[nullspace]

Developer here. I quite like Jira, I've never seen anything as fleshed out or complete as it is. At a previous startup, I used clubhouse.io, but I seriously missed Jira after a few months.

I generally think Atlassian is a really solid company building good products and I really don't get the hatred. I'm also open to acceptable alternatives to Jira and Trello.

Edit: ooh, just saw that they also own statuspage. And everyone uses/likes statuspage.

[harry8]

>... I really don't get the hatred.

The hatred pretty much comes directly from the fact that as developers we are not the customer, just the user.

What do developers want? Not to wait for flipping ever on every damn mouse click. To be as fast and minimal as possible. Stay out of the way so I can get work done.

What does the customer (the person who selects the product and signs away company $ for it) To "manage" developers with more of the latest utter bullcrap management cult incantations that are fundamentally useless while being time expensive to developers who have just a little bit of talent. Kanban. What the actual f&^k? Seriously. Does it cost develeoper time? How much? Is it worth that time?

So yeah, bits of jira as a bug tracker were designed ok, then made worse and worse and worse and slower to run and worse I have to do what now? and slower and worse and what else is there non-atlassian like literally anything else is worth a shot.

Years ago in a fit of "do something about the misery" I looked at the atlassian website, saw "contact the founders" and thought I'd let them know how much worse this crap was getting and how much I didn't like putting up with it as a user. Some flunky created a goddamn jira ticket, then closed it! Never seen by the founders. Being an angry idiot I sent another one filing a bug that "contact the founders" is not seen by the founders so is wholly dishonest. You can guess how that changed everything.

They don't and didn't care. They hate me and my kind is the only reasonable inference I can make. What am I meant to do? Turn the other cheek so they can make more money kicking me in the shins? Yeah so there's one place the hate comes from. We are forced to use a product made by a company who hates us.

Hopefully that clears it up one perspective for you. Others may see things differently of course.

[killjoywashere]

I oversee multiple teams and have one R&D team that I built. Hired every person. They are all far better coders than I. But I’m the outward face negotiating for resources. And my team using Jira helps me get them resources. I use Jira with them. I’m also pulling tasks across the board. The brutal reality is it’s my reputation that brings in money and resources. I need to effectively estimate what we can do. And Jira really helps with that.

The other teams I oversee use project management tooling too. And I see them. I’m here to tell you there are SOTA companies, led by engineers, that use Gantt charts.

I used to think the anti-Jira, anti-management crowd was inherently right. Now I’m quite a bit more skeptical of those views.

[AlotOfReading]

As someone who is fervently anti-jira, it wouldn't be that hard to make it tolerable. Just make it so that I can't measure page loads with a wall-clock (I've clocked multi-minute loads before) that need 3-7 clicks to get where I need to be. Don't have an abundance of weird subviews that hide half the editable fields I use for another half that I don't. Make the currently active filters clear. So on and so forth, just make it usable.

I would still think jira is a bad tool (in the same way that JNCO jeans are bad pants), but at least using it wouldn't be painful.

[Cogito]

I used to consult on JIRA a while back.

These complaints seem like they have a couple of potential causes.

One very common load time issue is downloading too much data at once, especially on boards. I understand some work has been done to make this better, but you may get some relief by creating new boards with very limited number of issues on it - you want the board's primary filter to be specific (eg a board just for stuff assigned to you, rather than for everything asssigned to your team).

The weird subviews tend to be configurable, and Atlassian has been moving more and more towards defaults (and locking down those defaults) for these configurations that push a specific persona/way of working. I'm sure they have data that supports those choices, and there is strong selection bias going on here, but almost all the consulting I did was trying to figure out how to work around those defaults (the simple ones you can just change!)

Probably, a lot of those issues could be fixed by your administrator - you may even have permission to fix them yourself, though that process can still be quite cumbersome and labyrinthine.

So many complaints about JIRA come down to complaints about how it's configured. Atlassian knows this, and I think they are trying to make it better, but it's a hard problem. I enjoy the endless customisation available as an admin but it takes time and effort to understand what's possible, more time and effort to design those changes, and the most time and effort to make those changes match what the teams need. It's a hard problem to fix.

Sometimes people, frustrated by this big bohemoth, will pick an opinionated tool that matches their way of working. This works great for as long as that tool keeps focused and the needs of the team don't grow.

[TheRealDunkirk]

> I used to consult on JIRA a while back.

If consultants exist for a product, you know up-front that the product is intended as an "enterprise," end-all-be-all product, intended to be bought by high-level people, implemented by middle-level people, and configured to frustrate low-level people. It's not the product; it's the implementation, and it's a misalignment of incentives. Most companies big enough to afford JIRA are going to have the same kind of middle layer that winds up making people complain about JIRA on forums like this.

