[jerf]

You don't understand the hatred for Atlassian until you've been around long enough to notice there's a cycle: 1. We hate X. 2. "Here's a lightweight replacement Y for it!" 3. Lightweight replacement Y is forced by the problem space to become as big as what replaced it. 4. We hate Y.

I'd guesstimate the hatred for Atlassian productions is about 75% simply the fact that anything that checks all the boxes necessary to become the enterprise standard will be something that is big and bloated and hated by the users, because Atlassian is merely the latest in a long line of systems hated by people.

Which is not to say anyone should change their mind about the product. Just bear in mind, there isn't anything better that, if it did somehow unseat Atlassian, wouldn't have exactly the same problems in 3-5 years. The problem is the problem space, not the solutions. I mean, sure, I'd like Atlassian to be faster and I suspect there's some room for improvement there, but even if they put a lot of work into it the problems would remain. The problem is that everyone thinks they mean the same thing by issue management, but when you sit down to actually see what that means, it turns out to be the leading bug tracker or wiki means you actually have to be a meta-bug tracker or a meta-wiki, and that's never going to be a great product.

[indeed30]

As my career progresses I find myself increasingly leaning towards opinionated tools that sell a methodology more than flexibility, for exactly this reason.

[ethbr0]

This is fundamentally a sales problem, more than a constant.

New large customer X wants feature Y. Your product does not currently Y. What do you do? It's hard to say "No." Especially when you have growth to maintain, revenue targets to hit, VC to please, etc.

To me, "opinionated" means "have a vision of what the product is and isn't" (that is strong enough to counter-balance sales pressure).

[terrortrain]

I completely agree with this.

At a few of the start ups I've worked at, "no" wasn't in the dictionary.

It was always a dumpster fire, the product had some many configurations and options. There were entire sections of the apps I didn't know existed. I think that all these features are ultimately what killed the start up.

At one point I (developer) had to go on a call with a customer to tell them no because the PM didn't want to disappoint the customer.

Learning to say no is extremely important for startups.

[atatatat]

Customized branch, supported at xxxx or xxxxx or xxxxxx per year.

[mattbuilds]

Yea I want tools to be similar how I write programs. Solve one problem and solve it well. If you need more functionality, write another small program for that problem and integrate.

Integrating can be tricky, but having one tool try to do everything usually means it does nothing well.

Ideally we will see more effort spent on straightforward, opinionated tools that allow integration. That’s my hope at least.

[azalemeth]

I hate Confluence infinitely less than I hate Sharepoint -- which is also mentioned in the article. Both of them market themselves as filling the same corporate overlord niche role. One of them even vaguely succeeds.

[prepend]

There’s a few products that I feel bad for the devs and people associated with. I really feel bad for SharePoint devs because it doesn’t seem like it should be as horrible as it is.

Like everything simple (let’s make a wiki tied to AD) is twisted around to make it complex and confusing so it’s lock-in forever.

The per user cost for SharePoint is like $100-200/year. Think about that for a minute. That’s really high for a wiki. And cheap for an enterprise knowledge workflow. But it sucks so hard if you want users to create, collaborate, and share info.

[CoastalCoder]

Not disrespecting your pain, but I'm guessing you never had to do serious work in Lotus Notes.

[prepend]

Good point. The last time I used Lotus Notes was 2010. I hated it, but it seemed to be constrained to its e-mail nightmare world. SharePoint, since it’s nominally web, gets stuck into everything.

Comically, SharePoint makes me tolerate Confluence and Salesforce more.

[atom_arranger]

Atlassian acquired Trello 4 years ago. Still seems to be doing better than Jira is, although I feel it’s maybe still slightly worse than when it was acquired.

I imagine if a company using Trello wants more features they probably just say “use Jira”.