[makestuff]

The last startup I was at went hardcore with their JIRA Hygiene. All of the developers complained, but it turns out our director saw the layoff writing on the wall. He wanted as much ammunition as possible to try and save his org. Once the consultant came in that the board hired, the first thing they dug into was the JIRA tickets.

The funny part about this though was that our team had amazing JIRA hygiene because we barely had any work to do (I'm not exaggerating when I say I would have about 5 hours of work a week, I would try to help other teams out but that was "stepping on other teams turf"). The teams that had the worst JIRA hygiene were the core platform teams shipping new features. Our team built internal tools so we didn't have to care about UX/scaling/etc.

Ultimately some of our team was laid off, but it made me realize upper management really had no idea what was going on since they were not technical. All they saw was pretty JIRA graphs and thought our team was a bunch of rockstars.