time out of five or ten to be generous, making a room and inviting just 1 person just foesnt work either, gotta call up a third person to make the sound work.

I mean how hard can it be ...

I think I need to compliment our IT department. I have experienced 0 problems with teams. Sometimes my network quality falls, but I just switch to my phone and everything continues.

Disclaimer: Never used the captions, meeting summary etc. Just the basics

I think it's because Skype was on that level 10 years ago until it got the Microsoft Enshit-Treatment.

The UI and UX is shit. Performance is shit. It's not only about configuration.

Here's my Jira experience. MS shop, have a programming department, but I'm not in programming and programming isn't our core product.

Need something that requires a Jira request. I use MS Edge because that's what IT recommends and it's not my computer. The only putative upside is that it knows who I'm logged in as. I click on the link for Jira, it asks me if I want to sign in with my account, which I assume is the MS one since it has the right email/user for it. It tells me that's the wrong one. Would I like to use my Atlassian account? Sure, let's use the same email. Whoops, you don't have an Atlassian account, but there's an MS account for your company. Do you want to use that, or something from the usual list of places that will log you in (Google, Facebook, MS)? Note that the MS option is only included in the list of third-party logins even though it knows my company has MS logins setup. So I click the MS option, and it may or may not ask for my password, because I'm already logged in via Edge, but it will certainly do my 2FA. And now I'm finally able to tell IT what is bothering me, and they wonder why people always seem frustrated.

So, now that I've gone through that once, I can save a single click by not choosing the Atlassian account option and go directly to signing in with a third party. I can only assume this is supposed to be the streamlined process.

I mean, it just sounds like the people from your Tools/Infrastructure/IT/Devops/whatever-it's-called-for-you department are fucking incompetent and can't properly configure a Single Sign-On. Took mine a few years as well, I think the ticket was stuck in the queue behind the "restart some servers when nobody's watching to see how long until they find the issue" tickets, which they seemed to be working on weekly.

Also, I can't think of any reason why SSO can't work with Mozilla or Chrome also, not just with Edge.

The problems with single sign-on and retained sign-on made it into The Boys. Most relatable scene in the show for me. I'm not saying my crew are geniuses, but this seems pretty endemic.

JIRA is fine as long as you forego using fucking align. Goddamn fucking align is a the biggest waste of upsell that they catch product managers in ever.

Only ever used Redmine.

We used to use Redmine and it was a fantastic piece of software.

That's actually reassuring to hear. Aside from Chilli, it's the only program I've ever used (12 years going). I've got teamates pushing for changes but jira comes at a high cost. Redmine may look old and I hate that it's written on ruby, but it's free and with some plugins it's been able to suite our needs well.

What's the issue with Ruby?

Only issue is that I have a team of developers and none of them are extremely proficient in it. It's not really a language we use often.

I use both Redmine and Jira at work. I don't know if we're using an older version but Redmine feels like something from 2001. Even the API for it is unpleasant.

Maybe it’s not changed then because I was using it in the early 2000s. 😀

That's the point, it's not flashy but everything loads instantly and you get work done in no time. 2000s style.

I find it an active hindrance to my work. To the point where I have written tools to read data from it via the API rather than use its infuriating interface.

I'm glad it works for you but to me it's a bit too minimalist. Its user interface is comparable to the forums I was using in 2002. I'd rather something more akin to the ones I was using in 2006.

We've been using Linear in my latest company and it is actually quite good. No bullshit fast UI, boards, issues linking with Git, a support that can take a feature request that is often implemented in a week or two after asking it.

I've tried out Linear (only peeked into it) and it's the perfect contrast of performance against Jira.

Just do a lightweigt process in a few docs and Excel, and meet in person often enough that you know what folks are doing. That's SOOOO much better and more natural for getting real work done. Great ideas die in JIRA among endless planning meetings and premature decomposition and estimates.

While I don’t like the main Jira software, the Jira Service Management part is actually kind of decent for my needs. It basically allows me to create a help desk for my small business, where they can report issues and I can view them in the Jira app. It’s somewhat limited on the free tier, only allowing 3 agents, but it works plenty fine for my use case.

As for the actual Jira software, I wouldn’t use it, since my workflow needs don’t require it.

Starting a new week on Monday, wondering how they f up tge experience on that web site this time....

Anyone who pushes jira is a waste of fucking carbon, and I hope they never find happiness.

why would you curse the waste disposal people at the landfill?