[llamaLord]

Mate... Jira is ~$8 a user per month. Complain about it all you like but you can't make comments about it's affordability. It's by far the cheapest option out there given it's feature set.

[climb_stealth]

I wonder if self-hosting is the performance difference. I have worked in projects with 15 years of history in Jira. And they were fine. It feels kind of slow but in reality it takes maybe three seconds to load any ticket.

But actual minutes to load stuff? That is insane and I can see where the loathing would come from.

[esperent]

> But actual minutes to load stuff? That is insane and I can see where the loathing would come from.

It's also a comment from a random internet person who has an axe to grind and no data to back it up. So take it with a grain of salt.

It's amazing how a ten second load time can turn into several minutes when it's software you dislike and you're telling people about it later.

...not saying previous commenter is wrong either. Just a reminder to be sceptical about all such claims when they're presented without data.

[doctor_eval]

A ten second load time is about 100x worse than it should be.

Exaggerating it to several minutes is less egregious by an order of magnitude.

[re-thc]

A lot of anecdotes are possibly from some years ago where self-hosting JIRA meant a single server on-premise. You might not get a lot of resources and can be used by the entire organization. The server would be at or over capacity 90% of the time so things could take forever to load.

Self-hosted JIRA also opened up to lots of customisations and hacks, which often weren't performant.

[jamesfinlayson]

With enough data it's possible - I remember a colleague going to a conference and chatting with some Atlassian people and they said their priority (this was probably 2016 or 2017) was getting Jira to be performant for companies with 500,000+ people. With enough users, labels, releases etc I can see Jira churning on something for minutes.

[kodah]

Small Jira instances usually aren't a problem. It's the ones with thousands of projects or plugins. It's the way enterprises force developers to use Jira so they can have "visibility". The problem with the visibility those corporations think they have is that it's incomplete. That incompleteness is a mixture of things:

- Jira isn't well integrated to things like GitHub Enterprise or GitLab Enterprise. Instead it tracks on a regex that mars commit history or messages. It's fundamentally disconnected from the VCS workflow.

- Enterprises want to manage visibility by team, but Jira provides few if any tools for managing multiple projects within a single Project. The data structure doesn't map to how many enterprises need to use Jira in order to do reporting.

- Many enterprises rule over definitions of p0 and p1 for anything. Local context gets rolled over by this and Jira just becomes a kind of table splattered with cards.

- Jiras query system is skin deep at best and doesn't support things like querying all issues of a given epic. Much of this is fueled by their plugin API. Do a GET request on any issue and take a look at all the null fields or objects with just pure nonsense in them.

There's probably more to this list, but the point is that Jiras problem is mostly its own doing. ZenHub does a great job of filling these gaps.

[namaria]

I think the problem with observability/visibility/monitoring is: you need a good internal model of the domain to have any insight. When people see a aesthetically pleasing dashboard that makes sense to them, they think they have insight.

It should be the other way around, because once you have a good mental model, you can get the data you need without it being plated for you. But the presentation fools people into thinking they have insight, so they come to depend on the tools that generate this illusion of insight.

It's not too dissimilar from powerful people being cut off from reality by sycophants and yes-people. Or managers who say 'bring me solutions not problems'. Once you outsource filtering, you lose control.

[aato]

Can you elaborate on how Jira helps you estimate?

[heisenbit]

If you have good developer providing honest estimates, no data protection concerns and they diligently provide actuals agile tooling like in Jira can provide great results.

But that all depends on culture. The poster seems to be an engaged manager, pays attention to the data and uses it in a sane way and has hired a group of strong developers.

This is not your average setup…

[re-thc]

It's hard to tell. How does someone truly know if the estimates are honest? It's more like the manager "assumes" it's right and fine.

[killjoywashere]

The manager does not assume. OKRs are made or not. The delta is measured. Repeat.

[ozim]

I believe misery for Atlassian products were mostly self inflicted by companies that insisted on having it on-perm and then not giving a damn about upgrades and not giving a damn about resources to maintain it.

I work with JIRA cloud for 8 years now and while there are hiccups it just works.

[Kelteseth]

We use selfhosted Gitlab and I do regularly report bugs in the Qt bugtracker that uses JIRA. GitLab is light years ahead of JIRA for even the basic task like adding a links, images or searching for issues. The UI is slow and cumbersome to work with.

[sgt]

It's slow though. Our on-prem Jira was much faster than the cloud one.

[newswasboring]

You've written a lot but I don't see what the actual complaints are. Is it just that it's slow af?

