Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by sverhagen 1207 days ago
It's fine?

Okay, we can quibble about the exact qualification. But I, like many others, am often quite upset about all sorts of stupid inefficiencies of Jira, and, to give a nod to a sibling thread: Bitbucket even more so. Now, you say "fine", I say very mediocre. And the thing with developers and their tooling is that we're often quite spoiled such that this mediocrity just doesn't sit well with us. In a lot of places, there is choice such that we can pick the most efficient, non-mediocre tools for our taste. But Jira is just such a de-facto industry standard, that there's less tolerance for shopping around, and many of us get stuck with it.

If you're in a sluggish enterprise, and you're conditioned to sit on the phone for a change request, or wait a minute and a half for your IT website to load, sure, Jira may be a breath of fresh air. But for a lot of us, Jira is the IBM of project management: no one got ever fired for buying it, but few people are happy with it either.

2 comments

You never had the pleasure of working on Yahoo!’s extremely customised bugzilla install I’m guessing. Once you used that you’d think Jira was pretty great and well optimised!
I have worked at Sluggish Enterprise™, which I was referencing. I had the luxury of moving on. So, I understand that you can always come across worse, but that doesn't absolve Atlassian, now does it :)
Some people are ok with mediocre, and that too is "fine", but you're right, Atlassian products are shite, they persist because of their ubiquity not because anyone I know or have ever worked with wants to use them.

Thankfully, they told industries like mine to go fuck ourselves when they discontinued the self-hosted options, and thanks in part, to COVID, there has been a lot of competition growing lately for developer tools like these.