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by malermeister 1463 days ago
I'm a successful engineer. I hate JIRA. I like keeping docs up to date, but if you're gonna make me deal with JIRA's BS just so I can do a quick doc PR, guess what, no updated docs for you.

Where was the value created again?

1 comments

They want full visibility into what everyone is working on all the time. Some managers, especially non-line managers, really like this idea. I can understand why, it sounds really good! Transparency can't be bad, right? In practice, it works a lot better to create fairly small teams, let them run independently and opaquely to the outside, and then coordinate between them periodically (bi-weekly, monthly, quarterly, whatever is found to work best).
I think one key thing those folks miss is that willpower is a limited resource. For me personally, dealing with bureaucracy drains it much quicker than my actual work product, writing and designing code. Making me track everything is thus a strong net negative on my output.

I'm senior enough to know what I'm doing, so don't make me waste my (and my company's, they're paying me after all!) time.