[harry8]

Lucky you, you've never used it. Slow, difficult to use, packed full of features you'd rather never have heard of that are utterly useless to getting useful things done that also persistently get in your way, slow you down, make the user interface even more difficult and are the pointy end of management idiotic policy wasting your time in the name of efficiency or whatever the hell idiot managers think they're doing with that garbage. (Not every manager is an idiot but all of them are convinced it's not them and they way they do it is just fine, "So we're updating the workflow...") Jira used to have lots of distracting "opportunities to upgrade" to additional parallel product. Do they still? Flashing notifications that when you clicked them interrupting what you were doing because it's got urgent vibes all over it, it was "you should buy this other thing!" Repeatedly. Yes and I hated myself every time while I trained myself in the knowledge that "Jira important notification means ignore" Great lesson for your team w.r.t. a bug tracker, huh?

Pick 100 things you wanted improved about it, limit yourself to just your top 100, Atlassian did absolutely none of those and yet made them all worse. Every year. And I'm sure it makes good business sense. They know who is signing their cheques, that is who they care about. And I'm also sure they're very relaxed about how developers loathe them, discount me totally and look at the rest of the comments or any time it comes up. That's their right. They can laugh at us all the way to the bank. If you had more money than your great-grand children could spend in lifetime of Brewster splurges why would you care that your users hate you? You've got far more important toys to play with.

[onethought]

> What do developers want?

Linear (linear.app)

[andrekandre]

hmm this product looks pretty good, and it even has a native-ish mac app (i really dislike having to use jira in a browser and juggle even more tabs)

https://linear.app/

[jemmyw]

As someone who has worked on integrations with Jira for many years, it's the length of time bugs stay open. Our customers use Jira and they have to put up with its buggy behaviour that takes a very long time to get fixed or is just marked won't fix without explanation. Every product has bugs of course, but their attitude to them is quite bad. For example, there was a bug to do with epics and webhooks for years. Then they finally fixed it, then Jira "next gen" broke it again. Couple of years later it was fixed again. I understand from some ex employees that the Jira product is quite hard to work on, which makes sense given it's lifespan.

As a user, it's ok. It wouldn't be my 10th choice, but it's not the worst tracking tool out there.

[jamesfinlayson]

Yes I heard that it was lots of legacy JSP stuff.

[coin]

> as fleshed out or complete as it is

Their dropdown list doesn't show the currently selected item

[hulitu]

Haha, this is the new trend. And hiding scrollbars or making them unusable.

[DrBazza]

As someone who never watched Gavin+Stacey, and cannot be held accountable for James Corden, I did, on the other hand recommend to my Megabank employer, way back in the 00s that we purchase Jira. I know we spent $$$$$ on it, and therefore helped Atlassian grow into what it is today.

Back then, Jira really was good and fast compared to everything else, which was pretty much bugzilla or a roll-your-own corporate ticket system. It was also the first thing we managed to get a bidirectional link from an issue into Subversion commit messages and back again, and it ticked all the boxes for... a development team.

Then came the "let's make it a generic issue tracker" approach, so yes, "as fleshed out or complete as it is" is indeed true. They've chased every niche that they can find that needs an issue tracker but making it so configurable.

It's just a shame it's a complete dumpster fire now. Slow. The search never returns what you're looking for (Confluence is worse if that's possible), and at some point and size, you're going to need a full time member of staff to look after... an issue tracker.

This feels like we're almost at one of those moments where Slack came along and reinvented all the instant messengers, and whatsapp/discord/whatever replaced skype (or arguably MS did that all by themselves). I know the apocryphal story for start ups is 'don't write a TODO list app, or an issue tracker', but there should be a better alternative. Youtrack always feels like it should get more traction, but perhaps Jetbrains are happy with it being an MVP for their own purposes.

[nullspace]

> Youtrack always feels like it should get more traction, but perhaps Jetbrains are happy with it being an MVP for their own purposes.

If Jetbrains Spaces gets some more adoption and maturity it may just kick Atlassian's backside. :)

[csomar]

Trello is not really their product. They acquired that company.

[nullspace]

Sure, but they also (likely) have tons of teams maintaining and improving them. It's somewhat (but not exactly) like saying Youtube and Android are not Google's products.

[verst]

Same with statuspage

[re-thc]

Same with Bitbucket

[flappyeagle]

What did you miss about jira when using clubhouse? From the outside it looks like jira with a different color scheme

[gautamdivgi]

I agree. I don’t get the hatred for jira. I mean don’t complicate its usage. It’s a pretty awesome tool. It’s simple. Yeah, there’s some clicking but on the whole that’s on the person owning the project to customize.

I don’t mind bitbucket either. We self host both.

[nivenkos]

I preferred Clubhouse to JIRA - why didn't you like it?

But yeah, JIRA is far from the worst of these tools IMO.