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by chousuke 1525 days ago
Beyond trivial scale, you need good processes so that individuals can do their jobs. If you have no processes, change and development becomes extremely difficult because people will be hunting for documentation all the time, stepping on each other's toes, and making mistakes that they should not be making because they forgot a trivial procedure that was a prerequisite to solving their actual problem.

I work with a variety of different environments, and depending on the environment I can either solve my problem in minutes and get it deployed in another few minutes or solve the problem in minutes and spend hours figuring out how to safely deploy it without breaking everything. JIRA is terrible if you do anything that it offers by default, but when used properly it can absolutely help with this.
2 comments
baq 1525 days ago
To add to that, and perhaps educate your downvoters a bit, it can be very hard to imagine why or when such strict processes are helpful without having direct experience with organizations of sufficient scale. It literally boggles the mind but the process truly is king when there are hundreds (or thousands) of individuals working on a single product.
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hn_go_brrrrr 1525 days ago
Agreed. An essential part of blameless engineering culture is "the outage isn't any one person's fault, it's the fault of the tooling and processes for allowing them to do that". Good processes prevent everyone from making the same mistakes.
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closeparen 1524 days ago
IMHO the "correct" or at least humane organizational design is that most things happen in local teams, which are of trivial scale and can get along just fine with informal, ad-hoc, or locally varied processes.

Obviously not all work is this way. Sometimes you need to drive a migration that touches every team, and then the technologies of bureaucracy and process become important. But most work should be done in human-scale groups that can be more towards the self-organizing and trust-based end of the spectrum.

However some middle managers take offense to the idea that their different sub-teams have different operating models internally, and lean on technologies like JIRA to try to make them all the same. Middle managers at my company have tried this, not very effectively , so it hasn't hurt me too bad. But I've seen their vision and recoiled in horror.

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